Now more than ever before, marketing across the digital realm has become essential for business success. It’s the primary way to tell people that your brand exists, to attract attention to your products and services, and to grow a loyal customer base from those who have already trusted you. When you add the COVID-19 pandemic into the mix, you know that customers are tired of self-promoting brands that don’t care about their customers – it’s time for brands to step up to the new digital marketing challenges and find innovative ways to stay relevant, visible, and above all, impactful. 

Although the need for digital marketing has been present for decades, its role today is vital due to lack of other forms of direct, human interactions between customers and brands. Now, digital outlets need to replace and somehow live up to the manners in which businesses used to interact with customers in stores. Luckily, there are simple but effective tactics to make your digital strategy more effective and to give your business that digital edge you need in the current situation. Here’s what you should do!

Leverage user-generated content

Modern companies build trust predominantly by ensuring customer satisfaction at every touchpoint, and then utilizing that satisfaction to do the rest of the heavy lifting in terms of marketing. Simply put: your happy customers are your greatest advocates. Their word means so much more than your ads, and their feedback and reviews speak volumes of your success. 

Reviews are a great place to start, but you can and should go beyond that and into targeted marketing strategies that let your customers use their own voice to shape your brand presence. Invite your customers to use your special hashtags when talking about your brand, invite them to share their experience to win a prize in social media contests, ask them to write a blog post, or create a video of them using your brand. Their satisfaction elevates your authority, so make sure you incorporate user-generated content into your strategy. 

Give your brand a personal edge

Does your business revolve around you as an expert in your industry? This is often the situation with entrepreneurs whose presence online requires more effort to retain the necessary visibility and awareness. However, if you aim to one day make your name synonymous with expertise, trustworthiness, and authority in your field, then personalizing your presence is indeed the right way to go for your digital strategy. 

For starters, make sure that you use a reputable and personal domain name as well as a .me extension so that your website reflects your expertise and to make your name more memorable in your industry. You can combine your name with a keyword from your industry to make it even easier for people to connect the dots. Leverage your personal brand to make your business more prominent, and let your entire digital presence reflect your professional persona. 

Implement diverse content formats

Videos are becoming a far more popular content format than pure listicles. Sure, how-to articles the likes of this one still have their place in your SEO strategy, as well as to educate and engage a regular reader. However, with more formats at your disposal, you increase your chances to engage more members of your target demographic. 

Just think of all those people so in love with infographics, videos, gifs, or the ones that appreciate podcasts. Use your existing content to transform it into different formats – such as turning your blog into a video. Move towards a more diversified content strategy so as to accommodate a larger portion of your customer base. Diversification is necessary if you’re looking to stay relevant in today’s market. 

Make use of ongoing research and analytics

Knowledge is the backbone of your strategy. That said, you can go ahead and write a stellar article of impressive length covering the topic of boxing. It can be informative, educational, and filled with puns and whimsy to suit a younger audience. If you’re an SEO expert, what’s the use of such an article on your website? Or if you’re an e-commerce business owner selling shoes? This might be an exaggerated example, but one that illustrates a point very vividly: you need to keep your customers at the heart of your digital marketing output. 

Learn about their preferences with the help of analytics tools that help you decipher their behavior and put their purchase and engagement decisions into a meaningful context. The tools at your disposal, both those on your website and the ones on your social media pages give you a fair share of data to help you understand customer experience and refine it on the go. Conduct regular analytics, tests, surveys, and ask for direct feedback, and all of these efforts will deliver insights you can use to give your digital marketers more “juice” for their strategy. 

Of course, the pursuit for better ways to reach more people online never truly ends. After the pandemic, you’ll find yourself yet again in the position to refresh your approach and take on more relevant trends and topics that will once more reshape how you tackle your position in the market. In the meantime, embracing the learning curve of it all can help you come with more creative opportunities to gain a stronger foothold in your industry with the help of digital marketing. The listed ideas are perfect for boosting your digital reach and allowing your brand greater visibility to slowly grow your business, so use them and adapt in order to thrive.