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Today, a huge percentage of the world's population owns mobile phones, tablets, and personal computers with an internet connection. And people lookout for new products or services on the internet on a daily basis. Hence it is very important for businesses to have an online presence and know-how to attract customers to their website and increase sales.

In today's age of social media, it is extremely necessary for businesses to know the importance of digital marketing strategy and how to use online platforms to market their products or services. For this, it is imperative to have a robust digital marketing strategy. It is extremely important for your business to have a digital marketing plan if you want to survive the stiff competition in the market. Digital marketing for business is extremely important because only with a proper digital marketing strategy, you will be able to promote your business and will be able to reach your potential customers without which you won't be able to sustain yourself in the market for long.

Business owners need to know how to apply a digital marketing strategy efficiently in order to increase sales. As the online marketplace is extremely competitive, it is extremely important to know how to market your product or service on digital platforms.

We will try to elaborate on how important it is for small businesses to have a digital marketing strategy in hand.

The need for a digital marketing strategy is indispensable.

Increase the brand identity of your business

Businesses have to publish interesting social media posts regularly in order to create awareness about their brand. When a potential customer comes across these published posts, he might visit your website and there could be a possibility of conversion.

There are a lot of things that depend on the kind of products or services you offer. If a customer is satisfied with the product or service you offer, there is a high probability that the same customer will rely on your product or service when they need them in the future. And without a doubt, the happy and satisfied customers will recommend your product or service in their community or circle which will help you to attract more customers in the future.  This will help you to establish a brand identity in the market and increase your brand recognition for your business.

Significant Enhancement in Conversions

An efficacious digital marketing strategy will help you to attract a significant amount of traffic to your website which will further help you to increase your sales and conversions. And these satisfied customers, through word-of-mouth, will attract more prospective customers from their community which will increase sales and conversions.

Essential for the Survival of Small Businesses

Established businesses with a strong online presence will have a lot of advantages over the small businesses that have a comparatively lower online exposure. Nevertheless, small businesses need not worry because by having an effective digital marketing strategy, they can establish their presence in the online business community.

One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that one can formulate a digital marketing strategy according to the budget they have in hand. Since small businesses have constraints and limitations in budget spend, it is not possible for them to go for traditional marketing methods in order to promote their business because traditional marketing can be a costly affair; whereas digital marketing can be helpful. In today's times, businesses prefer to promote themselves through digital marketing because nowadays, people spend less on magazines and newspapers because all kinds of information are available on digital platforms. Hence, it is essential for an online business to have a digital marketing strategy.

Learn from the needs of your customers

Gradually when your customer base starts expanding, you can learn from the needs of your customers. As customers will be leaving their reviews, opinions and feedback on your website, you can learn and observe what features are your customers liking and what are problems they are facing with your product or service. This will help you understand the needs and requirements of your target audience and will give you insights into what are the areas in which you need to improve. There are several analytical tools available on the internet that will help you understand the needs, requirements, interests and user behaviour of your target audience. This information will help you to tweak or modify your product or service according to the needs and preferences of your target audience.

Conclusion

The main focus of a website designer and a website owner need not be the same but could be entirely different. The main agenda of the website owner could be to promote the website, generate leads, maximize business and earn profits. Whereas the aim of the digital marketer and the SEO could be to optimize the website for higher rankings and traffic. One of the most important prerequisites for a successful business is that it should have a business website that is social media friendly, very responsive, easy to navigate, and must be simple, neat and clean. The website must connect to the latest social media trends, and if not, it has to be modified in order to ensure that it is social media-friendly.

In this article, let us try to understand some important aspects which could help increase the frequency of interactions of website visitors between websites and social media.

Responsive website

It wouldn't be surprising to learn about the fact that the majority of the users are using their mobile phones for interacting on social media. With mobile phones accounting for 50% of global web traffic, it is very important for businesses to build responsive websites for mobile phones.

Buttons

Buttons and icons are attractive visual representations on a web page that stand out from the contents of a page. Thus the social media icons on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Pinterest on the web pages must be clickable and the visitor must be able to navigate between the website and its social media pages. The social media icons must be strategically placed on the website so that visitors who read the contents of the page must be able to easily share the page on their social media profile.

Commenting on social media channels

Providing social media icons on your website will encourage visitors to click through and leave comments. These comments posted by the visitors will be viewed by more people on multiple social platforms and this can help you attract more traffic to your website.

Button Relevance

It is important to create a social media-friendly website with page relevant buttons that links out to major social media platforms. For instance, if your visitor is now on the About Us page on your website, you need to have proper social media buttons that take the visitors to the profile page on that particular social media. Or maybe if you have a product page that has an associated campaign on Twitter, you could provide a hashtag or link the Twitter hashtag to the button on that page. This is a process to retain the visitors and encourage them to engage on your website. It is important to redirect visitors to your social media page and the reason is that the users might not make a decision to buy your product the first time they visit your page but redirecting them to your social media page will help them see the comments and reviews of the product or service which might encourage them to make a purchase on your website.

Intersperse web page contents with social media screen captures as proof

The comments and user reviews posted by your past and existing customers will provide the visitor with an understanding and impression about your product or service. The comments posted on the social media pages can be captured through screenshots and they can be interspersed with the website content which would leave a positive impression in the mind of the visitor which would help you increase your brand presence.

Content is important

What could encourage a visitor to share any piece of content on your website to their social media page? The content on your page must have an intrinsic value that evokes the desire of the visitor to share the particular content. Another way to encourage people to share your website content on their social media profile is by offering inducements such as discount vouchers for shares. The content on your website must be able to motivate the visitor to share the content on their social media profile. If you intend to redirect visitors to social media sites, you need to regularly and frequently update the pages and the content in order to retain the interest of the visitors.

Reverse traffic

It is not always necessary that the traffic flows from the website to social media. The reverse could also happen where the traffic might get into your website when you publish a post on a social media platform with a link to our website. But on the other hand, it could go bad if you infuriate the visitor by asking them a ton of details without a systematic fashion and the visitor is not provided anything in return. Instead, if they are given a choice to proceed to view the web page by filling or not filling in the details, there are chances that the visitor would consider filling in the details.

Social media nowadays is not just a platform for leisure and entertainment. With the rise of influencer marketing, it has become a much sought-after platform to earn revenue. Today, people do not prefer social outings these days whereas they are more inclined towards spending time on social media.

Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, people tend to spend more time on social media and because of this, businesses partner with influencers to promote their products or services on social media. As the influencers promote a business, the brand credibility and goodwill of that business are increased and because of the high reach of the influencers, businesses are able to attract a lot of traction which in turn affects sales in a positive manner.

Because of the developments in existing business and because of the sprouting up of new startups, it has never been so important for businesses to do their branding. Today, businesses are targeting their audience by developing influencer marketing strategies and micro-influencer campaigns. Because of the unparalleled reach of social media platforms, businesses can target new focused groups and expand their reach exponentially.

With the influencer marketing realm booming beyond heaps and bounds, it is further classified into macro and micro-influencers.

Who are micro-influencers, and what do they do?

Brands are adopting a new fad of shifting from macro- to micro-influencers. Micro-influencers have a follower base between 10,000 to 1,00,000 and they are considered experts in their respective niches.

Micro-influencers have a promising audience base and they have relevant expertise of their niche. Micro-influencers connect with their audiences organically and their audience trusts the content they publish and the zeal and enthusiasm a micro-influencer brings open doors for innovations.

The future of micro-influencers

Marketing strategies for social media by micro-influencers helps the brand that they are promoting achieve the trust of their customers and prospective customers. Micro-influencers help businesses generate sales though they may be small-scale influencers. They significantly help to increase the value of a brand's product as they display a lot of enthusiasm and creativity which helps them stand out from the established influencers.

With increased conversions by micro-influencer marketing, brands are motivated to increase their spending on influencer marketing instead of pumping money into traditional marketing. Micro-influencer is considerably cost-effective and reasonable compared to macro-influencers. Their reach is also highly authentic and elicits high engagement.

Micro-influencers have a very transparent relationship with their followers and they have a very strong influencing power and they leverage their power to its best which is one of the main reasons brands prefer to collaborate with micro-influencers to promote their products or services.

They take up challenges and help brands build scalable campaigns and those campaigns draw a high reach and engagement. Brands have realized that quality is more important and micro-influencers are better as they have a defined niche and their reach is high. Micro-influencers are 6.7x more cost-effective per engagement and are found to have 60% higher engagement. They have 22.2% more weekly conversions than the average consumer.

Google reviews are one of the most important things required for a business to succeed. Google reviews make your business look trustworthy and a valuable source of information in the eyes of the consumers/visitors. With Google reviews, there is a high probability for a business to be noticed by Google. Higher reviews, both in terms of volume, quality, and diversity will help your business be identified by Google helping you secure a position on the Google My Business page.

It is very important for your business to have an unhindered focus on Google reviews and it is essential to improve them in order to have a good ranking in local SEO. Local SEO is extremely important and Google reviews can build the brand visibility and authority of your brand. There is a lot of importance of SEO in digital marketing because a business will be able to generate clicks and attract traffic only if its website is listed on the 1st page of Google. Only if your website gets traffic, your business will be able to generate sales. The listing ranking of your business is considered by Google and it is one of the factors that is accounted for while ranking web pages on Google.

How do Google Reviews relate to SEO?

Google reviews help the overall SEO efforts and also help to improve search rankings. It is necessary for businesses to realize and understand the importance of Google reviews. There are so many factors involved in search rankings and Google reviews for a business is a strong indicator to search engines and it is the Google reviews that show if the business is trustworthy and reliable. To manage business reviews on Google is a task when competition is always at its peak for both small and businesses on the web. By managing online reviews, you can create a brand image for your business and raise the visibility of your business website on search results. These days, people use Google in order to find new businesses and appearing on top search results/listings is beneficial for your business to generate more clicks on your business website.

It's easier to find your business

People find new businesses with the help of Google search. It is important for a business to appear on Google search because only if you appear on Google search, your website will get organic clicks. It is estimated that a website will receive around 32.5% of traffic share for the first organic click it receives on search engines. By receiving more positive reviews on Google, a business could rank better on search engine result pages.

It is proof that your business is committed to its customers

Negative reviews give your business an opportunity to learn and improve from your mistakes and shortcomings. When a negative review against your business is posted on Google or on your website, you come to know what exactly was and what did not go well. It is a good practice to provide a solution to the customers of your business and apologize for the bad experience they had by associating with your company.

How to increase Google Review Rating

Businesses must note that 85% of customers don't trust reviews that are more than three months old and 40% of people only look at reviews that are from the past two weeks.

Hence, if you got positive reviews sometime back and you are happy and satisfied with those reviews, that is not how it actually works.

Ask customers directly for a Google Review

You can ask your customers or clients for a Google review. It is a direct way to ensure that satisfied customers receive your request. You can also call your customer and ask him to leave a review.

Send a follow-up email for more Google reviews

After you successfully complete the work of your client, you could send him a follow-up email and ask them to leave you a Google review. In the email, you can be personal, thank them for choosing your services, tell them that you appreciate and read all their feedback. Then you could provide them with a direct link to write a Google review about your services.

Affiliate marketing is the marketing technique that gains affiliates, a particular commission of a product's sale based on the recommendation of the affiliate. It is said to be the most affordable and easiest way of marketing where one does not necessarily have to create and sell a particular product. One must ensure to establish a connection between a buyer and seller and earn the commission when the sale of that particular product is finalised.

Surveys have shown that many online companies sell shoes or offer certain domain services via affiliate programs. By enrolling on these affiliate programs, one gets the advantages of getting unique tracking links and use these links whenever they are ought to write about these products. These affiliate programs use various payment terms. Such as:

Pay Per Click or PPC: One makes money online, based on the number of visitors redirected to the advertiser's website through one's affiliate site.

Pay Per Sale or PPS:  Getting to make money online when the purchase of a particular product is completed. The advertiser has to pay one a certain percentage from the sale.

Pay Per Lead or PPL: Making money online when the visitors provide their contact details information on the advertiser's website.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is mostly a passive income source. It may be very competitive but it is perhaps the easiest way to make money online with the help of affiliate marketing techniques. In today’s post, we list some of the tips that will help you make money with affiliate marketing.

Try to be patient: There are plenty of affiliate marketing works. Be patient enough to find the one that you can work with. Try to feed your website using qualitative content to achieve high ranking positions and raise awareness. Do attend affiliate marketing events, seminars, webinars and join relatable discussion forums and online communities to meet new people. These experiences will help you develop efficiency in this field and make you more passionate to make money from these affiliate programs.

Focus on product selection: Never ever make a mistake promoting everything by registering with different affiliate programs. It is impossible to focus on each of them which would eventually lead to disappointment. Instead of promoting everything, select products that are unique, incur larger profits and can reach more people.

Use various traffic sources: To make money online, always ensure to send more traffic to the sales page. Running ads on one's own site is beneficial and quite an alluring way to woo buyers.

Attract targeted traffic: Attract visitors which make them click on the affiliates' links. In order to make money online, one must always think of ways to lure in buyers. Use different advertising techniques such as paid advertising, free advertising, article marketing and email marketing and implement these strategies to enhance sales. Contact various higher ranking search engines which may act as a credible source to reach targeted traffic. Submit your articles to certain article publishing websites and affiliate marketers to publish your articles again. This will help the original publisher earn higher search engine rankings. Get the visitors of your website to subscribe through emails which will affiliate marketers eventually.

Test, measure and track: Be ready to test any action and measure each performance which can help you to understand what works best and what does not. Change or keep your actions to determine which ad works best for you. Place your ads in different areas and track them comparing the sales benefit in each.

Have a thorough research of product demand: One must thoroughly understand market needs. Explore by studying the choices and needs of your customer which leads to a decent traffic flow to your site and work on maintaining the sales chart. Come up with ideas that might help to promote and meet the user's needs.

Follow new methods and techniques: Everyone looks up for help through various search engines online. Who doesn't want to make money online through affiliate programs? Everyone, yes every other person wants it. Just like digital marketing, affiliate marketing is very dynamic. Try to be updated with the latest methods and techniques required to become successful in this competitive environment. Being up to date results in utilising new techniques that help in the long run.

Select the right advertiser: The quality and efficient service of your website are as important as that of your advertiser's website. If the visitors of your site are not satisfied after purchasing the products you'd advised, they would probably never rely on you again which might hamper your credibility. Hence, you must ensure to choose and work with those who offer good customer service while promoting a particular person or company.

Use necessary tools: Use necessary means that help in making your campaign efficient. There are various helpful tools that can be effective in conducting market research, competitor research and help in tracking and converting your ad campaigns.

It is a fact that digital marketing is the talk of the town as digital marketing helps businesses to increase their reach and expand their customer base in a shorter span of time compared to traditional print marketing. Digital marketing helps businesses derive value for the money they spend. Today, it is imperative for businesses to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends and understand the intricacies of digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is often considered online marketing but it is more than that. Digital marketing refers to a marketing procedure that uses different digital channels to reach prospective customers. Some of the most used digital marketing channels are mobile phone messaging (both SMS and MMS). email marketing, social media marketing, display advertising, search engine marketing and apps.

Let us discuss some basic digital marketing strategies that small, medium-sized and large businesses can use to promote their products or services.

Few Basic digital marketing strategies that can be used to promote your business.

Your business website

A business website is very important for a business to succeed. However active you may be on social media, it can't replace a business website. A business website is a place on the internet where you are in complete control of your message. However advanced and attractive your website is, if it is not mobile-friendly, it would score a very less chance to be ranked on search engines. An easy-to-use and mobile-friendly website stand more chances to get ranked on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website in order to be ranked on search engine result pages. It is an organic process. In order for Google to rank your website on the search engine, you need to have the right keywords in your website, must have a good social media presence, your website must have references from external sites, and much more. There are several digital marketing agency services offering specialized SEO services that help you grow your business website on sear engine result pages.

Local Search Engine Optimization

According to Google, there have been more searches conducted from mobile phones than on desktop computers. Google's search results now favour websites that are optimized for local search by including location-related information and location-related keywords. In order to get your website ranked on local search, you can claim your business location on local search directories such as Google My Business (GMB). You also need to make sure that all the information listed such as name, address and phone number are exactly the same on all the local search directories. You need to make sure that you use exact words instead of short forms; for example, you should not use "St." in one listing and "Street" in another. In case, if your NAP (name, address, phone number) varies from one listing to another, search engines may not be able to recognize it as the same business mentioned and this can hear your search results.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the third most popular digital marketing method and it is used by nearly seven in 10 businesses. Approximately 47% of people across demographics check their email on a mobile phone and 81% of those use smartphones (as opposed to tabs). Around 33% of email opens occur on mobile devices and hence, you must always prioritize optimizing websites for mobile phones. It is best to keep emails short, with a very clear call-to-action and it is better to use plenty of white space so that it is absolutely made clear of the buttons or links in the email.

Read our article on "What is Email Marketing & Why Does My Business Need It?"

Social media marketing

According to Clutch, around 83% of companies use social media as a marketing channel to promote their business. You need to ensure that you are keeping track of the latest social media channels.

Content marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and marketing content such as blog posts, ebooks, white papers, infographics, videos, etc. which can be shared on digital platforms.

If you are looking into the marketing of your brand, product, services, you must have heard about email marketing. It is the oldest form of digital marketing and has been in use since the 80s, if not before. Email marketing is reaching out to the people who have subscribed to your email list by sending mails, informing and educating them about your product and services with the aim to turn them into a sale. Though numerous forms of digital marketing have evolved since then, the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns is really not lost. However, we have to admit that the strategies of email marketing have definitely changed over the years.

Today in this post, I will talk about 5 strategies that can help you yield better results for your email marketing campaign.

5 MUST-TRY STRATEGIES FOR A MORE EFFECTIVE EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Use your data to personalize email messages:

Studies have shown that personalized emails have 6 times more chances of getting read and converted. But how to exactly personalize emails. No, it doesn’t mean you have to write a single message to a single customer. It is practically not possible to write like this to hundreds and thousands of subscribers in your list. Understandable. Personalization here means gathering data and studying the data to understand the likes, dislikes, preferences and choices of the majority of your subscribers. Upon understanding the same, you will be able to create emails talking about exactly what your subscribers want to hear instead of what you want to tell. Using the first name in communication is one of the best ways to start with an email in a personal tone.

Segmentize subscribers for more effective communication:

Drawing clues from the previous pointer, we can well understand that the bigger your subscriber list grows, the more varied the options of choices, preference, likes and dislikes will go. It will increasingly become difficult to draft a one-size-fits-all email communication and yet maintain the personalized tone. The solution is the segmentation of your email subscribers list. Creating various personas depending upon the responses of your subscribers, you will be able to segment them into various groups. Again segmentation can be done depending on the sales journey the subscribers are on. Then you can create campaigns to communicate and push them towards conversion. Studies showed that segmented email communication received as high as 90-94 per cent open rates and about 35 per cent click through rates.

Opt for responsive email design:

In the modern world, 90 per cent of emails are checked and responded to using mobile devices and on the go. Therefore, it is very important that your emails are mobile-friendly. Otherwise, high chances are your subscriber will actually unsubscribe from your list. Who really wants to invest time (though seconds) in an email in the inbox that can’t be read. And if your luck is really good, it will go to Trash. But in any case, it is not serving your purpose. However, this problem can be easily solved with a responsive email design. Creating a responsive email design means that the user experience is optimized regardless of the device or screen they use. Most email service providers offer this solution within their email functionality.

Focus on design and CTA

In today’s time, emails have evolved much more than just written texts. Now we include posters, links and visuals in the emailers. Therefore it is important to give enough attention to your emails. While it should bear the colours and designs according to your brand recognition elements, it is also important that it is easy to comprehend and take action. Some of the ground rules are to write short, easy to read headlines. Keep the entire content easy to understand, keep the visuals well connected with your communication, use large and attractive click to action buttons.

Automate email campaign

Automated email campaigns simply mean triggered email campaigns. Trigger-based emails are emails that are sent out automatically based on user behaviour. In this type of email campaign, a series of emails are pre-made and fed into the automation engine and they get automatically triggered when a subscriber takes action on a previous email. The advantage of these email campaigns is that you can gradually inform, educate and finally lead a subscriber to the sales stage which ensures better chances of conversion. Again because it is automated it really is not much of a hassle to execute, once readied and fed to the system, the campaign pretty much does its own job and gather your leads.

Digital advertising is considered an integral component of marketing strategies today. One must ensure to have an efficient digital marketing team that will help the business grow to make its way to developing a successful online presence which will eventually lead to larger sales.

Digital advertisements help reach a company to a much wider audience. Make sure to work on your ads to get the targeted results. Working on the design, channel, logic and every other aspect of the advertisement needs to be analysed well to get better outcomes in one's favour. Hire experts who can create digital ads to get the most out of your ad campaigns. Work with the best channels and try to create contents that might be beneficial for your company to get desired results through the ad campaigns.

In today’s post, we will discuss some really helpful marketing strategies which can help your company get the right kind of digital advertisement results which may help you achieve greater outcomes.

10 DIGITAL ADVERTISEMENT TIPS FOR BETTER RESULT

Creative Elements:

Your business might have certain visual elements that might make it stand out from the competition. Channelise that as an advantage in your marketing efforts. Be it a logo, font, mascot or colour scheme get these features to help your brand get recognised by the audience. Work on implementing unique and creative visual elements in your ads that might help to bring positive outcomes for your business. Researchers state that it is very important to come up with newer creative content when advertising on social media.

Spend Wisely:

Each and every platform used for online marketing provides you with a different value. You need to analyse which of these platforms are worthy enough to invest your time and money in. Be specific about your brand needs and plan your budget accordingly. You must decide what works best for you and which platform can put in specific advertising efforts to yield success through the campaigns.

Do Your Research:

Even if you have an idea of what works best for your audience with the help of your advertisements, you must take out time to conduct thorough research and have data that can support your actions. It is always essential to adapt to various customer needs and plan your marketing strategies accordingly.

The Buyer Process:

Observe buying patterns of your products to understand what more you need to present to your buyers and work effectively to reach new users. With the help of buyer analytics, you can track each step a visitor takes to surf through your website before buying your products. This information will help your digital marketing campaigns cater to targeted audiences which may help in greater sales benefits.

Know Your Target Audience:

This is a very important point. May how good your product is and how wonderful the advertisement campaign you create, unless you are pitching them to the right kind of audience, it will be far from effective. Therefore it is very important to have a clear idea of who your target audience is. Understand your audience well, create buyers’ persona and pitch each persona in their own preferred way. That’s pretty much a simple secret to the success of digital media campaigns.

Connect Social Media Metrics With ROI:

Try to find what works best for your campaigns and use the data efficiently to yield positive results. When you are marketing your products online, you are reaching out to a diverse group of people which must be taken into consideration while determining your results. The key to developing a reliable social media attribution strategy is to find out what promotes engagement with your company with what actually drives conversions.

Your target audience is not only trying to find friends or good deals on social media. Every other individual that interacts with your brand has a different behavioural pattern, voicing opinions, responding to world events etc. Respond and interact wisely with people who put up queries about your products. Just because they like and share your campaigns does not mean that the consumer is ready to buy the same. A brand needs to connect with the social media metrics at first with hard metrics like sales, ROI, registrations and leads to develop an efficient marketing strategy to reach out to its buyers.

Leverage Facebook:

Studies show that 80% of the small and medium-sized businesses do not use ads for Facebook despite it being a great advertising space for such business types. Facebook takes the word of mouth publicity to a whole new level where people rely more on their recommendations from friends and can sway away from a consumer even at the littlest odds. Facebook is a great advertising platform that helps small businesses to reach their target audience without spending a fortune. Make sure to try to work on some ads and figure out what's going to work best for your brand.

Integrate All Marketing Channels:

To reach your target audience effectively, one must ensure that the ads are integrated across various platforms and give out the same message to its users regardless of the platform. Each social networking site has a different vibe & feel to it, so one must try to get their digital efforts to match each site maintaining uniqueness and consistency to promote your brand.

Geo-fencing:

This new marketing strategy allows the brand to target its consumers based on their physical location eventually working out to guide them to your business. Geo-fencing can be really effective for many businesses to drive more sales. Many digital marketers are utilising geo-fencing combined with digital advertising to engage with the consumers and send the right message to drive in-store traffic.

Optimise Product Listing Ads:

When creating product listing ads, one must ensure to have all the elements in it which the users expect to get when they search for that particular product. Make sure that the customers do not lose interest and be prompt to answer any queries upfront. Include even the tiniest of product information that can be beneficial to the purchasing process. Always make sure to take the necessary time to build a product feed that provides a detailed description of your products which can be presented well on various online search platforms. Adding a product picture along with the description on a search result page can visually appeal more to the audience than to the normal text ads.

The unprecedented crisis of Covid-19 laid its impacts on almost every aspect of human lives, be it day to day living or business or social interactions. While some impacts are really appalling, there are certain impacts that can curve the way towards more positive outcomes. Today, let's check out how digital marketing got impacted in Covid-19.

HOW COVID 19 IMPACTED THE AUDIENCES

Audience moving more and more into digital space was certainly not a new phenomenon or a phenomenon caused due by the impact of covid 19, however, it received a considerable boost in this crisis time. People, being stuck at the home, drew more closer to the digital mediums because every shortcoming of life due to covid was kind of getting some resolution on the digital platform.

Buying groceries, go digital!

Connecting with friends and family, go digital!

Need a job, go digital!

Pay utility bills, go digital

When everyone is so moving towards digital, it is needless to say that marketing in digital mediums is bound to take a leap. While online consumers were already present in the Indian market, the pandemic has increased the size of the marketing vastly. When your consumers are online, the brands have no other choice but to take their marketing online to reach more and more audiences.

HOW COVID 19 IMPACTED THE MARKETING STRATEGIES

It is being said that Covid 19 has made even the die-hard traditional marketing strategists go digital. Traditional media was losing acute attention from the audience for quite some time now. Even the media were steadily losing audience, especially from the urban market. Covid 19 has just blown a fan to this phenomenon. The age-old advertising process becomes more and more intrusive and annoying especially when people have a way to do away with them or consume content as per their choice, wish and time. With the changing mode of consuming content, the ways of catering for them also are changing.

Deep marketing or digital marketing strategies to offer the right product to the right audience and at the right time is now the most effective way to gain lead and conversion. Email marketing can really help the marketing strategies here.

Instead of cutting the audience’s attention intrusively by flashing your ad, it is more effective to now engage them and allow them to take an action and associate with your brand.

Instead of showing them your content at your time, it is better to offer them content which they can view and consume and their time. Having your website is a must for businesses now.

Instead of flashing your content, focus on educating your audience about your product, service and their effectiveness on their lives. Consider blog marketing to effectively reach your target audiences.

SOME TIPS TO ACHIEVE MAXIMUM RESULT FROM DIGITAL MARKETING

If you are already convinced how digital marketing strategies can help your business gain more customers, here are a few simple pointers that you must keep in mind while marketing in digital mediums.

Take care of your website’s performance - Understand that all your competitors are now on digital platforms and all vying for the attention of the target audience. While digital media is a very effective space, it is important to know that it can also be very volatile in case your website has a simple shortcoming. Therefore, it is very important to keep a keen eye on the performance of your website, its content quality, speed and engageability to attract more audience and hold their attention.

See that your audience has easy options to reach you - As I mentioned, digital mediums are a very competitive space. To hold back your customers make sure that you are easily accessible to them. Offer them an easy way to reach you. Flash your business name, phone number, email address prominently on your website. Offer them a call back option and do call them back at the earliest upon receiving their lead. Offer them chat boxes to ask questions instantly.

Make full use of social media - Do not down-eye the effectiveness of social media for your brand. Make full use of social media to reach, engage and associate with your audience. Never before there was such an easy way to reach and interact with potential customers and get to know their opinion on your brand.

Social media trends are evolving with new features and changes in algorithms. A few years ago, Snapchat was known for its disappearing content but now even Instagram has it and more than 500 million people are using this feature. Marketers need to evolve by keeping an eye out for the latest trends in social media.

Let us discuss some of the most important social media trends in 2021:

1. Live streams will remain popular

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to go digital. Businesses now prefer zoom conferences over face-to-face meetings. Since the pandemic struck the world, Facebook witnessed a massive surge in messaging and live streaming thereby increasing engagement. People love interacting with brands right from the comfort of their homes.

2. Stories as a content format

More than 500 million users interact with Instagram Stories on a daily basis. Hence it is essential for brands to consider publishing Instagram stories as part of their content strategy. Stories in the form of videos stand more chance to be viewed than photos. As per a SocialInsider study, it is found that stories in the form of photos had more drop-offs than video which means that people like to spend more time watching videos than photos.

3. Virtual reality will become more popular on social media

Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the most recent technological trends in the digital space. Interacting through VR gives people a sense of being present at that place. Since social media platforms are pushing forward with adopting this technology, virtual reality is going to gain more popularity on social media.

4. Augmented reality as a media trend

Augmented reality only requires a smartphone and it is more accessible than VR. Augmented reality is interactive and encourages engagement. It has become one of the most important social media trends and brands have been creating amazing AR filters to promote their products or initiate interactions with followers. Augmented reality helps the audience be engaged and entertained. If you rightly implement AR into your marketing strategy, you could take your brand to a different tangent.

5. Social commerce will continue to grow

The social media industry is trying all possible ways to enhance user experience that enable users to select the product or service on social media and make the transaction without having to go to any new browser or tab. Facebook allows you to set up shops on the platform wherein users can buy products directly from the Facebook platform. This will help brands to increase the sales of their products or services on social media. Lately, it is seen that people use social media to research products or services and customer reviews influence their purchase decision. Allowing users to buy products on social media helps reduce the chance of transactions being abandoned.

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms globally, and many businesses already use it as a platform to share picture and short-video format content. This has mostly included print style advertising or short announcements. Instagram TV (IGTV) is a feature that allows sharing of long-form video on the social media platform. Specifically, up to 60 mins of video from the web or 15 minutes of video on mobile is supported. This is significant as normal Instagram posts are limited to less than 60 secs of content. Here we discuss everything you need to know about IGTV to get your content out there. Be it for personal use, or

branding and creative

works.

Why IGTV- Multiple studies show that consumers engage with online video content more than written and even TV content. This is perhaps unsurprising as we can access the internet so easily from our phones today. IGTV is a platform for your video content that is accessible by millions right from their phones. The great potential of IGTV for businesses lies in the fact that so many people regularly use Instagram that your content will be reliably visible to thousands of potential clients instantly.

Here are a few kinds of videos that you could upload on IGTV for your business:

o Series- Publishing a series of videos on a certain theme can be a great way to start off on this platform as it shows consistency and helps increase exposure and popularity among your audience. For instance, an audiobook making company can have a series of IGTV videos where people can listen to a live reading of the first chapters of certain books to get a taste of the kind of content the company offers.

o Behind the scenes- Take your viewers behind the scenes by showing off bloopers, outtakes and other material that wasn’t on the air. This can create a lot of interest and show that your content is also fun to make. Disney did this with Toy Storyland and called it ‘behind the magic’.

o Tutorials- Since IGTV allows long videos, you can provide in-depth tutorials about your products, answer FAQs and even demonstrate any extra tricks or easter-eggs for your watchers to learn. This format is often used by software developers and culinary companies to help their customers out with their products.

o Interviews- If you have any notable brand ambassadors or clients that can speak about their experience with you or if you simply want to generate attention via celebrity association, arranging interviews and putting them up might be the way to go. This is often done by podcasters and news organisations to generate interest in them.

o Vlogging- streaming or vlogging content to your audience creates a more personal connection to them than normal update videos. Vlogging can also be used as a QnA platform where you answer audience questions on video rather than by text. This format is more successful if the audience recognizes the person doing the vlog.

How to get started- Firstly, you’ll need an Instagram account. Even though there is a standalone IGTV app, the platform is inseparable from Instagram.

Your video must follow some technical guidelines:

1. Length: Minimum of 1 minute, maximum of 15 minutes (on mobile) or 60 minutes (on desktop)

2. File Type: MP4 File format

3. File Size: Maximum file size is 650MB (for videos under 10 minutes) or 3.6GB (for videos 10-60 minutes)

4. Dimensions: Video displays at a 9:16 aspect ratio (for vertical videos) or a 16:9 aspect ratio (for horizontal videos)

5. Resolution: minimum resolution of 720p

6. Frame Rate: Minimum30 FPS

Here are some basic things to keep in mind while working on your IGTV videos:

o Remember to optimize your title, thumbnail, and preview before hitting “post”.

o, Keep in mind that your IGTV is closely linked to your Instagram. So avoid reusing too much material from your main feed and assume that your audience will already be familiar with the Instagram platform.

o While you have 60 mins to work with, don’t waste time needlessly. Given that it is a social media platform, attention spans are unreliable and so you should get to the main point quickly to not bore your audience.

o, Try to maintain a consistent aesthetic and style in your videos to promote brand recognition of your work.

o Finally, consider adding good captions because a significant amount of video on social media is viewed as muted. Also, add messages asking for sound if your post relies on audio.