5 Tips for Digital Marketing Success Digital marketers fail when they don't follow these golden rules.
By Finnegan Pierson Edited by Dan Bova
This story originally appeared on PR Daily
In a tech-driven world, it's difficult to decide which paths are best for building brand awareness and driving sales.
This is a big part of the job for a digital marketer who wants to promote it online. A digital marketer takes advantage of many different platforms and digital marketing tools in order to boost a brand's image.
When digital marketers fail, it's because they are not following these five rules for successful efforts:
1. Clearly communicate your role.
If you are trying to help a company build awareness of it's brand, you first must ensure that the people you are working with at the company understand your role.
Before you begin building your awareness plan, do a quick presentation explaining to your client how you will expand promotion of a product through multiple platforms, including Web ads, social media, emails and multimedia platforms. Your client must understand how you will use your skills on multiple platforms in order to reach consumers.
2. Demonstrate your skills.
In digital marketing, all electronic media platforms are open for discussion. To build awareness of your brand, experiment with targeted media—such as paid ads and SEO initiatives. Also coordinate print materials that sync with your electronic-media messages. Doing this will build a consistent campaign.
Keep track of what works and what doesn't. An important part of being a digital marketer is having metrics to back up what fails and succeeds so you can learn lessons and improve future campaigns.
3. Identify trustworthy brands.
Become a student of trustworthy brands and learn from brands and campaigns that have succeeded.
You can borrow (and steal) those ideas to promote your organization or client. Good ideas are born to groups of minds that are working together, so use the collective insight of a well-established brand to build campaigns for your clients' brands.
4. Use creativity.
The very best campaigns in the digital marketing world are the ones that grab your attention without being gimmicky.
Know your client and your client's audience well. Decide if they can take a little humor, if they need a more cerebral message or if they crave a more emotionally driven campaign. From there, you can inject your creativity to build a campaign that will catch your audience's attention and drive both interactions and sales.
Attitudes and values change over time, so a big part of your job is to know your audience and to track their interests, behaviors and buying patterns over time. That gives you a better understanding of whom you are marketing to, which will lead to stronger and more engaging digital marketing campaigns for your audiences.
5. Dive into social media.
Social media is one of the newest and best ways (besides email) that you can drive interest for your brand.
Social media is especially helpful if your client has well-established accounts with a number of followers on Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram. Tweak your digital marketing campaigns for each of these platforms so that you are creating interest for the products you are marketing in creative ways.
On Twitter, post creative news headlines that prompt the reader to click on your link to see your website. Remember that "click baiting" can backfire on you if your product cannot deliver on the promises you are making. Experiment with catchy headlines, but make sure what you are pointing your audience to can satisfy the energy and time it takes to click through.
If you are marketing on Instagram, use beautiful photographs shot at interesting angles to promote your brand and products. Use good lighting and write memorable captions. Include multiple variations of your hashtag in order to fill Instagram's feed with your brand. Users will see your photos in multiple streams when they search for hashtags.
