Successfully implementing marketing strategies is an art form. You have to carefully tailor your strategies to your business and marketing needs. Most importantly, you have to keep track of changes around you and adjust your marketing strategy as needed.
How often do you review and adjust your marketing strategy?
Now that 2021 has entered its last few months, it’s the best time for you to take a look at popular marketing strategies today and see which ones you can use. In no particular order, here are seven of the most recommended digital marketing strategies to try this 2021.
1. Get On the Social E-commerce Scene
If you run an e-commerce business and haven’t started selling on social media platforms, then you are missing out — big time.
One of the fastest-growing trends today is advertising and selling products on social media. Over the past year, people have been spending much more time on the internet, more specifically on social media platforms. And since that’s where your target audience is, it’s only logical to follow them there.
Both Facebook and Instagram launched Shop platforms. These allow consumers to shop directly on the apps. One big advantage of this is the shorter customer journey. Your target audience can quickly go from the search stage to the conversion stage in just one app and perhaps even in a matter of minutes.
2. Go Local with SEO Marketing
The pandemic really put businesses and consumers through the wringer. Adapting to the “new normal” is a priority for your business’s survival. Informing your customers and target audience of any changes is crucial.
The best way to do this is through local SEO marketing.
Make sure to update your Google Business Profiles regularly. And we’re not just talking about your business hours and contact information. With stay-at-home and social distancing orders still enforced in some places, you should also include other pandemic-friendly details. Examples of these include curbside pickup, delivery information, online appointments, and more.
Additionally, everyone knows how hard the pandemic hit small local businesses. So it’s no surprise that more people are doing their best to show support. If you’re not taking advantage of local SEO, you might miss out on an influx of new and supportive local customers.
3. Optimize Keywords for Voice Searches
More people working from home means more people are exploring and testing just how well their smart home devices and voice assistants work. One way they do this? By using voice searches to the fullest.
As such, optimizing your digital marketing strategy to include keywords for voice search can potentially pay dividends. But what’s the difference between traditional keywords and voice search keywords? Short answer — the length.
Voice search keywords are often complete and grammatically correct sentences or phrases. In contrast, the usual keywords are often just a couple of words. For example, instead of manually searching for “new iPhone specs,” your target audience might ask Alexa to find out
“What’s the difference between the Apple iPhone 12 and the new iPhone 13?”
4. Put Your Words Into Action
The pandemic isn’t the only nation-rocking event that happened in the past year. 2020 was also the year that people took action on several different social justice issues.
From the widely publicized Black Lives Matter and the Stop Asian Hate movements to international environmental sustainability efforts, people are noticing whether businesses follow through on their words of support.
Now isn’t the time to simply post a black square on Instagram and call it a day. Consumers are more enlightened than you think and want to see actual responses that show efforts towards inclusion, diversity, or sustainability.
So if you want to have a positive image, build rapport, and gain consumers’ trust, you’ll need to walk the talk and be authentic in marketing your responses to current issues.
5. Build and Foster Active Communities
Speaking of building rapport and gaining consumers’ trust — one amazing way to do this is through community building.
Fostering active communities of past and potential customers improves long-term engagement. It can also help with boosting brand awareness. A few ways you can build your digital community is through social media platforms, online boards, forums, and even your own site-hosted network.
With more and more people active on social media platforms, it pays to be active there as well. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are pretty much a given but don’t forget about other sites. Videos are huge today, so see how you can leverage your presence in YouTube or TikTok to grow a community. If you’re in the gaming industry, then a Discord server is a good option, too. Another option is to start answering questions in Quora. Doing this also helps you be seen as an authority in your industry.
6. Social Video Marketing and Live Streams
As we mentioned, videos are huge. The growth of social videos and live streaming as a marketing tool isn’t anything new either. The majority of businesses currently use some form of video marketing, and most marketers see better returns on investment with videos compared to regular images.
One of the best things about video marketing is the opportunity to go casual. You don’t need highly polished videos with exceptional edits and color grading. Especially not if your platform of choice is TikTok — that’s not what your target audience wants to watch on the app. They are looking for videos that are fun, casual, and shareable.
If you can make shareable content regularly, you can easily build a following and an active community. This would help you when marketing new products or services in the future.
7. Automate to Make Marketing Easier
The best digital marketing strategy to gain popularity this year might be marketing automation. Not only can using automation help you enhance efficiencies, but it can also help you save some money.
You can apply marketing automation to your customer relationship management tools and email marketing. Instead of sending one email at a time and waiting for a response before sending another, you can simply automate a sequence of emails based on consumer actions.
Here are some areas where you can apply marketing automation:
- Auto-responder sequences
- Event and promo reminders
- Up-sell campaigns
- Lead nurturing campaigns
You can even apply marketing automation to Google Ads. Automated Bidding makes it easier to maximize clicks, target impression share, and maximize conversions.
Utilize Trends to Grow Your Business
Keeping up with the latest digital marketing strategy can pay off well. Remember that your marketing strategy isn’t a one-and-done thing — it requires tweaking and innovation to keep up with the times and with your consumers!
If you want to learn more about marketing automation or any marketing strategy we suggested, visit our website at Create By Influence. You can also check us out on social media — we’re on Facebook and Instagram.
