According to a survey by Coresight Research, over 47% of US shoppers have bid goodbye to shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retail stores. The case is similar across the world. Brands now have greater need for digital marketing than ever before.
With millions of companies now almost exclusively using digital marketing to gain brand visibility, it’s important that they avoid silly digital marketing mistakes and implement strategies that actually convert.
Here, we take you through five effective digital marketing tactics that you can implement on a budget:
Get micro-influencers on your side
The days of using celebrities as brand ambassadors are long gone. To generate leads today, you need to use spokespeople who your audience can relate to.
Micro influencers (those in the 10K-100K follower range) are a super effective medium to generate leads for your business. They often belong to the same cultural & financial background as their followers, have the same aspirations as their audience and as a result, are perceived to be trustworthy by prospective buyers.
It’s necessary that you find micro influencers who are relevant to your target market and partner with them to create campaigns that convert. The best place to find micro influencers is on Instagram. Just look through the posts of your competitors to see if there’s any high-profile account who’s constantly commenting on their posts or who may be actively promoting their products/services. If these individuals fall within the 10K-100K follower range, then they’re your micro influencers. You can contact them to pitch your campaign.
When selecting a micro influencer, it’s important to check for brand congruence. Your ethos and that of the influencer should match. Second, you can just check for your company/brand name in the hashtag list. If anyone’s been actively using your branded hashtag and is generating quite a lot of traction, then you can work with them on your campaigns too. You can also use platforms like TaggerMedia to evaluate the traffic generated by different micro influencers and you can use these stats to choose your brand-partner.
TaggerMedia is an all-in-one influencer marketing software that can help you manage end to-end influencer campaigns. You can choose qualified micro influencers from an expansive pool and forge time-bound partnerships. The tool can help you evaluate the performance of each post published across social media channels and get accurate reports about overall campaign success. The best part? Tagger Media supports content in 9 different languages.
Hook prospects with the most compelling content
Content really does convert. Studies show that long-form content in particular, can generate twice as many backlinks and 9X the number of leads, compared to short-form content.
Audiences these days absolutely love reading listicles and mini-ebooks. Research-rich content in the form of whitepapers and guides have become very popular during the coronavirus pandemic.
You should also enlist emails. Newsletters via emails are a great way to announce surprise offers, seasonal discounts and important updates (both about the pandemic and your brand’s response to it). They are extremely personal communication that can be further customised based on the order/search history of the prospect.
Videos are another great content format to explore during the pandemic. Your video can be anywhere between 30 seconds and 8 minutes, depending on the channel you publish it on.
Often, many companies have excellent ideas for content, but they don’t have in-house talent who can create the content for them. If you’re in the same predicament, consider outsourcing your content requirements.
Narrato.io – a content ordering and writer hire platform, offers customised, well-researched and creatively-written content at budget-friendly prices. The platform is powered by a smart algorithm that matches clients with writers who have the most relevant expertise. Narrato has a built-in readability, grammar, content quality and plagiarism checker, which ensures the writers have the modern tech support to create awesome content.
Use heatmaps to create a converting website
It’s been found that on average, website visitors stay only for 30 seconds on a site, before exiting it for a competitor’s site. Often, brands find it difficult to know when visitors made the decision to leave. What content did they browse when they were on the site and what content went unnoticed? How long did they spend browsing through a particular page?
Heatmaps of website visitor activity can answer these questions. This colour-coded visualisation shows you what website visitors do when they’re on your site. They show you how often a visitor clicked on a particular link/button, how frequently visitors visited a particular page and the path visitors used to navigate through your site. You can use this tool to make mindful website design decisions that can bring you more leads and conversions. For example:
- Check how far down readers scroll on your page.
- Find out where audiences stop and concentrate (indicated by repeated mouse clicks or highlights on sections of the page)
- Identify which CTAs, buttons and advertisements receive the most (and lease) clicks.
- Check which internal pages and links site visitors are clicking on and navigating to.
- Identify any anomalies which occur due to broken links and 404 errors.
- Compare how your pages on desktop and mobile look like and whether they experience the same usage behaviours.
There are tools like Heatmap, Mouseflow and Lucky Orange that help you with the heatmap analysis of your web assets and optimise for conversions.
Timely banner advertisements can do wonders for your marketing
Did you know that the average internet user gets inundated with over 1700 banner ads per month? It’s no wonder that prospects ignore at least half the banner ads they see.
The trick to using banner advertisements for digital marketing and lead generation, is to use them at the right time and the right place.
A study of brands which ran Google Ads 24 hours per day / 7 days a week, showed that Tuesday at 7:00PM was the best time to publish a banner ad.
You can also use the Google Ads Hour of Day tool to find out what bespoke day/time works best for your brand, by analysing your ad engagement.
In addition to scheduling your Google Ads, you should also post banner ads on Facebook and Instagram. These ads must be relevant to the prospect’s web usage history or purchase preferences.
When implementing banner ads in your campaigns, remember these tips:
- For homepage takeovers (especially during influencer campaigns), choose a leaderboard ad (728×90px). Pair it with the Medium Rectangle (300×250px) ad to promote related products or campaigns.
- Always position your advertisement above the fold, so it is immediately noticeable to every visitor.
- Buttons that link-back to your site should always be placed at the lower right-hand corner, after your message. This way, it’s non-intrusive, but effective.
- The only advertisement where you can use 10 point-or-les, script-type font, is a disclaimer ad. For all other ads, stick to formal fonts like Bodoni and Helvética, with font size 12 or 14.
Bannersnack and Mybannermaker are two good platforms to create eye-catching banners. Good old GIMP and Photoshop also works, but may require some designer effort!
Customise your digital marketing campaigns by collecting customer insights
We were just talking about how effective personalised advertisements are in generating leads. But how can you collect information about audience preferences in the first place? Site cookies aside, you should use surveys.
Customer surveys are an integral part of any digital marketing campaign. They are easy to administer and can be published on absolutely any social media channel. From quizzes to opinion polls to online scratch cards, there are numerous interactive surveys/data collection templates that you can use. As your audience plays the game/quiz, you can sneak in a few purchase-relevant questions which can help you products & services and also design ads, blog posts and digital marketing campaigns.
For example, you’re a fabric designer and your quiz is titled “Which English Queen Are You Most Like?” You can include questions like “Which fabric will your ball gowns be made from?” or an MCQ like “Choose the embellishments you’d like to have on your coronation dress”. The truth is, even though the quiz has nothing to do with the player’s current life, they are still very likely to answer with their own preferences. This way, you’ll know what type of fabrics your prospects will actually like and create products accordingly. You can also customise the advertisements the right way.
Of course, you can also go the formal route and directly administer a survey to prospects. To get more site visitors to actively participate in your games, surveys and quizzes, write a killer survey introduction:
- Always be upfront about the goal of your survey. If you’re planning to introduce advertisements to them, it helps if you mention this. That way, you’ll get the most relevant and truthful feedback.
- Explain why they were chosen. Every customer loves to feel special and explaining why they are the perfect fit for the survey, will encourage them to participate.
- Highlight privacy. No customer wants to share their personal information. Telling them how you’ll protect their personal data will win their trust.
- Limit the number of questions to 10 (lesser if you can swing it – MCQ’s can be a great format here).
- End with thanks. It’s polite.
Good old Google Forms work well for customer surveys, but if you are looking for more featureful options, then you can consider Typeform, SurveyLegend or CrowdSignal .
Wrapping up
Generating leads during a slowdown or recession can be tricky but you can always rely on the digital world to show you new opportunities. Optimising your existing digital marketing efforts can also give you the same or better returns at low cost. Above are five of the several other such opportunities. Bottomline – thinking out of the box is key to survival in hard times.
To learn more about how Allegiant Media can help you with your next social media or digital marketing campaign contact us for a demo today!
This article was originally featured on TaggerMedia.com on April 24, 2020 and was written by Nisha Prakash, a blogger specialising in social media marketing and content management. Nisha works as a senior content writer with Godot Media and is an avid runner, trekking enthusiast and lifelong bibliophile.