73% of small businesses are currently investing in digital marketing and 95% of those businesses report that they’re going to increase their marketing budget this year.

With so many businesses realizing the value of digital marketing, it begs the question: just how are they making it work?

Digital marketing is an art, and to really succeed you need to not only know what you’re doing, but you also need to ensure that you’re going at it all with a solid plan.

Here are our top ten digital marketing tips in order to kickstart your marketing efforts and help you climb the ranks.

1. Know Your Brand

Developing a solid brand strategy is crucial in ensuring that you’re engaging in good online marketing.

Why? If you don’t know what your company represents then you’re not going to be able to develop strong messaging across all of your marketing channels.

It also helps you work your way towards cultivating a strong marketing strategy when then turns into a strong content strategy.

Seeing results from digital marketing means communicating value effectively across all channels.

If you have worked to identify your brand’s vision, mission, and core values, then this will be easy to do.

You’ll already know how you wish to position your brand, what kind of language you want to use, and even the kind of visual identity you wish to possess.

Not only this, but you’ll have already identified your key audience and their buyer personas. This makes marketing so much easier.

Trust us, if you work hard on your brand strategy, you’ll feel grateful down the road.

2. Do Keyword Research

Marketing tips usually include something about keywords. In today’s digital landscape, keywords are how potential customers find and interact with your brand.

If you think you’re putting a lot of time, effort, and money into digital marketing but you aren’t seeing any results, then it could be due to the fact that you aren’t using the right keywords.

This is something you’ll want to do at least once every quarter, as popular keywords and search terms tend to change rapidly.

To ensure that your research is effective, you’ll want to use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner while also searching online yourself.

Think like a potential customer. What terms might they be searching for on Google in order to find your product or service?

It’s best to be as specific as possible here as it will lead to higher conversion rates for you. Try to avoid selecting broad one-word keywords. These have lots of competition and don’t really help people find exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Don’t Be Afraid of PPC

Paid ads sound a little daunting to some people. The fact that they have to pay for anything throws off a lot of smaller businesses with smaller marketing budgets.

If you can post for free on your blog and on social media, then why would you pay for marketing ads?

However, paid-per-click ads are actually one of the most cost-effective and effective marketing tools for small businesses! Don’t let them scare you away.

In fact, businesses tend to see nearly 200% ROI on PPC ads. That’s right, most companies who invest in PPC ads earn about $3 for every $1.6 they spend.

Because developing paid ad campaigns is so time-consuming and tedious, though, it’s best to leave this to an expert.

They’ll know how to create ad groups, write text copy that converts, and continuously optimize your campaigns in order to see results.

It’s worth noting that PPC ads are especially great for local businesses who cater to a local audience.

Local searches are especially popular and people who are searching for something “near me” tend to be ready to purchase.

If you’re a local business, you should definitely be using ads as a way to increase conversions. With extensions such as calling, business hours, and more, it’s easy to do if you’re local.

4. On-Site SEO is King

If you’re not working on your search engine optimization, then you’re not truly engaging in digital marketing.

What is SEO? It’s the process of optimizing your website so that search engines will find you and rank you at the top of the results page.

This means including things like keywords in your website and blog copy, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s worth noting that all of these are on-site SEO techniques (with the exception of perhaps guest posting, but that still links back to your website).

While paid ads are a great way to build awareness and increase sales of a specific item or service, you’ll need to think about on-site SEO just as much as off-site.

This will help you establish yourself as an authority in your industry and will help you rank organically on the search engine results page, which is what you really want.

5. Always Analyze Your Metrics

The best digital marketing strategies always include room for analyzing the metrics of campaigns.

You can invest all of the time and money in the world into digital marketing, but if you’re not looking at the results of those efforts, then what are you really doing?

One of the best online marketing tips we can give you is to set time aside each week to take a look at the performance of all of your marketing efforts.

This includes your blogs, email campaigns, paid ad campaigns, and more. The best part is, though, is that it’s incredibly easy to receive insight these days.

Any marketing platform or content management system is going to come with an analytics feature that will let you see how your campaigns are performing and what you need to change.

Always make small changes that will help increase your efforts, even if just by a little bit.

6. Incorporate Video Marketing

People are visual learners, and they prefer to interact with companies through visuals rather than text.

While it’s important to create high-quality content and blogs to get your message across (which will increase your SEO ranking), you also need to invest in video marketing.

In fact, 83% of brands polled said that video marketing is becoming more important. Videos can also be more effective at developing brand trust, increasing buyer confidence, and so much more.

It doesn’t have to be long-form video content. Video marketing also includes short Instagram videos, live Facebook updates, and 30-second trailer teasers of a brand new product.

You can get as creative as you’d like here, but as long as you use video as a way to further brand your company and push its core mission and values, it’s hard to go wrong.

7. Create High-Value Content

This goes for both written and visual content. Most people who read online marketing tips and tricks tend to think, “Well, we’re already writing great blogs and producing YouTube videos!”

Yes, but are they high-value in their general quality and do they offer solutions to your readers or viewers?

When it comes to blog content, you’ll always want to focus on creating high-value content.

In part, this is important because Google loves to rank high-quality content, well, higher.

Also, readers tend to drift more towards blogs that offer them something of value instead of always selling to them. Avoid being overly-promotional and try to instead focus on offering solutions to their problems or answers to their questions.

The same goes for video content marketing. First, you’ll need to ensure that all of your video content is high-value in a production sense.

Don’t throw precious marketing money away trying to produce low-quality videos just for the sake of it.

You’ll also need to ensure that the content of the videos themselves is high-quality.

Take the opportunity to create a how-to YouTube series about how to use your products. Or, think about forming a strategic partnership with another brand that will help cross-promote your company.

8. Set Up Remarketing

Digital marketing isn’t a “one and done” kind of thing. You’ll need to set up campaigns and develop strategies. Then, you’ll need to constantly monitor them and optimize them to ensure they’re working.

One easy way to sort of “automate” this kind of optimization is to set up remarketing.

While this is something that a digital marketing agency will probably do for you as part of managing paid ag campaigns, it’s pretty easy to do yourself if you want to.

Develop expertly-crafted retargeted campaigns that target people who’ve visited your pages or clicked on your ads. You can even do it with abandoned cart users!

Get creative here and try to think of ways to add more value to what you’re offering. Sometimes, this means incentivizing users with a 10% off coupon or free shipping.

Whatever works, go with that! It will pay off. 26% of customers return to a site after seeing a retargeted ad.

9. Work on Building Authority

Establishing yourself as an authority in your industry is one of the fastest ways to increase your digital marketing efforts.

If you’re consistently publishing high-quality and high-value blogs, people are going to turn towards your company for expertise.

Not only that, but they’re going to link back to your blog when they use them as sources in their own content or even share them on social media.

Furthermore, building authority takes form in many different ways, and if you’re smart about how you do it, it will help your link building efforts.

All of this helps establish you as an authority, particularly the first point. Create a Quora account and answer questions that real people have about subjects in your industry.

Remember to always link back to your website or specific service pages to increase your link building efforts. However, you’ll want to avoid seeming too “salesy” here and try to incorporate them in ways that feel natural.

10. Don’t Forget About Google My Business

This is perhaps one of the most often overlooked digital marketing tips of today.

Google My Business is crucial for local SEO and general marketing efforts! Because local searches are so popular, people are increasingly searching for things “near me.”

If you have Google My Business set up with your address, business hours, phone number, and more, then Google will show your company at the top of the page when someone searches for your product or service in your area.

It’s also just so easy to set up that it would be silly not to quickly do it and have it there in order to grow your local SEO efforts.

Be sure to fill out all of the fields to give your potential customers as much information as possible.

Then, find unique ways to incentivize current customers to rate you on Google. Offer a small discount or a free product when they publish a review on Google.

This will help ensure that people in your area look to you as a quality business with lots to offer.

Need More Than Digital Marketing Tips?

Do you need more than ten digital marketing tips to help you get your business back on track?

Most businesses struggle with succeeding in digital marketing on their own. If you’re tired of losing precious money on wasted ad campaigns and marketing tactics that don’t work, then get in touch with us.

Here at Local Finder, we offer marketing services that range from blog writing and SEO to video production and inbound marketing.

Ready to get started? Contact us today and tell us a little bit about your brand. We’ll get back to you ASAP and begin the process of enhancing your digital marketing efforts.

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Gain Visibility: 10 Digital Marketing Tips to Help You Climb the Ranks