Four Digital Marketing Practices for Success in 2018
Although it is still a relatively new area of business, digital marketing has undergone massive changes in its short lifetime. The techniques and strategies that worked well five years ago are now spectacularly outdated, having given way to methods that are more targeted to audiences of sophisticated internet users. Here are four of the key marketing strategies your business should implement to see success in 2019.
1) Write Longer Blog Posts
Creating blogs as a way to attract traffic from search engines and engage new audience members with valuable content is still a viable marketing strategy. However, the days in which 250-word blog posts were sufficient are long since over. Today, the optimal blog post length for SEO purposes is usually regarded as being around 2K words. Though this length varies based on the keywords you’re trying to rank for, it’s a good rule of thumb, especially for more competitive keywords. You should also be sure to populate blog posts that are this long with images, infographics and other multimedia content to keep them visually interesting to the reader.
2) Post Regularly on Social Media
Social media marketing is one concept that confuses business owners. The well-known social media platforms haven’t been around all that long and are changing constantly, making it difficult to establish a consistent set of best practices for using them to reach customers. One thing that is largely agreed on, though, is the fact that it’s important to post regularly in order to keep your audience engaged and growing. On Facebook, for example, it’s usually advisable to post about twice per day. Be sure that you aren’t just posting for the sake of it. Instead, provide valuable content, tips related to your niche or links to external resources your audience might be interested in.
3) Focus on Your Email List
One of the few things that have remained more or less unchanged about the landscape of digital marketing is the fact that an email list is still an incredibly valuable asset for promoting your business and getting sales. To make full use of it, follow a few basic email marketing practices. These include using free content to generate email sign-ups and sending out emails that provide useful information, rather than just product promotions. The more you can build up your email list, the more value you’ll be able to realize from it.
4) Invest in Video
While written content is still a great way to promote your brand, people are now consuming more and more video content. In fact, roughly a third of time spent online is allocated to watching videos. As such, it’s important for your brand to be represented in the video medium if you want to maximize its exposure to potential clients. From helping improve conversion rates on your website to generating leads through third-party sites like YouTube, video content is a great way to improve your approach to digital marketing. As with other forms of content, it’s important that you use video to provide value to your customers, rather than being too promotional.
By keeping these four practices in mind, you’ll be able to generate more sales and reach more customers in 2018. As you implement these strategies, be sure to run tests to see what marketing methods produce the best results for your business. Once you’ve identified the tactics that work best for you, continue to invest in those methods while exploring new ones to improve your results. Marketing, especially in the online sphere, is not a static game. Instead, it’s a dynamic and ever-changing field that you’ll have to keep working and experimenting on to keep up with.
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