Print marketing may still have its place in your business, but it’s expensive, time-consuming and not environmentally friendly. The majority of print marketing gets immediately thrown away without even being looked at. Making full use of all the opportunities that digital marketing provides will increase ROI, save time, reduce costs, and increase profits.
We’ll start with the basics and assume you have a website. It’s the first touchpoint for your customers and once it’s live, that’s when the real work begins.
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Getting People To Your Website
Of course, in any print marketing, you already use it is essential to include your website address. But how do you get website traffic via digital marketing?
SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is essentially a complex set of techniques designed to place you high in Google search results. The visitors are known as ‘organic traffic’ and anyone coming to your website via this method is a free lead for you. Of course, ‘free’ is a relative term here. Competition can be fierce for keyword searches, so you’ll either get to grips with the technology and SEO best practices yourself (which change all the time), or you’ll pay experts to do it for you.
PPC
Your other option if you just want to appear at the top of Google, is to pay for it. Google offers pay per click (PPC) ads for your chosen keywords, but again with fierce competition, you may need deep pockets. You either need to know what you’re doing, or you can pay a specialist to manage it for you.
Social Media
A social media presence is now expected by customers. LinkedIn, Facebook/Meta, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok and many more. Be selective depending on your business. For example, ‘Visual’ businesses do well with Instagram and Pinterest, and due to its market dominance, arguably every business needs a Facebook page.
A word of warning; avoid spreading yourself too thinly trying to get on every platform. The result will be a dead page with no content that reflects badly on your business as you simply can’t spare the time for updates. Once you’ve set up a page, you’ll need followers. Pages that have no followers are negative rather than positive.
Encourage existing customers to follow your pages and avoid the temptation to ‘buy’ followers just so you look popular. You want genuine followers who are in your target market, these act as warm leads and are more likely to engage with and share your content, increasing your brand awareness. A page with 10,000 purchased followers will post and get no likes, and that looks suspicious to a potential customer.
You can also use paid ads to use detailed segmented targeting and find new customers and drive traffic to your website or social media, and there are companies that specialize in this.
Quality content and engagement is everything. You must keep those pages fresh and active, or not have them at all. Be selective, active and engaged.
Digital Marketing in Your Physical Premises
Whether you have a shop, restaurant, hotel, gym, or hair salon. anywhere with physical premises, you can tie your whole marketing strategy together easily with digital signage.
Digital signage creates eye-catching rotating message displays either in-store or in a mall or retail district. You can display any message at all, from promotional offers, information about your service, or even restaurant menus. For example, businesses using digital signage software in retail can display special offers and popular products.
The value of this is that content can be instantly changed. Price changes, items temporarily off the menu, and promotions starting or ending can all be immediately applied, even across multiple store sites.
Digital signage has a higher conversion rate than print simply because people pay more attention to it. It’s also way more cost-effective. You have to print one item for every person you want to reach, try and estimate the right print amount for the best discounts, find storage space for it all, and pay to distribute it. Or you could put out one message, once, on digital signage and everyone will see it.
Tie all your website and social media marketing together with a QR code displayed on your digital signage. ‘Scan to like us on Facebook’ with perhaps a discount incentive. Instead of relying on happy customers remembering to go home and look you up on social media, now all they have to do is scan the code.
