Photo by Ketut Subiyanto

While coming up with a great idea and turning it into a new business can be exciting, marketing it successfully is another story entirely.

Digital marketing can be an intimidating undertaking, especially for new business owners who aren’t aware of all the various avenues you can explore. But even for pre-established businesses, staying adaptable to the latest marketing trends and avoiding the “set-it-and-forget-it” advertising approach isn’t something that comes easy for many.

To simplify this process, there are some foundational strategies every business can apply to level up their digital marketing approach while maximizing returns and building a sustainable volume of web traffic.

Define Your Target Audience

For most businesses, being able to bring in a certain amount of customers is fairly achievable without much effort. Today, there are plenty of paid advertising options that can quickly help to get some attention to your website or blog with some funding. However, the key to building sustainable website volume that actually converts to sales involves knowing exactly who to target.

The more accurate you are in finding customers who are actually in need of the products or services you offer, the more likely you’ll be able to associate revenues with your website visit. To do this, you’ll want to ask yourself some important questions:

• Who is your ideal customer – age, gender, lifestyle, or budget?
• Is there a specific problem your specific customers face, and if so, what can you offer them as a solution?
• Where do your customers often go when they need answers to questions in your industry?

Each of these questions helps you better understand the type of audience you’re trying to connect with and gives you some perspective on how you can prove that your brand, products, or services are relevant to them.

Optimize Your Website for Success

First impressions are everything – this statement rings true for businesses that operate both physical storefronts and virtual ones. You only have seven seconds or less to make a lasting impression, so it’s important to make the best impact you can right out of the gate.

When it comes to making your website stand out from the rest, form and function will play a critical factor. Before you start investing heavily in growing your social media presence or paid advertising initiative, make sure the page(s) your target audience land on are optimized for conversions.

UX (User Experience) is an important factor to consider when getting your website to a state that both your users and search engines need it to be in. Some of the ways you can do this is by focusing on the following areas:

• User-Friendly Navigation: Your website should have a site structure that makes sense to users and provides an easy path to find what they’re looking for.

• Great Visual Elements: Most people are visual learners whose attention spans can quickly fade when staring at pages and pages of written text. Incorporate images or multimedia wherever possible to help your site stand out.

• Mobile-Ready Design: More people now navigate the Internet with their mobile devices instead of a desktop PC. Leverage this by keeping your website responsive and mobile-friendly.

• Faster Site Performance: Search engines prioritize websites that have faster website performance. This makes the user experience more enjoyable and reduces the likelihood that users will leave (“bounce”) your website prematurely.

Create Relevant Content

Today’s online consumers are much more savvy when it comes to combing the Internet for the products or services they need. They’re also much more aware of how to avoid spammy advertising tactics and have a built-in radar for identifying and avoiding sites defined as “clickbait.” 

To avoid being classified as a business your potential customers want to avoid, it’s important to quickly establish meaningful connections. One of the best ways you can do this is by providing relevant and helpful content to them.

You should think of the content you create as the glue that will hold your relationship together. To do this, it needs to be unique and engaging while regularly helping to solve your audience’s problems. This is where doing research ahead of time is so important since the content you provide will need to speak to their interests, wants, and pain points.

If your business is in the real estate or home renovation sector, the content you provide should speak to that audience. Maybe your customers are interested in helpful tips about bathroom remodeling projects or design ideas for new flooring installations. If all your content were only designed to support the transactional elements of these topics and weren’t actually informative, it wouldn’t be considered valuable to your audience.

Leverage Social Media Strategically

Social media can be a powerful tool for businesses to support their digital marketing efforts. However, there are right and wrong ways to use this medium when establishing a following for your brand and creating an optimal brand image.

Choose the Right Platforms

Not every platform makes sense for a business to maintain an active presence. Spreading yourself too thin will just mean you’re taking a “quantity-vs-quality” approach and will provide very little value to your customers and your brand.

Instead, focus on building a presence on platforms where your target audience is likely to be. Depending on your business niche and your audience demographics, you may want to focus on platforms like Instagram or TikTok for younger millennial audiences or optimize your presence on LinkedIn if you’re targeting other businesses or experienced industry professionals.

Balance Your Content Mix

Not all of your content will appeal to each member of your target audience. This is why it’s important to mix up the content you introduce with the right balance of broad and niche topics. This will keep your social media posts dynamic and more shareable.

Remember, the content you produce and share through social media should never come across as self-beneficial. The goal is to educate and inform your audience on topics that matter to them. The associated sales conversions will only come naturally as your audience builds trust in your business and wants to support it.

Leverage Data and Analytics

Data is a critical component for making smarter decisions about everything – from your business operations and sales efforts to knowing how to prepare a home for sale on the market. The analysis of this data can be a great tool for your business to leverage when putting the right foot forward in your digital marketing approach.

An effective way you can start applying data analysis insights is by identifying and tracking important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business. This could include:

• Website Traffic Volume
• Bounce Rate Percentage
• Conversion Rates
• Social Media Follower Counts
• Newsletter Signups

There are literally hundreds of different metrics you can identify that will help you benchmark your digital marketing success. But if you’re not tracking them over time, it can be hard to know if the investments you’re putting into various marketing strategies are paying off.

The great thing is that there are a number of free or paid tools you can use, including Google Analytics or SEMRush, that can help you organize and track these metrics over time. By monitoring these tools regularly, you can start making regular improvements to your strategies that pay off long-term or redirect your resources when the strategies you’re applying are no longer effective.

Start Maximizing Returns from Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Marketing your business effectively doesn’t need to be a complicated process, but it does require effort and a smart approach. By applying some of the fundamental elements discussed, you’ll be able to maximize returns from your digital marketing efforts while keeping your business on a sustainable growth path.

 

Author: Dalip Jaggi

Entrepreneur, technologist, and passionate business leader sum up the core of Dalip Jaggi, co-founder of Revive Real Estate, a PropTech company with a goal to democratize house flipping. Since its 2020-inception, Revive has since become the smartest solution for homeowners to maximize their home’s sales value across the nation.