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Today’s digital marketing landscape is more competitive than ever. To stand out from your competitors and drive more traffic to your website, you need to target your audience effectively. With so much content being produced daily, businesses must find new and innovative ways to meet their marketing goals.
Digital marketing has become a go-to strategy for growing brands, whether implementing search engine optimization techniques or creating a video blog on YouTube. To get the most out of your marketing efforts, you must understand how all these different strategies work together.
Marketing is more than just advertising; it’s a fundamental science with principles, theories, and best practices that you can learn and implement in any business venture. Here are the top digital marketing skills you should hone this year to improve your marketing game.
Search engine optimization is a core marketing strategy for any business. It’s an essential process for increasing your visibility on search engines to drive more referral traffic to your site. For the uninitiated, SEO primarily involves three steps: keyword research, content creation, and backlink building.
First, you need to determine which keywords your audience uses to find your products or services. You can then use those keywords to create different content for your websites, like blog posts or product reviews, so you can appear on the first page of search engine results whenever someone types in one of those terms.
When you build backlinks to your website (from other sites with a high search engine ranking), it signals to the algorithm that your site is valuable and should be displayed at the top of the search results.
Regarding digital marketing, video content sits at the top of the food chain. Consumers are more likely to share a video online than any other form of content, and more websites are investing in video as a marketing strategy.
Businesses who create video content on their website see a higher return on investment than those who don’t. Research suggests that 64% of consumers prefer watching videos over reading blog posts, and 80% of those will take action after viewing the video. Video marketing is a great way to promote your products or services and build your brand’s presence online.
But, it’s important not to spam your viewers with generic, uninspired content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience. To create an effective video marketing strategy, you should determine what type of video content best suits your brand. You can create a plan for distributing your video content across different channels, like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and more.
Social media marketing is another must-have marketing skill for 2019. More than 2.8 billion people worldwide use social media, so businesses can’t afford to ignore this channel. To create an effective social media marketing strategy, you need to understand the different social media networks and how they work.
For instance, you can use Instagram to build a brand identity, drive more traffic to your website, and create a sense of urgency around your products. To stand out on social media, you must produce high-quality content consistent with your posting frequency. It’s essential to stay consistent with your brand and find new ways to stand out from your competitors.
For example, you can create a hashtag specific to your brand and use it in your Instagram posts to start a trend.
Digital advertising refers to using online advertisements to promote your products or services. Digital ads can be displayed on various websites, apps, or social media channels and are often seen as banner ads, video ads, and sponsored content.
These advertisements often appear at the top or side of your screen while browsing websites or apps or playing video games. If you have an advertising budget, you can work with an advertising agency or a third-party company to create and implement your digital ad campaign. However, you can also create your ads from scratch. If you’re creating your ads, follow these best practices:
– Make sure your ads are relevant to your product or service and target the right demographic.
– Your ad copy should grab a potential customer’s attention and compel them to click through and learn more about your brand.
– Include a clear call-to-action that tells your customers what they need to do next.
– Include high-quality images and videos in your ads to make them visually appealing.
– Create a detailed ad schedule to ensure your ads run as often as possible.
– Track your ad statistics to see what types of ads are resonating with your audience and which aren’t.
User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design are two terms that will pop up frequently in your marketing terminologies list. While they’re both essential concepts in digital marketing, UX design focuses on the experience your customers have when interacting with your brand.
In contrast, UI design refers to the visual experience of your brand’s website or app. To create a brand that resonates with your customers, you must clearly understand who your target audience is, what problems your product solves for them, and how your brand can solve those problems in the simplest way possible.
It would help if you kept a few things in mind when designing your website or app. You need to prioritize your content, so it’s easily accessible from the homepage and findable by search engine crawlers. You also want to ensure your website loads quickly, so your customers don’t get frustrated and leave.
Finally, you must ensure your data is being collected and analyzed correctly. If you’re using digital tools to track your website traffic, set them up correctly. When collecting data, you want to ensure you’re only ordering the data that matters.
For example, you might want to track the number of visitors to your website each month, but you don’t necessarily need to know the length of time they spent on your site. And finally, once you have all of your data in one place, you need to know how to coordinate and interpret the information to make data-driven decisions for your brand.
These are just a few of the most important digital marketing skills you can learn in 2019. With these strategies in your marketing toolkit, you’ll be well on your way to increased brand visibility and increased traffic to your website. Now that you know the most important digital marketing skills, the next step is to get to work. You can’t expect to become an expert overnight, but with persistence, you can make significant progress in your marketing game.
