Businesses have gotten more dependent on their digital marketing strategies amidst the global pandemic. With the novel coronavirus spreading at a rapid pace, people can’t help but wonder how long it is going to take to get things back to normal. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost all industries. Companies have started to embrace the new changes to survive the market during and post the pandemic. For example, digital marketing has become more important than ever. You need to have a proper digital marketing strategy in place in these tough times.
Role of Digital Marketing in the Pandemic
The sudden disappearance of all offline marketing channels, conferences, and face-to-face interactions have become a major challenge for marketers and businesses. The situation has gotten to a point where customers are not comfortable walking through the door of your retail store, let alone touching the products on the racks and shaking hands with you. Online shopping isn’t new.
But, its popularity has grown over the past few months. Even those who had never purchased anything online are installing grocery mobile apps to stock up on the essentials without putting their life at stake. While no one knows how long this will last, experts believe that the pandemic will result in a long-term change in the way businesses are conducted.
It is safe to say that the internet happens to be the only thing that has not been quarantined for customers and businesses. With every marketing channel closed, brands are left with no other option than digital marketing. Exploring different marketing channels and setting up your business in the digital world has become more of a necessity these days. Digital marketing is not dying anytime soon. In fact, it is expected to witness a major revolution in the coming years. If you want to survive the fierce competition, then you are going to need to embrace digital marketing. Here, we are presenting a few easy and effective ways to ace digital marketing. Let’s take a look:
Focus on your Content
You must have heard the saying Content is King! No brand can succeed in the digital world without prioritizing their content marketing strategy. Google has clearly mentioned that unique, search engine friendly, informative, and quality content will rank higher. Not only blogs, but it is high time you included videos, infographic, images, and podcasts to your content marketing. Content is not only important for search engine ranking, but it makes your brand appear as an authority figure in the specific niche. Your target audience is likely to consider your businesses as a successful and trustworthy brand if they like your content.
Remember that content is the most valuable part of your sales funnel. On that note, let’s check Some easy tips to improve your SEO with content marketing:
- Content-Length: Research suggests that the average word count of the pages ranking on the first page of the search engine is 1890. Now is the best time for you to focus on lengthy posts. Contrary to what people believe, people tend to give in-depth posts a read. Long-form content does not mean adding random and unnecessary words to your posts. That’s not how it works. If you want to boost customers’ engagement, then your posts need to be well-crafted and informative.
- Write for Humans, not bots: Google’s ranking algorithm has changed a lot in the past few years. Priority is given to those who focus on their audience, rather than writing content for search engines. Publishing plagiarized, hard-to-read, keyword-stuffed, and non-relevant content on your website will bring your SERP ranking down. Never write for search bots. Stuffing keywords just to get a top spot in the search results is not going to work. It will rather have a negative impact. Besides, a poor-quality, copied, and irrelevant content will not bring organic traffic to your website. You couldn’t be more wrong if you think people will stay on your website and go over your content.
- Make the Best of Title and Sub-heads: The title and subheadings do wonders for your SEO. A majority of people consider your title to decide whether they should stick around or abandon a website. Not only your audience but even search bots consider the titles and subheadings on your website to understand your content. It is okay to add the main keyword to your title or sub-titles. But, do not force keywords into your content. The last thing you want is to get your website penalized for keyword stuffing.
Optimize Content for Search Engines
SEO and SEM are two crucial components of digital marketing. With more and more people searching for products and services online, you need to optimize your website for search engines to get good rankings. You should aim to get your website on the first page of the search results. People trust Google Algorithms. They know the pages that rank on the top of the search engines have the best content.
- Use the Best Keywords: The fact that keywords still matter to your search engine ranking can’t be neglected. Keywords are important! The first step to build your keyword strategy is researching the best and most-used keywords in your industry. Fortunately, it doesn’t need a lot of research. Use a keyword planning tool to get insights into the phrases and terms that have a high search volume. Optimize your title, sub-heads, and blogs for search ranking with the industry-specific keywords. If you want to boost your SERP ranking, then you will have to focus on keyword planning. Conduct competitors’ analysis and use tools like SEMRush to find out the competitive and long-tail keywords for your website. Make sure you target the right keywords and place them strategically throughout your content. Never go overboard with keywords.
- Add Meta-description: Meta-data briefs your audience about the subject you have discussed in the post. It may not be related to search rankings directly, but it helps people decide whether they should go on reading the post or skip it. Try to add unique, exciting, and relevant meta descriptions to attract your audience to your website. The average length for meta-data is around 150-160 characters.
- Internal Linking: Internal linking helps your audience and search bots determine the content structure and relevance. Not only does it make it easier for your audience to navigate around your website, but it’s also a good way to increase customer engagement and your search ranking.
- External Links: Just like internal links, Google bots review each external link on your website to find out the posts and web pages you are linking to. Google has strictly prohibited link trading. Webmasters are not allowed to purchase and sell links for the sake of search engine ranking. Likewise, the links you receive from the other websites, as well as the links on your posts that point to other websites, must be reviewed properly.
- Use URL Shorteners: URL shorteners, as the name suggests, refer to the tools that optimize the URL of your web pages for search rankings. Short URLs are easy to read and share. In addition to SEO, a short URL can help improve your offline marketing. For instance, you cannot get long and complicated URLs printed on your business cards.
- Optimize your Website Images: Nobody likes to read long blog posts without subheads and attractive images. You are going to need to add some relevant and interesting images to your post to boost your site’s search engine ranking. Make sure to add Alt tags in the images for SEO purposes. Additionally, try to include keywords in the image description. Don’t forget to compress your image before publishing it on your website. Images, videos, audios, and other such content tend to consume a significant amount of space. This impacts your website loading speed. Each image must be compressed and optimized for the search engine before posted on your website.
Conduct Competitors Analysis
You have published a high-quality and engaging content on your website; your SEO is great; you have optimized everything for the search engine! However, nothing works. Your page is still ranking low in the search engine. Well, you can ace content and SEO. But, you won’t be able to take your online business to the next level without beating the competition. Competitor analysis is one of the most important steps of a successful digital marketing plan.
To secure the highest rank in the search engine, you need to identify the competition in your industry, brands you have to compete with, and their strengths and weaknesses. You will have to refine your marketing strategies to out-compete your competitors. Let’s understand the components of competitors analysis.
- Identify Your Competitors: Use SEMRush to identify the top competitors that are ranking on the first page of the search results. You will have to consider both direct and indirect competitors. Any company that sells the same products and services as you will be your competitor. But, you only need to focus on the top competitors that are doing great in the search engines. Find out the range of products they offer and the audience they target.
- Gather Information about Your Competitors: Now, this can be a little tricky. Identifying your competition needs only one Google search. But, when it comes to finding out their marketing strategies, you will have to conduct in-depth research. Fortunately, you don’t have to hire a research company for a competitor’s research. The information is readily available on SEO tools.
- Keyword Analysis: Understand what keywords your competitors are targeting. If they are able to bring people to their website with certain terms and phrases, then the same is going to work for you. Identify their top and best-performing keywords. You don’t have to use the same keywords for your online store. Just try to take some idea from your competitor’s keyword strategy and build your marketing strategies around similar keywords.
- Competitors’ Position: Where do your competitors stand in the search engines? Do they use PPC and search engine marketing to grow their brand’s visibility? Are they active on social media accounts? How do they build customer engagement? What marketing strategies do they follow? All these steps are important to determine the position of your competitors.
It is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors to improve your search engine ranking. Competitive analysis is extremely important to expand your business to the new markets. You can even take your business to the global level gradually.
Use Bing Ads
Advertising on search engines is not a new concept. Pay-per-click advertisements have become quite popular for brands that want to achieve a high ranking in the search engine with greater brand visibility. But, choosing the best platform to run your ad campaigns can be a tricky choice. Google is the first platform that crosses our minds when it comes to marketing. Know that Bing is equally powerful and extremely affordable.
While Google happens to be the most popular search engine, Bing is also an effective platform when it comes to digital marketing. You could be losing a large number of your potential customers to your competitors by neglecting Bing Ads. The main purpose of digital marketing is to improve your visibility by allowing you to tap into all the effective marketing channels. The Microsoft search engine has become as important as Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Its popularity has grown. That being said, many brands have started to embrace Bing as a marketing platform.
Since Bing has lesser competition than Google and Yahoo, its ad campaigns are relatively cheaper and better than other search engines. There is no denying that Google is still dominating the online market. But, the popularity of other search engines is growing at a rapid pace. Due to the lack of competition, Bing ads are 33.5% cheaper than Google. Bing comes with some advanced and competitive elements that have the potential to boost your business growth. Overall, Bing can be an ideal solution for startups that are looking for a cheaper yet effective ad campaign.
The most important skill for a product leader is active listening. Be a good listener and you will naturally build trust across individuals, teams, and disciplines.
InHype
The current state of AI design has two major downsides:
- What matters is understanding the hows and whys of trends’ emergence and adoption.
- Because at the end of the day, trends have a lot to tell us about our cultural moment: what we love, what we hate, what we want to move toward.
- The closer we get to understanding those things, the closer we get to getting inside others’ heads — to empathizing with them. And, really, to understanding ourselves.
Make better business decisions
Strategies for email campaigns vary, but the email newsletter lies at the heart of each. It is a sort of a decider: whether your readers will be back or ditch you and your company. But make sure that every email newsletter looks pleasing and is unobtrusive.
What matters is understanding the hows and whys of trends’ emergence and adoption. Because at the end of the day, trends have a lot to tell us about our cultural moment: what we love, what we hate, what we want to move toward. The closer we get to understanding those things, the closer we get to getting inside others’ heads — to empathizing with them. And, really, to understanding ourselves.
Getting Started
That’s because in spite of its iffy earnings reports over the last five years, Synergy Research reported that IBM had 7 percent of the cloud infrastructure market in its most recent report, which it defines as Infrastructure.
Enter CSS grid: which lets you place an item exactly where you want it, both vertically and horizontally. Sounds simple, but the reality is that it unlocks a level of expressive freedom and control that previously only print could give us.
Still, IE usage probably isn’t significant enough to fully explain the lack of grid adoption. So, consider that the stats cited above focus on page views, not pages. That means that it’s the lack of adoption of grid by major websites that more likely explains grid’s seemingly poor performance to date.
