6 Innovative Practices in Digital Marketing for 2021 and Beyond

Digital marketing has been the “new normal” for businesses for much longer than a forced shift online by a global pandemic. But even though digital marketing has been around for a while, it continues to change and evolve as customers change how they make decisions and purchases based on technology innovations. Here are some of the best practices for digital marketing when it comes to now and the future, to best engage your customers in your business and build awareness of your brand across all digital channels. According to Forbes, “one of the best ways to start [with digital marketing] is by looking at your competitors,” to best understand what methods are working for businesses similar to yours, and what may prove effective for your brand, as well.

1. Optimizing Digital Marketing through Paid Ads

Savvy shoppers can spot paid ads in search engine results, and easily skirt around them to find the information they’re looking for, ideally without the result winning a bidding war for their attention. But when it comes to similar paid ads in social media, even savvy shoppers and researchers may be pulled in based on intelligent social media algorithms that know just how to nudge the casual scroller. Find out where your customers are encountering your brand, through integrating your customer data with information provided by a data management platform (DMP) to find out what your customers are interested in and what places they frequent on the Internet. By strategizing your digital media buy, you can save money in the long run by targeting known places your current and potential customers are going.

2. Personalization in Emails

Getting a letter in the mail, addressed to you, may be a heartwarming artifact of the past, but what lingers on is a fondness for getting messages addressed to you, even if the mail may be electronic these days. By using dynamic content and personalization tokens, email marketing has become even more effective at grabbing and holding readers’ attention through these simple psychological means of keeping eyes on content. By making your message and even your subject line call out to your email recipient personally, you have a higher chance of converting them into customers and keeping them interested in what your business has to say.

3. Positioning Your Brand through Social Media

Building your brand’s presence on all relevant social media platforms helps you reach all sorts of audiences, based on related accounts and content. Just by following a social media hashtag, a potential customer may stumble across your business and learn about your products, services, and career opportunities by browsing your social media content. By optimizing your content based on each social media’s trends, you have a better chance of your content reaching more people and spreading farther through the algorithms for positioning your message out there. Use short captions where necessary, lots of hashtags where those help your content trend, and different styles of visuals and pictures to make sure your audience is benefitting from following your accounts.

4. Engaging Customers with Video Content

Whether it’s Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok challenges, we’ve seen that video content is hugely influential in holding attention and spreading information across huge audiences. Many businesses have seen this trends and have adapted to include video content as part of their content and social media marketing strategy. This can look like showcasing employees with fun or funny videos, making unexpected and unusual videos to try to virally launch your products into the news, and riding on current trends to benefit from existing social marketing that other people have built for you. Just make sure that whatever you make in video content makes sense for your brand, so as to not turn people off of your brand because you’re reaching too far.

5. SEO Website and Content Upgrades

Without having to pay for search engine result advertisements, businesses can improve their ranking for their websites and content by investigating and optimizing how their content is structured and crawled. Some SEO fixes are quick to implement and easy to understand, like making sure your content headers are structured correctly. Some SEO fixes and changes take more tech-savvy heads to put into action, which is where agencies and consultants specific to SEO come into play. Technical SEO requires experts in web design and programming. Content SEO requires experts in keywords and how to break content into skimmable chunks for casual readers. Both are worthy of investment of time and money, so make sure you understand your business’s opportunities when it comes to SEO and what investment your business can make for improving SEO.

6. (In)Convenience of Mobile and Online Shopping

When it comes to online shopping, businesses must make sure their online presences are optimized for all sorts of screen sizes and aspect ratios, to make sure your potential customers aren’t turned away from browsing or shopping because your mobile website is frustrating. Phones, tablets, laptops, and monitors of varying sizes can all show a website differently, so making sure your website is optimized for all possible aspect ratios is important for converting the casual visitor into a customer. If they can’t figure out how to check out once they check over your products, you’ve lost a sale. If they get frustrated with the loading speeds of your website, they might leave. So make sure you’ve tested your website inside and out, and you have a great website foundation for them to spend time on, to build your customer base and keep them coming back for more.

Understand What Digital Marketing Your Business Needs

OSG has proven that we have the expertise for understanding and tracking the customer journey, for all sorts of businesses and industries. When it comes to digital marketing, we have the technology for gathering all possible data, from social media combing to text and voice responses from customer communities. By understanding which avenues of digital marketing work best for your business and customers, you can make smarter and data-driven business decisions that create real business outcomes for your brand. Contact us to learn how our technology can help your business grow!