Understanding the Landscape Inside the Ever-Changing Digital Marketing Space

In the technological modern world, it can be increasingly difficult to understand exactly how to leverage social media and the world wide web to market your business. It isn’t usability that presents a problem, as this has actually improved over time.

Instead, the issue lies in the fact that the digital marketing space is constantly changing and evolving. As soon as you become knowledgeable on the last update, things shift again, and you must learn anew. There is good news, however.

While digital marketing can never be called “simple,” there are a few things that you can do to help yourself understand how to leverage this virtual marketing landscape.

Understand What You’re Trying to Achieve

If you think about and fully understand what it is that you are trying to achieve you’ll know which areas of the digital landscape to focus on. Going about it blindly will never prove fruitful. For each unique campaign, your focus should be one goal — at maximum, two goals.

These goals could encompass growing your email subscription list or generating new business leads. It might be to increase website traffic, increase lead to customer conversion ratings, or even just increase your Facebook followers. All goals should be decided as a measurable metric in order to track how your campaign is doing. Additional milestones along the way should be decided so tweaks and changes can be made to keep the campaign on track for success.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

Instead of using all the social platforms available to you, find out where your customer base mostly resides and focus on those sites. Spreading yourself too thin will not only be stressful but can lower content quality significantly. Choose social sites that are relevant and helpful to your business industry to begin with, in addition (of course) to your website and blog.

It also makes sense to stick to the most popular social platforms. Unless you are in a very specific niche, obscure platforms will not essentially be useful to you. Currently, the most popular platforms for social media management include:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Pinterest

Know Your Target Audience

Knowing who you are trying to market towards is vital to overall success. It will fuel every decision you make, from designing your campaign to implementing it and beyond. Ask yourself the following questions to get an idea of who your target audience really is:

• Is my audience primarily male, female, or equally both?
• Is my product or service tailored towards a certain income bracket?
• What problem am I solving for my audience? What are their needs, wants, likes, and dislikes?
• How old are they?
• Do they work in a specific industry?
• Is there anything special about my audience? For example, do they wear glasses or drive a certain kind of car? Are they single moms or auto mechanics?

Content Should Always be Valuable

While content is still (and probably always will be) king, you can’t just write something and hope it draws in the crowds. Every piece of content you create should be valuable to your target audience.

Before writing anything, ask yourself if the content will solve a problem for your target audience, or offer industry-relevant information necessary to an informed purchasing decision. If the answer is no, question why you’re creating that specific content.

Maintenance Over Growth

Although it may sound redundant at first, you should allot more of your marketing efforts towards maintaining your current business relationships than you do in attracting new customers. It makes sense, however, when you think about the importance of repeat business and how keeping customers is much more cost-effective than attaining new ones.

Generally, you should allot approximately 75% of your time and resources towards keeping customers. The remaining 25% of time and resources can be used to attract new ones.

Keep Learning

The most important aspect in understanding the ever-changing digital marketing landscape is to keep learning. If you can get a new certificate or read a new eBook on the topic, do it. Read the latest trending articles and watch how-to videos. Anything you have the opportunity to learn should be an opportunity taken.

At SocialSEO, it’s our job to keep learning and use the most up-to-date digital marketing techniques and trends to help our clients in the ever-changing digital space. Want to leave your digital marketing to the experts? Contact SocialSEO for a FREE digital marketing consultation today!