If your business is not using digital marketing, then you are missing out on a lot. A strong digital marketing strategy (delivered by an expert digital marketing agency) that is tailored to your business can help you develop a much better presence on the web and sell more products. Your competitors have most likely already incorporated some digital marketing tips into their efforts, and this means it’s time for you to catch up – or risk falling further behind.

Today let’s explore some smart ways to grow your business with digital marketing. First let’s take some of the typical actions that a prospective customer might take, and let’s see how your competitors are showing up with digital marketing.

How your competitors are using digital marketing to reach your prospective customers

Every marketing strategy has to start somewhere. And in order to know where you’re starting from, you must review your competitors. Every business is different, which means every business has different strengths and weaknesses. 

In order to know how your competition is marketing their business, here’s a list of things you can do:

1. Run a Google Search that a customer might run for a solution like yours. Are you ranking first? Who is? If you aren’t at the top of the search results then you are missing people who are actively searching for your product or service.
   
   
2. When you search similar terms that your customers do, are you seeing ads for similar services? This is what your prospective customers who are looking for someone like you will see too.
   
   
3. Search for your product/service with “near me” afterwards – eg. “family lawyer near me”. Does a Google My Business Page come up for a competitor? Do they have more positive reviews? Many of your customers will be discovering their business doing the same.
   
   
4. Search for your business on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn – do you appear in the social platforms? Look at the top results. Are they posting frequently? Engaging with their community? Do they have lots of reviews? Businesses that are doing these things tend to win.
   
   
5. While you are doing these searches, check your competitor’s website. How obvious is their promise? How clear is their call to action? Do they offer a guarantee? Is there an option to download something to join their list or community? Do they have reviews and testimonials from happy customers? Evidence of awards that they’ve won?
   
   
6. Now sign up for your competitor’s email list. What emails do you receive? How often? Is it information, product offers, events? Email marketing is still the highest ROI digital marketing channel, and lets you maintain a conversation with your ideal customer until they are ready to buy.
   
   
7. Pay attention to the ads that you are seeing in your web browsing and social feeds after visiting your competitor’s websites. Are they serving any specific ads to you? If you are looking at competition website’s, they might start showing you additional ads to invite you back to reengage with their business.

How you can replicate the winning strategy of competitors for yourself

During this process of research, you have identified some tactics that your competitors are using to win new customers online. Let’s look at some of the core activities that you have identified.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results. Search engines such as Google use structured data markup and other techniques in an attempt to present the most relevant and useful results to their users. Through a combination of website optimisation, content creation, and building trustworthy links back to your website, you can climb the rankings and overtake your competitors.

Google Search Ads

Google Search (PPC) Ads is running highly targeted text ads on an auction basis for people searching for a solution similar to yours on Google.

Google Ads (PPC) offer a streamlined and cost-effective method of digital marketing that offers great control over your budget, and being able to increase clicks in a matter of seconds gives you quick feedback and easy optimisation opportunities for your online marketing strategy.

Google search network allows advertisers to show ads based on Google search results.

These ads are shown just below the Google search results and may show up to five ads at once. The advertiser may create an auction bid to compete with other advertisers in this ad auction. This is called a cost-per-click (CPC) model.

It’s fast, measurable, and scales well as a strategy. This is often one of the core strategies every business should consider to promote themselves for people actively seeking for a solution.

Google My Business optimisation

Your Google My Business (GMB) page is one of the first things that people discover when searching for a business based on a specific geography. Optimising your Google My Business page with relevant keywords, up to date descriptions, great imagery, and lots of 5 star reviews is an excellent way to generate a lot of new enquiries for your business.

The GMB allows you to show off all the great work that you do in the local area and it’s also the perfect platform for giving potential customers a taste of what it’s like to work with you.

A recent study by BrightLocal shows that 74% of consumers would trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations when deciding whether or not to use a business. It’s no wonder then why over half of all local businesses claim to be actively seeking them! So let’s take a look at how you can get more 5 star reviews for your business.

Social Media Management

Social media management is a term used to describe the process of strategically planning, implementing, and evaluating a company’s social media presence across multiple channels. This includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more!

Social media management helps your customers find you online. It generally involves:

Well optimised company pages – This includes descriptive page content, a clear description of your services and products, and great photos showcasing your brand and products.

Frequent social posts – This includes a mix of business insights, helpful tips and advice, promotions and other news. 

Engaging with your customers online – This includes responding to comments, questions and posts in a timely fashion. It also means being active on multiple channels on a regular basis.

Consider partnering with a smart social media marketing agency like Eloquent that can help you grow your business.

Website Optimisation

Every good website has these four components.

1. Clearly outline how you help your audience: Make sure your website is easy for people to understand. Tell them what you do, and how you can help them.
   
   
2. A clear call to action: Make sure people know what to do next. Add a “Contact us” button or a “Sign up now” button that is easily visible on each page of your site.
   
   
3. Social proof including testimonials and awards: Displaying social media badges, client logos, and awards on your site shows credibility and helps build trust with potential customers.
   
   
4. Easy navigation: Your navigation menu should be clearly visible on every page of your website and should be intuitively obvious (i.e., not hidden behind several clicks).

Here at Eloquent we take website design and optimisation to the most advanced levels by using neuromarketing and behavioural psychology to improve the performance of websites.

Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is a piece of content that you offer to your leads in order to collect their contact information so you can communicate with them in the future. In other words, a lead magnet is something you give away for free in exchange for someone’s email address or some other contact information.

A lead magnet can be almost anything – a useful tool, an informative article, a worksheet, an e-book, a video series – but it must have value for your target audience. Additional lead magnet ideas include events, webinars, quizzes, calculators, tip sheets, product catalogues, whitepapers, original research, and more!

A great lead magnet is easy to consume and quickly solves a problem that relates to why your audiences use your business. 

Here’s how they work:

1. You create a Lead Magnet with useful content related to what your audience wants. You then promote that Lead Magnet via social media or email marketing. A smart strategy can be creating a time-based lead magnet.
   
   
2. Your audience consumes the content in your Lead Magnet and enters their email address in exchange for it.
   
   
3. You then collect their email address into an Email Marketing Platform like ActiveCampaign or MailChimp. The platform will allow you to add them directly to your email list so that you can start nurturing them towards a purchase with additional information, reviews, case studies, and offers.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing tasks, especially repetitive ones that involve communicating with customers or leads. Using an automated marketing system, usually focused on email marketing, allows marketers to focus on creating campaigns and increasing sales, rather than spending time executing repetitive tasks such as sending out purchase confirmations and follow-up emails.

The primary benefit of marketing automation is the potential for increased productivity for marketers. Automated marketing processes streamline repetitive tasks and free up time that can be better spent on more creative pursuits. Instead of manually sending out a weekly email newsletter to a list of subscribers, for instance, a marketer can create one campaign in an automated system and send that email out to everyone on the list at once.

Marketing automation also has the benefit of removing human error from repetitive tasks. If a response rate drops after sending out a certain email campaign, for example, it might be because the campaign was poorly written or because it was sent to people who weren’t actually interested in the message.

With an automated system, marketers can perform split A/B testing to determine which messages are well received by their target audience and which ones aren’t. This feedback loop allows marketers to refine their campaign strategies over time and reach new customers without making costly mistakes along the way.

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting is core pillar in your paid traffic strategy, and they are incredibly effective method of getting people to come back to your website, and eventually convert. 

Retargeting is the practice of showing ads to someone who has visited your site or has shown interest in your brand. 

Here are 3 ways you can use retargeting to increase sales:

1. Use remarketing for abandoned cart email campaigns: This will allow you to send out special offers or discount coupons to people who have already expressed interest in making a purchase from you.
   
   
2. Use remarketing to remind people about your brand: Do this by putting ads directly on top of your competitors’ sites. With less direct competition for the clicks, you will be able to reach people who are further down the sales funnel.
   
   
3. Use remarketing for post-purchase follow up: If someone buys from you online, send them a few emails thanking them for the purchase and offering some free tips on how they can maximise the value of their purchase (encouraging repeat purchasers!)

You need to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy

A comprehensive digital marketing strategy is one that uses all the digital marketing tactics available in your arsenal to help grow your business, rather than using a scattergun approach. This does not mean it has to be complicated or expensive, but it does mean you need to understand which of these tactics work for your business and how best to use them.

With a clear digital marketing strategy, you are able to see the bigger picture and make better decisions about what will really accelerate your growth.

This post is intended to give you an overview of some of the different digital marketing tactics available, so you can understand what they do and how they fit into a broader strategy.

A smart digital marketing agency like Eloquent can help you create and implement a comprehensive strategy using all these tactics and more to help your business win against your competitors.

We have experienced expert teams of strategists, Google Ads and paid traffic experts, graphic designers, direct response copywriters, website developers, and campaign managers (supported with best in class technology and proven frameworks and processes) to help deliver on your digital marketing objectives.

Digital marketing is an investment, not a cost

The most important thing to understand is that digital marketing is an investment in customer acquisition and growth. Rather than thinking about your spend on digital as a cost, consider it as a method of growth. Over time you will see a positive return on your investment in new customers and the ability to charge a premium over your competitors.

Always remember that implementation and success takes time.

Digital marketing is not some short term magic bullet – it takes time to get right and measure properly. In fact every time you change something you can expect a dip in performance as you wait for search engines to catch up with your new content/changes. This means that it’s best to make changes gradually rather than rushing into them without understanding the impact they will have on your business.

Grow your business with the right digital marketing partner

Digital marketing can be a very powerful tool to help your business generate more leads and sales, even if you’re a smaller or mid-size business. 

Even if you are a startup or a SMB, your web presence is important and by doing digital marketing the right way, you can build a brand and improve your exposure. 

This can lead to higher conversions and of course more customers. The idea here is that every business in every industry has equal opportunity to increase their exposure through digital marketing – it’s just about having the right strategy and implementing effectively.

Eloquent is a specialist digital marketing agency with a team of experts who can help you succeed in growing your business. 

If you are committed to growing your business with digital marketing then contact us for a discussion on how we can work together to achieve your objectives.