With the Internet pervading all aspects of our life, new technologies are converging lot of business verticals which have impacted significantly all marketing practices around the world. Digital marketing has become the linchpin to guide customers throughout their journey from the zero moment of truth—ZMOT to first moment of truth—FMOT then other moments of truly experiencing a product or a service.
Even brick and mortar business needs digital marketing skills to emerge from the traditional mode and shift to digital world.
However, many entrepreneurs, as I come to know while meeting them, are yet to work seriously to improve digital marketing skills. It continues to be a grey area in an era where the whole marketing concept taught in business schools and practiced in every industry is now disrupted upside down!
We’re witnessing major shifts from vertical to horizontal, exclusive to inclusive and individual to social. Customers do not trust any more brands’ ads when deciding to buy a product or opt for a service. They rely predominantly on their friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, fans on Youtube, answers from Quora, subreddits on Reddit, so on, and so forth!
Here are seven important digital marketing skills you need to focus on 2019:
1. Social Media Management—SMM
2. Web Design & Development
3. Content Marketing
4. Search Engine Optimization—SEO
5. Email Marketing
6. Online Reputation Management—ORM
You should not focus only on catching up with the unstoppable digital tendency, but also make efforts to turn your business digital space into a personal brand with emotions, feelings, and simple human traits.
1. Social Media Management
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Quora and alike social media sites have emerged as the most profound face of digital marketing. Planning your social media marketing is very critical when asked where to put more time, energy, and money in the right place where your costumers actually are? How to create your own storytelling formula that reverberates with your clients’ looking at their smartphones 40 times a day?
Having a pro-active social media presence across all platforms is not only a strategy to boost your business prospects but your Minute of Angle—M O A to adjust flawlessly your next shoot!
There are plethora of apps and softwares that can help you in managing well your overall social media platforms be it your business pages on Facebook, LikedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Youtube. Great tools enabling users running social media marketing campaigns, gain insights with some analytical tools, social listening, featured publishings, automate answers, schedules posts, queue content for groups, profiling followers, etc.
I was shopping around while drafting our digital marketing strategy and here is a selection list upon my research for your social media management apps and web tools:
‣ Facebook Pages Manager
FREE App. So you can manage all your facebook business pages in one place.
‣ HootSuite
FREE up to 3 social network accounts. Then charges $29 per month for Pro plan.
‣ AgoraPulse
Starts with $39 per month so to view general reports for 4 main social networks.
‣ Zoho Social
Starts with $8.33/month plus add-ons like team members or brands for $100 each.
‣ Sprout Social
Begins with Premium account for $99 per user/month for 5 social profiles only.
‣ TweetDeck
FREE. It’s the dashboard for desktop only Twitter account. No iOS app available!
‣ Sendible
For solopreneurs, $29 per user per month. Small business for $99 per 3 users!
‣ Social Studio
Social listening tool by Salesforce costing for basic services from $0 to $99/month.
‣ Buffer
Pricing starters and business plan from $0 to $399 with various features and bets.
‣ MeetEdgar
No iOS app available but offers 25 social media accounts for $49 per month.
‣ DrumUp
Starter plan $15 up to $159 per month. +Mining tool around all web content.
‣ TailWind
For all your grams & pins on Instagram & Pinterest from $9.99 per account/month.
‣ eClincher
Basic plan starts from $49 per month to $199 for Agency accounts.
‣ Social Aider
$4.99 per mont for personal use only. But professional is $11.85 for a month!
Above all that, you should keep an eye on competitor activity to learn, improve, and shape your social media marketing. There are good tools and softwares to see how your rivals are engaging and enticing their consumers in using multichannel platforms. Plenty of websites can help in getting such insights like spy.com, or ahrefs.com.
2. Web Design & Development
There are some essential digital marketing skills you must acquire around creating and designing your own website. I don’t mean to be a pundit in PHP or Python but having enough basics about web programming languages will immensely help you if you decided to use WordPress, Joomla or Drupal to build your website. Indeed they’re easy-peasy platforms to do it like Weebly for instance!
If that seems a lot in your case, still you can engage an expert web-developer bearing in mind you should carry on some preliminaries to well explain your website’s purpose and ensure a mutual understanding the time some technical jargons will be spelled out!
But don’t worry, here you go a short list of the most used web programming languages an open sources out there:
‣ HTML 5
Stands for Hypertext Markup Language to create web pages. The fifth version of HTML.
‣ Javascript—JS
1 of 3 core technologies languages of the web world. JS enables web interactive pages and serves as bedrock for many web applications.
‣ CSS
Stands for Cascading Style Sheets, as name cites it’s style sheet language responsible for content and presentation layout, colors and fonts. It’s written in HTML language.
‣ WordPress
Free open-source content management system—CMS based on template system and plugin architecture. Easy to build websites with endless themes, templates, etc.
‣ Python
This is the number one easiest language to learn but can be powerfully scaled up. Did you know that Youtube, Google were developed using Python language?
More web languages are being used by developers but the above list is the most popular in the web space to construct your fundamentals.
3. Content Marketing
Content is the king and oxygen of your digital marketing and no strategy can ensure success without having good content. The reason why digital marketers must embrace it comes down to search. Google built algorithms that keep always updating their tweaks such as Panda, Penguin or Hummingbird looking to give value in search results for website with better content.
Numerous content types you may think about creating:
‣ News and blog content
Easy form to create—like our blog—to top the list of your content marketing to-do’s.
‣ Guides and interviews
This longer-form content can be published on your blog for specific ends relevant to your business.
‣ E-books
Type of white papers related to some research you conducted in your industry can advance customer base with high potential to dominate your expertise domain.
‣ Infographics
Visuals and graphics gain lot of clicks, shares and likes pan all social network sites.
‣ Videos
This is very powerful if well used on your Youtube channels, Instagram IGTV or Facebook Watch!
‣ Photographs
Strapping gear if sharply customized to instagram or Pinterest and other social media platform to sell and tell your stories!
4. Search Engine Optimization—SEO
Your website is of no help for digital marketing if it is not optimized for good search engine ranking. Foremost thing you do while building your website is indexing it on Google, Bing or Yahoo. So simply adding your webpages into those search engines.
Keywords or keyword phrases form the foundation of your SEO to know what your potential customers are looking for your products or services. If you’re developing your website on WordPress for example, Yoast SEO plugin can help you to describe a particular post on your website.
Then, it’s often recommended to use SEO tools to find out the performance and zero on the bottlenecks. Or check what key words are trending on the web like Google trends.
Always focus on creating quality inbound links rather than going for quantity. Avoid buying links, as it is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Another spotlight, but up to your choice, is the search engine marketing— SEM dilemma and its worthiness against its cost especially for small businesses or new startups. Some statistics shown that 70 to 80% of users ignore paid ads on any given search, focusing only on organic results.
5. Email Marketing
One of the most ubiquitous tactic of retention marketing. Email marketing is a marvelous cost-efficient communication tool that can serve both sales pitch and branding. Here below what could be used for:
- GENERATING MORE LEADS
- IMPROVING & BOOSTING YOUR SALES
- REDUCING YOUR MARKING COST
- SHORTENING SALES CYCLE
- FILTERING QUALITY REFERRALS & LEADS
To do so, you won’t be willing to rely on your old desktop email system to achieve the above results! Alternatively, lot of customized email service providers—ESPs are available out there in particular softwares, or software-as-a-service—SaaS than can help not only conduct your email campaigns but maintain your customer relation management via integrated CRM technologies.
6. Online Reputation Management
Today, consumers tend to go variety of channels to view others’ experiences to inform purchase decisions. Reviews and ratings play a vital role along the customer journey which necessitate that your digital marketing must focus on creating and managing a sound reputation across all digital marketing channels and streams.
Social listening is one of the new research fields dedicated in tracking your brand image across a wide range of online platforms including social networks, search engines, and review sites.
Subsequently, your digital marketing should also focus on:
- Monitoring the brand awareness through multiple platforms.
- Flagging any false spam reviews defaming your brand.
- Engaging by being positively authentic to negative feedbacks.
- Asking for recommendations and positive reviews from happy customers.
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