When you have a great business idea, you’ll want to see it realized and then watch it grow to be a success. One of the optimal tools for businesses of all sizes is digital marketing. It delivers results, can adjust to fit your business plan, and doesn’t require a huge budget.
When working out how to grow your business online, digital marketing is a crucial element to achieve success. Whether you already have a strategy or want to increase your marketing efforts and results, this guide will help.
Let’s take a look at the latest advances in digital marketing, how they help you, and what that means for your business.
Table of Contents
What Does Digital Marketing Look Like in 2023?
Digital marketing is a field that changes rapidly due to advances in technology and our understanding of how to best use it to achieve our goals. Practicing and perfecting your approach is an ongoing task that involves staying on top of the top digital marketing trends. Being one step ahead can make your business stand out from the competition.
For online marketing to be effective, you need to reach your target audience with the right content and via the appropriate channels, including social media platforms. Fortunately, new channels and tools are emerging to help you hone and streamline your strategy.
Adapting a strategy can be just as daunting for existing companies as digital marketing for startups. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By basing your approach around your core goals and brand identity, you can see results. Most importantly, it’s best to keep some core pillars, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and social media, while incorporating new trends.
How Does Digital Marketing Help Your Business?
No matter the size of your company, you need to be able to justify any marketing spend. It’s essential to understand how digital marketing helps to grow your business so that you have the resources to implement your digital marketing strategy. Not everyone’s an online marketing expert, so it’s helpful to be able to demonstrate and explain the value of your proposed internet marketing efforts.
You need to take the time to look at how Internet marketing leads to business success. However, you also need to set it out in terms that’ll win over other decision-makers in the company. Everyone from the CEO down will be convinced that social media marketing and other digital approaches are vital elements to help you grow.
Cost-Effective
Global digital advertising spend is predicted to hit $836 billion in 2026. It’s true that advertising is big business and is clearly attracting more companies. But don’t be misled into thinking that you need to spend a lot to get results.
Big campaigns require significant budgets to run, especially if you’re running TV ads with famous people promoting your product. Not many companies can afford that kind of marketing, but they can still expand their reach and captivate target audiences with digital marketing.
It’s not just about budget, though. Internet marketing is cost-effective because you can track your progress and adjust accordingly, but it also opens up many opportunities that wouldn’t be achievable if you stuck solely to costly traditional marketing methods.
Finally, don’t be afraid of making small tweaks along the way, you can improve the ROI of a campaign without starting from scratch.
Scalable
Money isn’t the only resource that affects your approach to online marketing. You need time and other resources, such as tools and expertise.
Now, you might be wondering how to grow a business online without biting off more than you can chew. The good news is digital marketing is often about working smarter and not harder. You can begin with content and campaigns on a few targeted channels. You can also focus on a few long-tail keywords for the most popular search engines; that’ll also help you get started.
As your business grows, you can increase your marketing efforts, both in scale and in cost. You’ll be able to add new campaigns for your additional revenue streams with more content across different platforms, but don’t be hasty. Only make your move when the time is right.
Precise
One of the reasons that digital marketing is so cost-effective and scalable is that it allows you to be precise when targeting your audience and evaluating campaign metrics.
With the targeting capabilities of most digital advertising platforms, you’re no longer making an announcement and hoping that some of the people nearby will hear your message and like it. Instead, you’re putting the right messages in front of the people who’ll be interested in your business.
Now, that doesn’t mean that all manner of advertising will be successful. A phenomenon known as banner blindness shows us that putting an ad on a page that’s seen by thousands of people isn’t the key to success. At best, it’ll be ignored, and at worst, it’ll bother your potential customer, leaving a bad impression. Does that mean you shouldn’t use paid advertising?
NO!
However, it does mean that you need to be “pickier” when choosing your ad platforms, formats, and targeting methods. Effective digital marketing is targeted to a granular level. It means you can find out what your target audience needs and where they go to look for it, and then adapt your strategies to match.
You can then use SEO and targeted ads to be the solution they need when they’re already using search engines to look for it.
Focused on ROI
The beauty of internet marketing is that you have plenty of exciting tools to help you focus on what you want. As well as getting granular with targeting, you can work out what works best to get you the most conversions.
Setting goals at each stage of the funnel helps, which means your digital marketing efforts will always help you achieve and grow.
A/B testing and calls to action are crucial parts of digital marketing that directly link your efforts to ROI. Using campaign tools to try out two different designs or two pieces of text helps you know what resonates with your audience. Once you know what converts, you can send it out and continue optimizing your content to get the best ROI possible.
Communicate With Your Community
You don’t need to take up physical space to interact with your customers and create a place for them. They can reach out to you, understand your brand and get a sense of community through online marketing. Brands and businesses have excelled at using social media marketing, their websites, and other online channels to create spaces to grow their communities – and you can do the same! Being able to communicate with new and existing customers will help you build trust and long term relationships.
Digital marketing allows you to express your personality. The more you put yourself out there, the more like-minded individuals will be attracted to your brand, your products and services. The digital sphere is the ideal place to answer their queries and provide information to help them.
Using Digital Marketing for a Competitive Edge
Now that you know how to grow your business with digital marketing and get others on board, it’s time to look at the latest digital marketing trends that can give you a competitive edge.
Online marketing is about getting your voice heard, but instead of having a shouting competition with other businesses in your industry, you can and should use new techniques to get your audience’s attention.
Before we start, let’s answer the question: is every new internet marketing trend right for your business? The answer is no, and the tricky part is deciding which practices to adopt. We’ve listed our top tips for choosing the ones that work for you.
- Always refer to your goals and work back from there to see if new channels or approaches will get you closer.
- If it’s not easy to answer question one, let your brand identity be your guide. If it doesn’t align with your values, it won’t be what you need.
- Budget is also a deciding factor. Will it save you money in the long run? Is now a good time to invest in new tools? Is it a cheap solution that you can test and reevaluate later?
Don’t let expertise (or lack of it) stand in your way. You can train staff, get help from experts or learn on the job when using new tools and channels.
Influencer Marketing
One of the most cost-effective digital marketing approaches is collaboration. Two popular forms are influencer marketing and user-generated content (UGC).
UGC means getting permission to share social media posts from customers who are talking about your product or service and why they love it. It’s authentic and cost-effective, and people love to see someone else tooting your horn. Similarly, Influencer marketing allows you to use well-known content creators to reach a wider, targeted audience.
Influencer marketing involves more informal and formal partnerships with social media users that already have a lot of followers in your target market. More people are turning to social media to make their decisions, so having someone with influence on those platforms helps you communicate and engage.
For every dollar spent, brands earn around $5.78, which makes this approach an effective one. It’s versatile, too, as you can work with one celebrity, several macro-influencers, or a mix. It’s beneficial for any business looking to grow its followers, increase engagement, create more content, and increase sales.
Digestible Content
One particular digital marketing trend that comes from audience demand and behavior is digestible content. While long-form content to explain complex issues is essential for customers who are further down the funnel, shorter and snappier pieces are needed for brand awareness.
First impressions and initial engagement happen within a few seconds, so it’s best to have some quick, digestible content to serve that purpose. Short videos are one of the main ways to get noticed in 2023. Not only are your customers living busy lives, but there are many other demands vying for their attention. That leaves brands a limited window.
Instead of adding to the burden or going unnoticed because you take too long to get to the point, use short videos to get your point across in seconds. Facebook Reels, TikTok videos, and Instagram Stories are three potential areas to explore, depending on where your audience spends time.
Using AI
There are some digital marketing trends that seem daunting, but they can actually make a significant impact once you get to grips with them. One of the latest (although “greatest” is still up for debate) is the sudden explosion around AI, its abilities, and generative content.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something that most digital marketers are wary of, and while there are reasons to be hesitant, it also presents marketers, businesses, and brands with innumerable opportunities. We’re not suggesting that you can replace intuition and creativity with machine learning, but you can use it to grow digital assets and give your strategy a boost.
Automating processes using AI can cut down the time-consuming parts of digital marketing. You can plan your calendar, organize your content schedule and publish to several digital channels with ease while keeping the human touch. Plus, with AI content editing, you can get the best of both worlds with accurate information that has a natural flow.
Encouraging Interaction and Engagement
Interactive content is the hottest trend in digital marketing for 2023 and beyond. Our devices can now handle a lot more, and we have the tools to add animations and moving elements to posts and web pages. Interactive content can be applied to email marketing, social media marketing, and your website.
It doesn’t have to be a lot of bells and whistles. Interactive content can mean animations or images that you can click to reveal educational information, statistics, or infographics. Your online marketing strategy could include adding virtual product tests or providing quizzes and calculators to help answer your customer queries.
Interaction leads to engagement, with people spending more time on your page. It can also be used to guide customers toward the action that you want them to take before they leave your site.
It’s an excellent way to keep customers interested, tell them more about you, and then naturally lead to the next step.
Embrace Internet Marketing Tools and Resources
So far, 2023 has brought us a greater range of digital marketing tools than ever before, particularly with the boom of AI-powered automation. Naturally, you don’t need to subscribe to every platform or purchase each software program you come across. However, it’s useful to line up a few options to help you achieve your goals. We’ve listed a few categories of tools to consider.
Social Media Listening and Publishing Tools
You can combine automating posting with a convenient scheduler and gain excellent insights using a social media listening tool. Not only will you know what everyone’s talking about, but you’ll also be able to see if your brand is mentioned and even what your competitors are up to so that you can plan accordingly.
Content is a 24/7 business, but you don’t need to stay on top of it all day if you have a program that can post to multiple social media platforms for you.
Influencer Discovery Tools
Not sure how to add working with influencers to your digital marketing strategy? There’s a tool for that, too! You can access platforms that have large influencer communities all in one place.
You can find people based on your audience, the influencer’s integrity, and many more criteria. Since most platforms also help you send invites, it’s a fantastic way to build authentic relationships with people who can help your brand.
Email Marketing Tools
Effective digital marketing often involves email newsletters. You can easily communicate with potential customers and your existing audience with a tool like Mailchimp. Many services also allow you to segment your audience, deliver target emails to each segment, conduct A/B testing, and automate messages.
You’ll find templates, workflows, and campaigns that cut down your workload while delivering increased customer loyalty and sales.
Content Creation Tools
One of the most time-consuming parts of digital marketing is content creation. While you can hire freelancers to produce superb written content, it can be more challenging to add some color to your posts.
There are several design and branding tools that create crisp layouts for your images. Others get you easy design templates for infographics, social media posts, email headers, and more.
Search Engine Marketing Tools
Your website is an integral part of online marketing. There are tools that can help you come up with blog post ideas, schedule posts, identify keywords, and give you information about your ranking on search engine pages.
Beyond on-page SEO, these tools help with several other digital marketing techniques. One is link building, as you can find suggestions for websites to approach for backlinks or guest blogs.
Measurement and Reporting Tools
As we mentioned right at the start, digital marketing works so well because you have the opportunity to check your progress, evaluate the results, and make small changes to optimize.
When you use measurement and reporting tools, you can see how well your campaigns and content are performing.
Analytics help keep your internet marketing on track. You can see how many people you’re reaching, how they’re finding your site, whether they’re engaging, and if they take the action you want and expect them to.
Conclusion
Every business can benefit from digital marketing. The scalable, ROI-focused, and cost-effective approach keeps you current and means you can stand out from your competitors. Embrace using new tools and techniques to help you reach your audience and raise your brand’s profile to grow your business online.
