Published on: 26 February 2019
Last Updated on: 25 January 2020
If you’re starting your own business in digital marketing; congratulations! Digital marketing is in and has a lot of potential in the job market. It is very lucrative for young entrepreneurs who are changing the way the world looks are business. There is a vast number of digital marketing jobs and career opportunities in the future.
Having been born into an era of technology, Generation Z has a natural affinity toward technology and computers. It doesn’t hurt to be equipped with the knowledge and even though you may have talent, it is important to enhance it with learned skills. Now, apart from talent what do you need to have a successful digital marketing business? Read on to know more.
Know your target audience:
For any marketing strategy, it is very important to know who you’re targeting. You have to segregate consumers according to their economic status, age, sex, and location. A local company targeting another city won’t get much business so it’s of no use. Besides the digital market is not exactly cheap so you have to narrow down your options to the demographics that will get you the most business. Teenagers won’t buy diapers, and a strategy that is targeting this age group will fail. If you are a digital marketing firm or a single entrepreneur, ensure that you thoroughly study the market as well as the client product and service. You need to have thorough knowledge to be able to empathize with consumers
Decide location:
After setting the demographics, analyze the locations where the advertisements may be relevant. Some products can be shipped across cities. In such cases, you can target any location that has not been targeted by your competitors yet. Unless you’ve got great content and a great marketing team, play safe with the location. A lot of investment goes into digital marketing and unless you’ve got money to burn don’t experiment recklessly. If your client ships the product across cities, you may still have to decide a relevant area to start targeting. An untapped market is always the best choice and you can market aggressively if you have the budget.
Decide content for marketing:
The consumer is king! For a digital marketer, content is king. With the right content and action words, you can sell any deal. Now, how do you decide what kind of content to add? It depends on the demographics. You will market brands, products, and services differently. Each of these has different methods of campaigning and so is the content. Brand marketing is different because here you’re establishing trust. You’ll target the audience with content that tells them why they should choose you. Products and services will have descriptive campaigns where you explain why the audience should spend their money on you. You can pitch the brand to a bigger audience whereas products and services will have a limited relevant audience only.
Allocate budget:
The next most important thing is budgeting. Now that you’ve decided upon the content and the demographics, you now need to identify the resources that will go into marketing. Do you have enough to do everything that you’ve planned? Allocate budget to each campaign according to their utility. Each campaign needs to be developed according to the content and budget available. Bear Newman from bearfoxmarketing.com says that spending more time and money on marketing will make a business more successful. Take cognizance of the platforms you’re advertising on. Platforms like Google and Facebook cost more than organic SEO practices. Which niche of digital marketing are you an expert at? Only stick to that and optimize marketing.
Do competitor analysis:
A very important component of digital marketing is competitor analysis. Unless you know what your competitors are up to you will not be able to build a good strategy. A good digital marketing strategy is one where you outsmart your competitors or target an area where you don’t have much competition.
Analyzing the strategies that your competitors make use of is a brilliant idea. Fortunately, this is easy now because everything is visible online and you have tools that can measure competitor growth.
Doing this is very important even if you are not running active campaigns to keep abreast of the trends in the industry. Analyze how they place their content and the catchy slogans they use. Remember you can learn a lot from others’ experiences too. This will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t in the world of digital marketing.
As interesting as digital marketing is, the gruel is just as much. If you want to be good at what you do, choose your information sources carefully and go through case studies for the best results.
Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.
Content marketing has been around for quite a long time, and it is the go-to marketing strategy for many businesses nowadays. But everybody uses it, and the results they get are more or less along the same lines…in terms of the time they take to materialize.
What if you’re looking to get better results from your content marketing endeavors? What if you want to do some smart work rather than hard work?
In this post, let’s take a look at some answers to this question.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is basically defined as the type of marketing that involves creating and publishing/distributing content to a certain audience. The purpose of distributing this type of content is to increase awareness of the product/services so that they can be sold more. While “content,” in this context, refers to the content of all types, mostly written stuff is utilized for marketing purposes.
This type of marketing takes different shapes and forms.
Some people can engage in content marketing by writing and publishing blogs regularly. Others can utilize their product pages as a medium to engage in marketing, i.e., by making the descriptions and the visuals, etc., appealing and attractive.
Actually, instead of mentioning them here somewhat haphazardly, let’s look at some of the content marketing methods in detail before moving on to the tips.
What Are Some Common Methods Of Content Marketing?
Here are a few of the common ways in which content marketing is employed.
Blogs: Blogs, especially when created by a professional writing service, have a key role that goes beyond just advertising products or services. Their main goal is to educate and engage readers. This approach helps grow a brand's readership and audience. By providing valuable and informative content, the brand naturally attracts more people. This isn't just a marketing strategy; it's about genuinely helping readers. As more people find the blogs helpful, they start to trust and follow the brand, leading to increased business opportunities. With the help of a blog writing agency such as Compose.ly, brands can consistently deliver high-quality content that connects with their audience.
Emails: Email marketing is technically a marketing strategy on its own, but since it almost always utilizes content of some sort, it can also be mentioned in content marketing. In an email marketing campaign, individuals are reached out separately by the brand. These emails can either inform the recipient about some sort of new product release, a sale or a special discount, etc.
Newsletters: Newsletters are technically emails, but they are not like other messages that are typically used and sent in an email marketing campaign. While the latter, for the most part, directly promote the offerings of a brand, newsletters are geared toward educating the readers. You can think about them to be a type of hybrid between a blog and a typical email marketing message.
E-books: While this one is a more elaborate step than what brands usually do, it is a good way to engage in content marketing.
Now, with all that out of the way, let’s take a look at some tips that you can follow to get better results from your content marketing endeavors.
Tips For Getting Better Results From Content Marketing
As we mentioned earlier, while content of all types can be employed in content marketing, written content is the most common…and perhaps the toughest to create. That is why our tips will be geared towards it in particular.
Don’t Write Like A Robot, And Don’t Write For Robots
In that rather wordsmith-is line, we’ve summed up one of the most important principles of writing online content.
Firstly, when you write content for marketing purposes, be it of whatever type and kind, you should make sure that your tone is friendly, communicative, and human-like. Mind you, there are exceptional cases where a totally opposite tone would be more suitable, but we are talking about the common cases here.
This is what we mean by not writing like a robot.
Here is what you can do to make your writing tone fall into this criterion. Of course, depending on the situation at hand, some of these tips may not be very applicable.
Try and refer to the reader as “you” and yourself as “I” or “we.” This is one of the basic and simplest ways to make your tone look more natural and human-like.
Since you have to make your written content look more like a conversation than a piece of written text, you should reduce your overall use of passive voice. People hardly use passive voice when they speak. I mean, I could have just said, “The passive voice is hardly used by people when they speak,” but I did just make my point.
Keep sentences short. Keeping your sentences short can also give a natural touch to your writing and make it more reader-friendly.
The second part of our tip was Don’t write for robots.
We should actually clear this up a little before moving on.
Nowadays, a lot of content marketing is done via search engines. When people write blogs, they channel them to their readers via search engines. The same goes for a lot of other types of content, like product descriptions and e-books, etc.
Now, in a bid to make their content look nice to the search engines, a lot of people can end up making it look too mechanical, erratic, and awkward for human taste.
Consider the following example:
We offer the best ramen in Tokyo. Our quality ramen store in Tokyo is very good. Buy quality ramen near me in Tokyo. (Note the atrocious keyword usage)
Good content? For the search engine, maybe. For the reader? It’s just gibberish.
You have to avoid doing this sort of stuff when writing content for your audience. You should strike a balance between making the content appealing for SEs as well as your human readers.
Do Proper Research…And Use It
When it comes to content marketing materials such as blogs and newsletters, your aim should be to provide reliable and educative content to your audience. This can only be done if you do proper research and then utilize it when writing the content itself.
In this part, let’s look at how you can do research properly and what benefits you can get from it.
Here are some things that you can do for effective research:
Look for popular and reliable sources on the internet. Before you start gleaning information from anywhere, you should establish its reliability first.
Once done, be sure to find out relevant facts and figures to add to your content. This tip is, of course, subjective. In some types of content, adding facts and figures may not be very suitable. However, it can be a good idea in things like blog posts, emails, and the like.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to use some material from a source verbatim in its actual form.
(More important than implementing theoretical and conceptual information is the utilization of the data you get from audience research. In other words, you should conduct audience research and then use the details that you find to adjust your content as per the needs of the audience. When we say “audience research,” we basically refer to using analytical tools to find out necessary information and details about your audience, such as the details about their age, gender, location, and so on.)
Now let’s look at what benefits you can get by doing and incorporating research into your work.
Authority: When your content is backed with research, it comes off as authoritative. For example, when you present a stat for a certain situation or occurrence, it looks more grounded as compared to an opinionated guess.
Up-to-date information: Conducting research can also get you in touch with up-to-date information. By not researching your material before writing it, you can get stuck with old, outdated information that can neither help you nor your readers.
Value: When your content is based on research, it provides value to your readers. For problems, it can provide solutions. For choices, it can provide expert opinions.
This sort of content is a lot more potent in building a better readership and for growing your brand.
Aim For Content Perfection
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi
It’s a bit of a dramatic way to start off this heading, but it does make the point that we want.
No content is perfect because perfection (least of all in written content) is not achievable. But if you aim for the bullseye, you can land somewhere close to it.
That is why you should make all the effort possible to remove all types of imperfections from your content.
Grammar errors: Grammar errors are by far the most common and most harmful errors that you can make in your content. You should be proactive about avoiding such errors during the writing phase. And once you do write the content, you should take steps like proofreading the content and using an online grammar checker to weed out the remaining ones.
Clunky readability issues: Readability issues, such as confusing words, long-winded sentences, and weird phrase choices, can also adversely affect the quality of content. you can remove these types of imperfections from your content by using an online AI-driven paraphrasing tool. A good AI paraphraser can improve the readability of the provided content during the rephrasing process.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is like the diamondback of content imperfections. You can’t spot it quickly enough, and it can kill the quality of your write-up without you realizing it. Removing this imperfection is necessary and tricky at the same time. The best way to go about it is to use an online plagiarism checker and then analyze the results to take the steps you need.
Conclusion
A lot of brands do content marketing nowadays. But, to bring yourself a cut above the others, you have to follow some best practices. We’ve outlined a few of those in the post above.
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In the past few years, brands, regardless of their shape and size have started understanding digital marketing. This means that convincing a majority of them about the advantages of digital marketing has ceased to exist in most situations.
You need to do thorough research when choosing a digital marketing agency that you need to partner with. If you are starting from scratch, you need to go via Digitech Web Design, a leading agency that can help you with everything from designing your business website to taking care of your SEO strategies and plans.
In 2020, brands are faced with a new challenge- which agency to partner with! Digital Marketing agencies are propping up left, right, and center. While everyone claims to be the best at what they do, it is for brands to be sure of their abilities.
In this article, we are going to help brands get on board the best digital marketing agencies as partners. However, before we get to the questions, brands should ask agencies, let us first look at some of the challenges of the same.
Challenges to Hiring the Best Digital Marketing Agency for your Brand
Every business is unique. It has its own sets of challenges. In terms of priority, some businesses want to concentrate on one aspect, while others look to do something else. It is important that your internet marketing agency understands your needs and requirements as a business.
Many brands feel that every digital or internet marketing agency offers the same. However, that is not the case. If you want to work with a complete 360-degree agency, you will have to shell out a premium. Therefore, it is essential to work with a skill set, which you feel would be most helpful for you at a specific time.
A creative agency will tell you that it is all about branding, logo, design, and language. An agency geared towards social media would want to focus on just that one aspect. You need to team, which amplifies your complete digital performance at all levels.
List of 5 Questions to ask your Digital Marketing Agency before you start
1. What is their area of Expertise?
It is essential that you honestly ask them about what their area of specialization at the very start is. Like we already mentioned, while some have a great social team, others might boast of a brilliant SEO team. Depending on what you want to proceed with for the next year, you need to ask them about their different verticals in the organization.
2. What are Budget and Fees?
At the end of the day, money matters. If you are looking for a highly-skilled, specialized agency, you need to shell out a good amount as retainer every month. However, if your agency helps you increase your sales and revenues multiple times, you will not feel the pinch. Try starting with a smaller agency to understand those basics and then proceed with the bigger ones.
3. What are their Credentials and Past Work Records?
Many brands feel secure when they see that an agency has handled clients in the past from their niche. While this is a great starting point, you should not let your options be limited by just this fact. If they have worked with a business of a similar nature in the past, then they are aware of all the challenges, strategies, and processes, which will be required in the case of your business.
4. What are their Marketing Inputs about your Brand?
Most agencies will ask you about your pressure or pain points and then proceed to offer solutions accordingly. You can use this to ask them about larger marketing and sales goals. This will help show you how much they are aligned with your brand. It will also demonstrate whether they understand your issues and are willing to address the same with their skills.
5. What is the Timeframe for seeing Results?
You are only working with an internet marketing agency because you want to start seeing results. There is always an expectation involved. Do not fear or feel embarrassed in communicating the same with the prospective agency. This will allow them to assess their performances and see whether they have the capability to fulfill your expectations.
The Final Word
It is essential that you proceed with these five questions before signing on an internet marketing agency. This will allow you to structure your expectations accordingly. A good digital agency can be a great asset to a brand. However, on the flip side, if you do not get the best agency, you will end up losing money.
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Selling art is always a challenge. You have to find ways to bring it to the attention of interested buyers. This involves working with agents, having big galleries to display your art, and so on. However, with the explosive growth of the web and the online market, artists now have more choices when it comes to promoting their work.
How to Sell Your Art Online :
You now have many different ways to provide exposure to your art online and find buyers. From online art galleries to creating your own website to sell your art, to promote your work through social media, there are many options.
1. Online Art Galleries :
The best way to sell art is to get people to see it. Sign-up with a good online art gallery that provides good exposure and if they sell your art, you should get the major share of the sale price. You have to spend some time doing research to find good ones.
The best online art galleries do not just display your work. They also curate your work and help you promote your work and to connect with other artists, and buyers, and collectors. Your art will be displayed well in the gallery in the relevant categories. Potential buyers can narrow down the results by filters like the subject, style, medium, etc.
2. Sell Through Specialized Art Marketplaces :
Websites like Etsy, ArtFire, etc. focus on providing a marketplace for artists and for handcrafted work. On these websites, you can connect with other artists and artisans, show-off your work, and also get the opportunity to sell them.
3. Popular Shops and Auction Sites :
While you are exploring your options, don’t forget websites like Amazon and eBay. Yes, they deal with a lot of different products. But they also let you reach millions of people across the world. To sell your art through these sites, you have to make sure that you promote your product links on social media, ads, and other means.
4. Build Your Own Website :
There are now many ways to get your own online store with minimal investment. You can try TicTail, SquareSpace, or an eCommerce platform like Shopify. You can choose web templates to make sure your website looks good. Choose templates that are ideal for displaying art. Build your website and start promoting it to get visitors to your site who may become buyers.
5. Sell Through Social Media :
Use social media websites like Facebook to promote and sell your art. However, for social media to be an effective marketing tool, you need to establish yourself as a person worth following. You need to build your personal profile, connect with other people, respond to other people’s posts, contribute useful content in communities, and so on. You can begin talking about your work and try to generate interest in it.
Tweet about any sales you made or a new painting you added to an online gallery etc. on Twitter. Use Facebook well. Create a business page on Facebook and post interesting content about your art, show off your work. You can even set up shop on Facebook and sell on it.
6. Print-On-Demand Websites :
With print-on-demand websites, you can get exposure to your artwork in many ways. You can sell prints of your work. You can have your art printed on several merchandise like shirts, coffee mugs, smartphone cases, and so on. This will create an awareness of your work and also provide a stream of income for you, letting you concentrate on creating more art and saving the funds to promote them in traditional ways.
7. Create Photobooks :
Take professional photographs of your artwork and then select a few to create a beautiful photo book of your art. Use a service like a Blurb which lets you create stunning photo books. Blurb has partnered with Amazon so you can easily sell your photo books directly on Amazon.
8. Use Instagram :
Instagram is an image sharing site. Take snaps of a few of your paintings or other artwork and share it. Use Instagram to create awareness about your art, your style, the media you use, and so on.
9. Make Use of Stock Art Sites :
Select a few of your art that you feel are good but you can afford to give away to get more exposure to your work. Create a profile for yourself on sites like Shutterstock that tell a little about your work and your style. Upload good images of your art and let people use it for other derivative works. This can give more exposure to your art and people who use your images can share your image or your whole portfolio with others on social media, spreading the word.
10. Promote Your Art Through Occasional Giveaways :
Everyone likes to get something for free, and if it is an original piece of art, that adds more value to the prize. Choose a small painting or illustration that is good but one you don’t mind giving away. Choose a picture or handicraft with size and weight that won’t cost too much to send to the winner.
To ensure that you get entries for the giveaway from people who are interested in the work, ask them for instance, to write about why they would like to win the prize. Make it easy for them to share the giveaway page on social media.
The internet has opened up so many ways to promote your art and sell it, through your own website, through online galleries, through social media, by organizing promotional events like a giveaway. Explore your options and use as many as you can to create a buzz about your work and finding buyers for it.
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