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Digital Marketing In The New Normal: 6 Tips For Lead Generation Success

Digital marketing is a complex process that requires much effort and patience from marketers. It’s not just about creating content and posting it on the internet. It’s also about creating an effective strategy that will help you reach your target audience.

In this article, you’ll learn six ways to ensure lead generation success in digital marketing:

Prioritize Your Niche
The first step in generating leads is deciding what niche you want to focus on. If you don’t know what niche you want to target, it will be hard for you to devise an effective strategy.

You can prioritize your niche by identifying your target audience’s most significant pain points. Then narrow down your list of pain points by choosing the one with the highest potential for conversion. You may want to add online articles on how to identify your niche to things you have to read now.

Create A Content Calendar
Once you’ve decided on a specific niche and created a content calendar, it’s time to start creating content that will generate leads. By focusing on one key area, you can optimize your efforts to generate more leads while keeping costs low.

When building a content calendar, you can create an editorial calendar for each month for the following year. This should include the topics that will be covered and when they will be posted online or published in print. Have topics that can be used as guest posts or blog posts on other sites. This helps you build your brand and reach out to your target audience without paying for each post individually.

Optimize Your Sales Funnel
After developing a sales funnel, it’s time to optimize your content to make it easy and convenient for potential clients to find what they’re looking for. This will also help you identify any areas of improvement when it comes to lead generation.

A vital step in creating an attractive landing page that gets visitors interested in what you’re offering is by telling them about your product or service in an engaging way. The second step is following up with emails that offer sales and discounts and building trust with customers over time, so that they’ll feel comfortable purchasing from you again in the future.

Build A Website With Lead Capture Forms
Another way that you can generate leads online is by creating a website with lead capture forms. This allows users to submit their contact details in exchange for something they want. These forms are very effective because they allow users to opt in even without previous knowledge of your business or product, making them more likely to convert into customers later.

You may also use these lead capture forms as an email list builder by connecting them to your autoresponder service and sending out periodic emails to your subscribers with valuable content. This will help you build stronger relationships with your customers and increase sales over time.

Read more: Digital Marketing In The New Normal: 6 Tips For Lead Generation Success

Digital marketing tips for growth amid economic uncertainty

No digital marketing professional knows how bad the economic downturn that has caused tens of thousands of tech-industry layoffs will be or how long it will last. No one knows when Google will actually deprecate third-party cookies — if ever.

But analysts have some advice for beleaguered marketers and CX leaders, many of whom will face shrunken budgets, to maximize investments in the coming year. There’s no time to lose.

“CX teams that track metrics and can demonstrate the efficacy of their efforts for business outcomes get budgets to continue,” said Joe Cicman, Forrester Research senior analyst. “Those that don’t? They don’t have a leg to stand on.”

Social down, streaming up
Facebook and Twitter used to be reliable marketing investments, delivering top-of-funnel audiences to marketing programs. Both have run into hard times, for different reasons.

Uncertainty in content moderation and concerning behavior from Twitter CEO Elon Musk have driven away half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers — massive brands including Dell, Merck, Fidelity and Heineken — according to research from Media Matters published in late November.

Ad revenues from Meta’s flagship marketing channels, Facebook and Instagram, are also shrinking, according to Axios research — down considerably from their 2017 peak. New privacy laws, Apple giving consumers the right to turn off cross-app tracking and Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies all have diluted the quality of audience data Meta can deliver. Furthermore, the emergence of TikTok, LinkedIn and Amazon as competing advertising channels has cut into Meta’s share.

Read more: Digital marketing tips for growth amid economic uncertainty

10 e-commerce marketing strategies for your business

Without a clear e-commerce marketing strategy, organizations could face significant challenges as consumer behaviors change.

E-commerce sales boomed in 2020 and beyond due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, online shopping has continued to grow, as have competitors and changing demands from customers. If organizations invest time and resources into e-commerce marketing strategies, they can help establish, increase and retain their customer bases.

E-commerce marketing strategies involve promotional tactics to drive traffic to an online store. A well-thought-out marketing plan, coupled with an engaging website, can convert visitors into paying customers, help businesses retain them and increase their overall customer lifetime value (CLV). If marketing teams stay up to date on the latest trends, they can help the organization reach and retain new customers.

These 10 e-commerce marketing strategies can help set an organization apart from its competition, strengthen the brand, attract new customers and increase sales over time.

  1. Search engine optimization
    Launching a website is a win for any e-commerce company, but websites aren’t enough for consumers to easily find the brand. To improve visibility, marketing teams must optimize websites for search engines. Positive search engine optimization (SEO) requires marketing teams to continually update websites with rich and relevant content that provides useful information for customers.

An SEO strategy can help organizations ensure their content shows up on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries and deliver positive CX when customers find the information they need. Marketing teams should use SEO keywords and phrases organically within content to alert search engines to the site’s relevance for those queries.

Read more: 10 e-commerce marketing strategies for your business

Anatomy of an email marketing strategy: from discovery to conversion

Content continues to prove itself as an invaluable part of a marketing strategy, for B2Cs and B2Bs alike. Brands that make it their business to create and serve engaging, useful content can keep their audience interested, gain their trust, and establish themselves as an authority in their field.

Content strategy can be a major part of reaching business objectives – according to Semrush’s 2022 State of Content Marketing Global Report, more than three-quarters (78%) of brands that achieved their business goals have a documented content marketing strategy, while 81% of companies that did not reach their goals do not have one.

There’s a role for content throughout the entire customer lifecycle, though it has the most impact when it is delivered at the right moment, which is where email comes in.

Mapping the right content with the right point in the customer journey and delivering it through email can be extremely effective. With consistent delivery of quality, relevant and valuable content, you get better quality leads and customers who are more likely to stay with you, as well as the opportunity to learn more about your audience and what they want, continuing the virtuous cycle.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can effectively build content into your email strategy in three steps: mapping the customer journey, collating the right content, and bringing the two together in an email programme.

Step 1: Understanding the customer and mapping their journey
As is the case with every marketing campaign, the best place to start is with an understanding of your audience. As a first step, draw upon any insights you have about your existing customers to develop different personas, before plotting the journey they take with you from awareness to conversion and beyond.

Reflect on the prospect’s needs, challenges and concerns on each step of that journey. Then identify the points at which they will be most receptive to content from you and determine what that content should look like.

An important point to keep in mind is that your email and content strategy must be aligned with the company’s broader marketing goals. According a 2019 survey from the Content Marketing Institute, the two biggest benefits of a documented content marketing strategy are aligning teams around common missions or goals, and making it easier to determine which types of content to develop.

If your business objectives are well defined, then goals for the content strategy will more naturally follow. It also means you’re less likely to waste money and effort on campaigns that don’t deliver material results for the company.

Step 2: Bringing together the right content
By this point you should have a good idea of the content you need, and fortunately, there may be no need to create it from scratch. It may be far more efficient to update or repurpose content that already exists in the company, which you can track down with a content audit. This is where you take stock of all the content you have on your site, such as blog posts, videos, guides, whitepapers and survey results, noting what content is performing well or tends to spur action.

If it is necessary for you to make new content, ensure you’re thinking about who your audience are as individuals – where they work, their life stage, their challenges, what they value, where they get their information – as well as where they are on the customer journey, to guide what you create.

Step 3: Aligning content with the customer journey
After you have an understanding of the likely journey the prospect will take with you and the content to which they’ll be most receptive, it’s time to bring the two together with your email strategy.

With a bulk communication and marketing automation platform, like Everlytic, it’s possible to set up automated workflows that send emails in response to certain behaviours, ensuring the prospect receives the right content at the right time. Also, if you have segmentation in place, you can adapt the email and personalise the content within it to suit their profile, rendering it even more valuable.

For example, when the Independent Institute of Education (IIE), South Africa’s largest private higher education institution, wanted to convert prospective leads into applicants and ultimately registered students, they used Everlytic to build a series of emails to nurture those interested in further study.

A series of emails and texts were sent to contacts over time, which were triggered by their behaviour. The content of the messages, of which there were five variations, would reflect where the recipient was in the onboarding lifecycle. IIE attributed the campaign as a factor in the 20% growth in student numbers the following academic year. This paced approach also took some of the strain off their sales and marketing teams.

Read more: Anatomy of an email marketing strategy: from discovery to conversion

Experts Share Tips on Strategic Web Design for Successful Digital Marketing

Website is the second most popular channel used for marketing purposes in 2022, according to HubSpot. While it’s important to note that 59% of users, as per Adobe, prefer “beautifully designed’” sites compared to “something simple and plain,” 88% of users won’t return to a website due to poor UX, as reported by Amazon Web Services. Hence, businesses need a website design strategy that combines visual appeal and usability to engage and convert users.

DesignRush, a B2B marketplace connecting businesses with agencies, leveraged its 13,000-agencies-strong network for quick insights – or “QuickSights” – on the strategic web design tips for digital marketing.

1) CAPTURE ABANDONED CARTS VIA EMAIL SIGNUP

Forge Digital Marketing CEO Erin Schnittker Siemek states that installing email integrations and leveraging exit and shopping intent popups to collect emails on websites is a winning combination to capture abandoned carts.

“If you have an eCommerce business, we stress the importance of creating integrations with Klaviyo on your website,” said Siemek. “Design a user experience that converts first and foremost, but the second best thing to [help increase] sales conversion[s] is email signup. [Therefore] structure your website and email integration to capture abandoned carts and use strategic exit intent and shopping intent popups to grow that email list […] A website that uses these techniques can expect to add 30% to their bottom line of revenue by correctly deploying email capture within your web design and development plan.”

2) DECLUTTER YOUR SITE FOR FASTER LOAD TIMES

In the opinion of Rahul Jain, founder of SlashMonk, decluttering is a key tactic to incorporate on websites because it helps improve usability and search engine rankings.

“Speed is key when it comes to website usability,” said Jain. “That’s why one of the best ways to improve [it] is by decluttering your site. By eliminating unnecessary elements and formatting, you can significantly reduce the time it takes your website to load. Not only will this make your website more user-friendly, but it will also boost search engine rankings. So go ahead – clean up your site and see the dramatic improvements it makes in both usability and search engine rankings!”

Tabitha Jean Naylor, owner of TabithaNaylor.com, adds that optimizing websites for fast speed is essential since delays can cost businesses a significant number of leads.

“An extra 5 seconds on your page load time can mean losing 20% of your leads,” said Naylor. “Optimizing website speed will ensure your potential customer stays long enough to engage and realize that they need your product. Compress images, get rid of unnecessary plugins and minify website code for faster speeds.”

Read more: Experts Share Tips on Strategic Web Design for Successful Digital Marketing

What Challenges Do Entrepreneurs Face In Digital Marketing?

If you are stepping into the field of digital marketing as an entrepreneur to grow your business then know that it is a great field that can increase your brand awareness but there are some enormous challenges and obstacles for people who are new to this field. Digital marketing is becoming popular with every passing day as its results are better than traditional advertising and it is cost-effective. Plus, the increased penetration of the internet has further helped in the growing popularity of digital marketing.

But there are a lot of challenges for beginners in the field of digital marketing that we are going to discuss shortly. Those entrepreneurs who are new to the field of digital marketing aren’t able to get promising results and their startups fail to do much in digital marketing but worry not. You just need to be careful in this field, keep your ground in front of the challenges that await your way and you will be able to succeed in digital marketing campaigns. So, here are the common challenges that entrepreneurs faced in digital marketing as a beginner:

Insignificant Knowledge About Digital Marketing
Most entrepreneurs and startups don’t have enough knowledge about the field of digital marketing due to which they struggle and mess everything up. It is a common problem, not in the field of digital marketing but in any other field. If you don’t have significant knowledge about a field and you jump right into it then you are going to make things even worse.

To be able to come up with promising results in the field of digital marketing, you should learn more about this vast field, gather some knowledge, and stay updated with the latest digital marketing tools and trends that are being used in this field before you actually jump into this field.

Low Budget
Budget and Capital, are the two things that play a significant role in any business category. Without a budget, no campaign or business can run. In the field of digital marketing, you must have a budget for your marketing campaigns that will help you reach your estimated target. Sometimes, it may be required to boost your content which also requires a budget. So, you have a budget pre-planned for digital marketing or else you will struggle.

Fail To Draw The Attention Of The Targeted Audience
People who don’t have knowledge about the field of digital marketing aren’t able to draw the attention of their targeted audience. To succeed in generating leads, it is important to draw the attention of the targeted audience to your products/services. It is beneficial for your business as it increases its popularity and you also get the attention of the audience that you were targeting.

Based on the products and services that your startup provides, you should have a rough understanding of the interest of your potential audience. Therefore, you should understand the interests of your audience and provide them with content that will catch their attention and will help generate leads. For instance, if you have a startup program similar to Omegle then targeting those people who wish to meet new people would be the ideal choice with content that they wish to see.

Ignore ROI
Another challenge or mistake you can say that startup owners make is that they ignore the ROI or Return On Investment. They start a marketing campaign and don’t even measure the progress of their campaign and whether it is generating results or not. Determining the ROI is helpful to measure how good your investment is turning out to be or not. If the ROI is good then it shows that you are going with a good strategy but if ROI is bad then you need to change your marketing strategies.

Unfortunately, people who are new to this field ignore the ROI due to which they are unable to predict the appropriate return on their investment and don’t make any changes to their marketing strategies. You wouldn’t see startups like Chatroulette making such a mistake.

Read more: What Challenges Do Entrepreneurs Face In Digital Marketing?

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Marketers use various strategies for firms to market and raise brand awareness. Social media marketing and email marketing are two of the most popular and successful ways to accomplish marketing objectives. Both are magnificent in their own ways. As of 2021, there were around 3.78 billion users of social media and 4.1 billion users of email globally, according to Statista. This amount represents about 48% of the world’s population.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular every day. Nevertheless, we are unable to control how emails affect their users’ ability to transact. The issue at hand is which is superior. Which of the two can influence the target audience more effectively?

What is Email Marketing?
A type of digital marketing called email marketing uses emails to spread brand recognition. It informs customers about the newest items, discounts, and services to help them remember the brand. The following are some advantages of email marketing:

  1. Strengthen Relationships, Loyalty & Trust
    Building individualised interactions with present and potential clients through email marketing is a terrific strategy. The readers of your newsletters and emails will come to know, like, and trust you and your business if you write them well. Consumers also do business with trusted companies.
  2. Increase Brand Awareness & Stay Top of Mind
    Consumers are reminded of your business, products, and services every time an email is delivered to them. This helps customers remember your business when it’s time to make a purchase.
  3. Segmentation
    Email marketing allows you to establish lists of each market segment based on demographics, interests, previous behaviour, etc. This allows you to develop marketing messages that are specifically tailored to each target audience. With the help of this incredibly successful marketing strategy, each segment will closely relate to your marketing message.
  4. Low Cost & Good ROI
    Comparatively speaking to other marketing strategies, email marketing is relatively affordable. For every dollar invested, email marketing typically returns $44.25 in profit.
  5. Easy to Use
    An email campaign may be set up quite quickly. You may upload subscriber information, segment your lists, use email templates, fill in your content, and send out emails to subscribers regularly using the many resources and software providers for email marketing available online. Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are two of our preferred email marketing services providers. Instead of using a pre-made template, having a customised email template that aligns with your company’s brand can be much more successful.

Read more: Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

What Digital Marketers Should Know About Direct Mail

Since I founded Gunderson Direct roughly 20 years ago, I’ve had a number of conversations where I’ve defended direct mail to digital marketers. It seems that our channel is just not as well understood as most others, so I’ve done my share of explaining.

Here is just some of what I say to help them understand how direct mail can help them.

• It has unique targeting capabilities: Cookie concerns? IP identification issues? A physical address is the most reliable contact information for prospecting. Direct mail datasets are appended with thousands of attributes—both demographic and behavioral—that are available for targeting. And you can apply AI and machine learning to model builds across numerous databases to constantly improve direct mail’s look-alike targeting capabilities.

• You can go bigger and cheaper (per impression): Scaling in digital typically means upping your bids to compete for a relatively fixed ad inventory. There is no bidding war to get into your prospect’s physical mailbox. In fact, the direct mail industry is set up to reward companies that scale, offering ever-improving manufacturing and data efficiencies as quantities increase. Scale a DM program, and your cost per impression typically drops.

• Omnichannel DM strategies can boost your response: The same data used to target a prospect’s mailbox can be used to target them digitally. Automated display (no cookies needed) and email touches, combined with the USPS’ free Informed Delivery program, can strategically surround the physical delivery of printed mailing withs additional impressions. We’ve found that these “digital surrounds” can improve overall campaign response by as much as 40%.

• Direct mail stands out: It’s often said that the average consumer encounters as many as 10,000 ads a day. Compare that to how many pieces of mail are delivered to your home each day. Importantly, ads in digital and traditional channels often interrupt your entertainment or information consumption, so they are often missed and easily dismissed. But direct mail consumption takes place away from a screen and can be reviewed at a prospect’s leisure.

• It makes an impression: People depend on physical mail to receive information from government and business institutions, making it a trusted source of communications. Furthermore, research shows that physical ads are remembered more quickly and elicit a stronger emotional response than digital ads.

Read more: What Digital Marketers Should Know About Direct Mail

This Holiday Season Play The Long Game With Email Marketing

As we predicted, promotional email volume has skyrocketed this year as brands worked to retain and reengage customers because of pandemic-related shutdowns. And marketers facing the decline of third-party cookies are now chasing first-party data through — you guessed it — email relationships. Inbox placement and reputation management vendor Validity finds that global inbox volume has increased 94% since Q3 2020. Competition for email attention and email data is tougher than ever.

The stakes around your email program are higher. Because of data deprecation, first-party data is gold. And email addresses unlock user identity and permission — keys to this treasure. So responsibly collecting email registrations, preserving relationships with good sending behavior, and enhancing user profiles through regular email interactions isn’t just about getting more opens and clicks. Improving deliverability now makes or breaks your entire customer data strategy. Here is how to do right with email marketing this holiday season:

  • Don’t get lured into the temptation of over-messaging. We get the appeal of sending just one more message when you are facing looming Q4 transaction goals. But wearing out your list now sacrifices longer-term revenue, compromises your sender reputation, and potentially deletes forever the identifier you need to stay in touch with a customer. GDPR allows that users can request that their data be permanently erased from a marketing database if requested.
  • Keep registration customer led. Boxed and Rue La La now require registration just to browse their sites. But we advise not forcing a customer’s hand. Let customers control their opt-in. Rent the Runway’s omnichannel preference center collects explicit proclivities and zero-party data such as user size and style searches for use in product recommendations. And Dollar Tree gives subscribers a chance to change contact information, desired message type, and frequency.
  • Deliver value to customers. We bet your email strategy over-indexes on accomplishing your Q4 goals — sales volume, revenues, inventory liquidation. This is the case for most emailers. But the best way to win this holiday and still have a database and solid sending reputation is to give customers what they want, rather than forcing them into your path to purchase. As Validity found, Red Letter Days increased inbox placement when it targeted emails to user behavior and preference. And improved inbox placement boosted opens and clicks, which generated more data for better targeting. This virtuous cycle increased revenue attributed to email by 10%. Email marketing vendors like Bluecore and Cordial collect and make usable non-email data (like point-of-service data, supply chain updates, or SKU-level metadata) to improve message relevance.

Read more: This Holiday Season Play The Long Game With Email Marketing

Email marketing is bigger than ever, so here’s how your small business should do it

Email is a critical marketing tool. Research firm Statistica reports that, in 2020, about 306 billion emails were sent and received every day worldwide, and this figure is projected to increase to more than 376 billion daily emails within the next few years.

That should not surprise anyone running a small business. According to recent research from Campaign Monitor, an email marketing platform, 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.

Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of confusion among small-businesses owners about how to best deploy email marketing.

For starters, you don’t want to send hundreds or thousands of emails from your company’s mail server unless you enjoy getting into a fight with your internet service provider. That’s why it’s always best to subscribe to a bulk email service such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, AWeber, or Emma. Besides providing templates and assistance for sending out email campaigns, the primary job of these services is to make sure that your email gets delivered.

The good ones will have best practices and actively enforce opt-in and data rules to ensure that you are not sending spam or messages to people who don’t want to hear from you. Because of these controls, the major mail providers such as Gmail, which recognizes that delivery is coming from a vetted source, are less inclined to block your messages or send them to spam.

What about content? The rule of thumb is that it should be short and mostly non-promotional. That’s because no one wants to receive advertisements. Your community will want information that will help. This information can be about your products but also include thought leadership, insights, and advice.

“If your email marketing is all about ‘buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff,’ then you’re not providing any kind of value,” says Bonny Clayton, a Media-based web design and marketing specialist. “Keep doing that and your email list is going to die.”

Clayton also recommends that if you’re sharing a blog or information about a new product, “don’t give them the whole kit and caboodle in the email. Whet their appetite, pique their interest in the email, and then say, learn more by having a big juicy button for clicking.”

Read more: Email marketing is bigger than ever, so here’s how your small business should do it

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