7 Digital Marketing Strategies to improve your ROI

The digital marketing landscape is diversifying as consumers generate their own content and marketers search for more ways to generate product awareness and interest. Competition is mighty fierce in the digital space, so marketers will do whatever they can to gain a competitive advantage. Here are some promising digital marketing tactics that will help you boost revenue in 2016.

Instagram Ads

You’ve considered Facebook Sponsored Posts and Twitter Promoted Tweets (at least, I hope you have!). But have you thought about Instagram Ads? Similar to sponsored posts on Facebook and Twitter, Instagram ads are like digital chameleons that blend in with a user’s feed to increase awareness and drive traffic to your site.

The demographics on Instagram are similar to that of Facebook—with the majority of users being age 18-29 and a higher ratio of females. The difference is a greater level of creativity and engagement. And with 400 million users, there’s quite an audience to choose from.

Evergreen content

What is “evergreen content?” Evergreen content is content that remains interesting and relevant for an extended period of time, regardless of a change in culture. This includes tips, tutorials, industry resources and product reviews. The term is most often used to describe sustainable blog content and white papers, but the tactic can also be used for other mediums such as infographics, video content and email campaigns.

In regards to email campaigns in particular, marketers can send links to evergreen content in a lengthy series of emails using marketing automation. The idea is that people don’t buy whenever you want them to (wouldn’t that be nice?)—they buy when they’re ready. So, evergreen campaigns help keep a company top-of-mind for when the consumer is ready to buy. And then ya swoop in for the catch.

Review generation

Customer reviews play a significant role in the online reputation of local businesses. Businesses with negative reviews, no recent reviews or no reviews at all are at a significant competitive disadvantage. In fact, 86% of customers say negative online reviews have influenced their buying decisions (Marketing Land).

Not only does every business need to get more (positive) reviews, they also need to respond to those reviews in a timely manner. With tools like Review Generation, businesses can:

• Collect new reviews
• Showcase positive testimonials on major review sites and social media
• Address negative feedback before it goes online (and possibly viral).

As a result, businesses can improve their customer review score, boost their local SEO ranking and ultimately improve their online reputation.

Crowdsourced content

The not-so-old adage that content is king remains tried and true. Of course, turning out heaps of tactical content is time consuming and resource compacting. Collaborating to create meaningful, relevant content is a trend we’ve seen grow this past year because it can save a ton of time while not sacrificing quality. Crowdsourcing content means soliciting ideas from others in the space to create content.

Crowdsourcing content saves time—you don’t have to generate all the ideas and words yourself. By asking others in your industry for input, you’ll also have the added perk of gaining insights you may not have thought of yourself. After you create the content, it’s far easier to reach a different demographic you might not have otherwise—those same people you got input from are likely to share the piece out themselves. Send the piece to those who have contributed right at launch time, and they will be inclined to share amongst their network. Boom, built in content amplification machine.

If you haven’t done it before, try crowdsourcing a list. It’s an easy thing to get from people and won’t take them much time to contribute. The Local Search Association just released 24 Expert Predictions for Local Marketing in 2016, a good example of a list made into a slide deck that is content crowdsourced.

Video content marketing

Video content marketing was traditionally unfeasible. We all lived through that era. It was incredibly difficult to get a return on investment from video, virtually leaving it off-limits for small and medium businesses. But now, with the advent of camera-ready smartphones and free video streaming services, the benefits of video marketing far exceed the costs. Yes, businesses can film with smartphones, as long as it suits the brand!

Vlogs, product launches, tips and tutorials—they all provide a lot of value to your partners and customers. What’s really unique to video, though, is that you can better aid apprehension, appeal to emotion, use humor (carefully) and relate to your customers. You can’t get the same effect with a written blog. These types of videos don’t need to be long—you can film 3-15 second micro-videos on Instagram, or one or two-minute videos on Facebook and YouTube.

Retargeting ads

You just checked out a cool new tablet on Amazon, and now you see ads about tablets on YouTube, Facebook and pretty much every other site you visit. For that, you can thank retargeting (aka remarketing), a feature of Google AdWords, Bing Ads and other ad serving networks.

When a visitor checks out a company’s website, that company has the ability to serve interesting and relevant ads on other websites they visit. Consumers think it’s creepy, but marketers love it. What’s neat about it is, the company already knows what the visitor showed interest in. Targeting them with that same product or similar products keeps the company top-of-mind so the consumer can buy when they’re ready (sense a bit of a common theme?). And even though consumers might find it a bit creepy, remarketing is actually helping them—they’re getting ads about products and services they really want to buy.

Custom landing pages

You may already know what landing pages are, but just in case you don’t—landing pages are webpages that describe a piece of content, where users must enter their contact info in order to access the content. It’s a lead capture tool that is a crucial piece to almost any lead funnel. Let’s face it, content is a waste of time (and money) if there’s no path to eventually convert readers into potential leads.

Landing pages that are linked from a blog or email should be relevant to that digital marketing piece. The featured content can be a white paper, case study, eBook or pretty much anything else that’s valuable enough for people to provide their contact info. There are many different lead capture software tools that allow marketers to gain anything from name, to number of employees, to annual revenues. So make some interesting custom content, put it behind a landing page, and then do it over and over again until you pass out.

Don’t resist the diversification of digital marketing. Consider these seven tactics when evaluating your marketing plan in 2016.

Do you feel like we’re missing a hot digital marketing tactic for 2016? Don’t be afraid—tell us in the comments below!