Digital Marketing Strategies Every Business Should Know About

To say that the Covid pandemic has disrupted the world of business would be an enormous understatement. Its fallout has affected nearly every aspect of the way business is carried out around the world. Integrate Your Personality Some of the impacts of the pandemic, like supply chain interruptions and workforce reductions, have been obvious. Others have been harder to identify. The disruptions that Covid has brought to company cultures are among those that are easy to miss. However, for businesses that want to stay productive and successful while navigating the new normal, valuing and maintaining a healthy culture is essential. Generally, company culture is understood to be the collective goals, values, and practices that a business puts forth. It extends to the way that leaders communicate with their employees and the way in which decisions are made. Culture is often thought of as the personality of a business. When well established and understood, it sets the tone for what leadership expects from employees and what employees can expect from leadership. In my experience as a business leader, an important element of culture that is often overlooked is the way employees feel about the work they do for the business. Covid brought many new feelings to the workplace. Initially, uncertainty and fear were the norm as businesses struggled to stay open. As businesses adapted, many employees found themselves in new and sometimes unusual roles, where anxiety and a lack of confidence were the norm. As the pandemic lingers, it can be difficult for employees to stay optimistic and positive about the future. For business leaders navigating the pandemic, keeping a healthy company culture requires helping their teams to navigate those feelings. Setting a tone of positivity is important. I try to always have an optimistic attitude in the workplace and strive to establish an overall mood of optimism for any meeting or task. Attitude of Appreciation While Covid has brought unique challenges to the workplace, the foundational needs of employees have remained the same. They need to feel their work is being valued and appreciated. Covid has not changed that. If an employee feels heard, valued, and appreciated, they are much happier. And helping employees to be happy and satisfied is critical for productivity and success, especially during a pandemic. The increase in remote work is another development prompted by covid that has had an impact on corporate cultures. Prior to the pandemic, 20 percent of employees worked from home. As a result of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, that number jumped to more than 70 percent. Adopting a more flexible culture has been essential to keeping employees safe and businesses productive. My business has been much more flexible with employees regarding remote work. In fact, when our entire office had a covid outbreak a few months back, we were able to continue our work from home with very little negative impact on the business. Shifting our culture to be more flexible communicated to our employees that we valued their health as well as their work while allowing us to stay productive and profitable. We have implemented a hybrid model that is designed to cater to our employee’s needs. Since we made the change, productivity for many of our employees increased, as did overall happiness, which led to better work ethic and results. For business leaders already struggling to address the new demands brought on by the pandemic, I understand that caring for company culture can seem like one more thing on a to-do list that is already too long. If that describes you, keep in mind that a healthy culture does not require a huge budget or a huge time commitment. A simple step that our company has taken is hosting game nights for our employees and their friends and families. We found them to be a great way to boost morale and an opportunity for employees to show off their workplace and feel good about their job. Their success illustrates that one of the best ways to cultivate a healthy culture is to remember that employees are people, too. Praise and encourage them as often as possible. And find ways to show them that you value them for more than their work.

Advertising has changed drastically over the past several decades. Many of these changes have been dictated by technological advances that keep opening new avenues for quality brand exposure. Not too long ago, the chief mediums of advertising were radio and television with no other options. In those days, advertising was more straightforward and much more focused on selling the product or service. In contrast, today’s advertising has a noticeably different function — building a reputation and an identifiable brand status. The advertising of today also has numerous outlets with social media alone. With all of these options, creating an advertising budget can be frustrating if you don’t know where to begin. Let’s take a look at five ways companies can stretch their ad budget to start building their brand and establishing a reputation with the public. 1. Plan Your Marketing An overused but spot-on mantra about planning says it all — if you fail to plan, plan to fail. Success doesn’t just happen for most people. Unless you are notoriously lucky, you will need to plan your marketing ads as you would prepare your grocery list. As with your food staples, when an item in your advertising plan is depleted, replenish it if it’s useful and important to you. If you plan to have a unique campaign, you need to make sure you have all of the necessary materials, just as you would if you were making a particular dish for dinner. Equally as important, every month or quarter, you should be planning for the next month based on the previous month’s or quarter’s data. Knowing what’s working and what’s not from your data is an essential part of creating an advertising budget that serves you well. And this planning also makes it easier to see where you should be spending your advertising money in the coming months. 2. Keep Your Marketing Message Consistent Having a ton of advertising venues may seem like you hit the jackpot. However, this situation can mean fragmented branding if you are not careful. If your branding is inconsistent across the internet and other outlets, you prevent the public from having an identifiable visual for your company. And your lack of a cohesive presence will most likely confuse potential customers. Therefore, you should keep your marketing colors, logos, fonts, and tag lines consistent across all platforms. To your customer, this uniform presentation makes your brand more substantial and more trustworthy, not to mention identifiable among the masses. 3. Publish Creative Content We all know the ads and advertising themes that resonate with us the most. They are the ones that have a catchy slogan or maybe colors and fonts that pop. Every advertiser strives for this type of unique creative content that touches the pulse of the general public. Sometimes this content can be elusive, so you mustn’t settle for the just okay options. Therefore, be prepared to pull out all the stops by utilizing your team’s strengths to develop stellar creative content that makes your brand stand out among the competition. Generally, your advertising team is comprised of creatives with various talents and specialties. Utilize these gifts, and don’t hesitate to try new and outlandish ideas. Some of the most iconic ad campaigns came from creative teams who dared to push the limits. 4. Use Marketing Automation Today’s marketing relies on building trust, and trust is achieved with excellent communication. One way to achieve an elevated level of trust is to let your system drive your marketing with simple auto-drip campaigns you set up beforehand and let your automation do the rest. While automated communication requires time and thought on the front end, it’s well worth the effort. Automated communication allows you to follow up with customers in real-time without lifting a finger. Whether it’s basic customer satisfaction feedback or a simple thank you message, having these created lines of communication provides excellent customer service and is a relatively effortless good business practice. 5. Spread Your Ad Spend The term “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket” absolutely applies in marketing. The best in the business highly recommend spreading your ad budget across a minimum of three marketing mediums. The best outlets will vary depending on the nature of your company. However, examples of possibilities include a blend of Search Ads, Retargeting Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Call Ads, TV ads, and Radio Ads, to name a few. And, here’s another excellent reason to use a marketing automation system — all of the above ad results are easy to manage because they are all kept in one place. The Bottom Line Advertising is big business, but it’s also extremely complicated these days. With so many mediums to work with, advertisers are challenged to create a killer campaign that stretches across numerous venues. However, by considering the tips above, feel confident that you can meet this challenge head-on by learning to stretch your budget as well.

The advent of social media brought the aspect of personalization to the world of online business. Over the last several years, consumers have increasingly searched for, followed, and purchased from companies and brands that they feel more personally and deeply connected to, stemming from the sense of engagement they feel when interacting with the businesses and brands they prefer to purchase from. When planning your business’s 2023 social media strategy, personalization and engagement should be at their core. Although planning an effective social strategy is imperative to your business’s success — especially with restrictions and nervousness in some regions — transitioning to a social commerce strategy can vastly increase your brand’s growth and value. Integrating Social commerce into Your Strategy Even though it has been more than two years since the pandemic began, COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon, and brands are suffering. Delays and disruptions in global supply chains resulting from the pandemic have affected virtually every industry and consumer market globally. However, consumers still expect the brands they do business with to meet their expectations—especially from virtual channels like eCommerce. Failing to meet those expectations can severely impact your business’s social media or commerce strategy, especially with many consumers today relying on social media to influence their buying decisions. Shopping through social media sites — a kind of eCommerce tactic referred to as social commerce — has taken on a new life due to the pandemic. Despite being around as early as 2015, social marketing-generated nearly $500 billion in sales between 2020 and 2021, equating to an approximate 40% jump in sales following the pandemic’s onset. For businesses, leveraging your presence and following on social media is crucial to remaining competitive in 2022, especially when targeting younger audiences. According to the Status of Social Commerce 2021 report, an overwhelming majority (97%) of Gen Z use social media as their top inspiration for shopping. The global social commerce market is projected to reach $604.5 billion by 2027, making the future of social media marketing look very bright. Nevertheless, implementing social commerce channels is merely one factor within your business’s overarching social media strategy. Without a bonafide brand presence on social media that consumers perceive as positive, you will be letting valuable dollars slip through your fingers. This is where the notion of personalization and engagement comes back into play. Engaging with Consumers Through Social Commerce One of the most practical uses of social media for businesses is its ability to find and connect with a larger audience of consumers. Long gone are the days when merely having an account for your brand on Facebook, Instagram, or other social media platforms was enough. In today’s world, your social media presence is a vital tool in attracting more consumers to your brand and engaging with them to convert them into paying customers. According to industry research, roughly half of all Americans who use social media are more likely to remain loyal to brands who engage with their feedback on social media. This statistic is even higher among millennials, with some 72% of millennials reporting that they are more likely to remain loyal to brands that engage with them on social media. Furthermore, about 50% of American consumers said they would be more likely to recommend a brand to others if its social media and social commerce presence is favorable, even if the product or service they purchased wasn’t. These statistics show us that engaging with your customers through social media is vital to have them remain loyal to your brand. When looking to plan your social media and social commerce strategy for 2022, look to ways in which you can further improve your brand’s engagement with consumers on social media. Utilizing the Power of Influencer Marketing If your business has yet to grasp the full potential that influencer marketing can have on your social media presence and social commerce growth, now is the time to start. According to one report from Edelman, 35% of people surveyed claimed to share the same values as the influencers they follow on social media, which can directly impact a brand’s social commerce. This is especially true amongst Gen Z consumers, who are more likely than other consumers to have their buying decisions swayed by the influencers they follow. It should be noted that social commerce and eCommerce are not inherently competitive; instead, they are two sides of the same coin. Social interaction provides the best benefits when it can be tied to your business or brand’s existing sales channels, whether digital (such as your business’s online eCommerce shop) or physical (like a brick-and-mortar storefront). Understanding how your business can best integrate social commerce into its overall social media strategy is paramount for 2022. Doing so successfully will allow you to grow in both customers and revenue. However, overlooking its importance in today’s marketing environment could ultimately spell the difference between landing another loyal customer or losing them to the competition. When planning your strategy for 2023, take a careful look at your various sales channels, find which ones could be improved — or even how one might compliment another — and create an engaging environment for your business on social media.