Marketing: Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

The proliferation of electronics and personal devices has opened up a whole new world for marketing. No longer are you limited to costly television commercials or billboards. Now you can advertise your product on websites, in email, in text messaging, on social media, through in-phone apps, and much, much more. The possibilities for getting your brand in front of your customers are nearly endless.

Learning the digital marketing basics will give you a good idea of where to start. Yet many people who are new to digital marketing make the easy mistake of focusing on building a website and maybe posting here and there on Facebook or Twitter. To really maximize the potential for digital marketing, you’ll need to use multiple channels that reinforce your efforts and expand your presence.

Drive Website Traffic

Whether you are advertising on the television or in traditional print outlets, you can be driving traffic back to your website. In printed materials, you can just list your website somewhere that it gets noticed. For television ads, you can list the website at the bottom of the screen and read off the address. You can incorporate the website URL into a radio jingle or a skit.

Every piece of advertising you invest in should be linking back to your website, helping you to drive traffic and increase your page rank, which will increase your exposure.

Highlight Landing Pages

A good landing page will help you to generate leads or to increase sales for a specific product or service. Writing a good landing page is an art. In fact, some pros even get paid six figures to write a single landing page.

Take advantage of your digital marketing efforts to highlight those landing pages and get the results you want. When you share links on social media, make sure they point to a single landing page. Instead of sharing your home page on some ads, share your landing page link instead.

You might consider running A/B testing with landing pages to see what formats are more effective with different advertising sources. For example, you might find that a splashier landing page is more effective with traffic coming from social media, while an information-driven page gets more results when it is shared from a print source like a newspaper.

Generate Leads

Your landing page, your website, your social media and other sources can all generate leads. The more advertising sources you have, the more leads you can get and the more diversity will be found in those leads. Include several opportunities on your landing pages and your website to collect emails, such as through free download offers, email newsletter subscriptions, or inquiry forms. Host contests on your social media that require providing a name and email address for entry.

Be as creative and inclusive as you can in your lead generation efforts. You’ll build a powerful list of potential contacts that you can reach out to when you want to promote a product or service, helping you to effortlessly increase sales.

Enhance Offline Marketing

Most customers these days are either digital natives or they have grown accustomed to having technology in their lives. People are much more used to accessing what they need with the help of an electronic device.

Make your advertising have more of an impact by enhancing your offline marketing with digital tools. For example, you can invest in an interactive billboard like those in Times Square that reflect back the viewer or change the information based on activity. You can display a restaurant menu on an iPad instead of a paper printout. You can provide a digital product demo on a DVD that you give away. Be creative and you will find many great ways to enhance your offline marketing efforts.

Digital marketing opportunities will only grow as technology advances and businesses become more savvy on the web. It is important that you start learning how to master the opportunities you have now so that you are ready to expand and be an expert when technology evolves.