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DQ News: 5 Ideas to Market Your Company in the Digital Age

The game has changed – or, rather – the game is changing.

The way we conduct business today is drastically different than it was a few years ago, and it’s still evolving. The internet, and specifically social media, has changed the way people and companies communicate in ways that you can’t ignore. To succeed in business today, you have to change the way you communicate.

Efficient Communication

Communication is a big part of marketing. The message you are sending out to the world about who you are, what you offer, and why anyone should care, is what marketing is all about. It’s always been up to you to craft that message, and send it out in the most efficient ways you can find.

The Good Old Days

In the golden age of advertising, it was easy to market your product or service to the masses if you had the money. Choices were limited, and if you’re product or service worked, you could make a great deal of money through traditional advertising channels. That school of thought no longer applies.

Digital Age Means Choices

In the digital age, consumers have more options, more freedom, and more power. They can see reviews from your customers, they can ask friends for advice, and they can research everything available about your company and your competitors. They demand more for less, and they feel that they deserve it.

5 Ideas for Digital Marketing

So your marketing has to adjust to fit into this new world. You have to reach people the way that they want to be reached. And if you have a good sense of the online marketplace and your competition, it’s easier (and oftentimes cheaper) to do this than ever before.

1. Get Involved with Social Media – Create a simple strategy that you can follow and start participating in the social universe. Generate followers by providing high quality information, fun discussions, polls and surveys, or free giveaways. Use Twitter and Facebook to spread brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, answer questions and help customers solve their problems.
2. Use Email – Email marketing is not a new thing, but if you’re not using email as a way to communicate with current, past, and potential customers, you’re missing out. Offer free content in exchange for signing up to an email list. Use emails to help your subscribers. Give them tips to keep them coming back, and offer them discounts that are only available to people on the email list.
3. Optimize Your Website – Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important tool for any small business, and should be treated as such. Hire a firm or an experienced individual to optimize your website with appropriate keywords, help build a strong network of links, and utilize social media to boost the site’s exposure. 65% of online users are using search engines to find what they’re looking for. That’s an audience you don’t want to miss out on.
4. Offer Live Service – Live chat services are great for small businesses to offer customer service without increasing your capacity to receive inbound calls. Whether you use a live chat service, email, social media, or phones to give customer service (or hopefully some combination of all of them), it’s important to be in constant contact with customers. It’s easy to lose a customer to your competition, and an unhappy customer can mean trouble. Go out of your way to serve them.
5. Always Be Testing – Your marketing campaigns should never become stagnant. Where you place ads, what they say, and how they work to bring in new business are things that you can test. Track performance, keep the things that work, and drop the things that don’t. Marketing, now more than ever before, can evolve seamlessly. The key is to take risks but keep them in check with performance metrics.

Obviously this is just a starter set of ideas. We would be here for days on end if I listed all the ways you can take advantage of the new digital world of consumerism to bring in new business. But hopefully this helps you get started by making you think about the way you do things, and how they’re changing.

Marketing to this new breed of consumers isn’t always easy. But if you can reach them on a personal level in their world, you’ll stay in the game.

About the Author: Zach Heller’s passion for marketing extends to all forms of communication between consumers and companies. His marketing communications blog, “I” of the Consumer, offers tips and tricks for marketers in the digital age.

Photo Credit: Joel Bedford

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