Marketing TECHniques: 5 Digital Marketing Tips for 2019

Featuring best marketing practices for today’s tech companies.

To prepare for a new year, I asked an esteemed colleague, Matthew Royse to share his top advice for companies who want to step up their digital marketing efforts.

According to Royse, “Digital marketing helps you interact with your targeted audience online and provides them with the right engagements points. Digital marketing enables you with data-driven insights about what your targeted audience really wants.”

He should know. He’s spent a couple of decades in marketing and communications working in industries like financial services, technology, media, and entertainment. In addition to his job as regional marketing director for Freudenberg IT, a global managed services company, he also teaches digital marketing and social media classes at Duke University.

Here are Royse’s top five tips to help you with your digital marketing efforts in 2019:

1. Ensure your website is built for inbound leads

Your website is your digital storefront or business card today. It is one of the most effective (and least difficult) places to start with digital marketing. And it’s an excellent place (and often underutilized way) to get the most out of your marketing budget.

Your website should walk the fine line of providing enough information to your customers and prospects without too many options, especially when it comes to your call to actions.

What types of call-to-action information should have on your website? Here are 4 must-haves:

• Contact us form: Use it to collect basic information such as full name, email, and phone number. Ensure you avoid the SPAM bots with your form so use reCAPTCHA instead of CAPTCHA. What’s the difference? With reCAPTCHA, all of website visitors need to do is check a box and Google verifies that the person is human (not a bot). It doesn’t require your website visitors to look at numbers or letters like you do with CAPTCHA, improve the user experience for your customers and prospects.

• Phone number: People still use the phone in today’s digital age. In fact, some of your better inbound leads may come from phone calls. Make sure you phone number can be dialed easily from a mobile phone on your mobile-friendly website.
• Email communications: If your website visitors don’t want to contact you via a form or phone number, just ask for their email address so you can keep in touch with them on a regular basis. Not only can you stay top of mind, you can get great prospecting information about your subscribers’ behavior.
• Social media buttons: If your website visitors prefer not to contact you via the website or subscribe via email, make sure you have social media icons on your website.

2. Do more with less

When you’re just starting out or if your business has been around for a while, it is important to focus on the digital marketing fundamentals, so you can do more with less. 

• Your winning strategy should start with a vision. For example, how you are going to communicate your digital marketing strategy to your employees and key stakeholders? Your digital marketing strategy is only as good as you articulate, communicate, and execute it.
• We are all media companies today, so it is important to think and act like the media. How do you do that? You should consistently produce compelling content with headlines to attract readers and can be consumed by everyone. Does your content use big words? Is it easy to scan or watch? Can someone quickly comprehend it?
• Without easy-to-consume content, your approach to digital marketing will most likely fail. Your content should be produced at an eighth-grade level. The best companies today market and communicate in simple language that is interesting and persuasive.
  

3. Think local for your customers’ searches

To gain more visibility of your company’s website in your local area, it is important to sign up for a Google My Business account so you can create and verify your company’s locations on Google. This account ensures your business shows up on page one in Google search results and your business is included in Google Maps so people can easily get directions to your business.

4. Take advantage of free digital marketing tools

One of the biggest marketing challenges today is finding the right set of digital marketing tools to use. Thanks to free digital marketing tools available today, you don’t need a lot of money to implement digital marketing.

5. Think visually in every marketing activity you do
   

Are your using great visuals with your content and on your website? If not, you should invest more in this area. Why? We respond to visual content faster since 90 percent of information that flows to the brain is visual. To ensure you are visual business, concentrate on these three areas:

• Videos: Videos give you the opportunity to directly engage your audience and reach a larger number of people. Research has shown that having a video on the homepage of your website increases your chances by 150 percent of showing up on the first page of Google. Research also shows that people are 85 percent more likely to buy a product after seeing a video.

• Images: According to research, content with images get 94 percent more views. There are a lot of websites you can use to help to find free, high-quality photos for your content.

• Infographics: Infographics are liked and shared three times more on social media than other types of content. Why? Nearly 50 percent of the brain focuses on visual processing. The infographic format can help your company explain complicated subjects and processes with data-driven insights.

What Matters Most 

“Digital marketing is a powerful, efficient, and effective way to ensure your prospects and customers find, engage, and stay loyal to your business in 2019. Even if you only use one or two of these tips, you’ll get results that matter,” says Royse.

He also wanted us to know that his favorite holiday cookie is a holiday-shaped buttery shortbread cookie with frosting.

[Leadarati helps IT firms drive value and increase opportunities through social, digital and online communications. Follow Anita O’Malley on Twitter @Leadarati]

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