The first impulse of everyone even mildly interested in your business is to look you up online. If they can’t find you online, it’s as if you don’t exist. Even if they do find you, if your site is non-responsive, your SEO rank is too low, and your content boring, they’ll probably choose against doing business with you. To help you avoid any of these scenarios, here are the top seven digital marketing hacks that you should know about.
- Content repurposing
Coming up with new topics is hard, especially when you have to do it once or twice every single day. Fortunately, if you know how to repurpose your old content, you can eliminate at least a part of the need for these new topics.
First of all, you can just take an old piece of topic and make a comparison to how things are today. You can just add a new section, change statistics, or take previous versions of the content in order to make a historical comparison.
Another thing you can do is start a series. Sure, this means producing a new piece of content, but you still get an outline, a format, and a general direction to head in.
One of the most popular ideas is to change the format. For instance, you could turn an old blog post into a video or infographic. You can even take its topic and turn it into a podcast episode.
You can also use this to make up for any shortcomings that you’ve previously had. You can get better visuals, animations, or videos.
- Improving your link-building strategies
Link building is a huge part of your overall SEO strategy; however, you can’t approach it too casually. These things are more complex than you would initially think. Some tricks that give amazing results for massive enterprises won’t work for small businesses. In other words, you need a completely different approach.
First of all, good link-building rests on the creation of high-quality content. This is the foundation of good link building since poor content won’t get published, it won’t rank well, and, most importantly, people will never use it in their own works, thus destroying your hopes of earning backlinks.
Another thing you need to understand is that link-building requires trust, relationships, and partnerships. You want other people to publish your content, but not only that, but you want this collaboration to last.
Lastly, the traffic of this published content should also be your concern. This is why you want to promote your content on social media and encourage others to do so, as well (one more reason why having a reliable network of people is so important).
- Producing interactive content
Creating interactive content means having a much higher engagement from the very start.
First of all, when it comes to interactive content, it is impossible to consume passively. There are certain chokepoints in the story, and the story won’t progress unless a customer clicks on something, picks an answer, or completes the task.
Since they’re actively participating, they’re paying more attention to what’s happening. This is important since it improves the quality of content consumption. Just think about spending hours producing a video only for the customer to skip through it or writing a long post only for someone just to read headlines or skim through it.
Interactive content has one more hidden perk – it gives you far more data to work with. Here, customer choices are not abstract or ambiguous. Instead, they’re showing you how they want to interact with your content in the way they prefer. All you need to do is take notes and apply what you’ve learned next time you’re making interactive content.
- Researching foreign markets
Expanding to a foreign market is generally a good idea. However, there are more than a few problems regarding this. The first one is the language barrier. The second is a culturally-sociological barrier. You need to find a way to overcome both of them.
When it comes to the first, the solution is fairly simple – you get yourself a translation service or hire a translator. With modern AI and NLP tools, this shouldn’t be that big of a problem.
Now, to avoid the results of the research from being tainted by your regional browser settings, what you need to do is use a VPN. While most of these apps are inexpensive, you can easily find apps for all budgets. Even a free plan could work if you just need to check a few things.
You could also hire a local marketing and analytical agency to do the heavy lifting. This is the most expensive option but the most reliable one.
- Specific GMB optimization
People don’t have the time for elaborate research, which is why, when they want some quick answers about your enterprise, they consult Google My Business. This is amazing because it automatically pops up after a Google search, and it provides some of the most essential info. The address, working hours, contacts, and even your rating and reviews. The photo will show your storefront, which will make it even easier to find your business.
Still, how do you optimize for GMB?
First, you need to complete your profile, which is a process that will be required of you by default. Then, you need to pick all the right categories. Here, you’ll select your industry, products, and services. This way, you’ll increase your visibility and become more searchable.
Photos you use may only appear in the snippet, and most people won’t actually zoom in on them, but it’s still better if the photos are of higher resolution.
Ultimately, you should encourage customer reviews.
- Social media automation
Scheduling your social media posts is not just a hack to help you save time and better manage your brand. It’s also a practice that will greatly help you with engagement. Every platform has periods of the day when the engagement is the highest. By setting your post to be published at these moments, you’ll already fare better.
You can also automate your analytics and reporting. This way, you’ll get notifications whenever there’s something to fix.
The key with social media automation is that you need to pick the right platform for the job. There are a lot of specialized software and plugins, so do your research a bit before opting for one.
Also, keep in mind that you need to make these adjustments for every platform that you’re on. Different platforms have different rules, but automation is already designed to save time. Why not spend just a bit more effort to ensure this is done right?
- Using chatbots for better customer engagement
Customers want preferential treatment, but even if they can’t get it, they still want to be taken seriously and treated as a priority. What does this mean? Well, first of all, they want you to be available 24/7. Even if you can’t respond right away, they want you to respond as quickly as possible. Both of these things can be provided by a chatbot.
Even a few years ago, chatbots were an amazing tool of engagement. Today, however, with the current state of AI chatbots and NLP, these tools can do more than just provide interactive FAQs.
Even if they can’t resolve every problem, take every order, and handle every single interaction, they can at least handle a triage of sorts. This means that they’ll decide what goes to a human customer service representative and what can be solved right away.
Anyone can do digital marketing, but not everyone can do it the right way
The problem with digital marketing is that everyone is doing it; if everyone’s doing it, it’s as if no one’s doing it. The only way to get ahead in such a competitive field is to go one step further and do things your competitors still haven’t considered. With these seven tricks on your side, you’ll have a fighting chance.
