The Goods Part 4: Best Digital Marketing ROI Tactics
By Lynette Sawyer
April 16, 2019
content, Content Strategy, Digital Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Influencer, Influencer Marketing, SEO, social media, Social Media Marketing, Video, Video Content, Video Marketing
The final installment of our four-post series, we delve into the report from GoodFirms on their research into Difficult Yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics. Missed our series? Take a read through “The Goods; SEO Strategies, Techniques, and Trends.", “The Goods Part 2: The Future of mCommerce and Mobile Apps”, and “The Goods Part 3: Website Design Statistics and Trends”.
Digital Marketing. Two important words—diverse in their meaning—for any business. Depending on the size of your business, digital marketing can encompass all your marketing efforts with a small or non-existent organic budget, or digital marketing is merely one part of your entire marketing experiences, with millions of dollars behind it. Unique as each business is in their marketing approach, they share a common goal when venturing into marketing; Return on Investment (ROI). What are the best digital marketing tactics that realize the greatest ROI?
6-Point Summary of the Survey
GoodFirms surveyed over 100 digital marketing experts to understand what the most difficult online marketing methods that are also the most effective are? The results of this survey painted a clear picture that there are two effective digital marketing tactics; practiced and customized. Practiced tactics are ones in place and can be mastered with regular implementation and, well, practice. Customized tactics are those which are customized by digital marketers as per business requirements.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) won 28.4% of the survey participants support. Topical SEO by ruling specific topics using long-phrase keywords and integrating video transcriptions were voted as the tactics that bring deep-rooted SEO results.
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Social media marketing earned 22.5% support. By engaging with users and your target audience on Instagram and Facebook groups, marketers gain organic conversions to promote your brand and lead to the creation of multiple leads.
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Link earning and building tactics were referenced by 14.7% of the total digital marketers. Finding queries on the web or topics whose answers are being searched in your niche, then creating content without violating Google’s rules and publishing it on other sites with backlinks is a tiring, but beneficial process.
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Content marketing was highlighted by 14.5% of marketers surveyed. Business blogs attract customers’ loyalty and build trust in their minds, providing a way to communicate regularly through helpful content. The use of research, videos, keywords, audios, and images are also a part of the useful results of content marketing.
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Email marketing was deemed as effective by 11.8% of the survey takers. Outreaching to clients, consumers, and influencers with personalized emails is arduous, yet effective. It takes a bit of trial and error knowing your audience and then generating results based on users' responses.
- Influencer marketing tactics received 4.9% of the survey participants’ votes. The difficult aspect of the whole notion of influencer marketing is finding the right influencer on the internet and deciding what dollar amount should be spent. When judged accurately, it creates positive leads.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—28.4% of Votes for Difficult yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics
Based on the survey of the participants (and likely all other specialists), the latest SEO trends highlight that the growing of organic traffic through SEO tactics is among the top—if the not the top—inbound marketing priorities. With SEO supported and favored by 44.6%, survey respondents feel businesses can achieve long-term, result-oriented SEO marketing compared to short-term marketing. Which specific SEO strategies truly help and are effective? Through the survey, two respondents expanded on their insights to provide two result-oriented strategies.
The first strategy is ranking, though we need to emphasize and reinforce that brands and businesses cannot rank higher or the highest for every keyword. As recommended by SEO company, topicseed.
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Rule certain topics by using long-phrase keywords in your content.
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Find the right balance between using a number of keywords and a number of pages.
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Develop a well-structured internal linking strategy using pillar pages.
To further quote topicseed with regard to ranking, “Although topical authority takes months to be fully implemented including planning and revamping of your existing content library, the payback is huge in term of evergreen ever-growing free organic traffic from Google and the likes!”
The second strategy is looking at how businesses can enhance SEO through video, particularly video transcripts. How many of us have experienced the desire to consume a video’s entire content offering, but its audio playback was not an option at that moment? Videos can deliver much more, including a personal brand story, when transcripts are used as part of the video. This multi-channel content source technique can be leveraged for attracting the audience as well as constructing productive long-term SEO benefits.
Publicis Health stated, “Video transcriptions on websites can add a significant amount of on-page content that search engines can read. Adding the video and the associated transcript can enhance visibility while providing a powerful user experience.”
Social Media Marketing—22.5% of Votes for Difficult yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics
Your social channels are up, and all of your posts contain little tidbits about your company’s products and services. Think that’s enough? Not quite. Through the survey, experienced social media marketing companies identified that businesses, and marketers alike, must focus on building rapport. Constructing this affinity includes participating in conversations, being a part of their communities, making waves to earn their trust, responding to negative and positive comments, and being overall engaging. It is an investment of time and takes commitment, but it will be successful in producing the desired results and applies to all social media channels.
Jessica Freeman, Owner, and Designer of Jess Creatives, a participant in the survey, supports this approach and is quoted as saying, “Every time I have gotten a client from Instagram, it is a direct result of engaging with their posts and stories. I don't pitch them; I just genuinely engage with their content. What makes this difficult is that it takes time!”
Paralleling engagement, participation by businesses, and being active in Facebook groups were also were other marketing techniques featured through this survey. With the use of the mobile app, it is now even easier for marketers to utilize and interact with social media groups to push their digital marketing efforts. Speaking to the importance of this social media synergy, Zach Hendrix, survey participant and co-founder of GreenPal, offered his insight. He stated, “No matter your niche or vertical, there is a FB group that you can participate in to contribute to the discussion, answer questions, and develop a presence to refer people to your business; often times when they are looking for exactly what you offer. We track the success, and 60% of the time we make a recommendation, they sign-up for our service.”
Link Building—14.7% of Votes for Difficult yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics
Link building can be challenging, especially while the landscape of SEO is continually changing. Today, the importance of building high-quality links has never been greater. There is little doubt that if you get high-quality links to your website, it will help you rank better and get more traffic. Link building consists of multiple pieces, starting with producing great content that attracts interest so that they want to link to you, as well as actively pursuing opportunities to be profiled by trustworthy resources and submitting content to them. Mark Bealin, Jr., Founder and Managing partner at SearchLab Chicago, had this to say about link building, “I've been in SEO for 10 years and experienced numerous algorithm updates from Google. Most of the spammy tactics that worked when I got started in this industry no longer work. Google has radically devalued spammy link tactics with algorithm changes and improvements.”
Content Creation—14.5% of Votes for Difficult yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics
Content is king. Seriously, no matter your strategy or tactic, there is always content in some form or another. Top-ranked content marketing companies participated in the survey, and all agreed that the base of every technique comes down to creating solid content. Content builds trust, attracts customers, and builds awareness. Most importantly, it also enhances your SEO!
Email Marketing—11.8% of Votes for Difficult yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics
How many emails do you get each day from a company promoting products and services? Five? Ten? Perhaps even 50? Email marketing is still an effective digital marketing tactic—if done right—and follow these basic rules; a catchy subject line, it’s personalized, mandatory unsubscribe options, and a text version in addition to an HTML version. Email marketing can help businesses increase the chance of visibility of the content you create and also drive traffic.
Influencer Marketing—4.6% of Votes for Difficult yet Effective Digital Marketing Tactics
Are you ‘under the influence’ of influencer marketing? Many businesses haven’t embraced this tactic, but if looked at as simply as positive word-of-mouth, it has the highest potential than any other tactic in the digital world. Nothing can sell your product and service better than a genuine recommendation from peers or trusted sources. The difficult part is finding the right influencers who have your target market, as well as determining your budget spend.
Lynette Sawyer
Lynette Sawyer is a Web Project Manager for Falcon-Software, a digital web agency founded in 1994. For the last 13-years Lynette has been in various digital capacities and her expertise goes beyond Project Management. Lynette brings experience and knowledge in graphic design, marketing communications, project management, product management and engagement.