Author: Isabelle Leichtman
While AdvantEdge has written many blogs giving tips detailing the best ways to use specific marketing tools (such as the social media website Pinterest and company surveys), we have yet to give an overview of all the possibilities for digital marketing that are out there! It’s never too late to start, so here are some suggestions of different ways to use digital advertising to your advantage:
Online Web Advertising and Videos: According to Business Insider, web advertising reached $32 billion in revenue this year. This includes your company’s website as well as using traditional advertising that can be posted on various websites in the side bar such as Facebook and Google. Videos are another great way for people to see what your company has to offer. Whether you have website videos or advertisements between shows streaming online, videos give your company a chance to get your name out there in a fun way! As Chad Barr and Alan Weiss state in “Achieving Your Business Dreams on the Web,” one of the great things about online marketing is the ability to reproduce your brand image via web communities, reposts, blogs, social media sites, etc.
Mobile Marketing: With the significant advancements in smartphones throughout recent years, mobile marketing has also seen large improvements. This category includes texts, emails, apps, and photos as ways to increase your brand visibility. As John Arnold describes it, mobile marketing can be broken down into two parts: mobile pull marketing and mobile push marketing. Mobile pull marketing is when you engage customers by having them take action (such as having them send a text or photo of a barcode which they saw in another advertisement). Mobile push marketing on the other hand is when your company directly sends out promotional messages via email, text message, or voice calls.
Social Media Platforms: As shown by Business Insider’s research, social media makes up 14% of online advertisement spent and totaled $4.5 billion in revenue this year alone. The biggest social media platforms for marketing are of course Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Foursquare (to name a few). While social media marketing is very user friendly, Jason Sherman of Inc.com points out some common mistakes such as posting too often, ignoring customers, and that number of responses from consumers does not change in response to more posts per day. This suggests you might be wasting valuable time. He also states that only about 30% of global companies respond to consumer feedback on social media pages and 25% do not even allow consumer posts on their page. Ignoring consumers will ultimately hurt your business because not only are you unable to understand and adapt your product/service to what consumers wanted, but you’re also making them feel that their opinion does’t matter.
For additional information, here is a great infographic on the history of digital marketing to understand how we’ve arrived at this new age of advertising!
