Entrepreneur & Business Owner Jesse Willms Highlights 3 Tips to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy in 2020
If you are thinking of enlarging and optimizing your digital marketing strategy in 2020 and going forward, then you are definitely headed in the right direction. Consider these compelling statistics: customers are 40% more likely to purchase from a business that tailors digital content to their specific needs and preferences, 81% of businesses spend at least $50,000 a year on digital marketing (with 41% spending more than $500,000!).
To help businesses maximize the results from their digital marketing investment, here are three proven and practical tips courtesy of Jesse Willms, a seasoned entrepreneur and business owner with a deep background in digital marketing:
1. Focus on Social Media
For 85% of businesses in the B2C space social media has now become the most prevalent form of digital marketing. The key, however, is to ensure that all content — such as infographics, videos, articles, and so on — is relevant and original, helps generate brand awareness, and is visually appealing.
“Merely pushing out generic, forgettable, or messy content across the social media landscape is counterproductive, and will lead to disengagement instead of engagement, and reputation damage instead of increased brand equity,” commented Jesse Willms, who owns several vehicle history websites that enable consumers to check out the history of used cars and identify whether vehicles of interest have been in an accident. “Businesses that don’t have the in-house capacity and expertise to craft original, compelling and shareable social media content should outsource this core function.”
2. Don’t Neglect Email Marketing
Because email has been around for so long — it pre-dates the web — some businesses think that it’s no longer an important part of a digital marketing mix. However, this is not the case. Research has found that 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months, and 31% of marketers say that email newsletters are the single best way to nurture qualified leads.
“A critical piece of the email marketing puzzle is segmentation,” commented Jesse Willms. “This means targeting specific emails and e-newsletters to certain buyer personas — for example, sending one email to existing customers, another to prospective customers, and another to ex-customers. Marketers that use segmented campaigns have reported as much as a 760% increase in revenue compared to marketers that take a one-size-fits-all approach.”
3. Blog, Blog and Blog Some More
Research has found that companies with blogs generate an average of 67% more leads per month compared to companies without a blog. Volume is also key: companies that publish 16 or more blogs per month generate 3.5x more traffic and 4.5x more leads compared to companies that publish between 0–4 blogs per month.
“Effective blog posts effectively use visuals like photos and charts, the text is spaced out and readable, and the length is anywhere from a minimum of 500 words on the low end, to over 2,000 words on the high end,” commented Jesse Willms. “In addition to attracting leads, blogging is also a major contributing factor to SEO rankings and time-on-site, which is a critically important metric that translates directly to increased engagement and sales. Simply put, the longer period of time that customers stay on a site, the more likely they are to move forward along the buyer’s journey.”
