Top 10 Digital Marketing Strategies to Drive Your Sales

When it comes to implementing new marketing approaches or revising the older ones, it’s often too tough to choose from the infinite number of existing and emerging methods and tools. In the meantime, other companies have been constantly testing new strategies, changing approaches, taking risks, and staying ahead.

By KATE PARSH

Let’s review 10 basic and fresh ways to enhance a brand’s website and major social media metrics that are directly linked with sales.

5 Trending Digital Marketing Strategies

1. Transforming a Website into a PWA for the Sake of Push Notifications

Not only for them, of course! Progressive web apps are still websites but on smartphones, they look like and are perceived as native apps. A plethora of famous brands have already built successful web apps for their stores. The more popular PWA examples include Lancôme, Uber, Spotify, AliExpress, and many more.

Business owners and digital marketers are switching to PWAs for numerous reasons. Basically, PWAs are much more convenient for users, i.e. they can boast: 

• Superb loading speed;
• Intuitive navigation and overall app-like usability;
• Security of payments due to an obligatory HTTP;
• Offline mode that allows continuing site usage with the temporary absence of the internet;
• Ability to add an icon to a home screen without downloading a weighty app.

Below you can see some screenshots of what the PWA of Lancôme is like. Did you notice how simple it is to save the PWA to the home screen of a smartphone?

When the online store is pleasant to use, people tend to spend more time on it. So, the likelihood of purchasing something rises too. Furthermore, unlike an ordinary website, a PWA allows sending Push Notifications with tempting offers, reminders, or discounts, returning people back to the store. And customer retention is highly important for a strong digital marketing strategy!

2. Making Shoppable Instagram Posts

An Instagram account is worth evolving at least because there are plentiful options of how to promote and sell products via Instagram. This is handy for customers and efficient for companies in terms of profit. Besides adding a link in the bio and “swipe up” links in Stories, a brand can tag its products from the Instagram Shop. This can be done almost everywhere: in posts, IGTV, Reels, Stories, and Live broadcasts.

Take a look at the screenshots above that were made on the official Mango Instagram account. When tapping on such a product tag, users can instantly see the price, “featured with” goods, and other things from a similar category. Right there is a “View on Website” button where people can buy a chosen item. Moreover, in the US Instagram has gained the Instagram Checkout feature that allows making in-app purchases. Certainly, the rest of the world is craving for it badly!

Instagram boasted about 130 million monthly clicks on shoppable posts in 2019 alone. Since then the numbers have been only growing!

3. More Customer Presence to Underline Credibility

The voices of real people who are satisfied with a product or service are an incredibly valuable asset for a business. Such feedback is really trustworthy from the viewpoint of potential clients.

Thus, from the digital marketing perspective, it’s smart to encourage customers to share their opinions. There are several directions worth developing:

Testimonials. These are especially vital for firms providing services and complex solutions. People tend to opt for a company with dozens of reviews (predominantly positive) than for one that has far fewer. So, don’t forget to suggest leaving a comment on the website. An important note: testimonials with real names, photos, and even social media links look particularly persuasive.

Product reviews by customers. Again, tons of detailed opinions on quality, color, size, and user experience could make this mentioned product far more appealing for the prospect.

User-generated content. Lively photos and videos can appear in the special widget on a website and, surely, in Instagram and Facebook feeds. It makes content diverse and helps build long-lasting relationships with the audience. The screenshot below showcases how Puma embodied the idea. On a product page, users can see how other people wear a particular model of sneakers.

One remark regarding all three options stated above. Different incentives, such as a discount in exchange for a review, make people give feedback more willingly.

4. Personalized Product Recommendations

The aspiration to create personalized offers for every single client is not just a trend, it’s a new golden standard for eCommerce. Such an approach simultaneously raises the average check and makes people feel that a brand really cares and truly understands their needs.

The ‘You May Also Like’ category (seen on the Puma product page screenshot above) is the field for personalization that is closely linked with cross-selling and up-selling. This block can include not only bestsellers or similar products but also a special selection of goods for a particular visitor of the store. The set of items is generated referring to previous purchases, favorites, things from abandoned carts, search history, and viewed products.

The concept of personalized offers can be adopted for email campaigns as well. The same goods that were viewed or marked by a prospect provide an excellent basis for precisely targeted mailing. Especially if such items go on sale!

5. Using Customers’ Data to a Maximum Advantage

Not everyone knows about an extremely helpful Facebook feature that’s aimed at targeting the Lookalike Audience by leveraging data taken from current clients. If you upload existing data to Facebook, it will then find people with similar preferences, interests, and other personal characteristics.

Thus, the next marketing interactions on Facebook will be as accurately targeted as ever before. The advantage of the tool is the tiny effort it takes to reach people who might like the product that will be shown to them.

…. and 5 Basic Digital Marketing Recommendations

1. Detailed Buyer Personas

If you have a clear understanding of who your overall target audience is and who are your specific buyer personas, then every marketing step that follows will be much more efficient. Once a company has portrayed its typical buyers, the brand will make better choices regarding:

• the tone of voice for further communication;
• the most interesting products for the audience;
• their pain points and expectations from relationships with a brand;
• their preferred channels for communication;
• and much more.

By the way, a buyer persona is a set of data including at least demographic information, behavioral patterns, motivations, and aims of, let’s say, a perfect client. This is quite a tough task to do but there are lots of helpful tips and prompts on this subject.

2. Valuable Content on a Website and Social Media

People appreciate the expertise, fresh insights, trend overviews, interactive pieces of content, helpful guides, etc. Even giants on the eCommerce market don’t underestimate the importance of articles on the site, just take a look at the Fashion Feed by Farfetch. They don’t forget to push readers to the product pages by giving relevant links inside the posts.

The most significant traits of excellent content have remained the same so far: uniqueness, usefulness, creativity, and captivating headings. Again, let’s use content produced by customers: often people make tremendous photos and posts definitely worth sharing!

3. Optimization of a Website

There is huge room for maneuver when it comes to site optimization. If we outline the directions which deserve attention, we’d get the following list:

• SEO optimization;
• Voice search optimization;
• Website’s speed optimization;
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO).

All these strategies are aimed at ameliorating a website’s ranking in Google and other search engines. The outcomes of such amendments are ranking at the top of SERPs, getting new visitors, and improving conversions.

4. Influencer Marketing & Brand Ambassadors

Experts recommend looking for niche bloggers with a quite involved audience, even if it’s not that wide. People tend to listen attentively to professionals who are carriers of profound and valuable knowledge and skills. Currently, there is a substantial rise of expert blogs on Instagram, so almost every business can find a suitable person to collaborate with for mutual benefits.

In the meantime, work with brand ambassadors remains highly prestigious and lucrative for brands. Celebrities, especially those who have recently appeared in a popular movie or released a chart-topping album, hugely contribute both to the increase of brand awareness and sales. Below you can see the example of such a collaboration of actress Emilia Clarke and Clinique.

5. Remarketing Campaigns

On average about 75% of users abandon their carts, and the statistics remain more or less constant year after year. Nevertheless, eCommerce sites can still encourage prospects to make purchases via several means, e.g., push notifications, mailing, or remarketing.

Banners with particular products catch up with users on varied sites via Google Display. These reminders work especially nicely for those who were close to the bottom of the sales funnel. To give you an example, this is what the remarketing ad banners of La Redoute look like.

To Sum Up

Digital marketing is a truly ever-changing field with new possibilities appearing every year. However, marketers shouldn’t underrate the power of conventional strategies. The best manner of acting here is to keep it all balanced through revising and correcting traditional approaches while implementing some trending methods. That will steadily help the business increase sales.

• Kate Parish, Chief Marketing Officer at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in Digital Marketing and website promotion. Kate always strives to stay in pace with the every-advancing online world, and the sphere of Magento PWA development. Her expertise includes in-depth knowledge of SEO, branding, PPC, SMM, and the field of online sales in general. LinkedIn