You’ve got your website sorted. It looks incredible. You might even check it daily just to admire the work of your web designer.
But how are people going to find you?
Without digital marketing, Port Macquarie businesses lose a crucial opportunity to drive traffic to their website, grow their customer base, and increase sales.
Digital marketing is a strategic game requiring an expert to keep a close eye on your customers’ online behaviour while finding the best channels to send out your business’s valuable content.
That’s why we offer digital marketing expertise alongside our web design services.
Businesses in Port Macquarie need to make the most of their online presence – and implementing a perfectly-crafted digital marketing strategy is going to maximise traffic to your website and dramatically increase sales.
The 5 Tactics We Love for Sales-Driven Digital Marketing in NSW
- Blogs
- Social Media
- Organic vs. paid
- Platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
- Guerrilla Marketing
- Chatbots
1. Educational Blogging
We’ll start with the most fundamental digital marketing tactic that all businesses should be using – blogs.
So, what do we mean by blogs? Well, we’re not talking about journal entries from poets on Tumblr. Blog articles for businesses are written to inform, educate, and inspire your audience by offering your leading expertise on a relevant topic to both your business and your customers’ experiences.
These days, people are doing more research online than ever before.
People will read a lot of content (11.4 pieces to be exact) to make sure they’re making the right decision before buying. So if you build a strategic content strategy that gives customers the resources they need to confidently buy your products, you’re going to see a significant return on perhaps the cheapest and most lucrative type of digital marketing in NSW.
Here are the most potent ways that blogs boost sales for your business:
- Strengthen SEO: As well as scanning for the inclusion of key search phrases, Google’s latest algorithm can prioritise quality content. Sharing consistent articles that include strategic keywords while offering valuable information to customers is going to leverage your business’s search engine rankings.
- Demonstrate thought-leadership & industry expertise: A busy blog full of relevant and meaningful content is a winning method of attracting organic traffic because customers are impressed and reassured when hearing from ‘an expert on the subject’.
Blogs are the perfect way to showcase how much you really know about your trade or service, and why that makes you so much better than your competition. This is your opportunity to say what your competitor hasn’t even thought of yet, with valuable advice and reviews of industry-related topics that your audience can’t find anywhere else.
- Fuel omnichannel marketing: Customers are more likely to buy from a business with consistent brand messaging. Posting a blog on your website, then sharing it on your social media and email list offers the perfect opportunity to maximise your omnichannel marketing to a broad audience – while ensuring a consistent message for credibility.
As you balance the hectic day-to-day admin of running a business, you’re probably thinking ‘but I don’t have time to write articles on the internet!’.
That’s where we come in.
Working with a digital marketing agency means that you have the support of an expert putting together a solid strategy for your content based on research into your customers’ online behaviour.
Once we’ve figured out what your business should be writing about, we’ll get an expert content writer to create the blogs that will showcase your expertise and drive online sales. Give Phiranno Designs a call to start your success with digital marketing in NSW.
Strategic Social Media
Social media is powerful. Terrifyingly powerful.
Half the world is on there: big businesses, young professionals, school children, even your grandma probably has a Facebook page – she might even share a meme now and then, or debate with strangers on 9 News videos.
But when used effectively (not donning a tinfoil hat and posting flat-earth theories), marketing on social media will boost brand awareness and drive traffic to your business’s website.
To successfully use social media marketing to increase sales, you’ve got to share content that is perfectly adapted to suit your audience on each platform – content that’s so engaging and valuable that your audience wants to share it with their friends, family, and colleagues.
Social media is a critical branch of digital marketing for NSW businesses. Underneath this umbrella term lies a bunch of different social media platforms, each with a different environment that calls for different types of content angled towards a different majority of users.
It’s a minefield out there, which is why you need a digital marketing agency to navigate through the madness with a strategy that gets results for your business.
Let’s break down the basics.
2. Organic vs. Paid
You might have heard the word ‘organic’ getting thrown around by marketing ‘gurus’ and wondered what overpriced fruit had to do with digital marketing in NSW.
Ironically, ‘organic’ just means something that you’ve posted for free. Just posting on your sharing an article on your business’s Facebook, starting a hashtag, or replying to customer comments on your posts is organic content.
What’s it good for? Organic social is great for nurturing your audience and building customer loyalty, as well as establishing your business as a thought-leader in your industry.
This means people keep following your business and hearing what you have to say because they consider it entertaining, informative, and valuable. When they keep your content on their screens, they’re going to buy your stuff.
How do I do it? A great example of organic social media marketing is posting a new blog article on your website, then sharing it on each of your business’s social media platforms. You adjust each post based on the target audience of each platform, such as highlighting what each audience demographic will find valuable about the article or using the right language or images or videos to suit that particular platform.
Think of organic social media marketing as the method of keeping your audience’s attention focused on your business. But how do you get them there in the first place?
Paid social media marketing involves spending money to cast your content out to a wider audience, in the hope of catching the interest of a few who become part of your organic audience.
Ever scrolled through Instagram and come across an ad for shoes on your feed, despite not following the page?
Congratulations, you’ve been targeted by paid advertising.
That shoe company has paid for its advertisement to go out to a specific audience based on several traits – and you might have been included because of your age, gender, who you’re currently following, and what you’ve liked recently.
What’s it good for? Paid advertising through social media is the perfect way to grow your organic audience by targeting a wider group of people based on certain data that is available on the specific social media platform.
By investing in a successful paid ad on social media, the new customers that come through will either buy your services immediately or become part of your ongoing audience that makes a purchase in the future.
How do I do it? The most basic method of implementing this strategy is choosing how many people you want the ad to reach, what demographic or traits you want to be represented in that audience, and then hitting ‘send’.
There are many ways of doing paid social media advertising, each with a different price tag, and your digital marketing agency will guide you with which strategy is best for your business.
3. Platforms - Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
Not too long ago, social media marketers were reasonably limited in terms of platforms.
Now, we have a whole host of them, including:
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Depending on your business niche (and of course your audience), one or many of these platforms might be a good choice for you.
Let’s break down the big three being used by successful marketers today.
Facebook’s been getting a bad rap at the moment, as the young and tech-savvy opt for the more immersive visual experiences offered by Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
With 41% of users aged 65+, many see Facebook as some sort of echo chamber for baby boomers, but there are more reasons to be wary of spending your marketing dollars here.
Facebook has come under serious scrutiny lately for committing data breaches, condoning cyberbullying, peddling propaganda, and sharing fake news.
Businesses need to understand that when a platform is perceived to be untrustworthy, any marketing campaigns using the site will be treated with the same caution. We strongly recommend speaking to a digital marketing agency before trying to increase sales through Facebook.
Can your brand be distilled into a beautiful photo? Are your products and services ‘gram-worthy’?
Instagram is a captivating platform with a visual focus, and businesses have been taking advantage of our addiction to ‘inspo’ posts by incorporating Instagram into their digital marketing strategy.
Increasing sales through Instagram isn’t just about paying influencers to pose with your products. Here are a few ways to be strategic with your business’s activity:
- Think of your profile as a storefront: To grab your buyer’s attention with your business’s profile, put a compelling call-to-action in your bio and use the highlight reels to house informative content that potential customers will want to read ASAP.
- Put your brand at the centre of all content: Successful businesses reinforce a clear, consistent brand identity through Instagram. You can do this by keeping a consistent theme and colour scheme in your photos, labelling all highlight reels with your logo, and maximising your use of branded elements within your content.
- Create a seamless shopping experience: If someone likes a product you’ve advertised on Instagram, you should make sure they can buy it as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
This means optimising your website for mobile, leveraging Instagram stories with the ‘swipe up’ option to buy now, and tagging photos with the links to purchase featured products.
LinkedIn is kind of the serious older brother of this social media trio.
Though originally simply a place for people to house professional profiles and connect with others in their circle in a more business-oriented environment, LinkedIn has gained a lot of popularity recently as an advertising and marketing platform.
It’s especially relevant for B2B companies, and because everyone has their job title visible, it makes it easy to filter prospects by relevant positions.
You can run in-stream ads just like all the other platforms, but one area where LinkedIn gives B2B companies an upper hand is its ability to send direct mail, called InMail.
It’s basically the business version of sliding into a prospect’s DMs, and is incredibly powerful for getting your message in front of the right people, in the right places.
4. Guerrilla Marketing
This is one of our favourite tactics.
It’s unconventional, outside-the-box, and frankly, a bit of fun.
Guerrilla marketing typically takes advantage of existing events or occurrences in real life. It uses the element of surprise to catch people off guard.
This one’s a real good example of how Duracell turns something we see every day (lights on a bus), into a clever campaign for their flashlights.
Simple but effective.
And guerrilla marketing doesn’t just have to exist in the physical world (otherwise it wouldn’t be one of our favourite digital marketing tactics).
It’s all about taking people by surprise, and in a way, hiding in plain sight.
Take Tesla’s recent release of the Cybertruck, which sparked a fair bit of controversy, and inspired thousands of memes in its wake. And what happened to those memes?
They got shared for weeks.
Or the campaigns that surrounded the release of both Deadpool films, which included spoof rom-com style movie posters, a fake Tinder account, and even a cheeky product promo.
5. 24/7 chatbots
The rapid innovation of AI has led to the widespread use of chatbots to improve user experience and increase sales for businesses.
With the rise of online shopping and browsing for professional services, customers gained the convenience of shopping from the comfort of their home (and in their pyjamas at midnight) – but they lost the guidance of shop assistants and salespeople. That is, until now.
Consider the following ways that integrating a chatbot into your digital marketing can increase sales:
- You benefit from a 24/7 salesperson without having to pay for one: With an intelligent chatbot managing the user experience of your website, all day and night, you’re maximising your potential revenue while minimising the overheads such as staff wages.
- Customers receive information and assistance about your products and services: Your customers can browse your website at any hour of the day and experience responsive customer service. This means they’re more likely to make a purchase immediately rather than delaying it until your business is open (then forgetting about it entirely).
- You gain invaluable data and insights into the online behaviour of your customers: Chatbots collect and store all customer interactions, which means you can spot trends in buyer behaviour and opportunities to improve to drive further sales.
As a business owner, you don’t have to worry about the likelihood of chatbots replacing most human employees in the next few years. You can just relish in the estimated $8 billion that will be saved by businesses by 2022 as chatbots take over customer service and sales reps.
Conclusion: drive online sales with a results-driven digital marketing agency
Now you’ve had a glimpse of the impact a digital marketing strategy can have on your sales, it’s time to take your online presence further with a full-scale online marketing agency.
As experts in digital marketing for NSW businesses, we’ve got the strategies and the resources to get long-term results for your business online.
Give us a call to find out when we can start.
