Digital ad spending is outpacing TV. Digital marketing is taking over the world of business but it can be a tough hurdle to leap for many business owners.

Let’s look at some ways to make the most of your online marketing efforts.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a blanket term that covers various ways of marketing your business online. It includes paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, content marketing, and various other ways of generating website traffic and leads.

A big part of your digital marketing success is focusing on the most valuable methods and not trying to do a bit of everything. If you spread yourself too thin, your marketing won’t make an impact with your audience.

Earned vs. Owned

There are two primary types of media your business can leverage – earned and owned. Paid media could be a third type but even if you’re paying for ads, the content of those ads will fall into one of the other two categories.

Owned media is any content that you create yourself. This could be articles and pages on your website, YouTube videos, social media posts, or anything else you create.

Earned media is content that your users or clients create for you. Go Pro is one of the best-known examples of earned media, with thousands of YouTube videos created by their users at no cost to Go Pro.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is critical to a successful marketing campaign. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if it doesn’t land with the people it’s targeted at.

Creating customer “avatars” is a good way to be sure your marketing will connect with your audience. An avatar is a fictitious client based on the demographics, interests, and problems of your typical customer.

Market research can provide everything you need to know – the average age of your target market, the types of jobs they have, their average income, their hobbies and interests, etc. Put all this information together to create your customer avatar and when you create any marketing materials, treat them as if you were speaking to your avatar.

Be Clear About Your Goals

Make sure you’re chasing the right thing with your marketing. If your goal is to increase sales by 25%, your marketing needs to generate more leads. Focus on the things that will get you that result.

For example, if generating more leads is your goal, you’ll be better served to use your marketing to drive visitors back to a landing page on your website where you can collect their name and email address than to send them to your Facebook or Twitter profile to follow you there.

With their email address, you can reach out to them directly. If they follow you on social media, you’ll be one voice in the constant stream they see in their feed. They might never see your posts there.

Leverage Your Existing Assets

You probably already have plenty of assets that you can leverage in new ways in your online marketing. You may be able to cross-post articles from your blog to Medium or videos from your website to YouTube, for example. Take a look at your current marketing metrics to see what your most popular content and topics are and double-down on them.

After all, you already know your audience is interested in those things. Why reinvent the wheel?

Let the Experts Handle it For You

To see results from your marketing, you’re going to need to put in a lot of time – both learning the ins and outs of online marketing and keeping up with the constant changes.

That’s time you aren’t spending on the actual work your business does.

FireRock Marketing can help. With our done-for-you marketing systems, we’ll create a digital marketing strategy that’s tailor-made for your business. Our experts will look after all the complicated technical stuff so you can focus on what you do best. Get in touch today to schedule a free marketing consultation.