What Digital Marketing Tool?

Tons of digital marketing tools exist to generate business online. A digital marketing expert picks the right tool for the job. You don’t unscrew a nail with a chainsaw (at least when you’re sober). Below is what small businesses must understand about the key digital tools available.

Infographics – Use when you want to explain something with visual aids. Label a map instead of taking 500 words to describe where all the countries are. Infographics are great to explain your competitive advantages, inform about what you do, how you do it and the benefit of your product/service. Plus it’s easy to share as a sponsored ad/post/tweet in LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Google Search – Advertise on search results relevant to your product or service. Powerful and productive if you know what search terms (keywords) you want to focus on. A waste of money if you don’t since Google Search ads are competitive. Instead of bidding on competitive keywords try focusing on specific phrases or geographies and bid aggressively. This won’t show your ad often, but will show to the most meaningful searchers when it does. Resulting in more clicks. The riches are in the niches.

Facebook – Use Facebook to share interesting content to current/potential customers. Say you sell insurance. Share tips on how to negotiate deals and any current offers. Facebook’s paid options allow you to push your content to viewers outside of your influence. This helps expand your reach and generate interest. Facebook is ideal to build your contact database for marketing automation. Use free contests and promote giveaways to get names of people interested in your offer. The insurance agent can offer a free consultation to people that like their page. They now have a new lead and can feed that data into their marketing automation software.

Google Display and YouTube Ads – Use these platforms to generate awareness for your product/service. The engagement of these ads is low — 1 out 1000 people on average click on them. Getting Google Display and YouTube Ads to ‘convert’ into leads is difficult, but possible with compelling communication. You need to exaggerate what you want ad viewers to do — sign up for your hopscotch contest, test drive a Vespa, download your Indian restaurant finder app etc. Use some form of targeting — geography, interest or demographic to ensure the right people see your ad. You don’t want your mixed martial arts ads showing on home and garden websites.