Digital Marketing Tips: Promote Your Business Effectively

While traditional marketing still has its place, billboards and print ads are no longer the only ways to grab attention. Now, digital marketing reigns supreme, with companies attracting new customers through online channels like search engines, social media platforms, and email.

To keep your business at the forefront of current online strategies, I have 11 digital marketing tips to share that will help you get started. From the importance of understanding your target audience to why you should automate your marketing processes, you’ll learn everything you need to know about promoting your business online.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

In any guide to how to do digital marketing for beginners, this tip is consistently bought up – and for good reason! Your target audience is ultimately who you’re trying to sell your product or services to, so your marketing strategy must appeal to their needs if you want to optimize conversions.

While you may already have an understanding of your target audience, I suggest taking a closer look at their needs. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is their key struggle? Your product or service needs to solve key consumer pain points. Make sure that your marketing content reflects this. You’ll want to communicate to your audience that you care about their needs and can offer a solution.
• What are their values? Ideally, your business’ values should align with the values of your customers. For example, if you’re selling eco-friendly products and you want to attract customers interested in sustainability.
• What are their shopping behaviors? Think about how they look for products to buy. Do they seek shopping advice from their favorite influencers? Or do they like to use Google search’s shopping feature to find what they’re looking for?

With this information, I recommend creating different user personas that represent your desired target customers. This will help you better tailor your marketing strategy to their needs.

2. Keep on Top of Your Competitors

Equipped with a deeper understanding of your target audience, it’s now worth examining your direct competitors and seeing what you can learn from them.

Take a close look at each competitor’s business model, online presence, and customer testimonials. Does their marketing express a unique value proposition? Or does it showcase a distinctive brand personality that’s appealing to shoppers?

Once you’ve found what your competitors succeed at, work out what needs improvement. You can take advantage of these weaknesses by creating a digital marketing strategy that better delivers what customers want.

3. Hone Your Content Marketing Strategy

An effective content marketing strategy should be directly targeted to what your customers are looking for, whether that’s entertainment or information. Content is still king, so whatever you create needs to be of value to your customers. 

Here are a few examples of content types to get started with:

• Business blog posts – Ideal for brands that want to showcase their expertise, writing informative blog posts offers a fantastic way to build authority in a given topic and prove to customers that you know what you’re talking about.
• Visual content – If your business has conducted its own industry research, you can transform your findings into eye-catching infographics. Share them across different platforms and encourage audiences to link back to your site.
• Social media posts – Social media is inescapable, so it’s important that you have a presence on one or more of these platforms to increase brand awareness. Posting regularly can help you reach wider audiences.
• Emails – You can use emails to forge relationships with existing customers and encourage repeat purchases. For example, you could send welcome messages, hold giveaways, or give customers a behind-the-scenes look into your business.
• Marketing videos – Videos are a powerful storytelling tool. By combining memorable visuals with engaging scripts, you can help your target audience better understand your brand.

Once you’ve identified the content you want to create, I highly recommend putting together a content calendar and batching your content to make sure that you’re posting consistently. This is especially important on social media, since most algorithms tend to favor content from accounts that post regularly.

4. Be Active on the Right Social Media Platforms

If you want to reach more customers, you need to be on social media, since it’s likely that your target audience spends a significant amount of their time on there anyway! However, the social media platform you choose can make or break your marketing strategy.

First off, avoid creating content on a platform your audience doesn’t use. For instance, if you’re targeting a youthful, trend-aware audience, TikTok is a great pick, while Instagram is a better choice for slightly older audiences like Millennials.

If you don’t have the resources to run multiple accounts, I recommend only focusing on one platform. That way, you won’t be spreading yourself too thin and you’ll have enough time to create high-quality content while still posting regularly.

➡️ Getting to grips with different social media sites? Our TikTok vs Instagram article delves into the differences between two major platforms

5. Partner With Influencers That Fit Your Brand

In a world where anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame, it’s worth leveraging nano or micro influencers on social media to reach wider audiences and attract customers that are aligned with your brand identity.

Unlike the internet’s biggest influencers, who have millions of fans, nano influencers have between 1,000 to 10,000 followers, while micro influencers have between 50,000 and one million social media followers.

Typically, audiences perceive these smaller influencers as down to earth, and trust their opinions when it comes to product recommendations. So, if you want to connect with your target audience, working with a selection of influencers is a great idea.

When looking for an influencer to work with, here’s what you should keep in mind:

• Who is their audience? For best results, the influencers you work with should appeal to an audience base that mirrors your own. For example, if you’re offering digital yoga classes, you could work with a fitness influencer with a health-conscious following.
• Which niche are they in? If you sell chocolate sweet treats online, you probably wouldn’t ask an influencer in the healthy eating niche to promote your products.
• What platforms are they on? Make sure that the influencers you’re interested in create content on platforms your audience actively uses.
• Do they have a good track record online? Be wary of any influencers with a controversial past. You’ll want to bring positive attention to your brand and avoid associating yourself with someone who’s known for bad behavior.

➡️ Do you know the difference between different types of influencers? Find out with our guide to mega influencers, nano influencers, and more

6. Leverage Email Marketing Campaigns

Despite what some might say, email marketing is not outdated – and it’s absolutely not dead. In fact, when implemented effectively, emails can increase customer engagement, drive further conversions, and help you better understand your audience.

To ensure that your emails don’t end up in the trash, I have some useful pointers below:

• Work out when to send – don’t overwhelm your customers with constant daily emails, since this is likely to annoy them and make them hit unsubscribe. Instead, think carefully about how often you’ll send. As a general rule of thumb, I suggest sending out a regular email between one to three times a week.
• Think about what your audience wants to see – the emails you send must be relevant to your customers. If you’re not sure what’s working, look closely at email analytics such as your open rates, click through rates, and number of unsubscribes. With this data, you can tweak your email campaigns to keep them as effective as possible.
• Don’t forget to A/B test – A/B testing is when you send out two different versions of an email to see which one performs the best. By testing the email body, send times, subject lines, or anything else that you’d like further insights on, you’ll see what audiences are reacting most favorably to.

7. Add a Personalized Touch to Your Content

According to customer expectations, 61% of customers feel that companies treat them as a number.* This is why having personalized marketing is a digital marketing tip you can’t skip. If you want to win over consumers, your marketing should speak directly to their needs.

Netflix is a prime example of successful personalization. The streaming service uses customer viewing data – such as what they’ve seen and how they’ve rated previous titles – to recommend other films and TV shows users may be interested in and deliver tailored marketing campaigns or ads.

To apply personalization to your own marketing, you need to find ways to collect customer data first. You could collect responses from chatbots or customer support chats, create quizzes or polls, or use cookies to track on-site behavior.

Once you’ve collected this information, it’ll be much easier to personalize your marketing efforts and ensure that they’re tailored to your audience. This may include offering personalized product recommendations based on past purchases, or tailoring the messages in your email marketing based on the type of customer you’re contacting.

But remember, if you’re collecting data, you need to be transparent about what you’re doing to build trust with consumers. To stop you from getting into any legal trouble, they must consent and have the ability to opt out of sharing their data at any time.

*Source: Salesforce

8. Mobile Optimize Your Website

Having a mobile-friendly website is a must, especially with our landing page statistic that revealed 86% of the top performing websites are optimized for mobile devices. Publish a website with poor formatting or cluttered design features and you risk putting potential customers off.

To provide users with the best experience possible, test your website. A mobile-responsive page should automatically reformat its content for smartphones, but you’ll need to double check its performance yourself. Watch out for:

• Unresponsive call to action buttons
• Design elements that disappear from the page
• Images that take up too much space
• Text that’s difficult to read
• A navigation bar that’s tricky to click on

9. Make Sure That Your Website Is SEO Friendly

One of the best ways to increase brand awareness is by implementing basic SEO strategies. For example, if you want blog posts, social media posts, or other forms of content to appear on Google search results, they should include target keywords that your customers will be looking for.

You can use tools like Google Trends or Semrush to conduct keyword research and find relevant keywords, or use a tool like AlsoAsked to see what questions your target audience are asking. With a list of these keywords, you can optimize your content accordingly—for example, by adding keywords to your blog titles and text—and create new pieces of content around your findings.

➡️ Need help boosting your online store’s SEO? See our guide to SEO best practices for ecommerce sites

10. Take Advantage of Google Business Profiles

It’s free to open a Google Business Profile, so I recommend getting your business signed up if you haven’t already. The tool’s main benefit is increased visibility for your brand, since it’ll enable your company to show up in Google Maps results. 

When signing up to use the feature, you’ll be able to add essential information about your business, upload high-quality imagery and logos, and indicate unique qualities that customers may find useful (like whether your business is Black-owned or LGBTQ+ friendly).

To make the most out of your Business Profile, here are a few best practices:

• Ensure that all information is accurate, especially your company name, address, and phone number
• Write a concise business description that clearly summarizes what your business offers – you can also use your target keywords here
• Upload high-quality photos that aren’t pixellated and will entice customers

11. Automate Your Marketing Processes

The last digital marketing tip on this list could save your business precious time, especially if you have limited resources to work with. To make your current marketing process more efficient, it’s worth looking into AI marketing tools to automate your day-to-day tasks.

The key benefits of automation include:

• Speeding up boring or repetitive marketing tasks, giving you back more time to work on your overarching strategy
• Helping you generate content, such as social media posts, blog posts, or video scripts
• Analyzing your marketing analytics and transforming the findings into visual data
• Automating emails to send to your customers, such as follow up emails or abandoned cart emails

If you’re curious about the tools currently available, here are a few of my recommendations to get you started:

Digital Marketing Tips: Summary

With these digital marketing tips under your belt, you now know how to effectively promote your business online. But once you’ve put these marketing practices into motion, what comes next?

To make sure that you’re heading toward your marketing goals, I suggest monitoring key metrics like conversion rates, return on investment, and click through rates to see how effective your strategies are. With an understanding of this data, you can create a plan of action and modify your marketing efforts to improve your chances of success.

➡️ Want some pointers on tracking your marketing analytics? Discover how AI can help with our AI analytics guide

Written By

Holly Choules

Holly Choules is a Writer at Website Builder Expert with a background in researching and crafting engaging content for digital platforms. In previous roles, she has demonstrated her wordsmith skills by writing for public facing brands in a range of industries. After gaining hands-on experience using leading website builders, like Wix and WordPress, she is now keen to share her findings through informative, easy-to-follow articles that help small business owners get online and grow their presence.

Since joining the team in 2024 and transitioning into the tech sphere, Holly is passionate about applying her three years of content writing experience and upholding Website Builder Expert’s position as an authoritative source on website builders, ecommerce, and digital marketing.

You can read Holly’s articles below, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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