Your Digital Marketing Expert

6 Ways To Increase Your ROI With Digital Marketing

Some people mistakenly believe that digital marketing is an expensive way to market a business. But it is more affordable than you realize and easily pays for itself. On top of that, it is a necessity. If you don’t create a strong online presence, it can be difficult to grow your business.

You won’t get the full impact of a campaign if you don’t use digital marketing to make it happen. As with any mode of marketing, you will need to see if your digital marketing campaigns are worth the time and money you’ve invested. There are several metrics you can use to determine the ROI of your digital marketing campaigns. This will help you know where to spend your time and when to move on.

Consider the following ways to improve your digital marketing strategy and boost your ROI.

Define Your Campaign Goals

When setting business goals, you need to keep several factors in mind. One way to establish a system is to use the SMART goal-setting method. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals. This will help you understand how to set and measure achievement with your goals.

This applies to campaign goals when trying to determine your ROI. Marketing ROI will depend on your industry, market demand, cost structure, and other factors. Your ROI is also determined by the campaign. Make sure that you define the purpose of your marketing strategies in detail and be mindful of having realistic goals.

Create Content People Want

Your clients are exposed to constant information online. You need to give your brand something that sets you apart to see a return. Content is one of the most important tools for you to stand out.

No client wants a sales ad. They want value and a connection. To get this, make sure your content is personalized. Look at your target customers and create for them. This may be based on their demographics, interests, location, or gender.

Moreover, there are a few other key factors to consider when creating content.

Develop Useful Content

Make sure you are providing something your audience can use. Solve a problem, whether by telling them how to care for equipment, how to utilize an item in a new way, or how to clean something, for example. Give them information that solves specific challenges.

Develop User-Centric Content

Whether sharing a service or product to your audience through emails or FB posts, connect with them on a personal level.

Get Regular Feedback

One of the best tools for determining what your audience wants is to send out surveys. These can get you real feedback on what your audience needs and expects your brand to deliver. Be sure to utilize regular Q&A sessions, polls, surveys, and webinars to keep in touch with your customers. This will be used to create more useful content.

Use Influencers to Market

Consider collaborations with influencers to keep marketing and working with your audience. They will know what content you need because they are immersed in it. When collaborating with a partner, you open your business to new leads and prospects.

Let Predictive Analytics Work for You

This essential tool boosts and measures ROI. Through AI and machine learning, you gain insights using models, datasets, and algorithms in an effort to predict future consumer behavior. You can also use predictive analytics for prioritizing leads based on which customers are ideal for conversion. This aids in customer conversion and retention rates by helping meet consumers’ needs.

Predictive analytics also helps fine-tune a marketing strategy by allowing you to focus on needs and spend your energy and time well.

Use Automation to Your Advantage

There are many different automation tools available for you to use to your advantage and reduce costs. That is why the automation industry is predicted to reach $6.4 billion by 2024. These tools perform repetitive tasks like managing docs, images, and email lists. That will give you more time to focus on running your business.

Conclusion

By adding the right strategies to your digital marketing, you will find an improved return on investment. Incorporate the above strategies to make the most of your marketing budget.

How Instagram Can Help You Increase Website Traffic

Website traffic is fast becoming an elusive commodity. You’d be hard pressed to find a niche without any competition. This makes it incredibly difficult to rank well on search engines, thus leaving you at the mercy of paid ads to drive traffic.

The conventional wisdom around increasing website traffic is no longer enough. Yes, you can work on a well-rounded content marketing strategy, do SEO and run link building campaigns. This is just one part of the puzzle now. There’s a greater need now to leverage your social media presence in order to increase website traffic.

It’s easier said than done, though. Getting people to leave a social network that they want to spend a lot of their free time on to visit a website is difficult. With enough optimization and focus, it’s entirely possible, and it works out well there’s nothing quite like it.

As one of the leading social media networks of our time, Instagram is a great resource to leverage when trying to increase the traffic on your website. It’s particularly useful if you already have a decent presence on the social network. Those followers can be converted into regular website visitors fairly quickly.

Why Instagram is so important when trying to increase traffic to your website

For marketers, Instagram is a goldmine. It’s one of the most effective social media networks with an audience that’s ready to engage. Instagram also happens to be pretty big across the globe. It has over 1.4 billion users across the globe, making it the fourth more popular social media platform in the world. Studies have also shown that people tend to spend more time on Instagram compared to some of the other networks.

Instagram’s focus on discovery considerably levels the playing field for brands, enabling startups and established businesses alike to tap into an audience that’s actively looking to find new content that appeals to their interests.

Such an engaged audience can be hard to come by on other social networks and this is precisely why Instagram is such an important tool to use when trying to increase traffic to your website.

How Instagram makes things difficult

It’s never too easy. Instagram has made a conscious decision to not make it too easy for brands to send people off the app. That’s understandable, the Meta-owned social media network obviously wants people to not leave the app as much as possible. That might be why it doesn’t allow clickable links in posts.

No matter how much engagement your posts get, the caption can’t include a clickable link. This makes it difficult even for people who want to visit your website, since it requires a bit of manual work from them, and that’s one of the easiest ways to make potential visitors lose interest.

Fortunately, there are several different ways through which you can use Instagram to direct traffic to your website.

How to increase website traffic from Instagram

1. Make the most of the Link in Bio

You’ve probably heard your favorite Instagram influencer mention this multiple times. Instagram allows users to add just one external link in the bio on their profile page. So it’s imperative that you make the most of this allowance.

Think of the Link in Bio as the prime real estate on your Instagram profile. You can put the link to your website here or if you’d like to have multiple links, use one of the many Link in Bio tools available to create a landing page that includes as many links as you want.

Since the Link in Bio is a treasured commodity, be sure of the goal you want to achieve. Whether it’s just driving traffic to the home page or a specific landing page, offering an incentive or growing your newsletter subscriber base.

2. Remind people that you have a Link in Bio

Remember, there are no clickable links in Instagram posts. Simply adding a Link in Bio isn’t enough. You need to remind your audience that they need to click on the link in your bio, otherwise they may not know that it even exists.

Your Instagram posts can include a reminder in the caption that invites the audience to check out the link in your bio. If you tend to post videos on your feed, that’s another great opportunity to get them to click the link.

Instagram users are very familiar with the Link in Bio. It’s widely used across the entire platform so there’s not going to be a learning curve here for them. They know exactly where to find it and how to use it.

3. Don’t sleep on Instagram Stories

Instagram may not have invented the stories format, but it has surely made it its own. Shoppable stories are particularly useful if you’re in the ecommerce business, as you can send visitors directly to a product page.

A shoppable story has a “swipe up” link, so viewers only need to swipe up on the content in the story to be taken to that page. If they’re even remotely interested in your product, chances are they will swipe up.

This is a simple yet powerful way of bringing more organic visitors to the site. The people who follow you on Instagram likely check out the stories that you’re posting. Simply by relying on this feature you could be sending a big chunk of them to your website.

4. Use a smart Call to Action with every post

A call to action is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. It sounds very simple, just telling people what you want them to do, but you’d be surprised just how effective it is online.

So whether you’re posting just an image, a video or a story, be sure to include a call to action that invites people to check out your website. The golden rule here is that your call to action shouldn’t appear to be pushing a sale.

It should feel natural, one that stokes the curiosity of the viewer and compels them to visit your website to find out more about the brand.

5. Optimize your website for mobile

Think about it. People use Instagram on their mobile devices. When you send them to your website, they’ll still be on their smartphone. If your website is not properly optimized for mobile viewing, they’re more likely to leave it without even seeing what you have to offer.

So while you focus your efforts on trying to get more people from Instagram to your website, do make sure that it’s optimized for mobile. Otherwise, all those efforts will have been for nothing.

Boost your efforts with Instagram marketing

Your marketing efforts on Instagram should go far beyond getting people to the website. There are a plethora of tools offered on the social network that you can utilize to grow your Instagram presence further and increase engagement.

Remember, the more popular your Instagram account, the larger the audience is going to be. Even getting a fraction of them over to the website could prove to be very beneficial.

Whether you’ve been running Facebook Ads for a long time or are only just starting out advertising on the world’s leading social media network, the cost of running these ads will certainly be a major consideration.

With billions of users across the globe in every demographic, Facebook is arguably the best place to be for brands to spend their advertising dollars on. To aid them in this endeavor, Facebook provides advertisers with powerful tools that enable them to fine tune their campaigns in order to achieve the maximum return on ad spend.

The fact remains, though, that Facebook advertising costs have risen steadily over the past few years. There’s no denying that Facebook Ads have become expensive and that presents brands with a risk. If their ad campaigns aren’t successful, they could end up losing a significant chunk of money.

Even if their campaigns don’t completely flop, the money that brands have to put in for these campaigns may simply not be enough to justify the return on ad spend. That’s why there’s a lot of focus these days on figuring out ways to reduce Facebook Ads cost. It’s easier said than done but it’s not entirely impossible.

How are Facebook Ads costs calculated?

It’s important to first understand the factors that determine the cost for your Facebook ads. The social network relies on real-time auctions powered by its AI algorithms to determine the price of every impression or click.

It takes into account characteristics such as locations, interests and even ad placements to reach the final cost. For example, brands will pay more for a campaign targeted to users in the United States than for those in Thailand. The time of the year also has an impact on ad costs. During peak shopping seasons, the average CPMs tend to jump by double digits.

Competition is another factor to keep in mind. Many different businesses are competing against each other for the same Facebook audience. This tends to drive up prices for everyone, as the auction model prioritizes those that pay top dollar.

Generally, the highest bidder wins the ad placement but there are other factors that weigh on it as well. Relevance is one of them. Facebook wants to make sure that its users see ads that are relevant to them, so it tries to strike a balance.

Tips to reduce your Facebook Ads costs in 2022

1. Use the Campaign Budget Optimization feature

Campaign Budget Optimization is a feature that Facebook offers advertisers. When enabled, this allows Facebook’s ad algorithm to decide how the budget for your ad campaign is split. It distributes the budget across ad sets to get more results depending on your delivery optimization choices and bid strategy.

Once you’ve set the entire budget for the campaign, this feature will then distribute it across the ad sets to favor those that are performing better than the others. It’s important to note that this feature is different from split testing.

Campaign budget optimization doesn’t choose a winning ad set to spend all the budget on, rather it simply allocates more or less budget based on how the different ad sets in the campaign are performing.

With Campaign Budget Optimization, you’re able to run more ad sets while Facebook’s algorithm handles the spend based on how they’re spending, and this can help prevent your budget being burned on ad sets that aren’t doing well.

2. Use fresh ad creatives at least once every month

If the ad costs on your campaigns are rising, you can always refresh the ad creatives. The general wisdom is that this should be done at least once per month. That’s due to the fact that Facebook’s ad algorithm favors new creatives over olders, so it won’t spend as much money pushing it in news feeds.

Most marketers agree that swapping the creatives at least once per month is enough. The guidance on ads that run on a higher budget is that if the statistics indicate rising costs, it’s better to opt for fresh creatives even sooner.

Remember, this is only required if the stats show that the ad costs are rising. If the campaign is delivering optimized conversions with fast delivery at low costs, then it’s best to not try and fix something that’s evidently not broken.

3. Improve audience targeting

Targeting the right audience is crucial to the success of your Facebook ad campaigns. If you’ve got it locked down, your campaign will not only hit the desired objectives but will also do that in a cost effective manner. Even if you’ve created an amazing ad with great copy, unless the targeting is right, it’s not going to achieve much.

When selecting the audience, try and find one that has a higher possibility of engaging with your ads instead of just looking at them. This may require you to test new audiences that may be a fit for your brand. It’s also important to use the ad targeting features to exclude sections of the audience that may not be relevant in order to reduce unwanted impressions.

The formula is quite simple. Work on improving your audience targeting to achieve a higher CTR for more conversions. This will mean you’re paying less CPM, thereby getting the best return on ad spend.

4. Don’t sleep on lookalike audiences

This is one of the most powerful tools that Facebook offers its advertisers. Facebook’s algorithm is great at finding new audiences that are quite similar to the audience that has already taken a certain action related to your business. For example, these may be people that have visited your website or purchased a product.

The algorithm will use this data to find completely new audiences that are essentially a lookalike of the audience that has already engaged with your brand. The source audience can come from a custom audience that you provide Facebook with or you can also use the Facebook Pixel to collect data.

Since the source audience already specifics to the algorithm exactly what it’s looking for, it doesn’t burn through as much of the budget as it would when trying to find a completely new audience for you without any direction.

5. Capture leads with retargeting

Converting cold traffic, or people who have never heard about your brand before, is extremely difficult. Brands in almost every industry struggle with this. It happens very rarely that someone will buy a product after seeing just one ad for it online.

Through retargeting, you can put ads in front of people who have already interacted or engaged with the brand. Retargeting allows you to continue to capture their attention and if so desired, even provide them with an incentive such as a special discount to get them to convert.

Retargeting tends to be light on the overall campaign budget compared to blasting the ad to a completely cold audience. If done correctly, it enables brands to significantly improve their CTR and conversions.

It’s not impossible to reduce Facebook Ads cost

It may seem very difficult at first, but diligently following these steps and other best practices, it’s entirely possible to reduce Facebook Ads cost in 2022. Even as competition increases and overall ad rates increase, there’s always room to optimize.

Brands shouldn’t lose faith in Facebook ads yet. It continues to provide brands with an incredible opportunity to reach new customers across the globe at a scale that few other social networks are capable of matching.

Small businesses tend to be on tight budgets. No matter how tight your budget, however, you need to make sure to set funds aside for digital marketing. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to stick to a budget with your digital marketing strategy. The following tips should help you do just that.

1. Make Your Free Google MyBusiness Account

Google MyBusiness accounts are completely free and are essential to digital marketing. Once you claim your free listing, you will ensure that your company shows up when people search for you on Google. Your business will also show up on Google Maps.

Take this to the next level by optimizing your Business Profile. This will help ensure your Business Profile shows up higher on the search results page.

2. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

There are both free and paid ways to use social media in your digital marketing. Ads are the classic paid option, but it only costs you time to use social media in other ways. Start by making sure that you have a business page on the major social media platforms. Even if you aren’t active on them, claim your page and set up your basic contact information.

Doing this will make it much easier for potential clients to find you. It will also prevent someone else from claiming the account with your business name and causing confusion.

Once you have your social media pages set up, focus on a few platforms. Decide which ones to focus on based on which platforms your customers spend the most time on.

Use your social media pages to promote your blog posts as well as sales, and engage with current customers and potential ones on these platforms. You can ask for feedback or run polls. You can comment on relevant topics or even join hashtags.

Tag People and Brands

To make the most of social media, consider tagging people as well as brands. Maybe you and another local business agree to promote each other, so you occasionally tag each other in posts. This lets you both expand your audiences.

Or if you have brand influencers or even excellent customers, tag them in your posts. Remember that tagging another profile will extend your reach, as people who follow that profile may see your post.

Of course, you should also encourage people to tag your business in their posts.

Use Hashtags

As mentioned, incorporating hashtags into your social media posts can be an excellent tool. Hashtags help you expand your reach.

You can also use hashtags to weigh in on trends or events. For example, if your city is hosting a major sporting event, make a post about that, complete with the hashtag. It could be as simple as rooting for your home team, or you could mention how your products or services would improve the experience of event-goers.

3. Use Local SEO

Technically, local SEO is completely free if you do it yourself. That being said, it will take time away from other responsibilities. Because of this, some small businesses will want to outsource their SEO to a professional. Even then, it can be a budget-friendly way to boost your website visitor count.

If you want to start with SEO on your own, look for location-based keywords and create blog posts or landing pages that focus on your local neighborhood. Another part of local SEO is claiming your profile in online directories.

4. Use Email Marketing

No digital marketing plan is complete without email marketing, and you can make this surprisingly budget-friendly. Yes, you will likely need software of some sort to make email marketing feasible, but you may not need very many features.

A small investment in email marketing can deliver significant results. Just make sure to use A/B testing and create compelling subject lines. You should also segment your audience for the best results.

5. Apply for Awards

If your business has earned awards, use that to your advantage in your marketing. Display the award logos on your website and social media.

Take this to the next level and apply to various business awards that you think you could win. After all, this increases your chances of winning one.

Conclusion

Even if your small business is on a tight budget, you will still have plenty of digital marketing strategies at your disposal. The above tips can help you make the most of limited funds, helping your bottom line while growing your business.

As you think about your digital marketing strategy, don’t forget to consider using local influencers. This can be a very useful and cost-effective way to promote your company. Additionally, even small businesses likely have the budget to work with local influencers. You simply have to know which influencers to focus on.

Understanding Local Influencers

First, what are local influencers? They are localized and sometimes called nano influencers because their audiences tend to be much smaller. Expect an audience of about 1,000 to 10,000 people.

While this may seem like a small number, local influencers have the advantage of being focused in your area. This means that nearly every single one of those followers is in your community. This is especially important for small businesses that want to attract local customers.

Their smaller audience size also means that local influencers are much more affordable than those with larger audiences. So, you get to stick to your budget while taking advantage of an audience that is much more likely to be close to your store.

You Get the Same Benefits as With Any Other Type of Influencer Marketing

When you use local influencers, you get the same benefits you would if you used an influencer with a wider audience. The difference is, they are more affordable, and a higher proportion of their audience lives nearby.

Remember that with any influencer marketing, the influencer becomes your spokesperson. Think of them as a brand ambassador who refers your company to a wide audience.

People looking for recommendations are likely to turn to influencers, especially if the influencer in question has built a strong reputation for providing good recommendations.

Simply put, influencers of any size will generate creative content, deliver recommendations, promote your brand, and boost engagement.

As with any other type of brand ambassador, you can also look for a local influencer who fits into a certain niche. So, maybe you sell jewelry or makeup and look for a beauty influencer. Or maybe you are with a gym and look for a fitness influencer. Some local influencers may also straddle multiple niches.

But You Also Get Other Benefits

But using local influencers doesn’t just give you the same advantages you would get with a larger influencer. We’ve already touched on some of the advantages, such as their affordability and localized audience that’s more likely to be close to your business, but don’t forget that local influencers also likely have a higher level of engagement than larger influencers because of their smaller audiences.

Make Sure the Content Is Relatable and Transparent

When using local influencers, you want to make sure that they post content that is relatable and transparent. Don’t encourage influencers to lie about your products, as this will lead to disappointed customers and a bad reputation. It could also get you in legal trouble if your influencers misrepresent your product.

You also want them to post relatable content. This helps their audience connect with them. If their content is more relatable, the influencer starts to seem like a friend. This makes the audience give their recommendations more weight than they would otherwise.

How to Choose Local Influencers

It is also crucial to know how to choose which local influencers to work with. Since you want their posts to be relatable and transparent, look for people who already have those traits in their posts. This will help ensure a natural fit.

Overall, you want your influencer to have common values. They should also have interests that are relevant to your company in some way.

When it comes time to narrow down your influencers, you want to pay more attention to engagement than to their follower count. Remember that the more engaged their audience is, the more likely they are to convert. And remember that local influencers won’t necessarily have massive audiences, as their audience will be mostly local.

Don’t Forget to Evaluate the Campaigns

As with any other marketing campaign, be sure to collect data so you can evaluate your influencer marketing campaign. This will help you decide if it is worth the cost and spot areas for improvement.

Conclusion

Using local influencers is a cost-effective alternative to choosing influencers with larger audiences. You get the added benefits of improved engagement and a local audience in addition to the other assets of using influencers such as recommendations and more content.