Days when businesses relied only on television, newspaper, radio or magazine advertisement to communicate what they do to their existing and potential clients are slowly phasing out. In today’s world where the internet is the order of the day, many business owners are always thinking of how they can come up with ways to keep up in today’s fast-paced economy. With many topics and subjects ‘trending’ one day and dead the next, it’s important for anyone who wants to stay relevant in business to keep evolving with these changes and accept the fact that things change whether we like it or not. The first quarter of the year 2019 is nearing to an end, this is the time where most businesses especially the corporates evaluate their performance to know where they stand in as far as achieving different set objectives is concerned. It is also a time to set new strategies to ensure targets that were not met in the quarter are achieved in the next. This requires businesses to improve their game and devise sizeable marketing strategies. Today we navigate through different digital marketing strategies that rise above the rest and how businesses should be putting plans into place to make the best use of them. What do we mean by Digital Marketing Strategies? Comprising content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing via social media accounts and PPC (pay-per –click); digital marketing uses a number of strategies to provide information to customers who are using mobile devices and personal computers. With the Internet continuing to play host to an increasing amount of products and companies digital marketing strategies are continually changing as businesses seek to retain existing customers and bring in new ones. With good, bad and ugly digital marketing strategies available today, we look at those that are going to help businesses attract a higher number prospective leads, result in higher lead conversion and ultimately cause more closed sales. By using this form you agree with the storage Chatting with the Aid of Bots or Sell Your Information. A digital marketing trend that simply cannot be ignored anymore is the rise of chat bots, which are tireless and always remain online. With these bots never tiring they are available 24 hours, 7 days to answer queries of customers who have problems with products and services. The bots also provide timely sales and marketing support when potential customers have questions just before purchasing a product or service. As chat bots engage with visitors as soon as they come onto a website they ensure that people are never left hanging when they have questions, and ultimately prevent them from moving to competitor’s sites. Use of Artificial Intelligence As artificial intelligence has been increasingly adopted in digital marketing it has helped in better analyzing trends in customer behavior. It also allows for search patterns to be analyzed and for social media platform data, to be used in understanding how people find products and services. With the aid of artificial intelligence and bots such as those employed by Facebook messenger, businesses can deliver optimized experiences to customers without relying on human operators. Video Based Content Creating content in the form of text is all well and good, but your company also needs to output videos. As consumers continue to prefer video in portrait mode or vertical format over that which is in horizontal mode, businesses are focused on creating such content. Marketing products and services via vertical video on social media platforms also improves engagement rates and brings in more leads, and this has helped drive up the popularity of Instagram stories among businesses. Big Data Driven Marketing Big data and predictive analytics based of it are already in use in some companies. The coming years ahead are going to see tools that provide market and customer insights being put to use by businesses that fall within the medium and small segments. Heightened Personalisation Increasing personalization of digital marketing is already happening and this year is going to see more emphasis being placed on it. With the aid of data that charts a customer’s purchasing history and preferences, personalized emails and texts can be sent to customers. When they visit websites personalization can also be used to create banners and carousels that appeal to each customer. Tying up with Social Media Influencers Getting social media influencers onboard and working for your business allows you to directly reach users with aligned interests. Businesses when using influencers also save money on marketing campaigns that are blasted out to a large number of people, whether or not they fall into the target audience. Influencer based campaigns also make use of the trust that such people have amassed over the years and therefore they are much more effective than traditional campaigns. Over the past few years we have seen folks out here in Kigali earning fortunes off their influence on social media. Use of Social Messaging Apps Employing a social messaging app such as WhatsApp, wechat and or Facebook Messenger gets your product and service better exposure compared to traditional social media sites such as YouTube. This is just one of the reasons why these messaging apps are becoming increasingly popular methods of digital marketing. When running your business it helps to have the best digital marketing strategies at your fingertips. Utilizing some of those current strategies as we listed above also gives you an edge of over competitors who are still using those which are a few years old. The writer is a Marketing, Communications and Public Relations specialist based in Kigali. Twitter handle: @rugambak
