5 Digital Marketing Strategies You Can Implement Independently

• By Rodney Laws
• 18-03-2020
• Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a necessary investment all businesses should consider making to get ahead in this online-dominated marketplace. However, if you lack experience and knowledge in this area, it can be tempting to outsource your strategy to an agency.

This can be a costly investment for a business looking to establish themselves and doesn’t guarantee results. The better strategy might be to run some experimental campaigns to get a feel for your audience and growth potential.

Here are a few strategies we think even beginners can implement, without running to an agency for help.

Product demonstrations

If the rise in content and the mobile app development of visually-led product pages have told us anything, it’s that people want to know as much about a product before they buy.

A product demonstration strategy is one guaranteed to get feedback from your audience, and one that’s far from difficult to create the required content for. If you think too high concept your campaign will go over budget, so start by creating simple content that features you explaining how the product works and operates. This kind of content garners an audience because it appeals to their curiosity and allows them to visualize themselves using the product.

From here you can post the video content to social media, ideally making it a unique centerpiece to your paid campaigns. Alternatively, you can latch onto the growing popularity of streaming to promote this content. Streaming has evolved on both dedicated platforms like Twitch and social media channels into one of the most popular styles of content among a wide user base. Livestreaming is even more interactive than video, giving you room to respond to customer queries while demonstrating how a product works.

This kind of content doesn’t need to be high quality or inventive, which is ideal for a first time marketing strategy with a tight budget.

Comprehensive loyalty scheme

Customer loyalty can be a hard thing to earn, but once you do it can be an enormous asset to your business. The power of schemes that reward customer loyalty has already been noted, with 84% of customers saying loyalty schemes make them more likely to stick with a brand. Best of all, they’re something you can do independently.

Like product demonstrations, loyalty schemes don’t need to be hugely innovative. Often, copying what others have done and playing things simple is best practice. Run a loyalty campaign that simply gives customers a discount if they’ve shopped with you before or entitles them to purchase new products early. This is a simple campaign with sales at its heart that helps to build a dialogue between you and the customer, while also giving them a clear call to action.

Loyalty schemes are often underrated for their simplicity and difficulty to execute. If you’re looking to build a concentrated, engaged base before expanding your business further without blowing your marketing budget, it’s one of the best methods around.

Refer a friend

Some of the best early digital marketing campaigns you can implement happen in the background, building relationships with your business slowly.

Refer a friend schemes involve you offering an incentive to anyone who directs someone new to your website. This can be a special benefit or simply a discount, both methods will attract their own unique type of consumer.

These strategies are effective because it offers an incentive for two people and creates a chain of contact, all leading back to new eyes on your business and website. They’re simple to pull off too, as something you can just throw out there after every purchase as part of your confirmation email.

Many of the best digital marketing campaigns you can do in the early days of your business with minimal effort are strategies you’ll be wedded to until the day you close down, this is one of those.

Content sharing

There’s a dearth of content on the web, and yet there will always be websites looking for more. One of the best ways to get noticed by new audiences is to write content for them.

Many websites will be open to guest posts or content exchanges. This type of campaign is another simple one that, if you have a competent writer, can be highly productive and easy to generate. Writing for another website can earn you a link back to your site, expose you to a new audience and earn you promotion across their social media.

Be open to the idea of accepting guest posts to your own website, and collaborating on content in general. It’s an easy way to grow interest in your website and more eyes on what you do than you generally would.

Simple SEO

Beginners may find the concept of SEO difficult to understand at first, but it’s not impossible to make important and impactful changes by yourself.

Some simple SEO changes you can make include optimizing your web pages. If you’re using a website builder template such as WordPress, then plugins like Yoast or Framework can help provide you with a checklist guide to getting your pages SEO ready, including meta titles and meta descriptions. This makes implementing basic SEO as easy as any other website improvement and will have a huge bearing on how many people can find your website.

Don’t forget to optimize your content either, considering the readability of your pages for both a human and Google bot audience.

As you can see from this list, there’s plenty a business can accomplish in the way of digital marketing without outside help. Experiment with these lower-cost methods and slowly work your way up to a more thorough digital marketing campaign.