By Megan Salzano-Birch If you’re not utilizing digital marketing for your business today, what exactly are you hoping to accomplish? Other than giving your competition a very lofty leg up. Today, digital marketing is a no-brainer. What isn’t a no-brainer is exactly how to implement and optimize your digital marketing strategy.
From website development to lead generation, brand building and even customer service there are myriad ways to approach digital marketing. Here are the top five ways for a flooring dealer to utilize digital marketing according to five industry leaders. viable lead-generating device in their digital marketing tool box. Following are seven tips from four top marketers in our industry to help you make video marketing work to your advantage.
TAKE A GLOBAL APPROACH
Every prospect has an unspoken question on her mind and that question is, ‘Why should I choose you instead of your competitor?’ Make sure your digital marketing is answering that question. If you have a digital marketing strategy and everyone else is doing the same strategy, you don’t have an advantage. It’s just the minimum entry requirement. It’s like having a storefront; if everyone has one, how does that benefit you? It just gets you in the game. If you want to win the game, answer the unspoken question.
— Jim Armstrong, founder, Flooring Success Systems
PRIORITIZE THE ESSENTIALS
The bottom line is digital marketing starts with a website. If you don’t have a website with a product catalog and content about the products you carry and services you supply—plus, an adequate amount of SEO—your store is not going to get walk-in traffic. Without a website with that content, you’re not a viable business. Then it’s about adding content to your Google My Business page. Fifty percent of the organic traffic we monitor comes from the Google My Business page to your website.
— John Weller, CIO, Broadlume
EMBRACE VIDEO
There’s no doubt about it. To be relevant and positioned for best success in today’s marketing environ-ment, business leaders need to embrace video as a means of brand building and message sharing. In a tech-driven, non-stop streaming society, people clearly have a preference for video content. Indeed, there’s emotion in motion, and we humans are moved by movement.
— Irene Williams, founder/CEO, Msg2Mkt
OPTIMIZE FOR VOICE SEARCH
So many business owners are not paying attention to what happens when a consumer says ‘Alexa, help me find the closest flooring retailer.’ Behavior is changing and voice search is very unique. We need to start thinking: ‘How do we make sure our websites are optimized around voice search topics?’ It starts with optimizing keywords in order to attract natural language. When people talk, they use a different language than when they search on Google—it’s much more conversational.
— Carole Cross, founder/CEO, Mobile Marketing
COMBINATION PPC/SEO PRACTICES
Having a combination of PPC (pay per click) and SEO (search engine optimization) is vital. Those two channels can bring the majority of traffic to your website. If you’re looking for a ‘best practice’ for SEO, I’d say it’s performing keyword research, then optimizing your site and high-quality content for those key-words. For PPC, a good practice would be to create a number of engaging ads, test all of them for a few weeks, then run your best-performing ads for a longer period of time.
— Aerin Ogden, digital marketing manager, QFloors/QPro
