6 digital marketing strategy ideas to refresh your brand

Digital marketing strategy ideas

It’s generally at the beginning of a new year that marketers launch their new digital marketing strategy. That means by the middle of the year it may already feel a little stale.

Now is the ideal time for marketers to brush up on new online marketing and technology trends so they can create fresh strategies to engage both existing and potential customers. So, if this is what you’ve been thinking about, here are some ideas.

Send welcoming messages

You’re careful to always welcome your guests into your home, right? You give them a warm smile or hug, hand them a drink and give them the best seat on the couch. That’s how you need to treat your online guests. Sure, you can’t send a cup of coffee over the interwebs. But you can send them an email or SMS to thank them for signing up to your newsletter or placing an order. This will make them feel welcome and valued.

Optimize for mobile

Responsive web design is nothing new. It’s the idea that your website’s design and development will respond to the user's’ screen size and orientation. Visitors to your site will experience the same content, but optimized to their screen, whether they’re viewing it on a desktop, mobile or tablet. And, recently, Google has backed the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project which was designed to ensure sites load quickly on mobile. Pages making use of AMP coding will appear in a special place in search results and/or with a specific AMP designation.

“The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms,” says the AMP Project.

Learn to embrace augmented reality

Augmented reality is nothing new. But the way it’s increasingly being used, thanks largely to the use of this technology by Snapchat and Instagram Stories filters, feels completely fresh. And, memorably, last year this time, augmented reality entered into everyone’s lives in the form of Pokémon GO. Scores of people could be seen, their eyes glued to their screens, as they took to the streets to hunt those pesky Pokémon. And it didn’t end there. Brands have come to embrace Snapchat lenses. Consider the example of Gatorade at the Super Bowl last year. It created a lens that showed a bucket of Gatorade being dumped over users’ heads. It didn’t die with the Super Bowl, with many more instances of it being used taking place long after the championship had come to an end and the Broncos had returned home to Denver, trophy in hand.

Related: 5 Future technology trends that’ll define 2017

Include video creation in your digital marketing strategy

There’s no doubt that this is the year that brands really begin to take video seriously. Both marketers and brands have come to realize that the average internet user does not want to scroll through swathes of text. They’d much prefer to watch a quick video. Hubspot cites statistics which indicate that 52 percent of marketers name video as the type of content with the highest return on investment and an important part of their digital marketing strategy.

Get creative with chatbots

We know that customers want to communicate with brands using chat. We’ve mentioned before that chatbot will soon be necessary for communicating with your customers. Chatbots started out as something weird which customers didn’t fully understand. But they’ve now become ubiquitous enough to not only be understood but appreciated. And the benefits of chatbots are enormous: they’re available 24/7, they can learn from their interactions through machine learning and can answer multiple queries, quickly.

Clickatell Touch, for example, makes use of machine learning and bot driven interactions to improve customer service, bolster your CRM efforts, assist with lead generation, and more. So, with all of those advantages, and many more, why aren’t you embracing chatbot tech for your brand?

Related: 3 reasons for businesses to adopt chatbots for CRM

Increased ephemeral content

Yes, it can be difficult to think about creating content that will only be visible for a few hours. But the reality is that this type of content, on Instagram Stories and Snapchat, is where the eyeballs are. So, during your next product photoshoot or staff brainstorm session, catch a few behind the scenes shots. This type of content can be regularly repurposed and reused and increase the efficacy of your digital marketing strategy, provided you’re careful not to repeat anything specific.

So, if you feel ready to embrace these online marketing and technology trends and refresh your digital marketing strategy, you’ll need to know how to correctly implement and amplify your efforts. Have a look at our recent article on the seven skills a digital marketing manager needs.