
12 Digital Marketing Tips From Top Brands
Digital marketing is changing how businesses connect with their audience by offering new ways to engage, inform, and inspire. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean digital marketing is easy, as you’ll have to figure out what works and what doesn’t to build brand awareness and attract loyal customers.
The good news is you can learn some digital marketing tricks from the best. Top brands like Nike, Apple, and Netflix have set the gold standard in digital marketing, creating campaigns that captivate millions. Their success isn’t just about big budgets either; it’s about innovative thinking, audience connection, and strategic execution.
Taking some lessons from some of the largest companies in the world can set your business up for success and help you get your share of the $4.12 trillion global e-commerce market. This article will explore 12 tips inspired by these industry leaders so you can achieve impactful results, no matter your experience level.
Quick Takeaways
- Aligning SEO with high-quality content helps meet customer needs, boost engagement, and improve search engine rankings.
- Creating a mobile-friendly website caters to the growing number of users accessing content via smartphones.
- Building a strong presence on relevant platforms engages with your target audience and creates valuable connections.
- Using analytics tools like Google Analytics can monitor performance, understand user behavior, and help refine your strategies.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing involves using online platforms and digital technologies to promote products, services, or brands to potential customers. Unlike traditional marketing methods such as print ads or billboards, digital marketing leverages the internet and electronic devices to reach people online.
Your digital marketing strategy connects you with your audience through various digital channels. These channels include:
- Social Media: Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn help businesses engage with their audience and build brand awareness.
- Email Marketing: Sending personalized emails to nurture leads and maintain customer relationships.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Improving website visibility in search engine results to attract organic traffic.
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): Running paid ads on platforms like Google or social media to drive targeted traffic.
When you combine these channels, your businesses can deliver customized messages, measure performance, and refine strategies for better results, making digital marketing a powerful tool for growth.
Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital marketing is how you reach your target audience where they are most active. Whether through social media, content, or email, integrating some digital marketing tricks helps you connect with potential customers in a direct and impactful way.
One key advantage of digital marketing is its cost-effectiveness. Unlike traditional advertising methods, digital campaigns can fit almost any budget, making them accessible to businesses of all sizes.
It’s also highly scalable, allowing you to expand your efforts as your business grows, whether you’re targeting a local community or a global audience.
Another significant benefit is data-driven insights. Digital marketing tools provide real-time analytics so you can track performance, understand customer behavior, and optimize your strategies for better results.
Top brands like Nike and Amazon use digital marketing to personalize experiences, create memorable campaigns, and maintain their competitive edge. Your businesses can also use these tools to build strong relationships with your audience and drive sustained growth.
12 Best Digital Marketing Tips From Top Brands
1. Combine SEO and Content Marketing
SEO is certainly nothing new. For a long time, search engine optimization was a function of keywords and coding. Then Google got smarter. Google learned that SEO is about rewarding brands with helpful content.
That’s why combining SEO (what questions do our customers ask) and content marketing (what answers do we provide) is one of the most effective digital marketing tricks we will see moving forward.
Today, most metrics included in Google’s algorithm have to do with content (even Google admits this) and the engagement you win through the distribution of great content. Using various types of content (visual, text, video, infographics, audio, etc.) is much better than using a single kind of content.
Stay Ahead of the Competition
As more businesses embrace content marketing, competition continues to get tougher. Everything you do online drowns in noise and information overload. Every business needs to publish better and more content to get ahead.
Content should be entertaining, informative, and empathetic, too. Valuable content answers the search intent or the question asked of the search engine. Still, it is also structured to encourage engagement, such as subscriptions to your email, sharing, comments, and other actions that contribute to ROI.
This content can be audio, video, or text, but whether you use one or all forms of digital content, it has to be good and original. If you can’t create unique, compelling, and good content by yourself, you can hire an expert to create content for your website and social media platforms.
You have to produce content that’s right for each stage in the conversion process (and your metrics need to match your goal with each piece of content).
Knowing where a visitor is in the conversion process isn’t always easy, but if you’ve done a good job of coding content (applying tracking codes so you know what type of content drove them to visit your site) and use tools that let you track where visitors have been before, you can make an educated guess as to what content they need.
Delivering the right content at the right time makes it more likely you’ll convert visitors into buyers and is one of the digital marketing tricks you’ll want to follow.
Reach is important. The more visitors you bring to your site, all things being equal, the higher your ROI. This fact is one of the reasons it’s important to have several social platforms and links to your content so visitors can easily share your content.
2. Have a Visible Presence on Relevant Social Media Platforms
Being seen online is the key to success for every business, especially today, where almost all companies have gone digital. It is one of the ways to stand out from the crowd.
For this reason, you need to build your online presence on relevant social media networks. Many social networks are available, but you need to identify where your customers spend most of their time and target them there. Pick those relevant to your business and prospects and build your online presence.
As my daughter will tell you, share more than once on Instagram, and she’ll unfollow you! In addition to sharing your own content, you should share content created by other great companies/ experts.
Remember that social media is not the place to pitch your products (unless your last name is Kardashian). Social media is for sharing and engaging. While social networks are a great way to understand what content resonates with your audience, social media is not the best digital marketing channel to demonstrate business growth.
3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile-First Browsing
Many consumers in the US and around the world only access the internet from their mobile phones. So you need a website that loads quickly, works across all types of mobile devices, and looks amazing.
You also need to make sure your content is mobile-friendly and that your website and social media networks are accessible on desktops and mobile devices.
One thing we are always looking to improve is the reader experience. For example, we are constantly testing which fonts, colors, and font sizes are best for reading on various small mobile screens. We also optimize page load times.
So, it is crucial to make your website and content accessible to users on all screen sizes. Update your website design using the latest trends and color schemes.
4. Use the Right Digital Marketing Tools
Digital marketing is an amalgamation of different strategies aimed at a plethora of channels, like SEO, PPC, social media, and so on.
To ensure an integrated marketing mix, you need the right digital marketing tools to help you run effective campaigns. You must also develop expertise in using them and applying the insights in the proper context.
For example, you need a CMS to power the content on your website. You also need email marketing tools to distribute your content (we use Mailchimp).
You might use a social media management platform to manage the social distribution (we use Hootsuite).
You should also consider lead generation, marketing automation, and CRM. Many smaller companies use Hubspot for all of these functions. Larger companies often use Adobe / Marketo for these functions.
We use a landing page service called ConvertFlow for lead generation, and I track leads using a sophisticated Google sheet. It works fine for us!
You’ll also want to use an analytics tool like Google Analytics to understand your website details. And, of course, there’s a whole world of Marketing Technology (MarTech) that larger companies are using.
5. Be Awesome at Design
Design underpins much of what makes digital marketing successful. Whether you’re designing a website, a landing page, or creating an image for your website, ad, or infographic, you must have good design skills. Not all of us are whiz kids in design, but there are some tools to help.
Canva is an excellent tool for creating social media images, whether you need them for your profile or as images to include in posts. One aspect of Canva I really like is the templates that help design great-looking images, even if you know nothing about layout or what fonts go together. They’re constantly adding new pictures and tools, such as infographic templates, to help you out.
Photoshop – granted, it’s expensive, but Photoshop is a great design tool, and using it is one of the digital marketing tricks you won’t want to ignore.
6. Create and Grow an Email List
Email is still an effective driver of digital marketing ROI. First Page Sage reports that email marketing has a 2.8% B2C conversion rate and a 2.4% B2B conversion rate, outpacing organic social media and video marketing. But you have to do it right.
First, make sure your website includes a sign-up form for an email newsletter. From there, you’ll need to deliver valuable content to your subscribers, not just promotional materials. Tell stories. We use our email lists to mainly share our content. We also do email nurturing to our leads and convert quite a bit through this process.
The trick is to balance content, stories, and calls to action. For example, our first nurture email just tells you a little something personal about me (I have four kids, and they ask lots of questions. Do you have any questions for me?)
But then, in later emails, I share some of our top stories, explain what we sell, and ask people to contact me.
7. Spend Wisely on Digital Advertising
Now listen, lots of people are spending on digital ads. Very few can show any ROI at all. (If you are, please let me know. I’d love to tell your story!)
Digital advertising, including PPC (pay-per-click), Google Ads, YouTube Ads, and social media advertising on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok, are all things you could test to deliver digital marketing success.
We’ve tried it all. Contextual content promotion is the one approach that brings in relevant traffic, engages visitors, and converts leads. We find your target audience wherever they are on the web and serve them an ad. But not an advertisement for your product. An ad for your content.
Then, we gather that audience into a re-targeting pool. And we hit them with offers like e-books, webinars, and free guides. This process allows us to deliver CPCs that are 80% less than average and CTRs 4-5 times higher than average.
8. Add Visual Content To Your Digital Strategy
A picture is worth a thousand words, and people will share images more often than text-based content. We love infographics because they can be attractive and engaging and display lots of information, making them one of our top digital marketing tricks. Our brains can process pictures much quicker than text.
Some top examples include social media graphics, videos, webinars, and even the title image of our blog posts, which are designed and branded to set us apart from just any old thing you might read on the web.
9. Closely Watch Your Analytics
Almost the other end of the spectrum from creativity is analytics, but that’s exactly the combination you need for digital marketing success. Google Analytics is perfect for understanding critical elements of your website and how visitors navigate through it. If you’re trying to gain insights from Google Analytics, you can use the Google Data Studio to give it a test drive using data from Google’s e-commerce site.
Several great tools exist for analytics outside of Google Analytics. You can use individual analytics from each social network (i.e., Facebook, Pinterest, etc.), bring them all to one place using a dashboard program, or pay for more powerful tools to gain more insights.
10. Integrate Strategies and Campaigns Across Channels
Integrating these tactics can be really challenging, especially in a larger firm where different teams may manage different platforms or where different ad agencies handle various aspects of marketing, such as content marketing, paid, and social. But, you have to integrate to achieve true digital marketing success.
Let’s talk about how you integrate these tactics that contribute to the success of digital marketing strategy.
Strategic Planning
The first step in integration is to have a strategic plan.
Coordination comes from strategic elements such as messaging. Still, even elements such as mission and goals help integrate efforts by creating an umbrella under which teams create posts, infographics, and the metrics used to assess them.
Start by simply identifying your digital marketing goals, what gaps you need to fill, and who can help.
Content Council
Bringing everyone together is important. Everyone should have time to share elements they’re working on and get input from the group about ways to extend a particular effort across multiple platforms and creative efforts.
The main goal is to help brainstorm ways to fill your content gaps. Once you align on your strategy, getting everyone on board can go a long way to bringing everyone together.
A Master Plan
There needs to be a point person in charge of digital marketing success, and that person is key to coordinating efforts across teams.
Some organizations have an approval process where the top person must approve everything before it goes live. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can slow the process down, and unlike traditional advertising, digital media is dynamic and data-driven.
A better strategy is to use a digital master content calendar to allow everyone to post what they’re working on, the assets they plan to use, and when the creative effort will go live. But it’s not enough to post plans. You can use your content council to review these plans and make adjustments.
For instance, reusing a graphic created by another team saves time and money and creates a visual that helps consumers (customers and potential customers) associate the two efforts. It also increases the frequency.
11. Develop a Clear Brand Voice
A strong brand voice makes your business stand out with your audience. It’s the personality and tone you use across all communication, shaping how people perceive your brand.
Leading companies like Coca-Cola and Apple demonstrate the power of a consistent, recognizable voice. Coca-Cola’s messaging is always cheerful, uplifting, and focused on sharing happiness. Similarly, Apple’s tone is sleek, innovative, and minimalist, reflecting its commitment to simplicity and cutting-edge technology.
To develop your brand voice, start by understanding your target audience. Are they young and casual or professional and formal? Your voice should align with their expectations and needs.
Next, one of the top digital marketing tricks is to maintain consistency. Whether it’s social media posts, emails, or advertisements, your messaging should sound cohesive and authentic.
A clear brand voice builds trust, strengthens your identity, and creates emotional connections, making it easier for customers to remember and relate to your business.
12. Stay Ahead With Trends and Innovation
Online marketing evolves quickly, and staying ahead of trends and embracing innovation can give your brand a competitive edge. Top brands like Tesla and TikTok are prime examples of how leveraging new technology, digital marketing tricks, and emerging trends can lead to success.
Tesla uses cutting-edge technology and a forward-thinking marketing approach, consistently positioning itself as a leader in sustainability and innovation. Similarly, TikTok has redefined social media engagement by capitalizing on short-form video content, appealing to younger audiences through creativity and trends.
To follow their lead, watch industry shifts, emerging platforms, and consumer behavior. Attend webinars, read marketing blogs, and participate in online courses to stay informed. Experiment with new tools and strategies, such as AI-driven personalization or interactive content.
Adaptation is key. Being flexible and open to change allows you to refine your approach, connect with audiences in fresh ways, and create long-term success.
Follow These Pro Tips
Learning from top brands offers invaluable insights into some digital marketing tricks and building a successful digital marketing strategy. You take much of the guesswork from the equation when you use proven techniques like personalizing your content, leveraging data-driven decisions, or enhancing customer experiences.
With the right mindset and strategies, your brand can achieve remarkable results, and Marketing Insider Group can assist you with our CRM and Marketing Management Services. We have three custom packages you can choose depending on your growth stage, helping your business reach the next level. Contact Marketing Insider Group to learn more, or book a consultation with our team.
I love this perspective on digital marketing tricks. I’ve been on a number of your contents on your site and I find them really insightful. Had to subscribe ASAP so as not to miss any entry. Thanks.
Thanks so much for the feedback! So grateful that you want to continue to follow the blog.
Content Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins….Thanks for sharing your pearls of wisdom.
Thanks for your feedback!
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Content should be entertaining, informative, or make the reader feel something. Valuable content encourages subscription to your email, sharing, comments, and other actions that contribute to ROI.