<p>In today&rsquo;s world, people&rsquo;s lives have been taken over by digital media. Be it reading news online or finding a restaurant to visit, being connected to another person living in another continent or even making purchasing decisions - digital media plays an important role in our lives. So, what is digital media?</p><p><br></p><p>We can define digital media as a blend of technology and content. It includes all electronic devices and digital platforms that can convey content which can be in the form of text, images, audio or video. Very simply put, digital media can include a smartphone app, eCommerce social media platform, a blog or even a video game console.</p><p><br></p><h2>Why does digital media matter to businesses</h2><p><br></p><p>The past two decades have seen a massive explosion of the digital media world. Digital media is changing people&rsquo;s day-to-day life. It has impacted the way people and businesses connect, communicate and collaborate in civil, work as well as business contexts. It is empowering and enabling people and speeding up democratization of knowledge and understanding. According to a survey conducted by World Economic Forum, half of the respondents agreed that digital media had improved their overall quality of life and roughly two thirds of the respondents agreed that it had improved their ability to learn and develop professionally.</p><p><br></p><p>With the world increasingly becoming digital and consuming more electronic content than ever, it presents a huge opportunity for brands and organizations to reach out to their customers as well as bring in more revenues and growth.</p><p><br></p><h2>Types of digital media platforms</h2><p><br></p><p>There are various digital media formats and platforms available today for businesses to take advantage and communicate with their potential customers for promoting their products and services. For businesses and brands, the following types of digital content, platforms and devices become important.</p><h3>Types of Digital Content</h3><p><br></p><p>When we talk of digital content, the first thing that probably comes to mind is a blog or website. However, digital content is more than these. There are various forms of content offerings that are making their way into the market. Here are some of the types of content businesses and brands should focus on so that they keep their target customers attracted, engaged and keep them coming back for more:</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Blogs: </strong>Blogs are some of the most common types of content enterprises invest in. A blog can be either long form (typically more than 1,500 words) or short form (limited to 1,000 words). While long form blogs contain more information and are ranked higher by search engines, short form blogs are precise and to the point. Irrespective of the length of the blog, you should keep in mind to make them educational, relevant and of high quality.

<strong>Infographics: </strong>An infographic is the presentation of data and information in a visually appealing way. An infographic is usually a combination of either photos, graphical images or GIFs, and textual content. The advantage of an infographic is that it is viewed, liked and shared more than many other content types. Another advantage it has is that it is a powerful way of conveying a message to your audience.

<strong>Videos: </strong>Till a few years ago, textual content such as blog posts and other text-based digital platforms were very popular. However, in recent times, videos have gained an equal importance in a brand&rsquo;s marketing efforts. In fact, there are different forms of videos an organization can experiment with today - ranging from Youtube videos to Facebook videos. Irrespective of what type of video it is, it conveys the message across to the audience in a memorable way. If done really well, it can become extraordinarily successful in driving massive revenues to the brand.

<strong>Social Media Content: </strong>It is common knowledge that most people are on different social media platforms today, be it for social, professional or for business reasons. This offers business the best opportunity to strategize their marketing efforts to drive more awareness, engagements and sales. The type of content used for social media should talk about your brand while keeping your audience hooked on to you. The combination of good social content and campaign can prove very beneficial to the business.

<strong>Ebooks: </strong>Ebooks are typically long form content packaged in a different format, which is usually in the form of PDF and can be downloaded for free in exchange for joining a mailing list by providing your contact details. An eBook can be a guide, whitepaper or a case study, all serving different purposes but with the ultimate goal of educating the potential customer. An eBook helps in establishing the enterprise&rsquo;s authority in the subject matter and makes for a powerful way of sharing knowledge with key decision makers.

A good eBook should have a catchy title, well-defined content sections, and a combination of text and visual content. Creating an eBook and placing it on strategic pages of your website or your email newsletter can work wonders by creating better conversions and sales.

<strong>Guest Authorship: </strong>Guest Authorship typically involves sharing valuable knowledge through content on popular and authoritative third party platforms such as magazines and blogs. Writing a guest article serves the same purpose of establishing oneself as a subject matter expert in a particular field. This not only creates awareness of the brand but also helps in driving leads to your organization.

<strong>Podcasts: </strong>While a podcast is not a widely used form of content, it helps organizations interact with their followers and potential customers. A podcast is typically an audio file that can be played on an mp3 player, laptop or mobile at any time. With podcasts, companies can share information about themselves, their latest offerings or even the latest trends in the industry. Podcasts are a great way of building trust among customers as the audience can hear directly from the organization. A transcript of the podcast also helps in adding to the SEO value.</pre><p><br></p><p>The list given here is not an exhaustive list of types of content as organizations can experiment with other forms of content such as book reviews, copywriting and interviews among others. However, the types of content mentioned above is something most of the successful businesses have utilized and continue to use.</p><h3>Digital Media Platforms</h3><p><br></p><p>Now that we know the various types of content a business has at its disposal, it is also important to know the platforms that are available to establish and enhance the organization&rsquo;s presence.</p><p><br></p><p>Some of popular digital media platforms for promoting and marketing a brand include:</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Social Media:</strong> As already mentioned, social media is used by most people, from individuals to professionals and business owners. Hence, this is a great platform for organizations to promote their business. Some of the popular social media platform include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and LinkedIn.

<strong>Search Engines:</strong> It goes without saying that search engines are great places to be visible to people who are actively searching for products, services and solutions similar to what you have to offer. Optimizing your content and website for search engines can easily get you to the top of search results.

<strong>Email:</strong> There are several businesses that think that email marketing is dead. On the contrary, if done correctly, email is a powerful way of staying in touch with potential customers.

<strong>Knowledge platforms:</strong> Knowledge platforms and popular forums offer great opportunities for businesses and brands to get connected to potential customers.

<strong>Mobile applications:</strong> Today, everything is going mobile as people expect to find everything at their fingertips. Hence, smartphones and other mobile devices offer a powerful platform for businesses to promote themselves and drive ROI.</pre><p><br></p><p><br></p><h2>Types of paid digital media</h2><p><br></p><p>At a high level, digital media marketing involves marketing and advertising on various digital channels including search engines, social media platforms, and other mediums. This could be in an organic way or through paid promotions. Learn how you can promote your brand and services in an organic way by clicking <a href="/blog/developing-digital-marketing-strategy-an-internet-first-approach" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p><br></p><p>Let us see in detail the different types of paid digital media channels and platforms available as well as the digital marketing and advertising activities that can be done in order to maximize your brand&rsquo;s exposure to your potential customers.</p><p><br></p><p><img src="https://cdn.7edge.com/file_managers/images/000/000/067/original/DigitalMedia.svg?1509191897" style="width: 701px; height: 701px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"></p><h3>Social Advertising</h3><p>Social advertising involves advertising on social media platforms. As mentioned earlier, social media is where most people spend a significant part of their day. Hence, advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Youtube can help in achieving an organization&rsquo;s objectives such as reaching more customers, building brand awareness and improving customer service. Creating the right content that can attract your target customers on the social media is the key to achieving ROI on social media platforms.</p><p><br></p><p>Here are a few tips to achieve success in your paid social media efforts.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Create multiple versions:</strong> When you consider posting an advertisement on the social media, it is always a good practice to create multiple versions of the advertisement. This is because, if one of your ads is not working, you can test the other one. A successful social media ad is likely to have gone through multiple variations and testing of each variation for its effectiveness.

<strong>Add a call-to-action (CTA): </strong>Every traditional ad ends with a call to action. So, why should a digital advertisement not? Including an effective CTA in your social media ad compels your viewers to click the CTA irrespective of whether they end up becoming your leads or not. The best way to add a CTA in your advertisement is to include one of the standard buttons such as Book Now, Learn More or Shop Now, that is appropriate to your niche. There is growing evidence which point to &ldquo;Learn More&rdquo; being the most effective button of all.

<strong>Create a landing page:</strong> The end goal of most social ads is to convert the audience into leads and customers. This means that they should have a landing page they should end up after clicking the ad. The most successful social media ads include custom landing pages where the visitors are carried to from the ads and the message on these landing pages is crystal clear. Care must be taken to create a landing page that is as targeted as the ad itself to increase its effectiveness. You can also choose to create a click-through landing page which acts as an intermediate between the ad and the landing page as it keeps the focus on the offer.

<strong>Offer a discount:</strong> People love discounts. According to a Facebook user survey, about 67 per cent of the users said that they were likely to click on a discount related offer. Hence, it is a good idea to include a discount offer and mention it in your ad to drive more conversion and sales.

<strong>Adjust your targeting: </strong>When you are creating an ad copy, ensure that the content is relevant to the target customers. Facebook gives an option of checking the relevance score of your social advertisement. The score determines if the audience are likely to interact with your ad based on the expected and actual positive and negative feedback it gets from the target audience. If the score is less than 8/10, it is better to adjust the targeting.</pre><p><br></p><h3>Search Engine Marketing</h3><p>Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of driving website traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. For example, Google Adwords is the most popular paid search platform available on the internet and used by search marketers. There are also several pay-per-click (PPC) advertising options available for digital marketers. SEM and PPC ads appear when a specific search term is typed in the search query. Hence, this type of advertising helps organizations create contextual and targeted ads for a particular set of audience.</p><p><br></p><p>Here are a few tips to improve your Adwords and PPC campaigns.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Research negative keywords: </strong>While looking for the right keywords for your campaign, it is not sufficient to search for the right keywords but also be mindful of the negative keywords that you don&rsquo;t want to come up for in the search results. Hence, researching and specifying negative keywords also becomes very important as they ensure that you are saving money on unnecessary traffic and lesser returns.

<strong>Capitalize on site links and ad extensions: </strong>A beautiful feature of Google is that it allows you to add extensions and CTAs to your ad copy and enables you to show more information in your ads. While site links allow several links to be displayed in your ad, each of them leading to a different page, other extensions you attract the user and obtain a higher click through.

<strong>Combine PPC with organic marketing:</strong> When it comes to digital marketing, it is not about choosing between organic and paid marketing but about combining both to obtain the maximum result. When organic marketing is combined with Adwords and PPC, the website stands a higher chance of dominating search engine rankings.

<strong>Optimize your landing page: </strong>Adwords and PPC are ultimately helpful in bringing more visitors to your company website and landing pages. However, once they are on your website, it is up to your landing page to live up to the expectation as well as perform the conversion. Hence, ensure that your landing page is as attractive as your ad itself. You will also need to ensure that the landing page is completely relevant to the ad being displayed so that more visitors stick around and make purchases.

<strong>Customize your Adwords settings: </strong>When it comes to Adwords, one set of keyword settings does not fit all. You cannot have default settings and expect brilliant results all the time. You will need to configure a few settings in your Adwords that include search and display network-related keywords, device-specific bids and keyword match types, as different settings yield different search and display results.</pre><h3>Mobile Advertising</h3><p>As smartphones increasingly become an integral part of our lives, it is important that digital marketers understand the importance of mobile platforms for advertising. Smartphones are devices that people check very frequently on a given day, which provides them huge marketing potential. From SMS to in-app marketing, there are many ways advertisers and brands can market on mobile devices. Hence, finding the right method is the key differentiating factor for a particular business. Not only as a stand-alone platform, but mobile devices should also be taken as part of cross-platform marketing efforts.</p><p><br></p><p>Achieving success in mobile advertising follows some of the same rules of any digital advertising such as having a mobile strategy, targeting the right customers, creating highly engaging ads and measuring your efforts. Here are a few additional tips on how you can achieve success using mobile marketing and advertising.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Leverage your character-limit: </strong>When it comes to text-based advertising, you are limited to only 160 characters. Hence, it is absolutely important that you make the best use of this character-limit. Focus on communicating your message in a clear, concise and attractive way. You can also add a short link while limiting the text, so that your audience can click the link to reach your landing page which can give out additional information.

<strong>Use mobile-friendly ad formats: </strong>Similar to an application that is expected to have a mobile-friendly format, it is also expected that your ad should have a mobile-friendly format. A popular mobile-friendly ad format is IAB Rising Star adhesion unit, which looks great on a mobile device of any type. Apart from taking up a small screen space and being anchored at the bottom of the screen, these units produce strong results.

<strong>Respect the user: </strong>Mobile devices are something that is personal to the users. Users want to be in control of when, where and how they want to use their devices to interact with the brands. Hence, hand over the control to your user. Mobile advertisements should be opt-in so that users decide whether they should or should not engage with the advertiser&rsquo;s message. They should also be made easy for users to dismiss as well as easy to access if they want to engage with it.

<strong>Make the terms transparent: </strong>When creating an in-app advertisement, you should ensure that you clearly communicate the terms as well as adhere to the rules and regulations, as not adhering to the regulations may land you into legal problems. You should also ensure that making in-app purchases should be made completely optional for app users.

<strong>Use QR codes: </strong>iOS and Android have the ability to scan in-app QR codes. Hence, if you have a native app and a slightly tech-savvy audience, then using a QR code in your app really clicks with your intended audience. This is also a smart way to lead them to your website&rsquo;s landing page. This way, smartphone users can scan your QR code and reach your website for making use of your promotions.</pre><p><br></p><h3>Programmatic Media</h3><p>The digital advertising industry is rapidly moving towards automation. Several leading advertisers are increasingly realizing the benefits of programmatic advertising. Programmatic or automated advertising uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to enable brands and marketers purchase ad space in real-time in a more efficient and flexible way while reaching out to the maximum number of target audience. Programmatic advertising helps businesses create highly targeted and personalized advertisements to their audience.</p><p><br></p><p>Here are some of the benefits of using programmatic advertising.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Flexibility: </strong>Programmatic advertising offers advertisers great flexibility for customizing their ad campaigns. It allows advertisers to decide their budget and how they want to place their ads. For example, as an advertiser, you can choose to either pay only for the relevant impression that you actually receive or sign up for a minimum budget. Programmatic advertising also enables you to opt for a minimum number of impressions as well as ad inventory across publishers. Moreover, you have the option of optimizing your campaigns mid-way based on views, clicks and conversions from the campaigns.

<strong>Improved efficiency: </strong>Automated marketing has greatly improved the efficiency of digital advertising owing to several factors. For starters, it eliminates the requirement for long-drawn negotiations between advertisers and agencies which would otherwise cost both time and money. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms makes the process of placing ads a lot simpler and efficient. The ability to measure the performance of campaigns in real-time also helps advertisers in making the necessary changes to their campaigns, which improves the efficiency of the campaigns.

<strong>Efficient targeting: </strong>Programmatic marketing uses extensive data that allows you to place targeted ads with high precision and accuracy. It allows you to target audience based on a number of factors such as audience geolocation, age, search terms, behavior, categories and site visits or even IP addresses. It also allows you to retarget customers after the site visitors have visited the advertiser&rsquo;s site, which helps in better conversions.

<strong>Wider reach: </strong>Programmatic enables you to reach out to a wider spectrum of target audience across multiple platforms and multiple publisher websites at a lower cost when compared to traditional forms of display advertising. Not only this, but you can also track your campaign&rsquo;s reach. You can find out how many people have looked at your ad, where the audience was located, the demography of the audience, time of the day they saw the ad and much more.

<strong>Real-time data and insights: </strong>Programmatic advertising provides you real-time data and insights into how your creatives and campaigns are performing. With programmatic, you don&rsquo;t need to wait till the end of the campaign to make changes but can obtain data as soon as the campaign is launched. You can see where your ads are being displayed, how much engagement the campaign is receiving and obtain other important insights. You can also measure, analyze and optimize your campaigns in real-time so that they perform better.</pre><h3>Display Advertising</h3><p>People read blogs, news articles, forums and other forms of online content on a regular basis. This offers tremendous opportunities for brands to reach out to customers through digital display advertisements. Display ads include banner ads, interactive ads, video ads, overlays and other similar ads that are usually linked to the organization or brand&rsquo;s landing page. However in recent times, display advertising is slowly losing its efficiency in attracting customers.</p><p><br></p><p>Here are a few tips on how you can improving the efficiency of your display ads.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Better targeting: </strong>One problem advertisers often face is the poor delivery of ads across the target customers. Many ads reach the audience to whom the product is either irrelevant or are the people who are least likely to buy it. Hence, focus on the audience who are most likely to drive value for your business. The better you can define your consumers and the more specific you are with your criteria, the higher the quality of the clicks your ads will get and more likely the visitors will convert.

<strong>Personalize your ads: </strong>Personalizing your ads is taking consumer targeting a step further. Researching your audience and using information obtained through analytics can help you create more relevant and personalized advertisements that drive better engagement from the right people and lead to better conversions. A few strategies you can use to personalize your ads include local segmentation, controlling the context of delivery and using consumer information obtained through their search history.

<strong>Use appropriate content: </strong>When it comes to digital marketing, the content is of utmost importance. To improve the efficiency of your online advertising, your ads must have the right content in it. For your advertisement to work, it must have content that delivers delightful user experience so that it drives user conversations and engagement. One tactic you may use to improve the quality of your ad is to display product-attributes effectively than focus on brand-led messaging.

<strong>Use cross-promotions: </strong>Cross-promotion of your ads is absolutely crucial to improve their reach to your potential customers. It is a powerful and inexpensive way of delivering targeted and personalized experience your ads have already delivered. By doing cross-promotions, you gain access to a wider range of a potential customer base that is already present on another channel or platform. It also offers brand consistency to your customers thus improving your brand&rsquo;s credibility while giving an additional push down your marketing and sales funnel.

<strong>Test and optimize your ads: </strong>Your ads should to be continuously tested and optimized to ensure that they lead to the highest level of conversations and engagements among the target audience. A/B testing is a popular way of testing the effectiveness of ads so that they reach their full potential. Through this testing, you can make small changes in the ads and see what impact it has on the campaign. Testing and optimizing of advertisement copies, images, targeting and landing pages must be part and parcel of your display advertising efforts.</pre><p><br></p><h3>Digital PR</h3><p>Digital PR can be considered part of content marketing as it involves tying up with key content writers and journalists to create promotional content and increase web presence. Digital PR helps improve brand visibility across digital media and generate traffic through exposure using online PR networks. It also has a positive effect on brand reputation and search engine visibility.</p><p><br></p><p>If you want to succeed in a digital public relations campaign, here are a few tips you should incorporate in your campaign.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Identify news content: </strong>When it comes to PR, you should learn to differentiate between different types of content. You should know how to identify what can become news and what cannot. You should also know which news is vital and can be sent to news organizations.

<strong>Identify the right people: </strong>It goes without saying that if you want your PR story to be read by a wider audience, you should identify the right organizations, journalists or influential people who have a good audience following. It is also a good idea to build up rapport with them as it will help you in the long run.

<strong>Write engaging press releases: </strong>Engaging press releases grab the attention of the readers. The first 20 seconds are most important as this time fraction decides whether your intended audience will continue to read the article or flip the page. Engaging content is also important to ensure that the news organization you send it deems it worthy to be published, with tens of emails sitting in their mailbox to be read every day.

<strong>Write an active title: </strong>It is very important to write the active title of your organization&rsquo;s story in the subject line. This helps the news organization to identify and differentiate your press release story from the rest. Else, with so many people writing &ldquo;Press release&rdquo; in the subject line, your story will become just another that may see the recycle bin.

<strong>Develop necessary skills: </strong>If you decide not to take the help of an external agency and plan to do it in-house or by yourself, ensure that you develop the necessary skills required to run a successful digital PR campaign. Along with gaining the necessary skills, you will also need some experience to take the DIY PR route.

<strong>Utilize current events: </strong>A smart way of coming up with new and engaging press release stories is to leverage the current events and industrial news, and tie it to your offerings. However, ensure that you take up only those current events that will gel well with your offering as a loosely tied story can become a wasted effort.</pre><p><br></p><h3>Native Advertising</h3><p>Native advertising is a form of paid marketing which is gaining increasing prominence among content marketers due to its non-invasive and non-interruptive nature. Unlike regular advertisements, native advertisements do not get ignored or blocked by users as they blend into the content people read or consumer. Native advertisements come in various forms including sponsored content, recommended content, advertorials, in-feed social ads and promoted listings.</p><p><br></p><p>Unlike display ads, native advertisements are considered better at building trust and engagement among customers. Having said that, you need to use them in the right way to ensure success in your campaign. Here are a few tips for running your native advertising campaign successfully.</p><p><br></p><pre><strong>Identify your channels: </strong>One of the best ways to start is to identify a list of digital channels and platforms where you want native advertisements to appear as only a few channels offer the option for native advertising. Some channels may also not be suitable for your efforts as they don&#39;t reach the right audience or cost too much. Review social networks such as LinkedIn, industry news sites and digital magazines, and similar channels to determine where your native ads fit best.

<strong>Know your audience: </strong>You cannot create an advertisement without knowing who your audience, what they like, and what their goals and challenges are. Once you know what your audience is, you can create your content to address their needs.

<strong>Identify the right formats: </strong>There are certain ad blockers that block not only banner ads but also native ads. This means that if you are using a format that can be easily blocked by ad blockers, you will not be able to reach out to your intended audience at all. Hence, it becomes necessary for you to look for opportunities that respect your content. For example, create your content in the form of an authoritative article that can be placed alongside similar articles, hence building up your authority.

<strong>Focus on content: </strong>Speaking of authoritative content, people expect you to write content that is not only of high quality but that which is also relevant to them and helps them solve their challenges. You can create content that is thought-provoking as well as articles about unexplored avenues in the industry. Additionally, test your titles for their efficiency to capture eye balls. You can use A/B testing to see which titles and descriptors attract more viewers and use them.

<strong>Explore various content formats: </strong>Besides textual content, you can also explore other formats of content. For example, you can use infographics to communicate your message. While they may be too common in the B2B world, they are also an excellent choice for native advertising as they contain quick and digestible facts with attractive graphics and a catchy title. Hence, if you are confused about which format to use for your native advertising, you can always start with an authoritative article or an infographic.</pre><p><br></p><h2>Challenges in digital media marketing</h2><p><br></p><p>The world of internet and digital media is constantly changing and is doing so at a rapid pace. It takes only a few months for one digital resource to go out of favor as some other new tool or technology may replace it. The constant change also is directly connected to the change in audience choices and behavior. This naturally presents certain challenges when it comes to digital marketing.</p><p><br></p><h4>Generating traffic and leads</h4><p>As per Hubspot&rsquo;s 2017 State of Inbound report, this came up as the top challenge most marketers are facing with about 63% of the poll respondents facing this challenge. According to few other research reports too, driving traffic and conversions is a major challenge for marketers. Evidently, marketers are having a tough time generating enough demand for their content. And as time progresses and the competition becomes tight, the task will just get tougher.</p><p><br></p><p>The solution to this problem is to ask oneself while creating content whether the content is something the audience actually wants and whether it is of high quality. The focus should also be on the way of promoting content such that the audience takes notice.</p><p><br></p><h4>Increased advertising costs</h4><p>While the right kind of advertising can give marketers the necessary visibility, the ad costs have gone up due to increased competition for advertising. Search engines and popular social media platforms are pushing up prices especially for competitive niches. Creating attractive ads and placing them on the right networks as well as programmatic ad buying can help you take the guesswork out of ad placement and ensure that you get your money&rsquo;s worth.</p><p><br></p><h4>More ad blockers</h4><p>Display ads are increasingly being blocked by website visitors and ad blocking software continue to evolve. This presents a huge problem for advertisers as they can send across the message to their audience with their ads being blocked.</p><p><br></p><p>Native advertising and inbound marketing are two solutions available to combat this problem. High-quality, contextual and targeted content can help attract the right visitors to your website as well as improve conversion rates.</p><p><br></p><h4>Lesser focus on keywords</h4><p>There was a time when SEO was all about keyword stuffing. When people used to search for something on the internet, content with the right keywords used to come up on top. However, the search landscape has changed. Users have changed the way they perform their search query. Online search now has evolved from search of fragmented terms to being conversational. Consequently, search engine algorithms too have evolved. Keywords have become less relevant. Instead, search engines focus on the intent behind the search query.</p><p><br></p><p>This means that you will have to start building your content around topics rather than keywords. The priority has to shift towards making your website a resource for the search topic instead of keywords.</p><p><br></p><h4>Lack of knowledge and time</h4><p>As per <a href="https://learn.infusionsoft.com/resources/tools/2017-small-business-marketing-trends-report" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Infusionsoft&rsquo;s report on small business marketing trends</a>, about 19.4% of the marketers said that they didn&rsquo;t have enough resources or time for their marketing efforts and approximately 10% said that understanding the trends and tactics of marketing was a challenge. In some other case, while the organization may have the necessary budget, it was challenge to get the people with the right skills.</p><p><br></p><h4>Targeting the right audience</h4><p>Targeting the right audience is a key component of digital marketing. To do this, organizations must first identify the buyer persona. However, many companies find it a challenge to create the user personas of buyers that can help them drive the maximum revenues.</p><p><br></p><h2>Keys to digital media success</h2><p><br></p><p>While organizations and brands realize that digital marketing is one of the necessary verticals they need to focus on, many of them do not find the necessary success in their digital media marketing efforts. The following are key points you should remember if you need to achieve the desired success and ROI from your digital marketing efforts.</p><p><br></p><h4>Set constructive goals and KPIs</h4><p>The first obvious step towards achieving digital marketing success is to create constructive goals. As an organization, it is important to set clear and quantitative goals in terms of the number of visitors, the number of leads and the sales you want to have at&nbsp;a certain period. It also involves setting a few performance parameters against which, you should be able to compare your achievements.</p><h4><br></h4><h4>Digital Media Strategy</h4><p>Before you start implementing your digital marketing goals, you first need a strong and powerful strategy. A digital media strategy is a blueprint and a plan of action that will help you achieve your goals. Your digital strategy will depend on the scale of your business and your objectives.</p><p><br></p><p>Your digital media marketing strategy should keep your buyer personas, the tools you need to achieve your goals, existing digital channels and assets, planning your media, and budgets for acquisition, conversions and retentions among others.</p><p><br></p><p>It may also be a good idea to keep a lookout on what your competitors are doing as their digital marketing success or failure may teach you something you ought to do or not to do.</p><p><br></p><h4>Improve your content and content marketing strategy</h4><p>A common phrase in the digital marketing space is, &ldquo;Content is king&rdquo;. And this is true. Good content and content marketing are key components of a successful digital marketing plan. Developing good and relevant content for your target audience and marketing it on the appropriate channels that will drive engagements and conversions is crucial for your business. Hence, you need to continuously evolving your content strategy to get the maximum benefits from your content.</p><p><br></p><h4>Optimize conversions</h4><p>Once you drive the right traffic to your web page, the next task for you is to convert visitors to leads. To ensure that you drive maximum conversions, you need to focus on conversion optimization techniques which involve tweaking the design and content of your website. For example, improving your Calls to Action (CTAs) and landing pages compels your website visitors to convert.</p><p><br></p><h4>Stay agile with your efforts</h4><p>With the customer behavior rapidly changing, the digital marketing landscape too is changing. While it is good to have a long-term goal and strategy, it is necessary to break them down into smaller goals and tactics that keep evolving with the changing landscape. For example, the recent changes in Google&rsquo;s algorithms have the changed the face of SEO and the way pages are ranked.</p><p><br></p><p>Social media as well paid search too are continuously evolving. A digital marketing strategy that is agile can help organizations take advantage of the opportunities while staying away from problems that may affect them.</p><p><br></p><h4>Measuring and Analyzing Marketing Efforts</h4><p>It cannot be stressed enough that measuring marketing efforts against key performance indices (KPIs) should become an indisposable part of the process to achieve digital marketing success. Your analytics give you valuable information about your customer demographics, engagement rates, traffic to your website and conversions among other critical parameters. This naturally helps you evolve your digital marketing strategy to achieve a higher rate of success.</p><p><br></p><p>The digital media landscape is undergoing rapid changes in the way content is created, promoted, digested, and monetized. Winning against your competition on this rapidly changing digital playing field needs a solid strategy, commitment, and expertise in order to deliver the best customer experience.</p><p><br></p><p>7EDGE provides unique strategies as well as transformative digital tools and technologies that help you strengthen your digital media presence and achieve measurable results.</p><p><br></p>