Why is Email Still King and Some Other Tech Marketing Tips

We would like to share a great article by Aaron Marks from Gartner on Why Email Marketing is Still King.  Enjoy!

1. Email is still king

Every year, you hear plenty of people predicting the death of email. Well, email marketing

 continues to shine — in fact, it was the single best performing channel in 2021. If you've scaled back on email, or it just hasn't been a priority for your business, now's the time to start investing.

2. But, you need to think beyond email blasts and newsletters

Gartner notes that respondents mentioned challenges "in aligning their email strategy with the right messaging." This is why you need to create more sophisticated nurture campaigns (also known as "drip emails

") that are closely aligned to the problems and challenges your customers experience — and how you uniquely solve them.

Most of the time, small businesses only do basic email marketing, like sending a monthly newsletter plus an occasional list-wide "blast" when they have something big they want to say. Buyers today expect more, and if you don't provide that, one of your competitors will happily do so and take the business from you.

3. It's time to diversify your marketing mix

Your current marketing plan

 may focus on a small handful of areas. Many small businesses I work with are doing a few foundational tactics, like trade shows, emails and social media; maybe they also have a blog where they occasionally publish an article. It's great to start somewhere, but the most successful companies are diversifying where they're spending their time and money.

So, how do you decide what to try next? A good guideline is to start by looking at what you're already doing that's working best. Then, think about what marketing tactics you can use that would supplement them. For example, if you do a lot of trade shows, you could start doing more content marketing — so you can offer your eBook or whitepaper to people you meet at the show. If social media is working really well, try another angle you're not already doing, like creating video content

 or posting polls to get even more engagement.

4. You probably don't understand your customers well enough

Of the dozens of small businesses I've worked with, I can count on one hand those who put in the effort to deeply understand their customers. Without a deep customer understanding

, you are going to spin your sales and marketing wheels without getting results. Every customer has different needs and desires, and you can't just guess them. Take the time to step back and deliberately understand customers by creating buyer personas

. What you learn from this process will dramatically increase the results you get from your marketing efforts.

5. Activating your entire funnel is more important than ever

When I start working with a new business, the most common thing I see is that their existing marketing efforts only focus on one part of the sales funnel

. They might be publishing on their blog and social media, which enables the top of the funnel, but they're neglecting to create case studies and demos that can improve the bottom of the funnel. Or they might be really good at creating sales collateral and data sheets, but they're struggling to create helpful, educational content.

When you're only doing one part of the funnel well, it's going to severely limit the results you see from your sales and marketing. If you've prioritized the bottom of the funnel while neglecting the top, you don't have a lot of prospects with whom you can share your great brochures and data sheets. And conversely, if you're really doing great with the top of the funnel but the bottom is somewhat forgotten, you're going to attract a good amount of leads, but very few of them are going to turn into customers.

Using their buyer personas

, business leaders must begin to better understand their entire funnel that their prospects need to go through to buy from them. Creating a content map is a great way to do this: You identify content at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel that you should have to enable your buyers. And then you can evaluate what assets you have and what still needs to be created. Put simply: An incomplete funnel will only drive incomplete results.

Next steps - go to http://www.allmymarketing.info to get your digital marketing in order.

What are The Different Types of Digital Marketing w/ AIMC Business Solutions

 Today we're going to talk about why digital marketing is important in today's world. We're also going to talk about what digital marketing is and the types of digital marketing channels that are out there.

Now digital marketing is becoming more popular than traditional marketing. That's not a surprise. Over the past few decades, digital marketing has evolved at a rapid pace. These days a lot of people spend most of their time on the internet. So what happens on the internet every 60 seconds? There is:

• a lot of snaps
• a lot of clicks 
• a lot of text
• a lot of videos watched
• a lot of pictures being taken
• a lot of voice-activated activity going on
• a lot of tweets
• a lot of email swipes.

In traditional marketing, we're talking about:

• print radio
• Billboard
• newspaper 
• TV 

Or  anything that's not on your mobile or laptop. So we know that traditional marketing reaches a limit and that digital marketing reaches a  maximum. What I mean by that is when you print something you're printing it for X amount of people. In digital marketing, we can promote it to an unlimited amount of people depending on the platform you use. Your reach is just bigger than what you can achieve with traditional marketing. 

The benefits of digital marketing does not end there. You will be able to measure your success more than what you can achieve with traditional marketing. You can also rotate your efforts more easily in digital marketing, focusing on not just people that showed interest, but even those that bought from you previously. Digital marketing has become the go-to marketing technique of this century. 

There are different options and different types of digital marketing channels that you could choose from and let's just go through that list of digital marketing channels.

The first one is what I consider the king of them all and that's SEO. Yes, SEO is also a type of marketing, just like email marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing.

Let me start with SEO because increasing the quality and quantity of relevant organic traffic on the search engines including Google, is extremely important. Google has a large market share so you want your pages on your website to be found and clicked on organically. That means if somebody types in a keyword you want your relevant page to show up first on Google so that the visitor can click on that link. We know that millions of people worldwide search daily. If you're ranking for those relevant keywords you can imagine how much traffic you can get.

Now for search engine marketing you can bid on a keyword and appear at the top of the search results for that keyword. The company or business that bids the highest will appear first in the results. The problem with this method, especially for upcoming businesses, is the cash flow. Not every business have the financial capacity to bid against other online giants to appear in the top results, but making use of proper SEO techniques can help them to at least appear under the top 10 on Google for their keyword.

Next up is email marketing. We all send emails daily. We also receive many emails daily. Setting up a list on your site and prompting people to subscribe is an effective way to capture leads and get them to become customers. The beauty of email marketing is the ability to segment an audience so that you can get more personal with them, knowing what they want and then communicate to them effectively. The magic happens when your platform, such as Builderall, can show you your open rates and other important statistics of your clients' actions. 

Then we have affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is an effective way for digital marketers to create a sales force of people. Basically what you're doing is you're getting merchants to promote your products and services on their website to get commission. The cool thing about affiliate marketing is that you can pick and choose the affiliates or the publishers with whom you want to work with.

Now social media is another digital marketing type. Social media marketing has evolved over the years but the concepts remain the same. It is all about creating different types of content, depending on the platform you will use. The content you will have for Pinterest and Instagram will probably be more about dealing with photos, where Twitter is all about tweeting a certain amount of characters. It depends on the social media platform that drives the type of content you're gonna promote. We know social media can be effective because people use social media. I mean Facebook is one of the more popular platforms and if you want to get your product or service out there you could certainly pay to have an ad on Facebook or you could just post your content organically.

Content Marketing is all about distributing valuable content online. When we talk about content marketing you know we're talking about different types of assets. So it could be:

• simply texting in the form of a post 
• it could be a video
• it could be an infographic 
• it could be an image. 

There are lots of ways to create content these days, especially in digital marketing and the great thing about content marketing is writing content for a targeted audience. If you're trying to target an audience on Instagram then you know who your audience is and you know what type of content you're gonna post on. So, that is content marketing, let's talk about mobile marketing.

What is the difference between content marketing and mobile marketing? 

Mobile marketing is strictly on the mobile phone. It is not on a desktop, so mobile marketing is a strategy on its own that helps you promote your product or service to a targeted audience through a mobile device. It can be done through messaging such as text, WhatsApp, telegram and even apps.

As you can see there are multiple ways in succeeding with digital marketing. The key is making use of the right platform that will be able to offer you all the solutions in one place. We offers that. No plugins or difficult coding. All the tools you might ever need online in one platform.