• by Jennifer Warren , Columnist, July 2, 2018

Almost everyone is into digital marketing these days. Yet, as a matter of fact, most of the digital marketers feel their efforts are just slightly better than “meh.”  

With so many digital marketing platforms available to pontificate about your products and services, it has become all the more important for businesses to prioritize a select few to ensure better payoffs for their marketing campaigns.

Here, I walk you through four new digital marketing tactics that will not only give a push to your marketing campaigns but pump up your conversion rates as well. 

1. Leverage AI-Powered Platforms to Find Real Customers for your Online Ads 

As it turns out, the online ad world is marred by fake traffic. According to Statista.com, digital marketing could be incurring losses to the tune of 19 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 because of non-human traffic, or bots, in short, attacking your online ads. 

This is where AI-enabled platforms such as Audience.ai come as a saving grace. The platform helps you build customized and relevant audience base, for your online marketing campaigns, on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. This is done by leveraging online data sources and by predicting buyer’s social media behavior.

Even companies like Microsoft and Marketo are using private audience networking AI to help their clients target real, relevant, and not bot-driven traffic. 

2. Offer Native Shopping Experience on Social Media Platforms 

As per an experiment run by Hubspot in 2017, the Facebook audience was highly in favor of native video content over non-native content.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, even Instagram has launched Shoppable Posts feature to help users shop on the platform itself rather than direct the shoppers to the website link.  

So, websites should ensure to engage, particularly, those social media platforms that offer native experience to shoppers. 

3. Enable Image Search for Better Search Experience  

Through online image search users could easily find similar or same products. Users just need to upload the image to the search bar of a website to fetch relevant results. Even Pinterest allows image search on its platform. The visual search medium has come up with Lens, a visual search tool, that allows users to capture images of an item and then find about it online.      

What’s more, even Google has come up with Google Lens, a visual search engine tool that helps you identify landmarks, objects and so on via a camera app.    

As mobile commerce expands, eCommerce businesses will have to power their search feature with image search to help users visually search for product images online.

4. Take advantage of Vertical Video Marketing 

The video is the future of content marketing.  In fact, brands could add more dimensions to their video marketing venture with social video marketing and more. For this, marketers could milk platforms such as YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. However, the latest buzz is about vertical videos, which Instagram offers by the name of IGTV. It’s a vertical canvas video app that’s available in the form of a dedicated standalone app and also accessible within the Instagram app. Even Snapchat and Facebook are gearing up to offer similar vertical content formats. 

Wrapping Up

The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving and keeping up with it is not an easy job, specifically for small businesses. But don’t let that scare you from experimenting. Of all the marketing avenues available, digital marketing is still one of the most effective, efficient and economical ways for businesses to spread a good word about your business. 

So, no matter what, if you are able to accomplish the above-mentioned tactics you will be surely adding more power to your online campaigns, and in turn propel conversions, in the future.