With ever-evolving marketing trends shaping how South Africans consume and do business, it helps to keep an eye on what’s working for your business, and what isn’t. With the right information, you can make a well-timed decision to beef up on digital marketing tools, reach your audiences more effectively, or automate your services.

Being digitally relevant is where it’s at. No matter the size or scope of your business, this is the space that you need to plug maximum energy into. Digital marketing helps you stay top of mind with your existing customers and attract new ones. But as the market evolves, your marketing strategy will also need a refresh. Here’s why your business would benefit from more robust digital marketing.

1. Digital marketing helps to streamline and automate processes

Yes, this may not be a new idea, but how efficiently are you automating your services? Time is always at a premium, so if you can eliminate, streamline or automate a business process and win back some capacity, that’s always first prize. Your bouquet of business services should consider:

• Social media marketing tools that allow you to schedule content and responses.
• Bulk SMS and email marketing tools, allowing you to schedule and send out mass communication at a lower cost.
• Project management tools that help you to allocate tasks and monitor workstreams.

2. You get to build your business reputation and create buzz

With digital and social media marketing, businesses are able to create a trackable digital footprint and presence that continues to speak to audiences, long after they’ve made a purchase, or to entice new customers to your brand. People will remember you for memorable content that you post to your channels, a quick response to a query or even personalised emails and communications.

3. Digital listings highlight your business

Increased and optimised digital communication touchpoints help people to remember your business and what it offers. In addition to WhatsApp, social media channels, YouTube and customer care lines, you can also invest in a Telkom Yep! digital listing. If you are listed accurately online, your web page ranks well on search engines. When this happens, your page gains authority and is served to audiences who are actively searching for your products and services.

4. You get to be more creative and have the opportunity to stand out

Let’s go deeper. What other tools and methodology can you make use of to highlight your business using digital marketing services? You can invest in reputation management and social listening tools that allow you to assess the sentiment of people who are responding to your ads and engaging with your content. More than monitoring the digital experience, you also have the opportunity to curate your customers' experience. This is where you can get creative and experiment with different types of advertising like native content and video marketing to appeal to people with content-led marketing, rather than hard advertising. 

5. The opportunity for greater insights

Time spent studying your audience is never wasted. By ramping up your digital marketing efforts, you get to deepen and intensify that knowledge by understanding user behaviour. You can get feedback and insights actively through strategic and well-planned surveys and polls. You can also invest in the right tools that will allow you to monitor click-through rates to your web pages, find out how much time a user is spending on a page through heat maps and analyse their website user behaviour and metrics.

6.  Remaining current, relevant and top of mind when your audience is ready to purchase

Marketing and building your brand identity is a year-round effort, not only ahead of prominent sales seasons. This is where social media and content marketing intersect to ensure that you drip-feed audiences messaging about your brand all year around, so that you remain relevant, on trend and, most of all, the first choice for your  potential customer when they are ready to purchase.