Tips, Trends, and Tutorials: How to Diversify Internet Marketing

As you (hopefully) know, Internet marketing is capable of driving businesses in either a positive or negative direction. It isn’t easy to juggle social media accounts, blogs, websites, and paid advertisements all at once. Those that succeed, however, understand how to diversify Internet marketing techniques that fit their businesses’ needs. Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about Web-marketing diversification and how it can help you wrangle in more business.

What Do You Mean by “Diversify?”

“Diversify,” in terms of marketing, refers to the act of separating out Web-based assets. This includes multimedia advertising, videos, Facebook posts, articles, blogs, testimonials, paid ads, and other strategies that companies use to increase their online presences. What the Internet says about a business is everything, though your goal should be to improve marketing success through notable results.

Page views, likes, shares, downloads, and email signups are one way to do this. You want to be able to track your campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t work.

Multimedia Marketing

Knowing how to diversify Internet marketing requires trial and error. For starters, you need to come to terms with the fact that you can always be doing more. Doing more, unfortunately, can also lead to a drop in quality marketing and act against your original goal.

By carefully spacing out newsfeed posts, blogs, and updates, you can better manage your publications. Timing, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. You need to diversify your marketing by posting images, short videos, product descriptions, and other multimedia (infographics, research articles, charts, etc.).

Your followers are not required to read your posts. More often than not, people get sick of the same old daily posts about coupons and a business’ product/service line. Throwing a few images and videos into the mix, however, can turn a few heads and keep your followers interested in your business.

Diversifying Content

What you post and say is also important. You need to keep your messaging fresh, informative, and entertaining at the same time. How, you may ask? Well…

• Query your customer base to learn what they want to know about your business
• Tap into current industry trends and create some commentary.
• Look for ways to tie your company into breaking news, entertainment, and other areas.
• Disregard business jargon and write for people, not robots.
• Integrate multimedia into your posts and content.
• Check back at previous posts to see how they fared in terms of likes and shares.

The goal is for people to notice your pictures/videos and click read more. Doing this isn’t easy, especially when everyone on the Internet is ADD-riddled and has little time to wade through a crummy article.

Another note about content: Make sure there are absolutely zero spelling and grammar mistakes. Mistakes make your company look bad and turn away readers.

Tying It All Together

The most difficult aspect of Web-based marketing is knotting everything together in a cohesive manner. Below is an example of how one company did this:

Business XYZ recently launched a new line of products. It’s the holidays, of course, and its marketing team is looking to promote its ecommerce services at the same time. What came next? The business created high quality imagery that uses the products, captured short videos, and wrote up articles that both promote and mention its new line. These include:

• Short Vine/Instagram videos
• An image post on Facebook with written descriptions
• Deals and coupon codes sent out on Twitter
• A blog post and press release outlining the company’s new ecommerce services that mention the new product
• Promoted customer feedback to increase reviews
• An emailed newsletter to loyal customers
• Website updates that fit the new platform and promote the product on the front page

This model, of course, can fit your business as well. The most challenging element of learning how to diversify Internet marketing is knowing which platforms work best.

Twitter, for example, is great for links, pictures, and quick messages. Utilize Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn for everything but save Instagram and Pinterest for entertaining, brand-promoted posts. Over time, you’ll figure out how to diversify Internet marketing to fit your needs.

Photo by: Arthur Cooper