5 Digital Marketing Tips That Brands Can Use to Drive Sales There is no right or wrong marketing technique, just ones that work well for your brand and ones that don't

The December-January period is one of the busiest times for e-commerce businesses and, with the end of the Christmas holiday campaigns, online brands are now looking to maximize their sales for the New Year festive season. But, with so many brands around, the question remains: How to have the best customer outreach strategies and what tools to employ? Here is a handy guide with five curated tips that advertisers can follow to optimize their digital marketing spending during the festive season.

Choose a smart mix of different marketing techniques

There is no right or wrong marketing technique, just ones that work well for your brand and ones that don't. This is why it is always prudent to opt for a healthy mix of different digital marketing techniques to create the maximum impact. Opting for marketing tools such as Google AdWords or Facebook Audience Insights, for instance, can help you reach out to the lucrative consumer base online or social media platforms to generate better leads and introduce more customization in your end-consumer outreach.

Another high-yield digital marketing strategy is to deploy affiliate campaigns, and recent numbers are proof that it can work wonders for your online sales during festive periods. As per the data from Admitad India, between September 28 and October 5, affiliate partners generated sales in excess of INR 8.5 crore for top online brands and e-commerce portals in India. So, if you're looking to maximize your sales, associate with top affiliate networks to manage your marketing campaigns. By leveraging multiple outreach channels such as price comparison, chat messengers, blogs/forums, coupons and cashback, among others, such affiliate associations allow you to reap the best rewards during festive periods.

A word of advice: set aside a dedicated marketing budget for affiliate marketing before you start devising your digital marketing strategy. This will incentivize publishers to promote your brand store/products and focus on pre-planning and audience capturing to book these inventories.

Invest in a mobile-led marketing strategy

India's ongoing digital transformation is one that is led largely by smartphones, which have emerged as the preferred devices to consume and access a wide range of content, services and information for the country's online audience. With smartphones expected to account for more than 76 per cent of the time that an average Indian spends in the online domain, brands have a unique marketing opportunity that is too big to miss.

This is why the brands must opt for performance marketing tools powered by mobile SDK integrations, which can help your brand or online store collect and track both data and events within your mobile app. Doing so provides deeper, higher-quality data about the channels that are driving the most traffic for your brand. Equipped with better insights about your digital marketing operations, you can then prioritize your marketing spends for the most optimum results during the festive sale season.

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Personalize the content for enhanced engagement

Content is king—nowhere does this adage hold truer than in the digital marketing space. It is one of the biggest differentiators for your online marketing strategies and can literally define how well your campaigns are received by the end-user.

This is why personalizing the content to suit the aspirations and requirements of different target audiences is important, even if you're essentially promoting the same product or services. You cannot expect the content message that was effective with new-age urban consumers under the age of 35—who is most likely to be a trendy digital native—to drive the same results with someone from a semi-urban or tier II or III geography. It is also essential to customize the content format to suit the device used for the best results.

Use analytics-driven marketing campaigns to create differentiation

Data is the oil of today's digital-first era and is fast becoming a key growth driver and differentiator for the digital marketing value chain. Leveraging data analytics to generate marketing insights can provide you with intelligent recommendations that can unlock better opportunities to sell, upsell or cross-sell. Data also makes attribution across traffic sources more accurate and can be further used to drive push notifications on mobile devices, whether through owned marketing initiatives or affiliate-driven campaigns. This allows you to reach the right customer at the right time, with the right message, for the best results.

Data-driven insights can also be coupled with advanced digital capabilities to augment purchase experiences. Take Sarafan, for instance, which is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that uses augmented reality or virtual reality to identify products featured in an online photograph and presents a price comparison across different online portals. This unique and interactive shopping experience improves customer engagement while also making the decision-making process easier and swifter to drive more sales.

Engage with customers through new-age affiliate marketing tools

As can be seen, affiliate marketing can deliver impressive results for your online business, especially during the festive season. However, managing the perfect affiliate marketing campaign requires you to handpick the most relevant tools and solutions. Integrating with browser extensions, for example, can help your online business seamlessly sign on publishers as affiliates, including bloggers and social media influencers. Similarly, by using deep-linking tools on messenger platforms, you can simplify the link generation process and generate accurate, functional affiliate links for publishers to use. This can enable better attribution and tracking while improving the quality of online traffic and leads generated, thus ensuring better sales conversion rates.

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