Digital marketing essentials for 2021

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Since South African businesses experienced challenges during the national lockdown, brands need to leverage digital marketing tools to make their businesses more visible in order to be profitable. Especially after South African businesses experienced lockdown, this has proven to be profitable. I think now 90% of businesses understand the importance of having an online presence, but might not understand the essential online marketing tools they need to use to attract clients and customers in 2021.

How to market your business online for free

By Gugulethu Rajuili 4 May 2021

Four digital marketing strategies:

1. Featured snippetsFeatured snippets are the search results that appear above Google's organic results and below purchase advertisements. Including featured snippets in your marketing strategy optimises your engine. 
2. User-generated contentThis is any form of content that is produced and distributed by users based on their experiences, views or reactions. This is important to enhance two-way communication with your audience. An example of user generated content is user reviews on Google. When you search for a company on Google, results come up with reviews and star-rated by the users. The more reviews and more stars a company gets from users, the more their Searching Engine scoring grows - which places a brand on top of results for search engines. 
   
   
3. Video marketingIn South Africa, 2GB of data costs around R150 to R180. This means that consumers are now able to watch video content between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. As a result, video marketing has become an effective and affordable tool to create simple videos to reach consumers easily. 
4. Digital adsThere are multiple social media platforms which offer the opportunity to advertise and increase the reach of a business. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all offer different means of advertising which reach a range of new customers, companies, and professionals. Investing in digital ads means investing in customer reach and business visibility. 

Digital marketing has become a necessity since the start of the pandemic in South Africa. Due to the nature of the society we currently live in, digital sees a lot more activity and presents a major opportunity for businesses to become highly visible and successful, as long as they invest appropriately.