6 Popular Digital Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Design Business

Marketing your business is vital for growth, but it’s difficult to understand the industry and its best techniques because it keeps evolving. What worked a few years ago might not anymore, and new trends are popping up all of the time.

We’ve explained just a few of the most common digital marketing techniques below to help you understand what your law firm SEO agency will be doing or to see what options you may need to consider alongside them.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization or SEO for short is all about increasing your website’s position in search results without paying for any ad slots. A massive piece of SEO is keywords, or important words relevant to your website and its content. For example, if you sell lawnmowers then you may want to improve your website’s ranking for when a person’s search contains the words “lawnmower,” “mower,” “yard care” or “lawn care.”

You want your website to be as close to the top of the results page as possible because you’ll get the most traffic that way and even if some people who perform a related search don’t click on your site, seeing it will keep you and your brand in the back of their minds. This makes them more likely to purchase your products over your competitors due to familiarity.

There are plenty of ways to improve your SEO, from providing high-quality content that’s relevant to your niche to more technical stuff like updating title tags.

Pay-Per-Click

Sometimes when you search for a specific item you’ll see ads at the top of your search results. These are pay-per-click (typically shortened to PPC) ads.

They only appear when certain keywords are in a search and the site then has to pay the publisher, usually a search engine, a certain amount every time their link is clicked on from this ad slot. This type of advertising tends to be pretty good for websites because they only pay when their ad is successful and it works for search engines because it gives them the money they need to operate alongside prestige.

PPC strategies can vary based on the payment model used by the preferred publisher. Flat-rate models are almost always a good choice because you’ll know up-front how much each click will cost alongside your ad’s position.

Bid-based models can be a little bit harder to predict as you not only need to outbid other advertisers but also need to reach a certain level of quality to guarantee the best ad slots. Keep in mind that site quality is typically more important than the money offered as the systems that monitor the auctions are automated.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is pretty simple: a brand pays for a certain creator to talk about or review their products and then puts a deadline for when the post has to be, well, posted.

Content creators like YouTubers are trusted by many people for a variety of complicated reasons, so sponsors tend to benefit greatly from these collaborations. If you’re looking to up your marketing game, consider contacting a content creator in a similar niche to your own and offering them a sponsorship; you’ll likely see great benefits from it.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has become a staple in the lives of millions of people worldwide, and this has resulted in the explosion of social media marketing.

You may even be familiar with some of these campaigns from X/Twitter thanks to one fast food restaurant: Wendy’s. Wendy’s blew up on social media because when other brands were being very safe in their content, Wendy’s was being sassy and sarcastic. They would make fun of other restaurants and even some other users who were clearly egging on the sass.

Many brands started copying this method of interactions, but you definitely don’t have to. You can post surveys on X, silly update posts on Facebook or even publish fun videos on YouTube and encourage people to interact with you both by asking for feedback and by responding directly to that feedback. Personalization is the name of the marketing game right now, and few strategies are as able to be as personal as social media marketing strategies.

Content Marketing

A newer marketing trend that you may need to get on board with is content marketing which requires your website to provide important industry-related information. A good example of what this means is the Betty Crocker website.

They sell baking and cooking mixes as well as kitchen tools, but you’d have little reason to visit the site very often if this was all it had to offer. They knew this and decided to post recipes on their website. This built trust and brand recognition over the years and now Betty Crocker is a staple in countless households. They still stand out today among the many recipe-focused sites as a go-to for many people because their recipes are super easy and their mixes are high-quality and easy to find in any store.

Home Depot is another example as they not only sell building materials and tools but also offer repair information on their website. You can do something similar even if recipes or how-to articles are off the table; offer information about your industry or even some of the products you offer and watch your credibility and profits rise.

Email Marketing

Email marketing can be effective, but it requires you to perfect a pretty tricky balancing act. On top of needing to make sure your email content reaches the right audience, you also need to personalize it just the right amount to keep customer interest without increasing costs and not send out too many emails.

If you send out too many emails, you’ll have people unsubscribing from your list and will gain a reputation for being annoying, but sending out too few risks people forgetting about you. Your emails need to be personalized but if you overdo it then your marketing costs will be through the roof and may be regarded as creepy.

And, of course, sending out emails to uninterested parties will see your marketing budget wasted as your emails are immediately deleted or sent to the spam inbox. Succeeding at this balancing act will bring some of the highest rewards possible from marketing strategies, though, so if you have a strong marketing agency behind you, go for it.