Essential Digital Communication Tools for Your Company’s Success
5.00/5It is unthinkable to carry out your communication strategy without digital communication tools. Information consumption is constantly evolving: in 2022, 67% of the world population owns a mobile phone. 63% are connected to the Internet every day.
Using digital communication tools in a smart way is to ensure that you can reach a large portion of the world population.
Of course, things are not that simple. It is difficult for a company to make a place for itself on the Internet as the competition is so tough. Moreover, each person has his own online habits: you have to look for your target audience where they are.
This article presents the tools you can use for the digital communication of your company. For more details, you can consult our complete guide on digital communication.
Your Website
Your website is one of the most important tools for your business. If it may seem complicated to create a website from scratch when you don’t have computer skills, there are platforms that allow you to build a website without having to write a single line of code.
You will have to optimize the content of your website. But for that, you need to have thought about its form and content. Is it a simple showcase site, or do you plan to make sales? You will probably need to implement a marketplace if necessary.
Moreover, in order for your website to be well referenced, it will be necessary to regularly feed it with content: a “Blog” section can help you. Finally, it is important that the information about your brand is presented in a clear way.
Your potential customers must also be able to contact you via a contact form or a link to your social networks.
Contact an agency specialized in website creation to be accompanied in your project.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a good way to communicate information while personalizing it for your customers. They also help to improve your website traffic. We advise you to use a tool to automate the creation of your newsletters, like MailChimp for example.
Social Networks
These are other must-have channels for your digital strategy, but also in the daily lives of most of us. In 2018, 58.7% of the world population, or 4.65 billion people, used at least one social network.
The most popular social networks are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and LinkedIn. Each social network has its own preferred audience and its own way of working (preferred types of publications and interactions, ideal publication times, etc.). Good knowledge of your audience allows you to communicate on the right social networks.
Moreover, tools exist to facilitate the management of your social networks, such as Hootsuite for example. The latter allows you to schedule your publications and manage several social networks on the same interface.
Social networks are becoming more and more versatile. Originally, they were used to chatting with other users and publishing content. Now, it is possible to record live videos and sell products.
This means you can make your business visible in many ways, interact with your audience and target a specific segment of social network users.
Content Sharing Platforms
These platforms differ from social networks in that they focus on publishing specific content. Here are some examples:
- Video content platforms: YouTube in the lead, but also Vimeo or even Dailymotion. Investing in this kind of platform is essential because a majority of the world’s traffic comes from video consumption.
- Twitch, the live-streaming platform for video games, reaches other audiences. Some political figures have used it as part of their communication in 2020 such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Gabriel Attal in France or the Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Other stars for whom video games are not their business also use them, such as the tennis player Gaël Monfils or the footballer Neymar Jr.
- Podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The consumption of podcasts has been increasing rapidly over the last few years, and this allows you to address certain topics over long periods of time (more than 20 minutes), on a medium that generates high engagement rates.
COVID-19 Boosts Audio Consumption by 76.2%: 2021 Survey
Amongst the 900,000 podcasts created last year, Sortlist launched its very own, ‘Beyond Marketing’, in August of 2020. With only 300,000 new podcasts created in 2019, we decided to investigate this rapidly growing medium. We asked 500 CEOs, managers, and team leaders of small and medium businesses (SMBs) across Europe about their audio content use […]
Online Advertising
Today, there are many ways to advertise online. The oldest method is certainly display advertising, which uses inserts and banners that appear on the side of a website, or at the beginning, middle, or end of an article, not to mention the banners at the bottom of YouTube videos. It is measured in several ways:
- CPM (i.e. cost per thousand impressions),
- CPC (i.e. cost per click on the ad),
- CPA (i.e. cost per action).
The effectiveness of your display advertising campaign is measured in CTR (click through rate) or the number and type of actions actually taken after clicking on the ad. The higher the CTR, the more profitable your campaign will be. And this will be even more true if that click leads to a purchase.
It is also possible to create sponsored ads or boost your posts on social networks. This allows your company to get into the news feed of your audience. Facebook allows you to define a target audience with a lot of finesse, which allows you to make a targeted and relevant communication. As for your organic publications (not paid), knowing your community and your potential customers is the best way to succeed on social networks.
It is also possible to carry out in-stream advertising, which takes place around a video (pre-roll and post-roll) that you are watching or during it (mid-roll). It is charged in CPM or CPV (cost per view of at least 30 seconds of the ad, or its entirety if it is shorter). These kinds of ads can, of course, be passed after a certain time (5 seconds on Youtube for ads longer than 15 seconds), but their mandatory display makes them very effective.
Let’s also mention the ads on mobile applications, which allow supporting totally free applications.
Referencing Strategies
Finally, let’s talk about the two main search engine optimization strategies. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA). To learn more, we have written a more complete article on the subject.
SEO consists in positioning your company at the top of the search results on relevant keywords. To do this, you will have to produce quality content optimized for search engines. It is long and tedious work that requires knowing certain techniques. You can use SEO diagnostic agencies to make your life easier.
Paid search works in a similar way to online advertising: you pay for a sponsored ad at the top of the search results page. Generally, getting one of these ads is done through a bidding system, and depends on the competition around the keywords you are targeting.
In Conclusion
We have discussed many digital communication tools. Note that it is not necessary to invest in all of them. Each of these tools requires particular expertise that you can outsource to a digital consulting agency.
In any case, to see things more clearly, we advise you to establish a digital communication plan, which allows you to define your communication needs and objectives, as well as your digital communication action plan.
