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Top Digital Marketing Tips

Our new Digital Marketer, Gareth, has just joined us from down south. His brain is crammed with knowledge and ideas about SEO, adwords, keywords and content. Here he unloads a few of those ideas to help with everyone's digital marketing conundrums.

When developing your digital marketing campaign, it’s imperative that you define what your business objectives are and outline key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure its success. Defining your objectives and KPIs first, allows you to analyse the impact of previous campaigns and decide what to do differently this time round. Start by thinking about the Ws:

 

  • Who is your audience?

  • Where are they located?

  • What devices do they use?

  • What channels are they most active on?

  • What content do we have?

 

Once you’ve answered those questions, you can focus your mind on developing campaign content that is relevant to your prospective customers and meets your objectives.

Mobile Friendly (Responsive)

With mobile use continuing to grow, it’s essential to have a website that is responsive. Consumer behaviour has changed: customers are always on the move and looking at your site on mobile devices as they go. It’s therefore imperative to spend as much time and attention designing your website for mobile as for desktop. A responsive website will have a positive impact on conversions for your business.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

 

Understanding which search terms prospective customers use requires extensive research and a disciplined approach. But, once completed, this research ensures that comprehensive coverage of target search phrases is maximised. This exercise is worth the effort as it identifies opportunities to optimise your website content, delivering better results and more qualified traffic.

 

Google AdWords

SEO takes time to build equity and trust with Google. Paid advertising provides you with an opportunity to instantly put new products or services in front of prospective customers when they are searching online. An important benefit of paid advertising is that, when they click, you pay, so it focusses the mind firmly on whether these clicks translate into business. AdWords is also an excellent tool for identifying high performing keywords. You can then feed this information into other marketing activities to improve performance.

Content

It’s no secret that, since Google bought YouTube, there has been a significant increase in the importance of optimising your video content to enhance your website's search ranking. As consumers demand video in search results, search engines will continue to increase the ranking factor of video content so your website will boost page rank. It’s also important to label the video with the correct title, descriptions and tags so that search engines understand the relevance of your video in search queries. Backlink from your YouTube video to your website and don’t forget to make sure your video can be easily shared on social media channels.

 

Call to Actions

 

Websites, email marketing, social media and all other forms of digital marketing require strong call to actions in order to deliver successful campaigns. It’s essential to consider three important factors when developing a strong call to action:

 

  1. Placement: Place CTAs strategically to receive maximum attention. Having multiple CTAs on a page is not an issue unless they are competing with each other. Have CTAs on every page of your website, as it gives customers an opportunity to action something, whether that’s to: make an enquiry; download information; register; read a related article; or even share on social media.

  2. Design: CTAs must be recognised as something a customer needs to click on, so it’s best to separate your CTAs from the main body of text, thereby maximising awareness of that action. Don’t be afraid to test and review different designs, colours and words to ensure you get the maximum efficiency from your CTA.

  3. Message: Make your CTA an obvious action so that your customer understands what will happen if they click your CTA button. CTAs aren’t meant to create surprises so use relevant action words such as: Order, Subscribe, Buy, Discover, Download, etc.

 

Social Media

 

An excellent channel to engage with existing customers, make introductions to prospective customers and promote what your company offers, giving you an opportunity to build your brand. As users of social media receive multiple messages everyday, it’s important to develop content that adds value. When defining your social media strategy remember that users expect great content - relevant and informative copy, captivating and engaging designs. Always include that all important CTA: what action do you want your follower to perform?

 

Email Marketing

 

Email marketing is an effective and cost efficient channel to keep customers informed of new products and services, offers and general news. It consistently proves to drive conversions. When developing your email marketing strategy, it’s important to deliver a design that is consistent with the rest of your company branding. Write intriguing subject lines, persuasive copy and include clear call to actions to ensure you maximise the results. The majority of email marketing providers allow you to test and it’s worth using this functionality. Test which subject line delivered a better open rate; test different layouts and images; test which CTA delivered more click throughs; test the best time or day of the week to send the email... the opportunities are endless.

 

E-Commerce

 

Your website is likely to have many goals, from sign up forms, downloads, contact forms or, the bread and butter: securing transactions. Invest time and resources to analyse your existing user behaviour so that you can develop designs that will optimise your website conversion rate. It’s important to remember three key points:

 

  1. Improving your conversion rate increases your revenue

  2. Converting more existing visitors is cheaper than going out to find new customers

  3. Designing a website that people love and find easy to use will keep them coming back

 

Analytics

 

The greatest feature about Google Analytics (GA) is that it’s free! GA can show user analysis that is paramount to updating your website design, but it’s also an essential tool to refer to when developing digital marketing campaigns. Keeping an eye on campaigns whilst they are are live is important so you can change tactics if required and, of course, do this again when a campaign is finished, so you can analyse overall performance. Digital marketing campaigns are highly measurable so use analytics to understand how you acquired traffic, what content engaged customers, how your conversion rate performed and who your audience is - to name only a few of the findings you can take away into your next campaign.

If you'd like Gareth's help with any of the above say hello at gareth@orphans.co.uk.

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