There is no doubt that it would require a near spiritual experience for many marketers to even consider the concept of deleting their Facebook account.
However, I am confident that many business and brand owners are wasting their time (one of their most scarce resources) investing in frequent Facebook and other social media contributions.
As with 100% of marketing activities, the key is to understand the key pillars of your marketing strategy before you proceed to invest in marketing execution tools.
This is the case irrespective of whether your planned marketing activities include social media tools such as Facebook or Twitter, mass advertising tools such as television or radio or sales promotions tools such as personal selling or sampling and demonstration exercises.
When I say key pillars of your marketing strategy I am referring to the most important strategic marketing planning and decision-making areas such as:
- Who is your primary target market?
- What are the most important needs and desires of your primary target market?
- What is your desired brand positioning?
- Where does your primary target market turn to when they need to access or purchase your product or service?
- What media and communications does your primary target market consume?
Marketing decision areas such as the above are typically addressed as part of the process of completing your marketing plan.
Only when you have clear answers to the above questions will you be able to optimise your selection and execution of marketing tools and activities.
5 Digital Marketing Quick Wins
If you have addressed the above strategic marketing planning and decision-making areas then the following suggestions may provide you with some digital marketing quick wins.
The relevance of the suggestions below will vary depending on:
- Whether you are targeting consumers or if you are a business-to-business marketer
- Your primary target customers media consumption and how they search for information regarding your product or service area
- How target customers use your product or service (i.e. their usage occasion)
- Their actual decision-making process and whether it is a very simple and possibly impulse purchase (i.e. spending less money and making a minor decision) versus a high-involvement, complex process (i.e. making a big decision and spending a lot of money)
- A variety of other factors including what digital marketing initiatives you have already implemented.
- Complete your keyword and key phrase research process.
- Sounds basic, but many people are out there investing in all sorts of digital marketing activities without having clearly defined the keywords and key phrases that are strategically the highest priority on which to focus.
- This is not just about finding the highest profile key words and phrases but also analyzing your competitors and your existing website usage to find the most cost-effective overall balance between the most highly searched for terms and the keywords and phrases for which you have higher probability of success in terms of being ranked by Google.
- A focused approach to keywords will serve to assist to generate more traffic to your website of your primary target market. Getting your keywords and key phrases right can also help you increase sales conversion rates by helping you optimise the structure and layout of your site and also the development of more effective call-to-action messages.
- Optimise your written digital and online content for Key Words and Key Phrases.
- This means reviewing and updating your written website content, blog posts, social media contributions and all other digital marketing activities to include the keywords and phrases that you have found to be the highest priority.
- This will involve you reviewing all content on your existing website and updating it to include your high priority keywords and key phrases
- You will also benefit from developing a system for integrating these key words and key phrases into all new digital and online content.
- Consider adding a Heat Map to your website so that you can review where your visitors spend the most time, where they click and what call-to-action messages are most effective.
- Optimising your written digital and online content for key words and phrases will not only increase traffic to your website but will also assist in increasing sales conversions as the strategic use of such key words and phrases will help guide your customers through their research and decision-making journey.
- Complete a technical audit of your existing website.
- Again, sounds basic but the objective is to both increase traffic to your website and increase sales conversion rates.
- A key objective is to ensure there are no elements that are unnecessarily reducing your search engine rankings. For example, in many websites large graphics slow down the speed of loading which can negatively impact on your Google ranking.
- Another key objective of completing a technical audit of your website is to ensure that any of the numerous basic technical issues that can go wrong with your website are remedied. For example, basic things such as making sure all relevant software updates are completed, eliminating or at least minimizing any security vulnerabilities, and identifying and eliminating any of the usual problems caused by human error either during the website development or continual updating process such as broken contact forms, accidently deleted written content, blank pages etc.
- Analyse your customer sales pathways and call-to-action messages
- This step involves analysing your primary target market and considering the journey they take from identifying their need, through to searching for a solution, finding your business, brand or website and then moving through their decision-making process to the point where they make a purchase decision.
- It is often useful to consider sales funnel concepts to identify the different information needs and effectiveness of specific call-to-action messages as customers progress from top of funnel stages through to bottom of funnel stages.
- Defining the most likely customer sales pathways and specific call-to-action messages that work best at the different stages of the sales funnel is a critical step in generating increased telephone or email enquiries, downloads and sign-ups to newsletters etc., bricks and mortar store visits or appointments and ultimately converted sales.
- Optimise your email marketing and even consider emojis!
- Consider your subject line and deployment times carefully. Your own experience will tell you that this is a critical factor when rapidly choosing to open or delete an email. Implement A/B Split Testing to evaluate variations of email subject lines and email deployment times. This will help you select the most engaging email subject lines and ensure that you optimise the time of dispatch of your email.
- You can even consider using emojis in your subject line (of course, this is not for everyone and will definitely depend on who your primary target market is and your desired brand positioning).
- Segment and Personalise your email deployment. The basic step of addressing emails to your recipients name will help engage the recipient and gives you the best chance of your email being read. Segmenting your email list will assist in generating increased open rates and also increased click-through rates.
- Develop a custom responsive email template. This will ensure your emails are branded, are more eye-catching and have better cut-through. A customer email template is likely to help you better convey your desired brand positioning and thus increase readership and click through rates.
- Use Google Analytics to track what links your readers click on. This provides you with valuable information regarding what content is of most interest to your readers, which call-to-action messages are most effective and also may provide a source of fresh sales and prospect information.
The list of digital marketing initiatives that can serve to increase traffic to your website or business is virtually endless.
However, it is critical to stop and consider your marketing strategy carefully before ploughing ahead and investing your scarce resources to make sure the specific digital marketing tool or initiative you select will help you:
- Build your brand
- Increase sales traffic and ultimate sales conversions
- Provide an acceptable return on your investment of both time and money
I hope some of the above suggestions have provided you with food for thought and ideas to assist you in growing your business.
Please phone or email me if you would like more information or some help with any of the above or any other aspect of your sales and marketing requirements.
