It doesn’t matter if you’ve created digital marketing campaigns since Facebook started or if you’re getting ready to send your first tweet, everyone can use a refresher on the basics.
In this guide, we’re going to cover all the information you need to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts: time spent on page, marketing funnels, social media contests, and more.
To make things easy, we’ve broken topics up into different sections, with links to each below. Feel free to click around to whatever topic interests you most!
You can have the best idea, product, or service, but if you cannot market and communicate why it matters to your audience, then your customer acquisition will suffer. Building an effective marketing strategy can feel a little overwhelming. With these steps, you can create a comprehensive and successful marketing strategy:
There is much more to a marketing strategy than these steps, but they provide the necessary groundwork to create a sound marketing strategy. Use these pointers to get your journey started.
Oversights in your marketing strategy are detrimental to your business, which is why it’s so important to identify any mistakes you might be making and address them head-on.
It’s easy to get anxious after implementing a new campaign or digital marketing effort, so be patient and remember that results don’t come overnight.
If you’re not considering mobile optimization for all aspects of your brand online, you risk missing out on the chance to connect with an enormous segment of your audience.
It’s common for businesses to think that they know their target audience, when they’re actually addressing the wrong crowd. Always keep your buyer personas and target audience in mind when creating your marketing strategy.
With a little time and effort, these marketing mistakes are all fixable. If you catch your business making them, be sure to stop and address them before moving forward.
In order to track the steps someone takes on your website before they complete a desired action, you need to establish a marketing funnel. A marketing funnel does exactly that: describes the steps that a website visitor must take before they reach a conversion.
Here’s an example of a simple marketing funnel we use at digitalJ2:
This simple marketing funnel allows us to easily track the percentage of visitors who go through each step and reach the desired conversion. A marketing funnel for your site can help you identify roadblocks and optimize your process accordingly.
You’ll have a difficult time building effective marketing campaigns if you don’t have a grasp on your marketing channel relationships and how channels interact with each other.
The goal for your business is to master multi-channel marketing relationships across the four stages of the buyer’s journey: attract, convert, close, and delight.
By connecting channels such as paid advertisement and blog content in the attract stage to pop-up ads and landing pages in the convert stage, you can close leads into customers and drive your revenue up. Understanding the synergy between these stages and the channels they contain is essential for continued success.
Having a clear target audience (or specific group of people that your business wants to reach with your marketing efforts) in mind is essential for any successful strategy. Here are some ways to identify your target audience.
Looking at who already uses your products or services can help you figure out who needs them most. Your current base of customers can be instrumental in identifying a target audience.
Analytics are a useful method for finding out how many people are interacting with your website and your social media accounts, as well as informing on demographics. Buffer’s guide for social media analytics tools can teach you more about how to use social media to develop a target audience.
While you want to appeal to as many potential clients as possible, your target audience cannot include everyone on the internet. Understanding who doesn’t fit in your audience is important for creating focused and specialized marketing efforts.
Your target audience informs the rest of your marketing strategy, so make sure to determine your focus group with care.
Effective differentiation is one of the main challenges in today’s market since there are new online companies and solutions popping up daily. If you want to stand out from your competition, you should:
Your business can build a strong and recognizable brand if it embraces these tips. Even if you’ve already implemented some of these qualities, remain consistent for continued success.
People often take just 15 seconds when visiting your website to decide if they’re going to stay or not, which is why it's so important to grab a visitor’s attention and keep it. You can do just that by reducing your site’s bounce and exit rates.
There are three key elements that determine how long visitors spend on your site: design, content, and experience.
If you want to keep visitors on your site, then having an engaging and high-quality design is very important. To do this, ensure that your page layouts are clear and not cluttered, as well as making sure that they’re optimized for mobile devices.
Regardless of other elements that make a site successful, most visitors are there for good content. Great content includes videos, client testimonials, case studies, and links to other content pieces (such as blogs).
Website design and content both contribute to the user experience, but you should also consider factors such as pop-up ads and CTAs (call-to-action), both of which can help or hinder a visitor’s enjoyment.
The longer a visitor spends on your website, the more likely they are to buy in and take a desired action. Make sure to give them plenty of reasons to stick around.
Landing pages are an essential step in any marketing strategy. If you want to create a page that pushes visitors to convert and potentially become customers, these factors are crucial to consider:
By focusing on these factors, your landing pages will compel visitors to take your desired actions, resulting in lead conversions.
If you’re seeing declining website traffic, it’s critical that you don’t just sit back and expect it to work itself out. Ultimately, it could mean business losses and lower revenue.
Here are a few steps you should take if you notice a decline in your site traffic:
Address these issue sources to gain a clearer understanding of what steps you need to take in order to start increasing your website traffic. Make sure to optimize based on the feedback you receive, and you’ll be back on Google’s first results page in no time.
Over the last decade, the shift to a more digital-focused world has caused an increase in your advertising options. Let’s take a look at the two most successful types of digital ad campaigns.
There are six key social media channels for advertising: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Social advertising is effective due to the number of people currently using social media platforms. This type of ad comes in a variety of forms and targets certain user segments based on criteria defined by your business.
Google ads offer an opportunity to promote your brand where your prospects already are. There are three types of PPC ads: search ads, display ads, and remarketing ads. These ad types engage users in different ways and help you reach a wider audience.
These are just a few different types of ad campaigns, but they’re a great place to get your business started if you’re rolling out your first campaign.
As a business, your social media presence should be fine-tuned to encourage growth and engagement. Let’s look at some of the things you should be doing with your social media accounts.
Alternatively, you should avoid the following practices:
Finding a healthy balance between your posts and overall social media presence will help your followers meaningfully engage with your brand. You should establish social media best practices for your business if you intend to grow.
There is no agreed-upon definition of “audience engagement,” but your business should still always encourage users to interact with your brand on social platforms.
You should start by deciding what your business’s goals are and what engagement metrics you’ll measure during the process. From there, focus on what social media platforms your audience uses the most. A common mistake here is to overload all platforms, which is ineffective and time-consuming.
Once you’ve determined one or two platforms to use, you need to concentrate on creating or sharing valuable, topical, and relevant content. When your audience begins to respond to that content, be sure to interact with them and respond.
These are just a few of the first steps you can take to drive up your social media engagement and delight your customers.
Social media contests can grow your following, increase user engagement, and make customers feel valued, which means there’s almost no reason not to do them! Here are the steps you need to take to make your contests effective and worthwhile.
Social media contests help you increase brand awareness, engagement, and generate leads for your business, all through the simple act of giving.
Facebook ads allow you to target a specific audience and convert them using a variety of methods, such as liking your business’s page, filling out a form, or going to a landing page and providing their information. Here are some ways you can enhance your ads and see better results.
You can target your Facebook ads to the point where you will only reach people who like specific pages. Use this to your advantage! Layering your targeting efforts is a great option when you have a small budget or a particular niche of people you want to reach.
Try using multiple ad sets to test different ads (as well as targeting). For example, one ad set will target the persona your client provides, while another targets a lookalike audience. Breaking your campaign into multiple ad sets gives you the chance to gain more insight into your audience.
Once you decide on your end goal, target audience, and ad type, use tips like these to create effective Facebook ads that reach the right people and drive up conversions.
Webinars are a powerful tool for businesses, giving companies the means to promote their products while also establishing their credibility. If you think webinars would benefit your business, here are some tips for making them effective.
Start by clearly defining your topic. This will grab people’s attention and draw a crowd of interested attendees. Next, find the day and time of day to hold the webinar. According to BigMarker, the best days for webinars are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m.
Once you’ve decided on a topic and date, you need to find the right platform and tools to use. Software like Canva, Piktochart, Click Meeting, and Slide Dog can help you hold a killer webinar. Finally, with your platform decided, make sure you come prepared with key takeaways and talking points to prepare yourself for any questions or concerns your audience might have.
It might sound counterintuitive, but businesses need to create a habit of responding to negative reviews left about them. Here’s how you can handle these reviews in a respectful and constructive way:
Addressing negative reviews is a great way to build faith in your brand and make your customers feel valued.
If you’ve converted very few leads, even after spending a lot of money on your campaigns, it’s time to focus on lowering your cost per lead (CPL).
Your brand’s buyer personas should fuel your entire digital marketing strategy. Fully understanding their pain points, demographics, typical online behaviors, and preferences is key to targeting, attracting, and converting them into customers.
A/B testing saves you from investing your money in an ad that isn’t going to be profitable by providing you with the insight that one variant is more appealing to your audience than the other.
If you’re trying to decrease your CPL, it’s important to make sure your audience doesn’t see one of your ads too often. If your audience starts to experience ad fatigue, your whole campaign can be ruined.
It’s vital to the health of your campaigns that you pay close attention to any KPI movement, good or bad. You should make changes to your tactics based on your observations before it’s too late.
By following these steps, you can optimize ad campaigns and reduce spending on your efforts.
No matter how long your business has been online, everyone can benefit from a refresher on the fundamentals of digital marketing. The digital world is ever-changing, which presents constant innovation and exciting opportunities for development.
Whether your business is just starting its first social media page or you’ve been running social media contests for years, assessing the foundation of your marketing efforts can help you remain relevant in the digital world.
With this guide, you can address everything from target audiences to landing pages, and everything in between. Be sure to also use the resources linked throughout to better understand these topics and enhance your digital marketing efforts. If you do, you’ll be sure to keep your business on top of their marketing game.