You have a blog or a website your promoting and you want to make some real increases in traffic and engagement. If you only have 30 minutes a day to spend on digital marketing what should you do? These 3 areas I believe will be the best bang for your buck. It’s easy for marketers to just say “engage your customer”, “optimize” and build a “conversion strategy”. But it always seems to get lost in the mix of digital strategies. Six months after the digital strategy was developed, are marketers still following the plan? Or are they just trying to get something live. We’ve all been there. So go back to the basics. Look at the content you have developed or already have in your arsenal and then – Fine Tune!
1. Are your pages optimized for conversions
- What do you want visitors to do when they land on your site? Your entire content strategy should be built with this question in mind. Once you know the action you want users to do then you can find the tools for initiating those actions. You have a Landing Page – right?
- Capture a first name and an email. Thats all you need to extend the conversation. Then leverage affordable services like MailChimp or Constant Contact for drip campaigns.
- Use free tools like Google Analytics to monitor visitor’s paths to the website and once they are on it, find opportunities to create a more user-friendly experience.
- Optimize forms on your site to build a stronger inbound lead funnel. If the user has an easy form to fill out they will complete it. Measure what your content is worth agains the amount of info you are asking them to divulge.
2. Optimize Your SEO
SEO optimization might be the single best area you can focus on. The more you optimize, the more of your audience you reach. And not the masses, but the people who are your customers. We’re spear fishing here, not throwing out a net. Know your audience, where they live and go fishing.
The SEO specialist on your team should ensure your content is optimized with focus keywords, Google-friendly HTML formatting, and a URL structure that correlates with your product keywords. Use hyphens, not underscore. No caps in the url. Optimize images with alt tags. These are all things your SEO speialist (or you) should be focusing on when publishing.
The best way to track and measure SEO is predominately held in Google Analytics. But there are some easy tests you should be performing such as:
- A/B testing for your home page and messaging
- Test different subject lines and calls to action to see what approach attracts the most clicks
- Test different creative to see what provides better engagement
- Google analytics:
- Traffic – track the volume of traffic and break it down into categories like organic, paid, and referral
- Demographics – are you attracting the right audience – look at gender, age and location
- Devices – what is your audience viewing your site on. Is it mobile? is your site optimized for mobile?
3. Engage with your followers
Social media is a way for your startup to interact with current and future customers. Leverage your followers and make them feel like valuable members of your brand. Find out which social platforms your customers are on and build out a content schedule – be frequent and consistent with your message. As you can imagine the big 6 are FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. But it totally depends on your audience.
Lastly, nothing you try is a failure. Every attempt is a learning so do not hide from failures. Strategically approach these as opportunities to win over customers with good customer service and express your brand’s long-term vision as frequently as possible.
“Email is still the number one method of engagement”
- The total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016. (Radicati Group)
- It’s projected that in 2014, 191.4 billion emails will be sent and received each day with about 108 billion of those being from the business sector. (Radicati Group)
- 78% of marketing emails are sent to a personal email account. (ChoozOn)
If you have a little money this may be for you.
- Facebook is the world: Facebook is steadily becoming a pay-to-play platform, and if you want to see any engagement you will need to invest into promoting your Facebook posts.
- Sponsored tweets: While Twitter still provides a good amount of organic engagement, the microblogging platform also has paid solutions for businesses, with one being sponsored tweet. By providing a sponsored tweet, higher engagement will most likely occur with followers (and others).
- LinkedIn’s premium services: LinkedIn is a inexpensive way to increase your connections and promote your services in a professional manor. They collect a lot of data and can target audiences extremely well.