19 Oct Digital Marketing – Where to Start
When it comes to a topic as wide as digital marketing, it can be hard to know where to start. There are so many options, each with different experts telling you that their way is the best way to generate online results in your business.
The purpose of this article is to help provide some clarity and help you break through the blur in the world that is ‘digital marketing’..
Here’s my best advice moving forward: whenever you engage in a digital marketing campaign, make your website the starting point. Everything else you do, whether on social media or search engines, should ultimately link back to your site.
Taking this approach can transform how you view your digital marketing. It’s no longer a disjointed set of moving pieces, but a single, concerted effort with a central objective. Every tool you use is simply a funnel to draw visitors to your site and generate leads or make sales.
With this in mind, the best thing you can do as a business owner is to optimise your website for conversions. You want to make it easy for users to move from interacting with your marketing to buying your products and services.
But where should you start? Let’s take a look.
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Optimise Your Homepage By Showcasing Your Top Products And Services
Many visitors will arrive on your site’s homepage the first time they interact with your business. It makes sense, therefore, to use this digital real estate to showcase your best-performing or most-requested products and services.
Why? The answer is simple: as many as 86 per cent of website visitors want to see information about a company’s products and services on the homepage.
In other words, what you sell shouldn’t be hard to find!
Don’t think of your homepage as a menu, organising all your site’s pages. Instead, think of it as a guide, directing users to relevant parts of your site. The goal should be to move people deeper into your site and closer to conversion.
Make Your Website Fast-Loading
The next step is to make your site fast Research shows that 83 per cent of users expect pages to load in three seconds or less. Furthermore, Google’s new “Page Experience” standards require that pages finish loading elements within 2.5 seconds. Longer than that could hurt page ranking.
Ensure Your Website Is Mobile Responsive
Did you know that 2 out of every 3 minutes spent online is on a mobile device? It is critical, therefore, to make your website mobile responsive. Interfaces should reflect the needs of mobile users. Consider your menus, buttons and checkout experience.
Make Your Call To Action More Strategic
Most businesses understand the importance of a good call to action. But many never think about them strategically – that is, in terms of the customer journey.
When designing calls to action, consider the end goal. Are you looking for sales or leads?
Ideally, you want to guide customers from where they are now to where you’d like them to be in the future. Hence, your CTAs need to reflect the next logical step in the sales process, not just bombard customers with demands that they hand over their money.
Watch Your Analytics
Next, you want to track your analytics. If you’re just starting on your digital marketing journey, don’t jump in at the deep end. Instead, pick and choose a couple of critical metrics and track how they perform.
If you make a change to your site, use tools to A/B test it. See which version of a page performs better and gets the most clicks and conversions.
Eventually, you’ll hit on formulas that deliver high levels of engagement and interaction with your brand.
Set Up Remarketing
If you’re using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, make sure that you set up both Facebook ads and Google ads for remarketing and retargeting.
Remarketing works by displaying image ads on third-party sites in the advertising network. It allows you to continue targeting the traffic you’re already getting to encourage them to return to your site. Remember, only around 2 per cent of sales come from direct conversion. More than 80 per cent come after at least five contacts with your brand.
Forward Ad Clicks To Your Sales Funnels
Remember this Golden Rule: Never forward users from your paid ads to your website’s homepage. Instead, send users where ‘they’ want to go. Connect your ads to your top services and products by creating direct links. From there, users should be no more than once click from where ‘you’ want them to go (the conversion).
Rotate Your Ads
Never let your ads get stale. Why? Because, almost always, there’s a more effective format you can use. Try new images and new text every month – and test them to see how they perform.
Google lets you rotate ads within a campaign and track the performance of each of them. You can even tell Google Ads to “rotate ads indefinitely” which allows you to separate low-performing ads from high-performing ads.
Pimp Your Social Media Profiles
Remember, your social media profiles are a funnel for customers you can then forward to your website. Getting it right, therefore, can boost website traffic.
Pimp your social media profile by:
- Making them look great
- Regularly adding new content
- Using the same profile image across all platforms
- Making your handles more consistent
- Untagging yourself from posts that might show your firm in a negative light
- Using keywords that make you more discoverable in search
- Filling in every field (such as what your brand does)
- Making the words you use entertaining, not boring!
Work On Your SEO
The foundation of great SEO is quality content. Articles more than 3,000 words get three times more traffic, four times more shares, and 3.5 times more backlinks than shorter articles. And content marketing itself generates three times as many leads as paid marketing while costing a whopping 62 per cent less.
Here’s my best advice on this one: always create original, unique content with internal links to your site’s own pages, and external links to other supporting sites (for instance, to back up your statistics). Make it entertaining and original. And deal with your audience’s pain points directly.
Follow Up Leads With Email Or Phone Call
Don’t allow a single lead – somebody who provides you with their contact information – to slip through the net. Every visitor who comes through your site is a potential sale. Don’t be like the tradesperson who doesn’t call back or provide the quote they promised. Explore every potential sale.
And there you have it; these are the essential to a solid digital strategy. Could you do more? Sure, but until you’re doing these, nothing more is needed.
And of course, if you’d like some help, why not get in touch. I built my first website in 1998, and have been helping local businesses improve their marketing online since July 2000! That’s 20+ years of successful digital marketing.
I’m sure I can do the same for you 🙂
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Paul Barrs is a long time digital marketing specialist who runs a small agency on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. His goal is to help small businesses become self-sufficient in the areas of digital marketing. You can find out more about Paul’s services via his website at https://www.paulbarrs.com
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