You Can Change your Digital Marketing Strategy in 3 Simple Steps.

Making adjustments to your digital marketing adjusting your digital marketing strategy can be simple.  The truth is that no matter what your online business footprint is, your strategy should be fluid.  Digital marketing is always changing.  The latest applications, Google changes their algorithms, or simply changes in the season can be a big shift in how you approach your marketing strategy.  We wanted to break down the top three things you can do to change the way that you decide what to tackle in your business and why.

Today only about 22% of businesses are satisfied with their  online conversion rates. (Econsultancy, 2016) (Source: Hubspot) Digital marketing is only as good as the data you use to create the strategy.

Find Your Audience.

If you do not understand who your audience is and where they hang out online; you are missing a major opportunity to improve your digital marketing strategy.  Every business is different.  If your customer is between the ages of 15-25 you are not going to find them in the same place as you would a customer base that is 30-40.  If you are not looking at who your customers are there are a few tools you can use to find out.  For instance Facebook can break down you audience by a multitude of options, but if you don’t have a following on Facebook that will not give you a big enough picture.  All of your social media sites should help to promote your digital marketing strategy.

You can also use analytical tools to  identify your audience based on your website traffic.  You may not have any tools setup to  analyze your online audience.  Find one.  If the audience you are finding is not buying from you, then you have to change your strategy to find them.  If your data does not match your current customers, you probably need to figure out why.  Look at your keywords, look at what your competitors are doing.  Most importantly listen to the results you are finding.

Think Before You Post to Social Media.

Start with the end in mind.  Every post you make is an opportunity to improve your search engine optimization (SEO).  The more your message speaks for your brand the better.  Most importantly as yourself if you are adding value to the overall conversation.  The last thing you want your digital marketing story to be is spam.  If you are constantly putting advertisements out to the world and you are not contributing more to the conversation, you will lose your audience.

There is a great history lesson for just how often Google changes their algorithm on our friends website Media Skyscraper.  IF you want a quick history lesson we recommend this particular article from their blog: The ULTIMATE GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES GUIDE 2019 FROM DAY ZERO IN 18,000 WORDS

(UPDATE:  for 2019 you can use this guide by Cardinal Digital Marketing)

72% of marketers agree that relevant digital content creation was the most effective SEO tactics. (Ascend2, 2015) Think about the things you want your brand to be associated with.  Do you think about how people are searching for your product or service? Is the link or message you are about to send speaking well for you?  If you are not thinking about what keywords you are using and how those keywords relate to the content you are sharing you should.  Start now.

Be Flexible with Your Digital Marketing Strategy.

Check your analytics often to make sure you are reaching the people that you intended to reach.  If you don’t have a good analytics tool to reference you need to have one.  Google Analytics is a great example of a tool that is free to use, but detailed enough for users to really understand user behavior on websites.  Digital marketing is most effective when you have statistical data to make intelligent decisions about your marketing efforts.  The best results come from good planning and strategic marketing deployment.

Don’t be afraid to throw out your digital marketing strategy if you do not see results from your current efforts.  Sometimes it is better to completely pull back the curtains and really examine who is pulling the strings.  Progress can be made fairly quickly when you are willing to look at what the data is telling you.

For more information about developing your digital marketing strategy, contact us.  We are here to help.