You spent countless hours developing your marketing plan, but now it’s not working out as you expected. Don’t waste your efforts by scrapping the whole plan and starting over, or worse, giving up. Instead, take time to evaluate what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be adjusted.
Here, the team at LaFleur explains how to determine whether your digital marketing strategy is effective and how to reboot an unsuccessful plan. We’ll look at four different digital marketing elements, including your business’s website, content marketing, paid advertising, and social media.
Develop a Findable and Functional Website for Your Business
Websites are crucial to your digital marketing plan and are the first place to look if you need a reboot. Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing; it should reel visitors in and convince them to contact you or make a purchase. Other digital marketing elements, like social and paid advertising, try to direct people to your website.
Evaluate Your Website With Google Analytics
The first step in determining whether your website needs a reboot is looking at your site’s performance through a Google Analytics account. Among other things, Google Analytics can show you how users are getting to your site, which pages they are visiting most and least often, and how long they are staying on each page. This data can help you identify opportunities for improvement on your site.
RELATED: Google Analytics: Nothing to Fear and Everything to Gain
Website success depends on two main factors: findability and functionality.
Findability
If your site isn’t drawing in many visitors and most of your users aren’t coming from search results, this might indicate that your site is not ranking well in organic search. This is a findability issue, and you may need to reboot your SEO efforts and perform a site audit.
An SEO audit is an in-depth technical analysis that involves looking at the structure and accessibility of your site, along with performing competitor analysis and keyword research. Insight from an audit can help you rank higher for relevant keywords and develop a more search engine friendly website.
Functionality
What if you’re getting visitors, but they don’t stay on your site very long or don’t ever interact with your call-to-action? This can be an indication that your site isn’t functional or user-friendly. You could have a technical problem involving your links, a bug in your automation programming, or a content issue. High bounce rates, the percentage of visitors coming to your page and leaving right away, may suggest that its content isn’t relevant or easy to understand.
Create Well-Written, Readable, and Relevant Blog Content
Your website and content marketing strategies are tightly intertwined. If your website needs work, it’s likely that you’ll be rebooting a great deal of the content as well. While content marketing encompasses a wide variety of tools and tactics, such as downloadable ebooks and client success stories that showcase your work, most content marketing plans concentrate on blogs that drive traffic to your website.
RELATED: Digital Marketing Essentials: Why Your Business Needs a Blog
5 Questions to Ask Yourself if Your Company’s Blog Performance Isn’t Up to Par
1. Do users see our blog posts?
Just like for your website, findability and SEO are crucial to the success of your blogs. For blog posts, SEO mainly focuses on your keywords, page structure, and meta description. Google Analytics can show you how many views your posts receive, what keywords are leading to clicks, and whether traffic is coming from organic search results.
2. Can users easily read and scan our blogs?
The average user will only spend 15 seconds scanning a blog post. Formatting your blogs with headings, bulleted lists (like this one!), and short paragraphs can increase the post’s readability and scanability and help hold readers’ attention.
3. Do our blogs provide valuable and unique information?
If you’ve got the SEO down, but your blogs are still not attracting traffic to your site, you may need to adjust the subject matter itself. Blogs that cover unique and useful topics will attract more visitors.
4. Are the topics relevant to our target audience?
Similarly, lower blog views could occur if the topics you are blogging about aren’t relevant to your client base and industry. Additionally, people who are viewing these unrelated blogs aren’t likely to convert into leads and customers. Which takes us to our next question:
5. Do the blogs help us achieve our business goals?
For many businesses, the goal of content marketing and blogs is to increase brand awareness, establish industry authority, and convert users into customers. The blog’s topic, style, and SEO should all help fulfill these goals.
Optimize Your Paid Advertising Campaigns
Effective paid advertising depends on having both a well-performing website and relevant content. With the abundance of analytics available for paid advertising, it’s usually simple to see if a campaign is working, but it’s not always easy to determine why a campaign isn’t working. The first step in rebooting a paid advertising campaign is determining the cause of its underperformance. This mostly falls into two categories; you’re not getting clicks, or your clicks aren’t converting to leads.
Low Impressions: Improve Your Ad Placement
When your impressions are low, not very many people see your ad. While this could be due to strict targeting parameters, it’s more likely that your ad placement (where it ranks and appears) is to blame. Ad placement, in turn, depends on the budget you set for the campaign and your ad’s Google quality score.
An ad’s quality score is a ranking that Google assigns based on how likely viewers are to click on it. It determines your score by analyzing the relevance of the ad and the landing page to which it leads. An ad that connects to a unique landing page designed specifically for the ad will receive a higher quality score and rank higher overall, gaining more impressions and potential clicks.
RELATED: Optimizing Your Paid Online Advertising Takes More Than a Great Ad
Low Conversions: Reboot Your Ad Landing Page
What if your ad is ranking well, earning impressions and clicks, but not leading to conversions? Typically, when users click an online ad, the ad links them to a page with a call-to-action that convinces them to contact, download, or buy. If your ad is bringing in traffic, but those visitors aren’t clicking your CTA, you’re not getting your money’s worth. Optimizing your ad’s landing page can help convert visitors to customers. Reboot the page by:
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- Creating unique landing pages specific to each ad group
- Writing relevant and conversion-focused copy
- Including short and simple contact forms
- Designing a clean page that doesn’t distract from the CTA
Increase Web Traffic Through Social Media
Last, but not least, is social media marketing. There are several key goals of social media marketing, but we’ll be focusing on using social media to drive traffic to your website. Through Google Analytics, you can see how much traffic is coming from your social channels and specific posts. If you’re not getting much traffic from social media channels at all, you may need to reboot your post content.
Diversify Your Posts With the Rule of Thirds
The social media rule of thirds states that you should be posting equal amounts of three different topics: company blogs and service information, company updates and events, and industry or community news. Posting content that doesn’t link to your website may seem counterintuitive. However, diversifying your content helps keep your social media pages fresh and balanced so that followers don’t get bored or annoyed and stop following you.
Include Visuals and Video Posts
Text-only posts often don’t hold followers’ attention or entice people skimming their social media feeds to click. Including images, infographics, and videos on your pages is considerably more eye-catching and attention-grabbing. Buffer reported that tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. That’s a lot of attention and a lot of clicks.
Need A Digital Marketing Reboot? Contact LaFleur
Rebooting your digital marketing plan can be a lot of work, but the results are worthwhile. If you need help rebooting your plan, our digital marketing gurus are here to help! Contact us today for a free consultation to discuss your current digital marketing plan and reboot objectives. Call us at (888) 222-1512 or fill out our online contact form to get started.
References
Cooper, B. (2016, April 27). How Twitter’s Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets and Favorites [New Data]. Buffer. Retrieved from https://buffer.com/resources/the-power-of-twitters-new-expanded-images-and-how-to-make-the-most-of-it