Digital Marketing

The start of a new year is a great time to set goals for your business and create a solid plan for achieving them. As you gather your team and discuss what you want to do this year, don’t forget to make a few resolutions for your business’s digital marketing strategy. Choose whether you want to improve on 2019’s strategy or go in a new direction.

Here are 5 digital marketing goals that any business can do:

1. Audit your current strategy

Before you can make headway on any other resolutions, you should first take a step back and assess what is and isn’t working. A digital marketing audit should review these components of your strategy:

• Spend – Did the amount of money that you spent in 2019 produce a positive ROI? 
• Campaigns – Which were your most valuable marketing campaigns and can those be increased in 2020?
• Waste – Which marketing and sales activities did you lose money on in 2019 and can those be eliminated or improved in 2020?
• Target Audience – Do you have clearly defined your buyer persona’s to ensure that you are targeting your potential buyers and influencers? 
• Channels – What were your most valuable marketing channels?
• Reach – How effectively did you engage your target audience across your digital channels?
• Content – Did your 2019 content development strategy help build your marketing assets? 
• Conversion – How well did your conversion perform and do they need more attention this year?
• Integration – Are all your marketing channels, digital and offline, cross-linked and integrated?
• Analytics – Are your marketing analytics telling you what you want to know? Are your current analytics even able to help you easily conduct this audit?

Each year your marketing strategy should continue to evolve and improve. 

2. Update your SEO strategy

As Google’s ranking algorithms are always changing so it’s important to keep pace in your SEO strategy. If you’re wondering where to start, here a few SEO tactics to meet the shifting trends:

• Instead of writing for your keywords, write for your customers.
• Integrate buyer personas, customer feedback, and marketing analytics into your strategy.
• Optimize your content for the way people search: voice searches and question-based queries.
• Don’t forget the technical details: make your website is fast, mobile-friendly, and structured to reflect the buyer’s journey.
• Strengthen your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Bring offline credentials, certifications, and customer resources online.
• Develop content that is easy for users to read and Google to crawl, like FAQ’s and How To’s.

3. Dive into content marketing

If content marketing isn’t already a part of your digital marketing strategy, 2020 can be your year. Many businesses avoid content marketing because they believe it is too time consuming. Or they are not sure how to develop and execute a worthwhile strategy. Depending on the business and their marketing team, those can be fair concerns. But if you consider these benefits of content marketing, it may be time to reconsider:

• Great content can attract and keep great customers when it’s developed with them in mind.
• A variety of short- and long-form content can grease your conversion funnel.
• Most digital content doesn’t cost a thing to publish. It can help you reach more potential customers across many channels.
• High-quality content elevates your trustworthiness and establishes your authority in your industry. This is something your customers will value and Google rewards in their rankings.

For a few tips see: 6 Powerful Steps for SEO Blog Writing

All those things considered, if your marketing team doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise to pursue a successful content marketing strategy it may still seem out of reach. Yet, that is where professionals like WSI Connect can help. Leverage the expertise of your marketing partners. Reap the benefits of content marketing without overwhelming your workload.

4. Secure your data

With all the data your digital marketing team has worked hard to gather, and the increasing popularity of cloud-based software to store and manage it, data security is of the utmost importance. A breach can damage your reputation and wreak havoc on your systems. Resources and protocols should be in place to combat WordPress hackers, malware, and/or bots. Better securing your data is a worthy – and necessary – resolution.

For WordPress users: Important WordPress Security Tips to Consider

5. Take advantage of automation

Marketing automation software can transform not only how your marketing team spends their day, but also how they think. When the repetitive, time-consuming tasks of digital marketing are automated, your team can devote their time and creativity to the bigger picture. For many businesses, the impact of this shift is hard to overstate.

Marketing automation software is designed to capture leads, develop relationships, and assist moving potential customers through your conversion funnel. This essential marketing tool can have a range of capabilities such as:

• Email marketing with segmented campaigns, behavior trigger emails, and A/B testing
• Lead nurturing with a lead database, drip campaigns, automated alerts, and lead scoring
• Social media management with a single interface, post scheduling, and messaging
• Analytics and reporting with multi-channel analytics, conversion rates, and ROI

And these are just a few of the tasks most software can take on. With a humming marketing automation system in place, when innovative marketing ideas come along, instead of asking “How will we find the bandwidth?” your team will ask, “When can we start?”

6. Analyze your efforts

An essential part of any marketing strategy is the ability to track campaigns, the amount of effort and money invested and measure ROI.

• Identify which marketing campaigns are driving new leads and new customers
• Look at website activity in Google Analytics to understand content performance
• Utilize the information you gather to improve, expand, or eliminate campaigns

More about Google Analytics: Understanding Google Analytics: Key Metrics

Need advice on your 2020 marketing strategy?