Looking to start marketing your business online, or to level up your existing digital marketing efforts? You’ve come to the right place! We have the top 10 tips to instantly improve your marketing.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Having a strong digital marketing presence is essential for business growth these days. Digital marketing is a cost-effective way to reach a larger audience than traditional marketing. The amount of data we can collect from digital marketing efforts is invaluable to companies as it can shape your overall strategy and help tailor your messaging.
If you have social media and a google analytics account set up for your business, you’ve taken the right steps to start marketing online. But knowing how to utilize these platforms is imperative to improving your overall strategy.
If you find digital marketing overwhelming or want a free consultation, see what we do or contact us . If you’d like to improve your digital marketing efforts on your own, we’ve listed out tips below!
Our Top 10 Digital Marketing Tips:
1. Know Your Customers
You have to understand who is buying your product if you want to be successful with your marketing efforts. What are the demographics of your typical buyer? What social media platforms are they most active on? What are their typical buying habits?
Consider establishing buyer personas to help you segment your customers. You may be thinking, ‘what is a buyer persona?’ Buyer personas are an overall depiction of your ideal customer formulated by both qualitative and quantitative data from market research and existing customer data. By utilizing personas, you can tailor your marketing content to these specific groups, including ad copy, content placement, content type, etc.
Using your analytics and sales data to better understand your customers’ behavior and needs will help you build your overall strategy.
2. Set Your Strategy & Your Budget First
Something we say often at Unfair Advantage is, ‘start with the end in mind.’ Identifying your goals, ways to achieve them, and available resources will give you a clear idea of how to approach your marketing strategy.
Writing down your goals using the SMART method will aid in setting up your marketing strategy to reach those goals. Not familiar with the SMART method? Let’s break it down for you:
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant)
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating)
- Achievable (agreed, attainable)
- Relevant (reasonable, results-based)
- Timely (time-based, time-sensitive)
Marketing efforts should always work together cohesively, and your strategy should connect between channels and methods. Having cohesive content promotes a strong brand voice and provides multiple touch points with potential customers across the platforms they most often frequent.
3. Create a Schedule
Having a schedule will keep you and your entire team accountable and on the same page. We recommend creating a content calendar including each marketing channel you’re utilizing to have a clear picture of how often you are connecting with your audience and what messaging you’re promoting. This will help you connect the dots between your content and enables you to be more efficient.
For example, you can use a google calendar , a content calendar template from Canva , or a physical calendar to write down when campaigns will be running, when sales are happening, when blog posts are going live, social content, and what the subject of the content is.
4. Create Content That Helps People
You may already have content and blog regularly on your site for SEO purposes or to gain more traction on social media – but are you being thoughtful with this content? Your customers will find more value from your content and engage more with your brand if you are answering their questions and showing that you can solve their problems.
Not sure what your customers are wanting to know more about? Use your website’s on-site search feature to see what people are looking for and write content for those search terms. You can also use Google Search Console to see what kinds of things people who land on your site are searching for and write related content.
Remember – SEO is not just ‘posting content,’ it is optimizing content to include keywords that are frequently searched relating to your brand or product to increase organic traffic. However, SEO specialists are trained to get you more organic traffic through a variety of means. SEO is a great way to get started with digital marketing. If you’re not sure how, see how we approach SEO .
5. Have a Consistent Social Media Presence
Consistency is key when it comes to social media – but posting consistently does not mean you need to post every day or even three times a week! Find a cadence that works best for your business and your resources and stick to that.
If you are struggling to find ideas for the type of content you should be posting, monitoring trends across social platforms and thinking how you can put your own spin on them can be helpful. You can pull inspiration from news, memes, trending audio, and more!
Once you’ve nailed down a regular cadence for posting, look at your post analytics to help understand which content performs best, then double down on that to increase your engagement and following.
Along with having a consistent posting schedule, we recommend regularly monitoring comments on your posts and posts within your community. Responding to comments helps your brand build relationships with your audience.
Social media management may seem straight forward, but mastering content creation and community engagement takes time. Hiring social media experts can help free up your bandwidth and achieve your social goals faster. Learn more about our social media marketing services and connect with our team to see how we can work together.
6. Go Local
If you have a brick-and-mortar location, you need to include local marketing in your strategy. 97% of Google users use search to find local businesses and 54% are using local search at least once a month. Additionally, 78% of local searches on a mobile device result in an offline purchase.
Implementing a local SEO strategy can help your business appear organically in these searches, resulting in more traffic for your business. If you haven’t already, you can claim your Google Business Profile for free. We recommend filling out as many of the fields as possible, including adding pictures and videos. You can enhance your profile by adding relevant social posts or updates and responding to reviews on a regular basis.
These additional tips can help with your local SEO:
- Check your Google Maps information to ensure it is up to date
- Reference local landmarks and events in your social content
- Host events and post them to your website
7. Use Paid Ads
Paid media is a highly adaptable and malleable medium and can fit into any marketing strategy. A small business with a low budget can still see a positive impact from paid ads. Taking the return from your ad spend and applying it to your marketing budget can increase results over time and end up paying for itself.
Effective and efficient paid digital marketing efforts can be time-consuming and complicated to manage and optimize yourself. To get the best results, you should work with an expert! Unfair Advantage offers PPC management services that are tailored to your business needs. We have a team of highly-trained analysts that are here to help.
8. Closely Watch Your Analytics
From Google and social media analytics to Google Search Console, data is the key to measuring success and figuring out what works. The first step in keeping a close eye on your analytics is ensuring your Google Analytics is installed properly on your site. You will also want to claim your free Google Search Console account to capture your website data.
Once your tracking is properly set up, you will want to start identifying trends in the data. This will help you be more strategic with your marketing efforts. Some key things to look out for are:
- What days times does your website receive the most traffic?
- What days/times do your posts receive the most engagement?
- What blog topics receive the most traffic?
- What type of content does your audience react the best to? (videos, static posts, etc.)
Be sure to set a regular schedule to review your data and write out your findings. Then, review your findings to come up with a strategy to double down on what’s working for your business.
9. Focus On User Experience (UX)
Think about what it’s like for a potential customer to visit your website. Is it easy and pleasant to navigate? Is your content compelling and engaging? It’s helpful to think of your own experience browsing other websites. What are things that bother you when you are looking at a new website? Compile a list and aim to avoid those features on your website to reduce user friction.
Looking at Google Analytics can be extremely helpful when working to improve UX. Look at the exit pages report in Google Analytics to find where your website visitors are dropping off and improve the experience on those pages.
10. Use The Right Tools
Digital marketing has taken off because there is so much data available for businesses to leverage. You can be more targeted with your marketing efforts and clearly measure what is working and what isn’t.
There are many tools out there which can help you to be more efficient with your time. For example, social media management tools are extremely useful in consolidating data and reducing your time spent scheduling posts.
There are many paid digital marketing tools out there, but we’ve listed a few free tools you can start using that will have an immediate impact on your marketing strategy:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- In-Chanel Social Media Analytics
- Canva (to design content)
- Later (content scheduling)
- TweetDeck (content scheduling)
- SocialBee (content scheduling)
Understand What You Can & Can’t Do
We understand that digital marketing can be daunting for a small business or team to manage, which is why digital marketing agencies exist! Effective marketing is complex and requires time, dedication, and money.
If you are new to digital marketing, or are looking to level up your efforts, we’re here to help! Unfair Advantage specializes in helping businesses that are smaller or are newer to digital marketing, so contact us to see how we can help!
