5 Ways to Radically Improve Your Digital Marketing

Implementing an effective digital marketing game plan can yield incredible results that will generate more awareness, web traffic, leads, and sales.

Making sure your vision of ‘success’ plays through comes down to having a solid strategy in place, followed by a clear roadmap.

But what do you do when the digital marketing transit looks like this?

(Source)

 You’re in luck because in this post I’m going to highlight 5 ways to radically improve your digital marketing.

1) Know Your Data

From Google Analytics, heat/click maps, and Facebook Insights, utilizing data to help you see where there are gaps within your campaigns will help you make the necessary improvements.

When diving into your data points, a few key items to look at are:

• Demographic skews. Who’s coming to your website? Who’s engaging the most with your content and brand? What more can you be doing to give these people what they’re looking for?
• Actionable points. From messaging to CTA buttons and design, identify the key elements that are driving the most engagement.
• Popular pages. Look at the most popular pages on your website and make sure there are CTAs on those pages to drive visitors further down your funnel. 

2) Learn from Customers

Existing customers are the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to figuring out how you can make improvements to your products/services.

To learn more from your customers, consider sending out surveys to help ensure that you’re delivering per their expectations, they are happy, and you’re getting feedback where needed to make changes.

Understanding more of what your customers want will also help with the following:

• Shape your content strategy to write about the things they care about.
• Add more service and product offerings for upsell opportunities.
• Increase their lifetime value.
• Develop case studies and get testimonials to better position your company. 

3) Kill Off Wasteful Spending

Know exactly where you should be spending more of your marketing dollars and where you should stop. The biggest mistake I see a lot of companies make is that they will dedicate money towards specific campaigns, but then fail to properly measure for progress and optimization.

Here’s what I recommend you do to ensure this doesn’t happen to you:

• Attach KPIs (key performance indicators) to each campaign, down to the tactical execution.
• Be specific on where in the funnel each campaign falls so you have a goal in mind.
• Make sure you’re focused on the right metrics. For example, I recently had a client challenge the positive results that my team delivered with our campaigns. This client was judging their success on the number of MQLs and SQLs they were receiving, i.e. more is better. Since they sell an enterprise product that has an average contract value of anywhere between $150K – $2M, getting more leads shouldn’t be the focus. Rather, it’s about getting high-quality leads that could range anywhere between 1-5 per month. Should they close one of those leads, they’ve then more than paid for my services and what they’re spending on advertising.

4) Optimize the Customer Acquisition Process

Look at the entire funnel and determine where the gaps are. From there, devise a plan to fix what’s broken so that you can collect more data on whether or not new changes are driving improvements.

When looking at your marketing funnel, focus on the middle of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. It’s in these very stages that you’ll find the buyer journey the most open – meaning, buyers are more willing to give you their information to look at your content and engage with your brand before wanting to be reached out to by sales.

Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the top of the funnel because the metrics you track there can help shape what happens further down the purchase path too. However, keep in mind that much of what happens at the top comes down to awareness and less about conversions.

5) Create Meaningful Connections

No one cares about what you do until they see the value in what you can do for them. One of the things I do when I set goals for what I want my company to achieve for the year is to outline how many people/companies I want to bring value to.

This takes the way I view my marketing efforts beyond just trying to get more sales and adding to my revenue goal. Yes, hitting my revenue target is important, but what’s more important is how I can empower and inspire others to take action too.

Creating meaningful connections, therefore, comes down to building relationships, having authentic conversations, and helping people without expecting anything in return.

Here’s what I recommend you can start doing:

• Discover existing Facebook Groups that are filled with like-minded individuals and join them. From there, contribute to conversations that are taking place by answering questions, posting your own questions, and sharing your knowledge without over-selling yourself.
• Other places to do the same thing: Reddit, Quora, and blog commenting.

Final Thoughts

Remember to keep your target customers in mind for all of the digital marketing campaigns you run. Once you have enough data, you can then use both to steer your efforts.

From there, you can then start tweaking each campaign to acquire new customers for a lower cost, and also figure out where your diminishing point of return is for the successful campaigns.