It’s no surprise that the proliferation of digital marketing has enabled businesses to expand their audience reach, get deeper analytics, personalize the buyer journey, and so much more. But driving real business results sometimes comes down to the simplest thing: making sure you are implementing digital marketing best practices.
As CMOs plan to increase their spending on digital marketing by 14.7% over the next year and the top four channels for increases in this spend being email marketing, mobile marketing, SEO and PPC, it’s important to ensure that you’re investing in a digital marketing plan.
Here are 7 digital marketing best practices that will boost sales for your company:
1) Lay out specific goals
Don’t get overwhelmed with trying to do too many things at once. Instead, work your way backwards by establishing what it is you want to achieve and then align your strategies and tactics accordingly. Doing so will help you stay focused on what matters most to your business and see each of your executions through. Here’s a simple framework you can work off of:
2) Know your audience
By deeply understanding your audience, you gain additional insights into aligning your digital marketing efforts with their purchase journey. This will also enable you to position specific content pieces with their interest levels, while building awareness for your company.
3) Build targeted landing pages
Rather than sending traffic to a generic page on your website like your homepage, create targeted landing pages that tie in with what you’re trying to promote or sell. Here’s a great example to mimic:
Focusing on targeted landing pages means that you also focus on optimizing them for conversions (e.g. filled out forms, purchases, etc.). Here’s why that matters:
- For every $92 dollars spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them. (Econsultancy)
- 57% of B2B marketers say conversion rate is the most useful metric for analyzing landing page performance. (Ascend2)
- 60% of online marketers plan to do customer journey analysis to improve their online conversion rate. (MarketingCharts)
- The average ROI on CRO tools is 223%.(Venture Beat)
4) Utilize the right tools
Selecting the right tools to help you achieve your goals will help you execute with efficiency and effectiveness. Here’s a list of tools to check out:
- Raven Tools: Easily run website audits to understand current site issues you have and generate reports on your digital marketing campaigns.
- Ahrefs: Track backlinks, keywords, and brand mentions as well as what your competitors are doing.
- Buffer: Save time managing your social media accounts by having them all in one place.
- Mailchimp: Create automated workflows, connect your analytics accounts and easily schedule out newsletters.
- Hotjar: See what’s happening on your website, make the necessary changes based on heat maps, engage with your audience via polls and more.
5) Make content a priority
Lay out an editorial calendar and content creation process that will help you stay on track when it comes to consistently pushing out content and aligning that content with the buyer journey.
Major stats to be aware of:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (DemandMetric)
- Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%). (Aberdeen)
- 72% of marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements. (CCC)
- Brands that create 15 blog posts per month average 1,200 new leads per month. (HubSpot)
6) Push for personalized emails
Segment your email list so that certain personas receive emails with content and offers they actually care about. The great perk about email is that you can set up automated workflows which will ensure you don’t get bogged down with just sending manual emails.
Further, make sure you include a CTA (call-to-action) within each email sent out and drive that traffic to its own landing page. Know that there is science to email marketing, so just buying lists and/or blasting people with the same message may not get you very far. Take time to test different subject lines, CTAs and overall messaging.
More specifically, pay close attention to the following ROI stats for email marketing:
- Transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email, and can generate 6x more revenue. –Experian
- Over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns. Automated email campaigns account for 21% of email marketing revenue. – DMA
- Companies who send automated emails are 133% more likely to send relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle. – Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups
- Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. – Campaign Monitor
- 50% of companies feel they can increase interaction within email by increasing personalization. – Experian
7) Promote your content
Getting people to engage with your content needs to go beyond the organic routes of just making a social media update. You will need to put some advertising dollars behind your content pieces to ensure you’re targeting the right audience.
Here are three different ways you can look at promoting your content:
Final Thoughts
Though there isn’t only one tried and true way to generate sales with digital marketing, know that you have to look at your investment in it as a marathon, not a sprint. Implementing these digital marketing best practices will help ensure you get started and continue on the right track. Further, encountering little wins along the way will help you see if you’re on the right track to achieving your goals, so make sure you are consistent, persistent and making analytics a priority with your progress.
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