While the digital landscape has changed over the past few months, businesses are still looking to accomplish the same goals: generate leads/sales, drive awareness and/or engagement, and sustain or grow their leadership position. To do so, it’s imperative to focus holistically on optimizing your digital ecosystem. A consistent focus on the following programs will help your business continue to succeed:
- Optimize your website/landing pages.
- Consistently evaluate your paid, owned and earned media strategies.
- Nurture leads with effective email marketing/marketing automation strategies.
When your digital ecosystem is a well-oiled machine, your marketing efforts will drive brand awareness and preference, as well as increased engagement and higher quality leads.
Step 1: Optimizing Your Website/Landing Pages
Your media programs, social media channels and email marketing campaigns may be in good working order, but if you’re website isn’t functional or on-brand, you simply won’t succeed. At the center of a healthy digital ecosystem is a well-crafted company website. Here’s what you should focus on to ensure your website is ready to support your digital efforts:
Branding and Messaging:
- Make sure your branding and messaging make sense. What is your website about? Does the tone and manner of the content match your brand? Is the brand identity consistent throughout the website? Is the design visually appealing, clean and straight-forward? Your brand positioning should be clear and obvious on your home page and your content should be easy to scan.
Navigation & UX:
- Do you have goals to track performance? What is each page trying to achieve based on your UX strategy?
- Keep your site or landing page’s main navigation simple and intuitive. Don’t get too carried away with bloated “mega-menu” designs unless they are necessary. Prioritize “above the fold” content that intrigues users to scroll down and further engage with your site.
- Make sure to incorporate CTAs to show the next steps. You want to take the user down a path that helps them make an informed decision. Be sure to add a CTA enticing visitors to follow your social networks, and include follow and share icons in header and footer.
- Don’t set it and forget it. Continuously test your homepage and be sure it’s helping you reach your goals.
Search Engine Optimization:
- Every page of your website is a potential search engine entry point, so assign a primary keyword topic to each. Placing that keyword in areas of emphasis like the title tag, main heading and even the URL helps Google identify the main topic.
- Don’t skimp on copy, especially for your most important or competitive keywords. Google typically won’t rank pages with “thin” content (one or two sentences) very highly. Images and video can help boost your standing, too.
- Mobile friendliness and page speed have become big parts of search algorithms. No matter how great your content is, if your webpage loads slowly on mobile devices, chances are Google won’t serve it up to searchers.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Paid Media Strategies to Drive Traffic and General Leads
Consumer habits, business drivers and competitive landscapes have changed in this new business environment, so now is the time to reset or re-evaluate your existing digital programs to ensure you’re continuing to drive maximum effectiveness. Start by defining goals and budgets through one of these methods:
- Top down: What is my budget? At a reasonable cost per lead or cost per sale, what results am I likely to generate?
- Bottom up: What are my sales goals? At a reasonable cost per lead or cost per sale, what budget do I need to secure to reach these goals?
- Next, identify your target segments and understand their media consumption habits and purchase influences. Detailed personas and journey mapping are the best practice tools for this job.
- Re-assess objectives, current results and KPI’s of all existing programs – The most effective way to evaluate your paid media campaigns are through the objectives set from launch.
- Consider or re-evaluate all valuable media vehicles – Aside from the traditional banner ads and search results, adjust to focus on high converting channels within your industry trends.
- Ensure you have relatable content that drives engagement – Providing viewers with valuable content in exchange for their information is a great way to drive traffic to your website and helps to generate more qualified leads.
- Utilize a dashboard that offers real-time results for consistent assessment – The most successful campaigns are the ones with eyes constantly on them. Evaluate, optimize and re-strategize based on the real-time results provided from dashboards.
- Consistently track and optimize until performance is steady – Digital campaigns need attention throughout each program. Weekly and sometimes daily changes are necessary to increase performance and stay on track to meet the established KPIs. Once a test channel is proven out, it can “graduate” to a proven place in your plan.
Step 3: Are You Nurturing Leads with Emailing Marketing or Marketing Automation?
Whether it’s Constant Contact, HubSpot, Pardot or another email marketing system, strategically tracking and segmenting your leads with a nurture strategy is a huge driver in building relationships with your prospects and moving leads down the funnel. Here are five steps to ensuring a successful start:
- Attract: Capture leads with a compelling and concise lead capture form that is personalized enough to sustain interest
- Personalize: Promote an offer or content that is attractive enough to motivate your customer segments.
- Engage: Create a workflow strategy for each segment that will nurture the relationship and drive prospects down the funnel.
- Create: Design and develop emails that are attractive and well-crafted, utilizing graphics and imagery where possible.
- Test: Once you’re up and running, continue to optimize your strategy!
Is your digital marketing ecosystem driving high quality leads? Fill out the form below and let’s talk about what optimizations you can make today.