7 Steps To Instant Digital Marketing Success
things you can do RIGHT NOW to improve your digital marketing
With a new year upon us, make it the year that you can make the most of digital.
Firstly these are not ‘hacks’ or ‘cheats’, instead, these are suggestions for things that you could do RIGHT NOW, literally the minute you finish reading this blog. Legitimate things that will improve elements of your digital marketing. If you are a new business or are just taking your first steps online, this information will be invaluable for you.
UTMs
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, but unfortunately, this is not a way to track sea urchins as they… urch(?) their way across the undersea internet cables. Rather, is a bit of code that is attached to a URL that can be paired with analytics tools to track performance. You might notice them sometimes when clicking on ads. A long series of characters at the end of a website url.
UTMs allow you to see where your traffic is coming from, whether that be tracking which post on social media led people to buy or fill in a contact form, or which ‘buy now’ button on your site has the highest click rate.
These are a great way to monitor the effectiveness of, and improve your digital marketing campaigns, by tracking what works and building upon that to grow future campaigns.
UTMs can look pretty long and clunky once you’ve included all the information that’ll inform you of where the traffic has come from. But fear not, most UTM builders come with URL shorteners or you can use programmes like Goo.gl or Bitly without affecting the info.
Update your social bios
Your social media bios are some of the first things your audience will see when looking at your profile. Make it snazzy and make them love what you’re all about with those few, select words, that describe how good you are and what you do.
Keeping these up to date is important in keeping your audience on their toes. Use it to notify them of new things you’re doing and maybe even tailor it to the time of year or content you’ve recently released. It’s your chance to capture their attention, promote your brand and give a taste of your ToV.
Remember, different platforms have different character allowances. Twitter and Facebook allow just less than 200 characters, whereas Linkedin will allow around 2000 characters. Make sure each bio is written slightly differently, tailored to the type of audience on each platform and to what actions you’d like them to take.
Set up GMB
We’ve written before about the importance of utilising local search. One of the best ways to do this is to set up your Google My Business account (As well as Bing’s version, Bing Places for Business, incase they use this search engine). The main purpose of this listing is to help customers find and interact with your business. It helps to improve your SEO and ranking, and is a listing that is optimised for mobile users too. See more about setting it up and the benefits in our Local SEO blog. It takes less than half an hour to get this bad boy set up, so why not do it right now?
Compress your website images
Compressing the images you put on your website can help increase the loading speed which will positively benefit your digital marketing efforts in multiple ways. There are many speed checkers out there, we like to use Google’s TestMySite.
Don’t compress them to the point where the quality is compromised, but know that that website speed is a contributing factor towards your SEO. Half of web users expect a site to load within 2 seconds or less, they tend to abandon the site if it hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds. Unnecessarily large images can negatively affect the speed of your site. For example, if you have image buttons, compress them slightly. These do not need to be high res! Your product images should be of good quality, but that random picture of a duck hidden in your ‘about us’ page probably could do with compressing.
Add client testimonial feedback to your website
Got any client testimonials laying around? Well grab them quick and pop them on your website. Whether that be a video or a quote, testimonials can instil a sense of confidence within potential customers when looking to buy your products or services. If you aren’t able to create a section to put these testimonials on your website, you can place them on your Google My Business through the dashboard.
If you aren’t collecting testimonials, then build this into your follow up process. It’s always good to get feedback, and gives your customers the opportunity to share opinions that may help you to improve your service.
Test hashtags on social to see which resonates with your audience
Adding hashtags to your campaigns can drive engagement. Whether that be #digitalmarketing or #officecat. Using hashtags means you can join in the conversation that the rest of the web are having, even giving you the opportunity to share information and opinions on things people might not even be searching for.
Have a play around with a couple of new and different hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Make sure they’re relevant to your content, but see which drive more engagement and have a look at integrating this into your social strategies from now on. Use tools such as Hashtagify to analyse the hashtags popularity, trends and correlations.
When using hashtags, consider your brand and ToV. If you’re a fairly formal brand, then hashtags like #wtf and #icanteven probably aren’t for you.
Use answer the public to see what type of q’s your audience are asking
Spend some time looking at Answer The Public to see the types of things your audience are searching for. Use this as inspiration and list out five blog/content ideas that’ll enable you to answer the things you’ve seen.
Content marketing is all about creating things that people will find interesting and adds value to wider conversation. Content that answers queries you’ve found in Answer the Public should be useful and engaging, and can result in page views and shares of your content online.
Now you’ve done these, watch your digital marketing flourish and return you with actionable insights for the next campaign! If you’ve still got a spare moment, why not check out our top recommended e-learning platforms to help your understanding of digital.
Amber Vellacott
Content Marketing Lead
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