In 2024, a digital marketing strategy is essential for the success of every business in just about every industry. According to a Pew Research Survey, 81% of Americans conduct their own research before making an important decision. In most instances, this research is primarily done online. Without an effective digital marketing strategy, it will be challenging to connect with these people and convert them into valuable customers.

Your digital marketing strategy provides your business with a comprehensive plan outlining how you’ll leverage the various digital channels at your disposal to reach your target audience, grow your brand, and generate the high-quality leads necessary for your business to thrive. For your digital marketing to be effective, it must go beyond detailing the specific tactics your business will use and also provide a big picture view of how your efforts will complement each other in order to achieve your overarching goals.

Despite digital marketing becoming an increasingly significant driver of success for businesses in recent years, 45% of organizations still don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. These companies are failing to leverage one of the most important tools at their disposal to help grow their business. In fact, businesses that have a well formulated digital marketing strategy tend to report greater success than those who don’t:

• 75% of marketers improved the trust and credibility of their company when they employed a digital marketing strategy
• Marketing teams that document their digital strategy are 313% more likely to experience success

Still not convinced? Here are 10 reasons why it’s crucial that you adopt a digital marketing strategy in 2024.

You’ll Have More Focused Efforts Aimed at Achieving Specific Goals

Your digital marketing strategy gives your marketing team direction. It provides a roadmap that keeps your business focused on the goals they want to achieve and the initiatives necessary to reach these goals. When you set clear goals as part of your digital marketing strategy, it also makes it easier to:

• Prioritize the initiatives that will be most effective in achieving your desired outcome
• Arrive at the proper budget necessary to achieve your goals
• Determine that best way to allocate your budget in order to maximize the ROI on your efforts
• Identify the right success metrics to evaluate the performance of your marketing tactics

You Can Ensure the Latest Trends Guide Your Efforts

Many businesses simply keep the same digital marketing strategy in place year after year. While this is better than not having a strategy at all, you risk using an outdated plan that either no longer aligns with your current goals or fails to leverage the latest trends that are impacting the digital marketing landscape today.

Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends has never been more important than it is in 2024. The last 12 months have ushered in a new AI era that is changing the way businesses operate. Many of the most successful companies have been early adopters of AI technology and are actively pursuing ways to use AI to improve every aspect of their operations, including marketing.

AI technology allows you to automate many aspects of your marketing efforts, improving your efficiency and results. A few ways businesses are leveraging AI in their marketing efforts include:

• Using AI tools to improve keyword research efforts
• Implementing AI-powered chatbots to improve customer experience
• Leveraging AI plugins to more effectively use existing platforms, such as Canva, with their social media efforts
• Leveraging AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze massive quantities of customer behavior data to determine the most effective targeting strategies
• Implementing AI-powered predictive analytics to more effectively examine patterns and trends that will optimize your marketing efforts

When you update your digital marketing strategy every year, it provides an opportunity to evaluate the latest trends, digital marketing channels and tools which can provide your business with a competitive advantage. This process of annual reflection and planning ensures you remain on the forefront of the digital marketing landscape rather than scrambling to catch up with the businesses that innovated before you.

You Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience

In order to ensure you’re targeting the right audience and delivering a message that will resonate with them, you first need to understand your audience on a deep level. What are their pain points? What information are they seeking out? What motivates them to take action?

With many traditional marketing methods, you lack the data necessary to gain these insights about your audience. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a treasure trove of data to help you refine your efforts to connect with your target audience more effectively. You’ll be able to capture a wide range of data, including:

• Which pages on your website are visited most often
• How long people spend on each page (a measure of their level of engagement)
• What questions are most commonly being asked (which you should then address in your marketing content)
• Which CTAs on your website are clicked most often
• How far down the page visitors go when they are on your website
• Which interactive features on your website generate the most engagement
• Which pieces of content are shared the most (an indication that your audience finds this content valuable)

In addition, you can leverage social media marketing to directly engage with your audience on a more personal level. You can learn a great deal about what your audience values by reading and responding to their comments on your social media posts. When you respond to these comments, you’re also creating a direct connection with the individuals who made them. This demonstrates that you truly value them, which will help forge a relationship which may lead to these individuals becoming customers down the road.

Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Eliminating Negative Reviews

It Becomes Easier to Develop an Effective Value Proposition

Most businesses face a very competitive landscape. In order to succeed, it’s critical to differentiate your business from your competitors so that your audience clearly understands why your offering is superior and provides a better experience. Developing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy with the help of experts from merged.ca can help you refine your value proposition so that it resonates better with your audience.

The data you compile about your target audience makes it easier to build out detailed buyer personas which help you understand their preferences, needs and motivations. This information can be used to develop messaging that will differentiate your brand from your competitors and allow you to convey the value your business provides.

Your digital marketing strategy can then outline the ways in which you’ll deliver this messaging to your audience. A cohesive strategy will also ensure that this messaging remains consistent across all your digital marketing efforts. Whether someone visits your website, engages with you on social media, reads your email newsletters or clicks on your paid ads, they will receive the same messaging about the value you provide and the ways your business is different than your competitors. This cohesiveness creates a powerful effect among your audience and helps you generate a loyal customer base.

You Can Target Your Marketing Resources on the Specific Audience Most Likely to Become a Customer

Traditional marketing methods such as TV, print, radio or billboard advertising provide very limited control over who your ad reaches. While you can make certain calculated decisions with these channels – demographic information is available for viewership of many popular TV shows and magazines – there’s still no guarantee that the people seeing your ad will actually be interested in your product or service.

Digital marketing removes a great deal of this uncertainty from the process. You have the ability to target the specific audience that is most likely to resonate with your message and become a customer. Digital marketing makes this possible in a variety of ways:

• You can target your social media ads to only be delivered to the profiles of individuals who meet the specific demographic information you identify in your buyer personas
• You can use organic SEO strategies and paid search (PPC) campaigns to increase the likelihood that your website and other digital marketing efforts reach individuals who are searching for information associated with the products or services you provide
• You can create gated content pieces that allow you to capture the email addresses of individuals who are interested in your product or service, allowing you to follow up with them using targeted email marketing journeys which will build trust and credibility in your company so that you remain top of mind as these individuals move closer towards their buying decision
• You have the ability to create sub-groups within your target audience to ensure these individuals receive the most relevant information for their needs

Digital marketing allows you to compile data that will help you better understand your buyer personas and refine your marketing strategy to address their needs more effectively. Over time, these refinements should improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, allowing you to improve your ability to connect with your audience and convert leads.

You Can Engage Your Audience at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Most people don’t make purchases on impulse. Instead, it’s common for them to engage in a lengthy process where they research their options to understand what they need. Part of this research will involve learning more about specific products and services, but it will also give them an opportunity to learn more about the companies which provide these products and services.

When you’re able to engage your audience in the early stages of this buyer’s journey, it gives you a greater opportunity to capture their attention and move them through your sales funnel. Digital marketing allows you to accomplish this at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

With digital marketing, you have the ability to create content that targets every stage of this journey. Therefore, you can meet your audience where they are at the moment. In addition, you can track your audience through the journey to better understand their buying process. As you gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, you’ll be able to refine your marketing efforts to convert more leads.

Results Are Easily Measured

One of the greatest limitations associated with traditional marketing strategies involves the ability to accurately measure the results of your efforts. It’s virtually impossible to identify how many people contacted you after watching your TV commercial or viewing your print ad. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a wealth of data that allows you to accurately measure the success of your efforts.

You can use analytics data to gain a comprehensive understanding of your website traffic, including:

• How many people visit your website
• Which pages they visit
• How many pages they view while visiting your website
• What type of device (desktop, tablet, mobile) was used
• Where these visitors are from
• Where your website traffic is coming from (organic search, paid search, social media, etc.)

This data can help you prioritize which marketing channels to invest most heavily in. For example, if you’re getting most of your traffic from paid search, you may want to increase your budget for your most important PPC campaigns.

You can also use this data to track all your sales back to an individual’s first digital interaction with your company. This process, called attribution modeling, enables you to identify trends in the way your audience is engaging with your online content. This information can be used to refine your efforts at every stage of the buyer’s journey to keep your audience more engaged and increase the likelihood of converting them into a new customer.

Find Answers with our Marketing Strategy FAQs.

You’ll Maximize the ROI of Your Marketing Efforts

When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you’ll have a framework in place that allows you to track the ROI of each tactic used in your strategy. An effective digital marketing strategy will always outline the:

• Specific goals you’re trying to achieve
• The marketing tactics you’ll use to achieve these goals
• The success metrics necessary to track the effectiveness of your efforts
• The benchmarks that must be hit in order to achieve your desired outcome

Your analytics data allows you to track the day-to-day and month-to-month performance of every campaign. Over time, this will provide you with a detailed understanding of which tactics are performing well and which are struggling to deliver your desired results. You can use this data to refine your campaign, focusing on the tactics that generate the best results. You can also reallocate your budget so that you dedicate more resources to the channels that are contributing the most to your overall success. This will allow you to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

It Becomes Easier to Compete with Bigger Companies

If you’re a small business, you most likely lack the deep resources possessed by the largest companies in your industry. With limited resources, it’s extremely challenging to compete in traditional marketing methods which require a tremendous investment of money to deliver results. Digital marketing creates an ability to target your efforts in a way that allows you to compete with these larger brands more effectively.

With some savvy SEO work, you can identify specific search queries and long-tail keywords which are being used by your target audience. By creating high quality content around these terms, you have an opportunity to outrank larger businesses who may not be focused on these valuable search terms. Creating content that resonates better with your audience than what is being produced by bigger brands gives you the ability to reach a larger number of people than is possible with a limited marketing budget that is focused on traditional methods.

Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Getting Your Content Marketing Strategy Started

You Can Improve Your Conversion Rate and Generate Higher Quality Leads

Perhaps the most important benefit you’ll experience from all the data generated by your digital marketing efforts is the ability to improve your conversion rate. You can review data associated with the various CTAs on your website and run A/B testing to see which are most effective. You can also identify which of your marketing methods typically result in the most conversions, allowing you to invest a larger percentage of your resources in the strategies which have proven to be most effective.

In addition, you have a greater ability to target specific audiences with digital marketing. This allows you to focus your efforts on the segments of your audience which yield the highest quality leads – both in terms of their likelihood of becoming customers and the amount of money they’re likely to spend with your business once they convert. This not only helps improve your conversion rate, but also can boost the revenue generated by each new lead.

Getting Started Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you already have a robust digital marketing strategy, congratulations. You are way ahead of many of your competitors. For those businesses that have been struggling with creating and implementing a strategy, here are some tips to help you get started:

• Identify your marketing goals – Less is more. If you establish 10 or more goals, you will struggle to create a cohesive strategy that achieves each of them. Pick the 3-5 goals that will move your business forward the most and focus on those.
• Identify KPIs for each goal – How will you measure whether you’ve successfully achieved each of your goals? What metrics are most effective at measuring this success?
• Understand your target audience – Create a series of personas that provide detailed information about each segment of your target audience. Include demographic information, pain points, what types of messages resonate with them, and what will motivate them to take action.
• Determine which tactics will most effectively achieve your goals – Are you focused mainly on organic search? Paid search? Does your audience engage with you most on social media? Make sure you’re implementing the proper strategies to achieve the goals you’ve established.
• Continuously monitor and refine – After implementing your digital marketing strategy, make sure you regularly review your data to measure the success of your efforts. When necessary, make adjustments to your strategy to improve the outcomes.

Read our other Marketing Strategy Articles full of Helpful Information.

Webolutions Can Help You Develop and Implement a Digital Marketing Strategy

Developing an effective digital marketing strategy is a complex process that takes considerable experience and expertise to get right. Unless your business has the resources to employ a team of in-house marketing specialists, it’s generally more effective to work with a seasoned digital marketing agency who can help you craft and implement a strategy that aligns with your goals. With nearly three decades of experience, Webolutions can set you up for success.

Webolutions is the only strategic digital marketing agency in the United States delivering a transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. We lead you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about you as a company. Our team will then conduct thorough market research to clearly understand what your competitors are doing and saying.

As part of this process, we’ll create a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that clearly differentiates you and makes you stand out from the competitors in your industry. This plan will be used to develop your Brand Platform™, which creates a cohesive story and brand messaging that will be used throughout every aspect of your marketing efforts. Based on this information, we’ll develop a detailed digital marketing strategy that brings your story to life and achieves your goals for the upcoming year.

Our team provides comprehensive digital marketing services, and we will recommend the right mix of methods to convey your brand story most effectively to your target audience. We’ll implement the right communications and tracking systems necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Over time, we’ll make any adjustments and refinements necessary to achieve your marketing goals.

This exclusive approach results in faster, easier company growth that allows you to thrive for years to come.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

The post 10 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

• Reflection on what has been working for your business over the last year and what areas need improvement
• Planning for where you want to go over the next year and beyond

This planning and reflection should take place in all aspects of your operations, including your marketing. Annual marketing planning is truly essential, as it is one of the most important tools you can use to consistently grow your business over time.

Marketing trends evolve rapidly, and the strategies you’ve used over the last year or two may not necessarily be the best solutions to continue pushing your company forward in the future. Making annual marketing planning part of your regular Q4 operations rhythm will ensure your efforts don’t become stale. Instead, you’ll be taking a proactive and strategic approach that ensures you continue making the best use of your resources and are implementing the most effective strategies to deliver your desired outcome.

What Is Annual Marketing Planning?

Annual marketing planning is the process associated with setting the course for your marketing efforts to ensure they achieve your business’ growth goals. This overarching plan will establish your marketing goals for the upcoming year and create a roadmap to help your team achieve your desired outcome.

Think of your annual marketing plan as a blueprint that keeps your company focused on all established objectives, identifies the best opportunities to pursue, and establishes the budget necessary to achieve your goals. Without this plan, your marketing efforts can potentially become very messy – it’s hard to know whether you’re pursuing the best strategies, you may not have identified the correct metrics to determine if you’re getting your desired results, and you may struggle to establish the proper budget to maximize the return on your marketing.

Crafting a strong annual marketing plan will accomplish several important purposes for your business:

• Define your marketing objectives and ensure that they align with your company’s purpose, values and long-term vision
• Keep your business on a path of long-term growth
• Improve your market position and identify new opportunities to pursue that can help grow your customer base over the next year
• Increase your company’s brand awareness
• Identify how essential marketing tasks and responsibilities will be assigned to the different members of your team
• Establish metrics that will help you determine the success of your efforts and identify aspects of your plan that may need to be adjusted over time

Annual Marketing Planning Essentials – 5 Key Elements for a Successful Process

Annual marketing planning is a process. As with all processes, there are key elements that must be addressed in order to ensure your efforts are effective. The advice below will focus on these high-level key elements – in other words, the foundation on which your annual marketing plan is built. This is different than the steps necessary to execute your plan. But without focusing on the following key elements, you won’t have the proper infrastructure in place to execute the steps associated with implementing your plan.

Clearly Define Your Coming Year’s Organizational Business Goals

Successful businesses have a long-term vision. If you’re only focused on the present, you’re more likely to muddle along and change course every time a new trend arises. This won’t help you achieve lofty goals that will push your business forward 3, 5 and 10 years from now. Your long-term vision should establish goals for how your company will grow over time:

• Target revenue goals to shoot for over a multi-year period (these goals should increase each year)
• Potential new products or services to provide over time
• Additions to your team necessary to reach your goals as your business scales up over time

While this long-range vision is crucial, it can also be daunting if you don’t break it down into smaller, more achievable stages. Each year, you should set specific organizational business goals that will help you incrementally move along the path to achieving your company’s long-term vision. In other words, you need to identify where the company is trying to go in the next year. This will help guide the marketing efforts necessary to get you there.

While your marketing team leads will be involved in this process, your executive team must drive the establishment of these annual business goals. Make sure you’re identifying big picture goals that will help move your business forward towards achieving your long-range vision.

Model Potential Marketing Strategies with ROI Projections

Once you’ve defined your company’s business goals for the upcoming year, it’s time to start evaluating potential marketing strategies to implement. It’s crucial that this evaluation is data driven. Simply choosing the hottest new marketing trend and hoping it pays dividends for your business is not likely to yield the outcome you desire.

Start by looking at your previous year’s marketing data to determine which strategies were most successful in the past. We recommend that you evaluate data for just about every aspect of your marketing efforts. This may include:

• Online paid ads
• Trade shows
• Referral partnerships
• Existing client growth
• SEO
• Tactical content marketing
• Targeted social media engagement

When evaluating these strategies, look at your funnel data points to understand how each strategy creates returns. This is the most effective way to generate accurate ROI projections for the strategies you’re considering. For example, you can evaluate the following metrics to determine the ROI you received on your online paid ads:

• Impressions for the spend – How many targeted people will see your ad. This information can be acquired with research.
• Click-through rates – How many targeted people will click your ad and visit your landing page. You can get this information from your historic data.
• Landing page conversion rates – How many conversions (both from phone calls and contact form submissions) you’ll expect to receive from your landing page. This can be determined from industry averages.
• Qualified leads – How many leads you can expect to receive that meet your criteria for becoming a quality new client/customer. This information can be acquired from historic data in your ERP.
• Lead closing rate – The percentage of leads you can expect your sales team to close. This is also contained in your ERP historic data.
• Average new client sale – How much you can expect to make on each sale. Your accounting system will contain this information.
• Average new client value – How much revenue you can expect to generate over time from each new client. This is also found in your accounting system.

By evaluating these comprehensive metrics, you’re able to develop a clearer understanding of how effective each strategy has been in the past. This should drive your decision making for the marketing strategies you choose moving forward. Keep in mind that this data should also be viewed in the context of how the latest marketing trends are impacting the success of each strategy.

Select Your Essential Strategies

Now that you have ROI projections for each strategy, it’s time to pick the best ones to achieve your goals. When selecting marketing strategies, there is one point that can’t be stressed enough – don’t try to do everything.

While it may be tempting to throw the kitchen sink at your marketing efforts, this will ultimately result in spreading yourself too thin, and your overall marketing results will most likely suffer. Instead, do the essential things you need to do, and do them well. We recommend focusing on 2-4 critical channels. This will deliver much better results than trying to tackle every possible marketing strategy at your disposal.

The data you compiled is crucial to selecting the proper strategies. Using your model, choose the strategies that deliver the best ROI, and do them well.

Outline Your Performance Intelligence System Needs

In order to accurately evaluate the performance of your efforts and continuously improve results, you must create an effective performance intelligence infrastructure. There is a big difference between simply compiling data and leveraging that data as true performance intelligence.

There is a hierarchy governing the relationship between data, information, and intelligence:

• Data – This refers to individual numbers, called data points. They can come from a variety of events such as website actions, customer actions, customer feedback, CRM interactions, an internal survey and many other sources. Tools such as Google Analytics provide these data points.
• Information – This refers to the smart, intentional arrangement of multiple data points to provide your predetermined, most critical insights quickly and accurately.
• Intelligence – This refers to the ability to acquire and apply knowledge (from information) and skills to continuously improve your outcomes and performance.

Keep these keys in mind when acquiring performance intelligence:

• Determine the critical information needed to evaluate performance at each stage of your organizational intelligence growth – This should occur in phases, based on the degree of impact the intelligence can have on your organization. Once you’ve dialed in your upper tier key measures, you can begin fine tuning and creating intelligence subsets.
• Avoid data overload and diminished results – You can only improve performance when the information you acquire is actionable for improvement. Many organizations waste enormous resources to collect, review and discuss data that isn’t relevant to the actions being taken. It’s crucial that you avoid this at all costs and simply focus on the data specific to the actions you’re taking.
• Create an effective system for conveying this information – You need to determine how to best organize and view all the data points to provide clear information that will enable you to make intelligent decisions.

Define the Budget Needed to Achieve Your Organizational Business Goals

Establishing a budget for your marketing initiatives is a crucial component to the annual planning process. You’ll need to know how much these strategies will cost in order to achieve your desired results and maximize your ROI.

It’s no secret that effective marketing can be expensive. However, when done right, this can be some of the best money you spend. It’s an investment in the ongoing success of your business. Effective marketing helps you build your brand, expand your customer base, and achieve continued growth over time. That is certainly worth opening the checkbook for.

The key is to let your performance intelligence dictate your budget instead of having your accounting team tell you, “Here is the money you have to spend on marketing this year.” If your budget it dictated by your accountant, you run the risk that your expenditure will fall short of what is needed to achieve your organizational business goals.

Therefore, it’s crucial that you approach this process as a strategic leader and say to your team, “Here are the goals, here are the essential things we need to do, and this is the budget needed to achieve our goals.” Your ROI projections and performance intelligence data should be able to provide the justification you need for your budget requests.

Putting Your Plan into Motion

When it comes to annual marketing planning, knowledge is power. This can’t be stressed enough. Without the proper data and performance intelligence, you won’t have the ability to confidently identify the best approach to maximize your marketing ROI for the upcoming year.

Therefore, it’s crucial that you take the time to get these aspects of the process dialed in before you start annual planning. Meet with your marketing team several months in advance in order to ensure they know what data you will need, and make sure they are creating the performance intelligence systems necessary to properly create the ROI projections you need. This way, you’re ready to hit the ground running once you’ve established your business goals for the coming year.

This process can be overwhelming the first few times you attempt annual planning, but the end results are well worth the effort. This will help you align your marketing strategies with your business goals in order to move your business forward. If you feel like you’d benefit from expert guidance, Webolutions can help.

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. We’ve seen the digital marketing industry evolve from its infancy, and we understand what it takes to identify the strategies necessary to achieve your marketing goals.

We’re the only strategic agency in the United States delivering a transformational Power of You Platform™ to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. This platform provides you with a collaborative, expert-led journey to identify what is special about you as a company in order to position you as an industry leader.

As part of our Power of You Platform™, we will guide you through the annual planning process in order to identify and implement the most effective strategies necessary to achieve your goals. Our team will set up the data analysis tools necessary to provide the information you need, and our real-time performance intelligence dashboards will deliver the actionable insights you need in an easy to understand format.

Our strategic marketing team has extensive experience conducting annual planning with our clients, and we can guide you through the process every step of the way. You’ll come out of annual planning with a clear vision and direction for the upcoming year, and you’ll be armed with the proper strategies necessary to get to where you’re looking to go.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 5 Keys for Effective Annual Marketing Planning appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Leveraging data when creating long range plans for your business provides several important benefits:

• It eliminates instinctive, emotional decisions and shifts your focus to crafting action plans based on real-world performance insights and industry trends.
• It helps you evaluate past performance to understand what has worked and what hasn’t. This enables you to set realistic goals and adjust your business strategies as needed in order to achieve these goals.
• It helps you identify industry trends that make it easier to forecast potential opportunities for growth as well as strategies to avoid in the future.
• It allows you to more effectively evaluate the needs of your customers in order to adjust your products/services in a manner that will deliver more value and drive more sales.
• It helps you achieve companywide buy-in for upcoming initiatives. It’s much harder to question the effectiveness of a particular strategy when it is rooted in hard data.
• It ensures your team understands the main components of your business strategy and remains aligned on the tactics required to achieve your goals.

If your business is in the process of making the shift to a more data driven approach, it can be a bit daunting at first. Fortunately, there are steps to take to ensure you get this process right.

Data Analysis Should Align with Business Goals

When it comes to data analysis, the expression “less is more” often applies. There is a virtually limitless amount of data you can collect and analyze, but it’s crucial that you focus your efforts on specific areas of your business operations. When choosing the data to collect and analyze, make sure you’re focusing on data that will provide the insights necessary to achieve your primary business goals.

When coming up with goals for the upcoming year, it’s best to focus on 2-4 key areas that will move your business forward. If you set too many goals, it will make it much harder to achieve any of them. By limiting to 2-4 important items, you can more effectively position your business for success in the upcoming year.

Your KPIs Will Determine the Data You Need

Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure how successful you are at accomplishing these goals. The specific KPIs you should track will depend on the goals you’ve set.

For example, important KPIs to measure the success of a marketing goal may involve website performance metrics, social media engagement, or email open rates. If you’ve set goals for your sales team, you may want to track total sales revenue, percentage of revenue from existing vs. new clients, lead response time, or year-over-year sales growth.

The key is to identify the specific KPIs that will help you measure the success of your goals at each stage during the process you’ve established for achieving them. You can then collect the right data to evaluate your KPIs, allowing you to alter your strategy as needed over time in order to more effectively achieve your goals.

What Tools Do I Need to Leverage Relevant Data?

In most instances, you won’t be able to harvest all of the data you need from one single platform. Instead, you should plan on adopting several different tools that can help you collect and analyze the data you need. The specific tools you should use will depend on the goals you’ve set, the KPIs you’re tracking, and the data you need to gain performance insights.

The following platforms can provide important data that you can use to evaluate the success of your business goals:

• Analytics tools – These provide robust data regarding your website and SEO performance. You can also conduct competitor analysis to determine what your competitors are doing better than you.
• CRM – Your CRM can provide a wealth of important data. Build more detailed customer personas, allowing you to more effectively target your marketing efforts. Manage supplier information to ensure you are receiving the services you need. You can also track the success of email marketing campaigns.
• POS – You can track sales data and customer purchase information.
• Accounting software – Track how much each customer/client is paying you and how close you are to achieving your revenue goals.

This list is by no means exhaustive. There are many data systems available. Make sure to do your research and identify the right platforms to deliver the important information you need.

4 Ways to Leverage Your Data

There are many ways you can leverage data to set your business up for success. The examples below are some of the most common ways businesses use data, but there are many others. The goals you set will determine the best ways to leverage your data.

Improved Marketing Success

Data analysis is a crucial component to your online marketing strategy. It will help you evaluate the success of prior efforts to identify areas in need of improvement. Leveraging marketing data can also help you develop more innovative marketing strategies moving forward that will allow your business to grow.

There are many ways to leverage marketing data to improve your results:

• Target existing customers – It’s much more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. You can use the insights from your marketing data to more effectively hold onto existing customers long term.
• Target new customers – While it’s important to retain your existing customer base, you still need to continuously add new customers to ensure your business grows over time. Data is crucial to your ability to market your services and products more effectively by delivering messages that resonate with your target audience.
• Identify new opportunities – The data you collect about customer behavior patterns and overall market conditions will help you discover new opportunities as they arise. You can then develop targeted marketing campaigns to more effectively capitalize on these opportunities.
• Track the performance of your efforts – You can track a wide range of metrics which will help you evaluate the success of your campaigns. Some valuable metrics to monitor include:
  • Keyword performance
  • Click through rates
  • Bounce rates on web pages
  • Time on page/time on website
  • Social media views, shares and likes
  • Email open rates
  • Total number of page views

The ways to leverage marketing data are virtually limitless. It can elevate your marketing efforts so that you can set your business up for sustained long term growth.

Competitive Advantage

The competition in most industries is fiercer than ever. Data can provide the intelligence and insights you need to improve your decision making and gain a competitive advantage for your business. You can leverage data to improve many aspects of your operations, including:

• Research and development
• Forecasting and planning
• Budgeting
• Performance management
• Pricing strategies
• Improving customer experience

Improved Business Outcomes

Successful businesses are constantly working to improve their processes and efficiency in order to achieve better outcomes. You can use data to improve these outcomes. However, it’s important to understand that as with setting goals, the most effective way to achieve this is to focus on specific areas of your business you would like to improve.

Some important business outcomes that can be improved by leveraging your data include:

• Productivity – You can leverage data regarding the way your resources are used to improve your processes and increase productivity.
• Service quality – If your business provides services, you can leverage data to identify what your customers like in terms of service features and offerings, as well as the things they don’t enjoy. This information can improve your overall service quality to deliver a better customer experience.
• Product quality – In most instances, better quality products will help you build a solid reputation in your industry and improve customer satisfaction. You can leverage customer feedback data from surveys and social media to determine how to improve the design and quality of your products.

Create Value

Providing high quality products and services are crucial to the success of your business. However, quality isn’t the only factor that drives purchasing decisions. Your potential customers and clients also want to feel like they’re getting good value if they’re going to enter into a long-term relationship with a business. By creating this value, you can stand out from your competitors and grow your customer base.

Data can be used to create value for your customers in a variety of ways:

• You can leverage data to provide insights and recommendations for your customers, delivering a better overall experience than is possible by simply providing a product or service.
• You can use data you’ve collected to help guide customers through their decision-making process to ensure they purchase the right product. This can elevate the way you’re perceived by customers and develop a deeper level of trust that leads to loyalty over time.
• You can also leverage data to identify the aspects of your products and services which resonate most strongly with your customers. This can help you focus on these features in order to ensure your customers are receiving what they need, when they need it.

Transforming Your Business into a Data-Driven Organization

Before you start planning for the upcoming year, it’s crucial to make sure your data collection and analysis processes are clearly established and being implemented by your team. There are several important steps to take:

• Set clear business goals and the KPIs associated with these goals.
• Identify the appropriate data tools to provide the information you need and invest in these tools.
• Assemble a team to analyze the data you’re collecting and provide recommendations that will achieve your goals. Make sure to provide all necessary training for team members who will be implementing new tools that they are unfamiliar with.
• Create a roadmap for executing the initiatives identified by your data analysis.
• Continue to evaluate your strategy over time in order to refine your processes and improve your outcomes.

Webolutions Can Provide the Data-Driven Recommendations You Need

Setting up all the infrastructure to collect and leverage the right data to grow your business can be an overwhelming process. Often, it can be helpful to work with a digital marketing agency who can deliver the data insights you need to properly plan for the future.

At Webolutions, we can help ensure you have the right data at your disposal, and we can guide you through the process of establishing the right initiatives to grow your business. We are the only strategic communications agency in the United States delivering a transformational Power of You Platform™ to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. As part of this process, we create Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards™ that provide you with thoughtful and organized real-time graphical performance models which allow you to see the critical information and trends that will drive your business success.

Our team will also analyze the data for you in order to make customized recommendations geared towards achieving the specific goals you establish. The information and recommendations we provide will help you craft a strategic plan for the upcoming year that will ensure your team remains focused on the important initiatives necessary thrive in this competitive business landscape.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation. We serve clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post How to Leverage Data to Set Your Business Up for Success appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Digital Marketing Strategy

Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in the way people consume information, purchase products, and interact with each other. At the turn of the century, roughly 50% of Americans were regular internet users, but that figure has now risen to 90%. We now live in a truly digital age.

With the widespread adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices, the internet is readily accessible at a moment’s notice. In this new digital age, the most effective way to reach your audience and grow your business is via online channels. In fact, 2020 was the first year that digital marketing expenditures exceeded traditional marketing expenditures. A well thought out, comprehensive digital marketing strategy is now one of the most critical aspects of your marketing efforts.

Surprisingly, many businesses are still overlooking this critical aspect of the process. Only 38% of companies surveyed have a well-defined digital marketing strategy that is fully integrated with their other marketing efforts. In contrast, 45% of businesses reported having no overarching strategy guiding their digital marketing efforts. Without creating a comprehensive strategy to guide your efforts, you’re much less likely to achieve your desired results. You will also lack the data and insights necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts in order to improve them over time.

Today, your digital marketing strategy yields a much higher ROI than a traditional marketing strategy. This is the most important way you can distinguish your business from your competitors, engage with potential customers, drive more leads, and increase sales.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Your digital marketing strategy refers to the overarching plan behind your marketing efforts. While the specific tactics used to convey your message to your audience is certainly part of this plan, your digital strategy encompasses much more than this. It involves a taking a big picture view of your marketing efforts to ensure they are coordinated in a way that will effectively achieve your goals.

When creating a digital marketing strategy, you must first answer the following questions:

• What are the goals you’re trying to achieve with your marketing efforts?
• Who is the target audience you’re trying to reach?
• What are the products and/or services you’re most concerned with selling?
• What are the market conditions impacting the products or services you provide?

Once you’ve figured out these important items, you’ll be able to start building a long-term strategy that will help your business grow and thrive over time.

The Building Blocks of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

There is a basic framework associated with creating an effective digital marketing strategy. It should include the following essential components:

• Establishing clearly defined goals
• Identifying your target audience
• Understanding your market positioning
• Creating your brand message
• Determining the best tactics to convey your message to your audience
• Setting up analytics to measure the success of your efforts

Establishing Your Marketing Goals

In order to be effective, your digital marketing strategy must first establish the goals and objectives you’re trying to achieve through your efforts. Once you understand your goals, it will be much easier to identify the best solutions to achieve them. Without setting goals at the start of the process, you’re much more likely to end up with scattered efforts that don’t help your business achieve any real growth.

When identifying your goals, it’s crucial to use the SMART framework. This means that your goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

This framework will help you create goals that are much more detailed. You’ll have a clear sense of what you’re trying to achieve. For example, setting a goal of “increasing organic website traffic” is relatively vague. Without defining the parameters of this goal, it will be challenging to identify the proper steps to take and measure your success over time. A more effective goal would be to “increase organic website traffic by 100% over the next six months.”

Now you have a specific target to shoot for (100%), and you will be able to measure your success (analytics data will tell you whether or not you hit this target). You also have a specific timeline established for reaching this goal (six months). If you’re hovering around the 100% mark near the end of six months, you’ll know the goal was attainable, whether you achieved it or not. If you blew past this benchmark, it’s likely that you could’ve been more aggressive in your target growth. If you don’t come anywhere near this mark, it’s possible that you set a goal that wasn’t attainable.

Other potential goals to set may include:

• Increasing total number of leads/sales
• Increasing the number of blog subscribers
• Improving engagement on social media platforms
• Boosting the average monthly open rate on emails
• Improving conversion rates for mobile website traffic

Keep in mind that these examples are very general. In order for these goals to effectively drive your marketing strategy, you’ll need to make them SMART. In addition, it’s crucial that you stay focused on the goals that are most important to your business. Setting too many goals can distract you from what truly matters, making it harder to achieve any results. For this reason, we recommend choosing 2-3 core goals that will benefit your business.

Identifying Your Target Audience

An effective digital marketing strategy must be specifically geared towards the needs of your target audience. But in order to understand what these needs are, you must first identify who your audience is. This process involves conducting some research:

• Compile data on your existing customers by talking to your sales team, reviewing website analytics data, and asking your account managers about their conversations with clients.
• Review your social media analytics data to identify the demographics of the users most actively engaging with you on these platforms.

Once you have this information, you should construct several buyer personas. These are representations of the characteristics associated with your target audience. You should create a different persona for each segment of your target audience since each segment may have slightly different behaviors and motivations.

Make sure your personas are as detailed as possible. They should include the following:

• Demographic information (age, geographic location, gender, relationship status, etc.)
• Income level
• Interests
• Education level
• Job title
• Habits
• Values
• Pain points
• The types of messages that will motivate them to take action

Understanding Your Market Positioning

Knowing your audience is one component necessary to establish effective brand messaging. But you also need to understand your position within your market. This involves:

• Identifying trends impacting your industry
• Evaluating your ability to effectively address these trends
• Assessing how you view yourself in relationship to the market
• Assessing how your business is perceived by the marketplace

You’ll also need to understand how you stack up against your competitors in order to gain a clear picture of your position within the market. This involves performing a comprehensive competitive analysis that helps you determine:

• How your competitors leverage their messaging to distinguish themselves
• Their primary tactics to appeal to and acquire new customers
• Their perceived strengths and weaknesses in comparison to those of your business

There are several steps involved in performing this competitive analysis:

• Identify which competitors to target – This should include a combination of the big businesses in your market as well as some of the smaller, local niche businesses.
• Review each competitor’s website – What products/services do they offer, and how do they stack up against your products/services? What is their unique selling proposition? How effectively have they created a brand that engages customers and conveys their story?
• Evaluate your competitors’ social media accounts – What tactics are they using to engage with their audience? How much engagement is being generated? What are other people saying about your competitors on social media?
• Assess the effectiveness of their SEO tactics – Tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you to better understand what your competitors are doing to achieve SEO results. Which keywords are they ranking well for? Which keywords are generating the most traffic for their websites? Are there any keywords that your competitors aren’t targeting which present an opportunity for you? What websites are driving backlinks to your competitors’ websites? Compiling this data will help you understand what is and isn’t working for your competitors. You can use this information to guide your strategy.
• Identify their top performing content – You can use a tool like Buzzsumo to track the activity associated with competitor content marketing efforts. This will help you identify potential content creation opportunities for your digital marketing campaign.

Creating Your Brand Message

You can use your buyer personas and the information you’ve gathered from market positioning to craft a strong brand message that tells your story and connects with your target audience. This message should form the foundation of the story told throughout all of your marketing efforts.

A brand is a memory bank of positive associations between an organization, what it stands for, and the moments of happiness it creates in people’s lives. Effective branding creates an immediately identifiable emotional connection among your audience that goes beyond logic, product superiority, product attributes, or technical specifications. It represents the culmination of the experiences your audience has with your company, and these experiences should be driven by a core set of innate values and a clearly defined organizational purpose.

Building a strong brand is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts:

• It differentiates your experiences from those created by your competitors
• It develops long-lasting relationships based on credibility and trust
• It improves your reputation even before customers/clients have experienced your offering
• It de-emphasizes price in the purchasing decision of potential customers and shifts the focus to the overall brand experience you’re cultivating (people are less likely to stress over price if they feel like they’re receiving an exceptional experience)
• It delivers a consistent look, feel, tone and experience that audiences immediately recognize
• It allows you to create a unique selling proposition (USP) that clearly differentiates you from what is being provided by your competitors

A strong brand contains a variety of important elements, including:

• A distinctive and easily recognizable logo
• An attractive color palette
• A font that complements your logo and colors
• Supporting images and graphics that convey the experience you’re trying to create
• A tagline that encapsulates your unique offering and experience

Determining the Best Tactics to Convey Your Message to Your Audience

As part of your digital marketing strategy, you’ll need to create a plan for getting your message out to your audience. There are a variety of tactics you can use to achieve your marketing goals. The right mix of tactics for you will depend on your specific marketing goals as well as your budget.

Website

Your website is the most important component of your digital marketing efforts. It is the hub from which all of your other tactics build. Your website provides a way for you to tell your story and convey your brand to the public. It should express your company’s purpose and values, explain the products/services you offer, and demonstrate what makes you stand out from your competitors (your USP).

For the most effective results, you should build a custom website that addresses the following elements:

• Aligns with your brand imaging and messaging
• Is easy to navigate
• Is mobile-friendly
• Provides a good user experience
• Acts as a resource for potential customers/clients seeking information about the products/services you offer
• Contains clear calls to action which move your audience through the steps you are trying to get them to take
• Provides important basic information about your company (address, phone number, etc.)
• Includes forms that make it easy for people to contact you directly

Depending on the specifics of your business, your website may need to perform other important functions as well. For example, you may want to enable ecommerce features that allow your audience to purchase your products directly on your website. Or if your business is trying to grow an online community, you may have a forum where members can post comments and ask questions. You may also want to include a gallery that showcases some of your best work. These additional features should help you achieve the goals you established as part of your digital marketing strategy.

SEO

A beautiful website is worthless if no one can find it. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. A strong SEO strategy will help improve your website’s rankings on the major search engines such as Google and Bing. Google has created a complex algorithm to determine which websites are most relevant for each search being performed. These algorithms are constantly changing and updating. Therefore, it’s crucial to work with an SEO specialist who stays on top of the latest SEO trends and helps you maintain strong search rankings.

Paid Search

It can often be challenging to generate high levels of organic search traffic. There are precious few spaces on the first page of search results, and often you’re competing with websites that are considered to be highly authoritative resources. In addition, there is a local search component associated with which websites appear on the first page. Therefore, it can take a long time for your new website to start ranking well.

One way to generate website traffic while you’re improving your SEO results is to implement a paid search strategy. Pay per click (PPC) advertising can drive qualified leads to your website from the moment you launch your campaign. You have the ability to target people with your paid ads based on a variety of factors, including demographics, geographic location, and the type of device being used. You can also adjust your budget based on the results you’re trying to achieve. You only pay when users click on your ad, so the more effective your ad, the more effective your results.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is used to complement your SEO strategy. Providing useful, robust information that your audience finds valuable will significantly improve the performance of your website on search rankings. It’s also an important way to tell your story, convey your brand messaging, and educate your audience about the products/services you offer.

When creating a content marketing strategy, keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity. A few comprehensive, highly informative web pages or blog posts will deliver a lot more value to your overall marketing strategy than flooding your website with low quality, poorly written pieces of content. When writing content, make sure you’re effectively answering the questions asked by your audience, explaining how you can help alleviate their pain points, and providing calls to action that direct users to the next steps in the process.

Social Media Marketing

There are over 223 million active social media users in the United States. As a result, social media marketing can be a powerful tool to help you tell your story and engage with your audience. There are two different aspects to social media marketing:

• Organic social media refers to the exchange of ideas, information and entertainment that occurs when you post on your social media profiles.
• Paid social media refers to the advertising component of these platforms. You can create ads and offers which are targeted to your specific audience. These paid ads will appear as sponsored posts on the newsfeeds of a user’s profile.

Email Marketing

Email marketing provides you with the ability to communicate directly with existing customers to build and maintain brand loyalty. You can also communicate with prospects who aren’t ready to purchase just yet so that when they’re ready to make a decision, your business remains top of mind.

There are many ways to grow your email list, from providing quality gated content to interacting with prospects at a trade show to asking new users to register their product after purchasing it. You can then customize your email campaigns to address the specific goals for each type of user on your list. Email marketing is an effective way to complement your other digital marketing efforts, providing another way to reach your audience and tell your story.

Reputation Management

Over 90% of people say they read at least one review before making a purchase. More than ever, online reviews can be a powerful tool that helps convert a prospective buyer into a paying customer. This makes sense – people look for social proof that they are making the right decision. When they see lots of positive reviews, they’re more likely to feel confident in their decision than if they see a bunch of negative reviews.

Reputation management focuses on helping you acquire and promote positive online reviews. This strategy seeks to identify customers who’ve had a positive experience with your product or service, and it will direct them to the most commonly visited review sites so that they can share their experience with others.

Setting Up Analytics to Measure the Success of Your Efforts

There is a wealth of data available to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. It’s important to leverage this data in order to continuously improve your digital marketing strategy. Make sure you’re monitoring analytics data directly related to the goals you’ve established. This will help you get the most value out of your marketing efforts so that you continue to grow your business over time.

Webolutions Can Help You Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Webolutions is a digital marketing agency in Denver providing comprehensive solutions to help you grow your business. Our process starts with creating a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that clarifies your goals, develops detailed personas and identifies your brand positioning relative to your competition. Then we’ll build a brand platform that transforms your messaging and helps you more effectively live your purpose and values. Based on these efforts, we’ll craft a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that leverages the most effective tactics discussed above to achieve your desired results.

As one of Denver’s leading digital marketing agencies since 1994, Webolutions has watched the industry evolve from its infancy. Our team consists of seasoned professionals with the specialized experience necessary to help your business thrive in a competitive digital landscape.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

The post 6 Essential Components to a Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Creating an annual marketing budget is always an important task for every business. In order for your business to continue to grow and thrive, you need to retain loyal customers and experience an infusion of new customers who will hopefully remain loyal to you for years to come. This requires you to get the word out about the products and services you offer, as well as why your company is the right provider to choose. Without an adequate marketing budget, you won’t be able to raise the awareness necessary to grow your business.

Why Do I Need a Formal Marketing Budget?

It’s one thing to understand the need to invest in online marketing efforts. It’s another thing to take the time necessary to thoughtfully plan out this budget so that you know precisely what you can spend on marketing and which channels you plan on devoting these resources to. While this level of planning requires a lot of work, it will be well worth the time. You’ll experience a variety of benefits when you create a formal plan for your marketing budget:

• It keeps you on track financially – Many of the marketing strategies you’ll choose to implement are costly. Creating a marketing budget will keep you on track and prevent you from overspending or underspending, both of which can have a devastating impact on the long-term success of your business.
• It helps you use your resources more effectively – Once you’ve established the amount of money you can spend on marketing, you can more effectively allocate those resources towards specific strategies that will achieve your goals. You’ll be able to identify which strategies fit into your budget, as well as whether you can afford a comprehensive package provided by a digital marketing agency.
• It helps you establish realistic goals and benchmarks – It’s crucial that you define certain benchmarks and goals for your marketing efforts to ensure they’re achieving their intended outcome. You can use your budget to set realistic expectations for what each marketing strategy should deliver based on the financial resources you devote to them. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your efforts over time and ensure you have the data necessary to know when it’s time to pivot to a new strategy.
• It facilitates long-term planning – The resources you allocate to marketing must get you through the year, and this will require some long-range planning. If you overspend early in the year, you may find that you lack the budget to continue certain valuable campaigns as the year progresses. While flexibility is always crucial when creating a marketing budget, establishing an overarching long-term plan to fund your efforts will help ensure these efforts remain consistent throughout the year.

View Your Marketing Budget as an Investment, not a Cost

Many companies view their marketing efforts as a cost, and this can be problematic. While it is true that your marketing budget must be included as part of your annual business expenses, viewing them as a “cost” may cause you to look for ways to cut corners on this expenditure. This is especially true during an economic downturn when money may be tight and you’re operating on smaller margins than you’re typically used to.

Instead, it’s important to see your marketing efforts as an investment in the ongoing growth and success of your business. Creating a budget will let you use this money more effectively and creatively in order to get the most out of this investment in your company’s future.

Your marketing strategy is the most effective tool at your disposal to tell your company’s story, grow your brand and build stronger relationships with your customers. When you cut back your marketing efforts, you’ll become less visible to current and future customers, and your brand won’t resonate as strongly with your target audience. Over time, this can lead to significant customer attrition rates.

Many of your competitors may cut back on their marketing budgets in 2021 due to the economic crisis we’re currently facing. However, it’s important that you resist the urge to follow suit. Instead, by maintaining or even increasing your marketing budget for the upcoming year, you have an opportunity to remain relevant with your audience at a time when your competitors may be falling off their radar.

This will pay huge dividends as our economy recovers following the pandemic. Studies have demonstrated that by investing heavily in your marketing budget during a recession, you’ll be better positioned to thrive long term compared with companies who don’t keep their brand on their customers’ minds during an economic downturn.

Read our article: 5 Questions to Get Your Marketing Budget Approved

What Does Your Marketing Budget Pay For?

When planning out your 2021 marketing budget, you may find the overall dollar amount to be a bit shocking. However, it’s important to remember that running a successful marketing campaign is expensive for a reason. There are a lot of costs that need to be covered by this budget:

• The costs associated with running specific campaigns – Certain campaigns will require an ongoing cost to fund. For example, paid search (PPC), influencer marketing campaigns and social media ads will all require a monthly budget to achieve your desired results.
• Marketing consulting services – Unless you have an in-house team of experienced digital marketing professionals, you’re most likely going to need help from an outside agency. Website design and development, SEO services and content marketing are crucial components to a digital marketing campaign, and most companies simply lack the personnel to manage these tasks in-house. If you need to recruit the assistance of industry experts, you’ll need to factor the costs of their services into your budget.
• Software – Even if you work with an external agency or a team of freelance professionals, there are certain aspects of your marketing campaign that you’ll likely want to manage in-house. There are a wide range of software tools to streamline this process. However, most of the useful keyword research tools, social media schedule software, email marketing automation platforms and other marketing tools cost money for a license.
• Training – Digital marketing is a rapidly evolving field, and you’ll want to make sure any team members responsible for managing and implementing your campaign remain up to date on the latest best practices. This may involve paying for online courses, subscriptions to industry-leader publications, or in-person workshops and conferences.
• Employee compensation – Your marketing budget also goes to pay any employees responsible for implementing your strategies. Even if only part of their role is devoted to marketing, this must be factored into your marketing budget.

Factor External Costs When Establishing Your Marketing Budget

While the list above highlights the many costs associated with running your marketing campaign, we also realize the amount of money you can allocate to these expenses are largely dependent on the other costs associated with running your business, including:

• Operational costs (manufacturing and shipping products)
• Payroll costs
• Business overhead expenses (office space, electricity, Internet, office equipment)

These costs, along with your marketing costs, impact your profitability and determine how much money you can invest in specific services. These costs will also help you set up benchmarks for desired ROI on your marketing efforts.

Establish Goals for Your Marketing Efforts

It’s important to establish goals for what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing efforts. Without clearly defined goals, you won’t be able to determine a reasonable budget to help achieve them.

Some common goals for a marketing campaign include:

• Increasing leads
• Closing more sales
• Boosting brand awareness
• Growing your subscriber list

Make sure your goals are specific. Generic goals such as “increase leads” won’t help you determine how much money it will take to reach your goals or provide a framework to measure the success of your efforts. A more specific goal such as “increase monthly leads by 25%” is easier to measure and gives your team a precise target to reach. By establishing the percentage of increase you’re looking for and the specific timeframe you want to measure, you’ll have a better sense of what it will cost to achieve your goals.

Determine the Best Strategies to Use

There are a wide range of digital marketing strategies to choose from, and not all of them will be appropriate for your business. The right strategies for you will depend on the specifics of your industry, your target audience and the marketing goals you’ve established. Rather than spread your resources thin across every possible strategy, it’s better to choose a few that are ideally suited to your goals.

Some potential digital marketing strategies to incorporate into your budget include:

• Custom web design – When was the last time you updated your website? If it’s been a few years, it might be time for a redesign. Your website is the cornerstone of your digital marketing efforts. It’s one of the most effective tools you have to raise awareness of your brand and connect with your audience. A customized website that is built using the most up-to-date coding practices is essential to achieving your marketing goals.
• SEO – A great website does you no good if your audience can’t find it. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy. It helps boost your website’s search rankings, allowing you to drive more traffic to the pages your audience will find relevant, informative and useful. This will ultimately help you grow your brand, position yourself as an industry-leading authority and convert more leads.
• Content marketing – Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with your SEO strategy. In order to rank well on search engines, you need content that delivers the information your audience needs. This can come in a variety of forms, including web pages, blog posts, videos, infographics, case studies, eBooks and other formats that are ideally suited to delivering the information your audience needs.
• PPC – Pay per click (PPC) and other forms of paid search advertising can be an effective way to ensure you appear at the top of the search results, especially in industries where organic SEO is extremely competitive. These ads can significantly improve your ability to reach your audience and convert more leads.
• Social media marketing – Roughly 80% of Americans use social media platforms. By tapping into this marketing strategy, you can more effectively raise awareness of your brand and build relationships with potential customers who may be interested in your product or service. Social media marketing can involve organic posts, paid ads or a combination of the two.
• Email marketing – Email marketing allows you to nurture leads as they travel along the sales funnel. By customizing your email marketing content, you can create a wide range of campaigns that meet the varied needs of your audience depending on where they are in the sales process.
• Local SEO – In recent years, local SEO has become an increasingly important way to show up in the local search results provided by Google. By optimizing your Google My Business listing, you can drive more local traffic to your business.

Research Marketing Provider Costs

Once you decide which strategies you want to use, you’ll need a team to implement them. Whether this is done by an in-house marketing team, a digital marketing agency or freelance marketing professionals, you should understand how much each option will cost you.

Consider the following factors when determining the cost of each option:

• In-house marketing team – The primary cost associated with an in-house marketing team involves the salary and benefits for each employee. However, there may also be certain software tools that your team will need to pay for in order to manage your campaign. In addition, it’s possible that you’ll still need to hire an outside provider to manage certain aspects of the campaign. Make sure you factor in these additional costs for third-party service providers.
• Freelance marketing professionals – Freelancers typically specialize in one specific aspect of the marketing process. For example, a freelance copywriter may handle all of your content, while an SEO specialist will focus on optimizing the site. If you’re building a new website, you may need the assistance of a freelance designer who creates the website layout and a freelance web developer who builds the site. The cost of freelancer labor will depend on their experience, the software tools they use, and several other factors. An a la carte approach to your marketing can potentially prove costly if you need to work with multiple freelancers.
• Digital marketing agency – Digital marketing agencies provide comprehensive services in order to manage your entire campaign. They provide the team, tools and industry knowledge to ensure your campaign is run properly. For many companies, the insights provided by an agency can be invaluable, especially if you need assistance developing your marketing campaign.

The right solution for you will depend on the unique needs of your business as well as the amount of money allocated to your annual marketing budget. By researching the costs of all these solutions, you’ll have a better sense of what you can afford and what you can expect to get for your money.

Webolutions Can Help You Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Digital Marketing Budget

Webolutions is a Denver digital marketing agency providing the robust services you need to get the most out of your budget. As part of our process, we encourage all of our clients to engage in annual planning with us. During this meeting, we explore your upcoming marketing goals in order to develop a customized campaign to achieve your desired results. We’ll then establish a set of metrics to measure the success of your campaign over time.

Over the last 25 years, we’ve refined our approach to reflect the evolving digital marketing landscape. This has enabled us to elevate our clients’ messaging so that they continue to grow and thrive year after year. Our approach incorporates the following pillars of effective marketing:

• Market positioning – We’ll work with you to crystalize your purpose and values in order to clearly convey this to your audience. This will drive our brand platform which ensures all of your messaging remains consistent.
• Spreading your message – We’ll identify the right combination of strategies necessary to ensure your message reaches your target audience. We’ll then craft that message to ensure it resonates with your customers.
• ROI-based measurement – Everything we do is driven by data. We’ll work with you to set specific marketing goals and then track their effectiveness to ensure you’re receiving the ROI you expect from these efforts.
• Long-term planning – Where do you see your company in three years? In five years? We’re committed to helping you get there. As part of our annual planning, we’ll evaluate your long-term goals and make sure your current marketing efforts are setting you up to achieve them.

Please contact Webolutions today to find out how we can help you get the most out of your 2021 digital marketing budget. We serve clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post Important Factors to Consider When Determining Your Marketing Budget appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Content Marketing

Developing a Winning Content Marketing Strategy:
Part 2

Content marketing is becoming an increasingly important tool for businesses looking to share information about their brand, expertise, and products or services with their target audience. According to Hubspot:

• 70% of marketers are currently investing resources in content marketing
• 24% of marketers expressed an intention to invest more heavily in content marketing at the start of 2020
• 40% of marketers identify content marketing as an integral component of their overall strategy

If your business doesn’t have a well-developed content marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a crucial opportunity to expand your customer base and grow your brand. Your content marketing plan defines the philosophy behind your content development, allowing you to more effectively manage the process and maximize the ROI on your efforts.

See our article: How to Measure Website Effectiveness

Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

A successful content marketing plan will help you maintain a cohesive message that conveys your brand and explains to your audience what makes you truly unique. Without a well-thought-out strategy, your content efforts are likely to be haphazard and fail to deliver the results you desire.

Developing an effective content strategy requires a systematic and methodical approach. The following steps will help you get this process right and set your marketing team up for success:

• Define your goals
• Know your audience
• Conduct a content audit
• Determine the most effective content types to use
• Plan out your content strategy
• Create a content calendar
• Create your content
• Promote your content
• Track and evaluate the performance of your content

Define Your Goals

Developing a content marketing strategy starts with defining your goals. What are you trying to achieve with your content creation efforts? This specific purpose should guide every aspect of the process. Every decision you make regarding your content strategy should relate to achieving your stated goals. This point can’t be emphasized heavily enough.

In all likelihood, you’ll arrive at multiple goals that you want to achieve with your content efforts. These may include:

• Increasing traffic to your website
• Improving your search engine rankings for specific keywords that are relevant to your industry
• Grow your list of email subscribers
• Boost your brand awareness
• Generate more leads
• Improve conversion rates for your qualified leads
• Increase social media engagement

Keep in mind that this list is by no means exhaustive, and yours shouldn’t be either. You’ll need to prioritize 2-3 core goals that will help you achieve your business objectives. If you try to focus on too many goals, it will become more challenging to establish a cohesive plan.

Know Your Audience

Content Marketing to Reach Your Audience

Great content addresses the needs of your audience. In order to truly understand what your audience cares about, you first need to know who you are trying to target. Then you can identify specific challenges and pain points they’re looking to address.

The most effective way to get to know your audience is to create buyer personas. These personas allow you to break down your target audience into segmented groups based on demographic information such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Income level

For each persona, you’ll want to create a robust, three-dimensional profile that helps you to better understand their behavioral motivations. This should include:

• Their pain points, challenges and goals
• What would make their life easier
• The specific products and services you offer which will help them achieve their goals or make their life easier
• The specific emotions that resonate most with them
• The channels they’re most likely to engage with

Once you know this information, you’ll have a better grasp on the kind of content your audience will respond to and the specific messaging necessary to connect with them.

Conduct a Content Audit

Unless you’re a brand new business building your web presence from scratch, you most likely already have content circulating on the Internet. It’s important to evaluate the effectiveness of this content in order to determine the best approach to take moving forward. This is accomplished by performing a content audit that logs all of your existing content, assesses its success, and identifies gaps that need to be addressed.

Your content audit should help you determine:

• Specific content types that may be resonating more with your audience and achieving the goals you’ve established
• Certain topics that may be driving more traffic to your website than others
• Which pieces of content most closely reflect your brand messaging
• Specific subject areas where you already have an abundance of content and others where you would benefit from adding content moving forward
• Content types that can be eliminated from your overall content mix
• Opportunities to repurpose existing content in other forms in order to reach a wider audience

This information will allow you to focus your efforts on what has proven to work best. There are a variety of online tools you can use for your content audit. The right one for your business will depend on your specific goals and budget.

Determine the Most Effective Content Types to Use

Now that you’ve evaluated your existing content, you need to determine which content types will most effectively achieve your marketing goals. There are a wide range of content types available to leverage when implementing your content plan, and each one achieves a different purpose.

Think of each content type as a different tool available to you. You may find that different options resonate with each of your personas. You may also find that a more diverse content mix allows for more engaging social media content that can help spread your message.

See our article: 3 Must Have Content Marketing Tools

Using a variety of content types will also allow you to repurpose the same piece of content in multiple formats in order to target different members of your audience. This will help you get the most out of each piece that you create.

Some content types you may want to consider incorporating into your plan include:

• Web pages
• Blog posts
• Videos
• Social media posts
• Infographics
• eBooks
• White papers
• Podcasts
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Email newsletters
• Guides
• Online courses
• Animations

While it’s important to have a well-rounded mix, you shouldn’t plan on using every content type listed above. Instead, identify 4-5 options that you believe will be most effective for your audience and focus your efforts on these specific types. Over time, you can test additional content types and incorporate the ones that achieve your desired results.

Plan Out Your Content Strategy

Content Marketing Strategy Planning

The first four steps have laid the foundation for your content marketing strategy. Now it’s time to actually create your strategy. This involves:

• Performing keyword research to prioritize specific subjects to cover in your content
• Generating a list of topics for each content type you plan on producing
• Creating a social media strategy that will consistently promote your content and drive traffic to your website
• Planning several bigger pieces of content that will serve as the pillars of your content plan and identifying supplemental pieces to support each pillar
• Identifying any changes necessary to the structure of your website in order to properly implement your content marketing strategy
• Conducting competitor research to identify examples of content that have achieved success with your target audience

You can use this information to develop a cohesive strategy that will utilize the different content types you’ve chosen to connect with your audience and address their needs. As part of your content marketing plan, you will need to determine:

• Which members of your team will be in charge of producing and maintaining content
• What human and digital resources are necessary to create your content
• How often you want to publish content

Create a Content Calendar

Now that you’ve constructed your content strategy, you need to create a plan that will outline how it will be implemented. The most effective way to do this is to create a content calendar. This will provide your content marketing team with an outline of the plan and ensure they stay on task.

The simplest way to manage your content calendar is to use a spreadsheet. Make sure it contains all information necessary for your writers to effectively implement your strategy. For each piece of content included in the calendar, make sure to include the following items:

• Content type
• Content topic
• Keyword focus
• Target publishing date
• Any useful resources that will help in creating the content
• Any notes regarding specific messaging required

If you’re creating a large quantity of content, you may find it helpful to use an online content calendar tool to manage the process.

Create Your Content

You’ve done a tremendous amount of legwork by now, and it’s time to sit down to write your content. If you’ve created a content calendar, you’ll have a clear action plan to guide your efforts. This will make the job of writing your content much easier to manage.

Keep the following points in mind when creating your content:

• 

  Content Development and Marketing

  Provide value – Simply posting content on your website won’t help grow your business or achieve your goals. Your content must provide value to your audience. As you’re writing, always prioritize information that will provide value and build trust.

• Comprehensive content – In recent years, Google has increasingly valued long form content that provides a comprehensive discussion of the topic. The more thoroughly you’re able to cover a subject, the more useful the information will be to your audience. This will increase the likelihood that your content ranks high on the search engines and converts well.
• Research – In order to deliver comprehensive content that provides value to your audience, you’ll need to do your research. See what authoritative resources are saying on the topic. Look at similar content from competitors that is ranking well on the search engines. Get a sense of what has already been said, and try to find a way to add something new or unique to the discussion.
• SEO – Your content is a powerful tool that can augment your SEO efforts. While you should always write primarily with your target audience in mind, you should also make sure your content reflects SEO best practices. Make sure to include all relevant keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing. Include links to other pages on your website that provide complementary information. When appropriate, provide links to authoritative websites as well. This is particularly important when citing statistics, since it will give your data more credibility.
• Visual layout – Most people tend to scan content when they read online. Make sure your content is displayed in a way that is easy to scan and digest. Avoid large blocks of text that are hard to read. Instead, include subheads that break up your content and identify specific topics being discussed. Use bullet lists whenever appropriate, and vary the length of your paragraphs to make them easier to read.
• Brand messaging – Always make sure your content conveys your brand messaging. This is your opportunity to explain to your audience why you are special and unique.
• Voice – Should your content have a professional tone or a more casual, conversational tone? What kinds of emotions are you trying to evoke? Whatever you decide regarding the tone and voice of your content, it should always reflect your brand messaging and connect with your target audience.

Promote Your Content

You can produce amazing content, but it won’t be of any use to your business unless others can find it. Therefore, it’s crucial that you promote your content in order to make sure it reaches your audience.

Your promotion strategy should include both organic and paid promotion. If you’re working with an SEO specialist, it will significantly improve your chances of ranking well on organic search. However, you may want to consider supplementing these efforts with paid search (PPC), especially for important pieces of content.

In addition, you should always promote your content on your social media profiles. This is an important way to reach your audience. Organic social posts are important, but also consider sponsored posts and paid ads on social media platforms to boost the visibility of your content.

When appropriate, you may also want to consider building relationships with influencers in your industry who can help your content reach a wider audience.

Track and Evaluate the Performance of Your Content

Track Content Performance

It’s important to track the performance of your content to make sure it’s achieving the goals you identified earlier in the process:

• Did you achieve your content marketing goals?
• How well is your audience engaging with your content?
• Is it ranking well on search engines?
• Are you seeing good conversion rates for the desired actions you’re trying to elicit from your audience?

You can use a platform like Google Analytics to track a variety of performance metrics that will help you evaluate the success of your content. This data will help you make any necessary adjustments to your content plan moving forward. This is a crucial part of the process. Constant evaluation of your content’s performance will help you to continually improve your efforts and achieve a greater ROI on your content marketing.

Webolutions Can Help You Create a Winning Content Marketing Strategy

Webolutions provides comprehensive custom website design services to help grow your business. We’ll work with you to understand your company’s goals in order to develop a well-rounded content strategy that builds your brand and addresses the pain points experienced by your target audience. Our team uses a wide range of content types to provide a diverse content mix that will resonate with each segment of your audience.

Our approach to content marketing is based on the following five pillars:

• Market positioning – We’ll set you up to compete with the leaders of your industry by elevating the experience you provide to your audience.
• Brand messaging – We’ll take the time to clarify your message and build a brand platform that communicates the value you provide to your audience.
• Promotion – We’ll utilize all of the marketing channels at our disposal to make sure your content is visible to the widest possible audience.
• Data driven decisions – We believe that every decision we make should be supported by data. We’re constantly tracking analytics on our content to make sure it’s effectively achieving your goals.
• Long-term planning – The best content marketing strategies set your company up for long-term growth. We’ll work with you to identify where you want your business to be in several years and craft your content plan with those goals in mind.

Please contact Webolutions today to learn more about your content marketing options. We serve clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 9 Essential Steps to Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. If you fall into this category, you’re failing to leverage a tool that is crucial to growing your business.

Content Marketing Strategy

Approximately 85% of consumers conduct online research prior to making a purchase. If you’re not providing these people with the information they need, it will become increasingly challenging to make your business stand out in a digital marketing landscape that grows more sophisticated by the day.

It should come as no surprise that a documented content marketing strategy will help you get the most out of your efforts. The Content Marketing Institute found that companies with a documented content marketing strategy:

• Are more likely to consider their efforts effective
• Feel significantly less challenged navigating the content marketing process
• Feel that they more effectively use all of the content marketing tactics and social media channels available to them
• Are able to justify devoting a larger percentage of their marketing budget to content marketing

Without a cohesive strategy, your content development efforts are likely to be somewhat haphazard, and you risk wasting a significant amount of time, energy and resources without achieving a strong return on your investment.

What Is Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing strategy refers to the overarching philosophy that guides your content development. It helps you manage every aspect of the process in order to ensure your content marketing efforts achieve their desired results. When your content marketing strategy hits the mark, you’re able to more effectively demonstrate your brand, message, and expertise to your audience.

Your content marketing strategy should be guided by the following questions:

• Who is the target audience for your content?
• What pain point of your audience is your content addressing?
• How will your content convey what makes your company unique?
• What content formats will most effectively convey your message to your audience?
• What channels should you publish your content on?
• How will you manage the content creation and publication process?

Once you’ve formulated your content marketing strategy, you can detail a specific content plan which documents the ways in which you’ll execute your overarching strategy. In other words, your content marketing strategy addresses the “why” question, while your content plan addresses the “how” question.

Why Do I Need a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content Marketing Plan

The Internet has changed the way we make decisions regarding the products and services we consume. The ability to conduct your own research has never been easier. As a result, your audience is significantly more informed before they ever reach out to a company regarding a purchase of a product or service. By developing an effective content marketing strategy, you can position yourself as an industry expert when individuals are conducting their research and more effectively craft the narrative surrounding your company’s brand.

In addition, you’ll experience a variety of important benefits from creating a content marketing strategy:

• A better understanding of which metrics are necessary to identify the content that works most effectively
• Better ROI on your content marketing efforts
• More personalized content that directly addresses the specific needs of different audience segments that you serve
• A comprehensive plan for repurposing content in order to reach a wider audience and get the most value out of every piece of content you produce
• Improved long-range planning that will optimize your marketing efforts
• Greater integration of social media with your content development in order to reach a wider audience
• Elevated reputation of your brand among your audience
• Improved lead generation
• Higher conversion rate

Webolutions Can Help Build Your Content Marketing Strategy

As an industry leading content marketing agency, Webolutions is in a unique position to help you get the most out of your efforts. As part of the website design process, we’ll work closely with you to understand your company’s goals and the needs of your target audience. We’ll use this information to build a brand platform that conveys your unique message, core values and the ways in which your customers will benefit from working with you. This messaging will guide all of your content moving forward.

We’ll make sure your core web pages consistently deliver your brand messaging, provide the valuable information your audience needs, and adhere to SEO best practices. In addition, we’ll work with you to create an ongoing content marketing strategy that will help your business grow and thrive over time.

With over 25 years of experience in the digital marketing industry, Webolutions has a unique perspective. We’ve been involved since the Internet was in its infancy, and we’ve stayed on top of the latest trends as content marketing has evolved over a quarter century. Our methods achieve results because they are driven by the data. We continually test and refine our approach in order to help you achieve your marketing goals. At Webolutions, we’re your dedicated marketing partner, and our primary purpose is to empower passionate people, like you, to thrive.

See our article: 3 Tips for Your Content Marketing

Please contact us today to learn more about your content marketing options. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post Understanding the Basics of Content Marketing appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

The key to successfully using Web analytics is ensuring that whatever you are tracking is actionable. It is easy to get bogged down in a huge amount of information provided by these tools.  As well, all this information can be manipulated dozens of different ways.  Without a plan, it is not uncommon to sit down in a meeting to review your Website analytics information and have everyone heading off in different directions, based on the numbers they relate to in the report.  This is complete waste of time.

Denver internet marketing and SEO company Webolutions approaches analytics differently.

Actionable Website Metrics

The only information that should be reviewed is the information that you have determined as actionable.  What do we mean by this?  “Actionable” indicates the results upon which you are willing to take action.  The actions taken may include:

•    Changing the ads which generated the traffic
•    Changing the entire structure of the Website to increase results
•    Changing the graphics of the Website to increase results
•    Changing the content of the Website to increase results
•    Changing or adding instructions to the Website to increase results
•    Adding more automated processes to the Website to increase results

Before implementing a tracking strategy, you must determine your willingness to take action based on the results. In all cases this is resource decision. This will mean paying your Website development company or allocating more time to your internal team to make these ongoing adjustments. If you are not willing to consider making drastic changes to your site, then you should only track the information upon which you are willing to act.

Website Analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Some of the key indicators Webolutions tracks monthly for our clients includes:

•    Number of Site Visitors by Specific Marketing Activity
•    Number of Sales by Specific Marketing Activity
•    Number of Pages Ranked on Page 1 of Google for Primary Search Terms
•    Bounce Rate of the Site’s Top 5 Entry Pages
•    % of Visitors Who Add an Item to their Shopping Cart
•    % of Visitors Who Complete the Shopping Process
•    Number of Incoming Links to the Website
•    Site Saturation of the Website

By tracking this basic information, we are able to determine and prioritize the actionable items which should take place on a monthly basis to increase our client’s overall Website performance.

Tips for Better Website Analytics

•    Schedule monthly (minimum) analytic reviews on your calendar and make this a priority.
•    Determine the specific information you need to track and make sure it is truly actionable.
•    Only track three or four actionable items at a time. This allows you to tell the specific impact of each adjustment.
•    Make sure you have an analytics solution which can provide the information you need to be successful.

Social Media Analytics

Social media has never been hotter. Companies are finding that social media platforms, especially Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, are extremely useful for engaging customers. Pretty much everyone, regardless of age, gender, race, or creed, is using some form of social media, and as such it follows that these networks have attracted significant advertising spend in the last few years.

Still, companies are struggling with measuring social media like they do their other advertising channels. Calculating Social Media ROI has been a source of great consternation for the marketing community, and rightly so. The traditional means of calculating ROI relied on a clear sales funnel. Now, this funnel has been convoluted. There are multiple touch points where customers see or hear a company’s message, some of which are on social media. It is easy to get overwhelmed by this attribution problem, but the metrics available from different social media analytics platforms can ease this pain.

Measuring Social Media ROI

This isn’t to say that you absolutely cannot measure the ROI of social media. It is simply much more complicated to do so than with traditional channels. Even so, there have been some great ways of approaching this problem. In fact, Webolutions’ Director of New Media Strategies, Mike Hanbery, has written about some of the ways to measure the ROI of your social media profiles.

Still, I won’t try to create an equation showing you a clear cut way to measure your social media ROI. First off, as touched on above, it is never that simple. Second, before grappling with these more difficult calculations, it is important to begin your venture into social media analytics by identifying what you need to measure in the first place.

So, where to start? There are a few KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you will want to collect first.

Social Media Analytics and KPIs

As you begin, the first KPI that social media networks tend to give you is your following. This is definitely important, as it shows the number of people who truly connect with your brand. These may be key influencers, or good business relationships. In any case, it is smart to monitor just how many of these individuals your business has supporting it. As a note: don’t get too caught up with this metric. You may be generating a lot of likes, but you want to make sure that you’re actually impacting your business.

Here is where we dive into some of the KPIs that are probably more revealing as to how well your business is utilizing social media:

Analytics: Social Media Reach

Like more traditional advertising channels, one of the first things to measure is your reach – the number of individuals who see your content. Within the Facebook Analytics interface, called Insights, you can pull reach and impression (reach, but where each engaged individual may have had multiple impressions) data readily, giving you a clear figure of just how many people saw your message. LinkedIn Analytics also clearly shows you how many impressions and unique users saw your posts.

Within twitter, reach is more difficult to quantify, but there are tools like TweetReach that can give you estimates of how many people your tweets are seen by. The free alternative is to calculate estimates yourself. Note how many followers that you have. Without any kind of interaction, this would be your reach. However, when someone engages with your content, by retweeting, mentioning, or replying, this individual’s followers also see the content of your tweet. Come up with a rough estimate of how many engagements each tweet receives, and how many other Twitter users are following these individuals. Again, this is going to be very rough, but in the end, you may form a multiplier constant. You then multiply your number of followers by this constant to estimate reach. To calculate impressions, multiply this result by the number of tweets you put out within a specific time period.

Analytics: Social Media Engagement

After reach, you will want to know how engaged your audience is. Again, Facebook analytics makes this pretty easy. Insights will tell you how many clicks, comments, likes, and shares your content receives, in addition to the unique number of Facebook users that performed one of these actions. For Twitter, without a paid tool, the process is more manual. You’ll have to go through each of your tweets, aggregating the number of engagements for each. Regarding link clicks, using Bitly as your URL shortening tool will provide you with the number of clicks that each link receives. Other paid tools like HootSuite will also do this, but offer additional detail.

From here, you’ll want to know how many of these link clicks went through to your website. Here’s where social media meets a more traditional sales funnel. Using Google Analytics, you can identify the clicks that come from any particular referrer, including any social media platform. I recommend that you create Advanced Segments, and enable Conversion and eCommerce Tracking. This will tell you exactly how people who click these links engage with your website, including form conversions and online transactions. From here, work through a standard sales funnel: calculate the amount of revenue generated per lead and apply it to your conversion metrics. Although this is inexact, it will give you an idea of ROI generated through your social media efforts. Most importantly, now you will be measuring social media metrics that actually affect your business.

How to use this Information

There is a good chance that you’re already using some social media platforms for your business. In order to make the most of the time and energy you’re putting into this new marketing medium, collect some simple metrics to gauge your performance. By monitoring the number of followers you have (likes in Facebook), as well as the reach and engagement levels of your audience, you will begin to see how effectively you are leveraging each network for business purposes. Once you can collect information on how this engagement ties directly to your organization, through link clicks to your website, you can place social media into a more traditional sales funnel, allowing you to better estimate ROI.

By actively collecting metrics on your social media profile(s), you will quickly understand how to engage your audience to produce leads, and generate more business. As a full-service digital marketing agency, Webolutions® can offer assistance to getting social media analytics started within your organization. If you would like to learn more about how Webolutions® can help you with this or any other digital marketing questions, contact us online or give us a call at 303-300-2640.

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Don’t Forget SEO as Part of Your Website Redesign Project Plan

If you are considering the redesign of your Website, it is critical to consider the impacts this could have on your existing and future search engine positions.

In many cases your business will have an established Website with some decent search engine positions. In order to update your site to a new or fresher look and to include more functionality, you may be considering investing in a Website upgrade. This will usually be a more expensive Website redesign and functional upgrade which includes a CMS, maybe a blog, some sort of Social Marketing and other substantial functionality upgrades to really enhance your Online presence.

If the SEO impacts are not addressed during the planning and design of your new Website, the results could be devastating.  Some of the impacts may include:

1. A complete loss of all your current positions on the search engines
2. Penalizations by the search engines which move your results to the bottom of the listings or get you banned from showing up in the search engine results for 4 to 12 months
3. The creation of a Website which cannot ever be effectively marketed on the search engines

SEO Considerations for Your Website Redesign Strategy

In over 95% of these projects, critical SEO considerations are never addressed. This happens for a number of reasons.

1. Most of the focus goes into what the new site will look like and what enhanced functions will be included Businesses 100% assume that all Web development companies understand how SEO works and that this is part of any solid plan. Most Web design companies DO NOT have expertise in SEO and therefore they DO NOT include this as a part of their plan. They are simply building a new Website to replace the old one.
2. Website Redesign Tip: Make Sure the Website Redesign Proposal Includes Search Engine Optimization for the Website

To maximize the SEO of your Website, steps must be taken by an SEO expert during the planning phase of your new site and implemented into the content architecture and application development plans.  These critical steps include:

• Keyword research to determine the best keywords for your marketing
• Current positioning research to determine your current keyword search engine placement
• Review of your current site’s page rank
• Review of your current site’s site saturation
• Create an inventory of all relevant site pages currently indexed on Google
• If necessary, create a new site URL plan to maximize the site’s ongoing organic search results (considering all the public areas of your new site plan)
• Create a 301 redirect map for all URLs which will not be utilized in the new site
• Create an Online Marketing budget and action items list for all initial and ongoing Online Marketing activities which will be implemented at the new site
  • SEO
  • Content Generation
  • Local Search Marketing
  • Link Building
  • PPC Marketing
  • Social Marketing
  • Analytics and Tracking plans
• Work closely with the site designers and application programmers to make sure all necessary functional specifications to maximize your site’s SEO activities are included in the application scope!!

Is it Time for a Redesign of Your Website?

The marketplace is continuously evolving. In recent years, the number of purchases made online has sky-rocketed. Considering this change, it is essential for companies to have a well-functioning Website for their audience. According to a study done by Nielsen, “the average person in the United States visits 2,614 Websites per month.”*

The convenience of providing your company product, information and brand online can help draw in users that are spending those lengthy hours online. To not have a properly working or up-to-date Website can be detrimental to your profitability. This is why it is important to consider how well your Website is working now. Is it time for a redesign?

Redesign tends to be at the bottom of the checklist, always there but never getting done. Great web design enhances your company image as well as user experience. Here at Webolutions, we help companies to redesign their Websites in order to receive maximum profitability from their online visitors. However, a redesign may not be the best solution for everyone.

Below is a list of things you should consider when deciding on a redesign:

Does Time Allow for a Site Redesign?

As mentioned, Webolutions helps companies to redesign their Websites so that they don’t have to spend the time learning how to do it themselves. Hiring a trustworthy and reliable SEO company to do the redesign can save you heaps of time that would be wasted otherwise.

If you do not have the money to hire somebody for a redesign, it is essential that you set a timeline for yourself to complete the redesign. By setting a timeline, you do not get lost in work. Without a plan, problems and road blocks are much more likely.

What Types of Content Should be Re-done?

Content may be the most important aspect of a Website. Design attracts the eye and establishes your brand, however solid design and good content will build reliability and accountability. Also well written content portrays your professionalism and knowledge of your industry. Basic things to consider about content include:

Readability – Does your content make sense to the user?
Typography – Does your type appear properly on your Webpage?
Optimization – Does your content allow your Website to be searchable?
Imagery – Does your imagery complement the content?

How do you Know What to Optimize your Content for?

Again, hiring a professional company to optimize and develop your content is a wonderful solution. Optimization of content can be daunting if you are not familiar with the best methods of doing so. Here at Webolutions, we have an Online Marketing team that specializes in specifically optimizing content for our clients based on research and the overall theme of your Website.

However if you are not able to hire a company to optimize your content for you, consider using free tools like the Google Keyword Tool. Other important aspects to consider include: site saturation, header/title tags, meta data, and proper keywords for your brand.

What Should you Consider About the Back-end of Your Website During a Redesign?

There are some questions you should answer prior to deciding how to redesign your site:

Who will be administering your Website?
Is it a content management system?
How often will it need updates?
Will it be built to accommodate future changes easily?

Having these answers will help you determine the proper and best way to redesign your Website.

How will Your “Call-To-Action” Appear?

Having a good “call-to-action” is important to convert viewers into clients. Depending on your line of work, your “call-to-action” may appear in different ways. Though, it should always be very easy for a user to find and click on.

What Does Your Target Audience Want?

Doing some research on your target audience can go a long way. Webolutions provides our clients with a Market Positioning Action Plan that flushes out all this data and leaves the guesswork out. Within this action plan, you will find personas based on their target audience. These personas give insights on how to best market to that audience. Determining your target audience and what they want to see can make the difference between having hundreds of clients and having none.

What Problems did You Have with Your Prior Website?

Clarifying old problems with your Website can help you avoid the same pitfalls in your new site. How was the accessibility of your old site? Analyze not only the accessibility but also your current design. Does your current design need updating? One thing to remember when redesigning is to not make drastic changes to your brand so that it is not recognizable to previous clients.

What do Your Competitor’s Websites look like?

Do some competitor research. This can help you determine what you like and don’t like, what YOU offer versus your competition. You do not want to be a carbon copy of your competitors; you want to stand out in your industry. By doing competitive research, you can determine how to stand out and establish your place in your market.

Remember that these are just a few questions to think about when considering a redesign to your site. The answers to these questions will provide you solid foundation to provide a great Website to your clients.

Also, remember to get feedback as you redesign from designers AND non-designers. Having different sets of eyes and opinions can be crucial in determining what is best for your Website. Asking someone who is not familiar with the project can provide helpful insights out of the designer’s viewpoint. Keep in mind this is not an adequate substitution for proper user testing, but can be very valuable.

Lastly, make sure to review and properly bug-test your entire site prior to launching. There are generally mistakes and errors to be found. Catching these before launching a new Website is crucial. Developing a systematic test plan is the most concise way to test your new Website.

If you are looking to redesign your Website but don’t know where to start, come into Webolutions for a free consultation. We can help you determine some of the answers to these questions and get you on the right path for your redesign.

How to use this information
If these steps are followed, you will not only avoid possibly devastating repercussions from your Website redesign, but you will have the opportunity to greatly improve your search engine positions. We welcome your comments to this post if you have questions, additions or feedback. If you are planning a Website redesign and SEO is important to you, we provide a free initial project consultation.  Just call us at 1-800-657-6055.
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