Spring is a season of renewal, a time when nature sheds its winter cloak and welcomes the warmth and freshness of new beginnings. Just as you declutter your physical spaces, your digital domain also deserves a thorough spring cleaning.

A clean and organised website not only enhances user experience but also improves performance, search rankings, and security.

Let’s dive into a comprehensive guide on how to spring clean your website, ensuring it’s ready to blossom in the digital landscape.

 

1. Update Content: Freshen Up Your Messaging

Start by reviewing your website’s content. Are your messages still accurate and relevant? Update outdated information, correct any errors, and ensure your content aligns with your current brand image and goals. This includes updating product descriptions, services, team bios, and contact information. Consider adding fresh blog posts or news updates to keep visitors engaged and informed.

2. Streamline Navigation: Enhance User Experience

A cluttered and confusing navigation can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates. Review your website’s menu structure and streamline it for a more intuitive user experience. Arrange categories logically, use clear labels, and remove redundant or unnecessary items. Ensure that your most important pages are easily accessible from the main menu.

3. Optimise Images and Media: Speed Up Loading Times

Large images and media files can slow down your website’s loading times, negatively impacting user experience and search engine rankings. Optimise your images by compressing them without compromising quality. Consider using lazy loading to load images as users scroll down, reducing initial load times. This not only improves user experience but also enhances your site’s overall performance.

4. Check Links: Ensure Smooth Navigation

Broken links can lead to frustration for both users and search engines. Conduct a thorough link audit to identify any broken links and either fix or remove them. Ensure that internal and external links are functioning properly, helping visitors navigate smoothly through your site and improving your SEO.

5. Review SEO: Boost Your Search Rankings

Spring cleaning is an excellent opportunity to review your website’s SEO strategy. Check for outdated keywords and update your content with relevant, high-ranking keywords. Update meta titles, descriptions, and header tags to reflect your current focus. Make sure your images have descriptive alt tags. A well-optimised website ranks better in search engines, making it easier for users to find your content.

6. Analyse Analytics: Gain Insights for Improvement

Review your website analytics to gain insights into user behaviour. Identify popular pages, high bounce rates, and conversion rates. This information can guide you in making informed decisions about which areas of your site need improvement. Use analytics to understand user preferences and tailor your content to their needs.

7. Review Security: Safeguard Your Digital Space

Security is paramount for any website. Update all plugins, themes, and your content management system (CMS) to the latest versions to prevent vulnerabilities. Clean out any unused plugins and themes to reduce the risk of potential breaches. Regularly backup your website’s data to ensure you can restore it in case of a security incident.

8. Mobile Optimisation: Ensure Responsiveness

With a significant portion of internet users accessing websites via mobile devices, mobile optimization is crucial. Ensure your website is responsive, adapting seamlessly to various screen sizes. Test your site on different devices and browsers to ensure consistent performance across the board.

9. Social Media Integration: Stay Connected

Review your social media integration to ensure that your social media icons and links are up-to-date and functioning correctly. Consider adding social sharing buttons to your content to encourage visitors to share your content with their networks, increasing your online visibility.

10. Test Forms and Contact Information: Enable Easy Communication

Forms and contact information are essential elements for user engagement. Test all forms, such as contact forms and subscription forms, to ensure they’re working correctly and delivering inquiries to the right destinations. Double-check your contact information, making sure phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses are accurate.

Summary

In conclusion, spring cleaning your website is an investment in its performance, user experience, and overall success. By updating content, optimising images, streamlining navigation, and ensuring security, you’re not only enhancing your digital presence but also setting the stage for growth and prosperity in the upcoming months. Just as the earth refreshes itself with the arrival of spring, let your website bloom with renewed vitality and effectiveness in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Ready to collaborate with our Digital Marketing Team? Visit our digital service page to learn more about the solutions we can provide. Alternatively, you can give us a call to chat about your needs and goals.  

Breaking news: you don’t need to be an experienced web developer to publish a page that looks beautiful and creates conversions. 

The power of drag-and-drop page builders today makes it so easy to build a landing page from scratch in a matter of hours. That’s great news for anyone running an online business, especially if they’re tight on time and budget. 

With that said, the internet is scattered with millions of landing pages. And to get visitors to stay on your landing page, it needs to be captivating and gosh-darn convincing.

More importantly, it needs to fulfill a single goal, which is to encourage visitors to click your call to action (or CTA) and convert – whether that’s to buy, download, or sign up just to name a few. 

To help you get the ball rollin’ in the right direction, we’ve compiled ten best practices to follow when building a landing page.

But before you put on your goggles and dive into the best practices, let’s talk about what a landing page is and why it’s important to have one. 

 

What Is a Landing Page? 

A landing page is a standalone page on your website that is created specifically for a digital marketing campaign.

As the name suggests, a landing page is where a web visitor lands after they click on a call to action or a link in a digital ad on Google, social media, or in an email, for example. 

Landing pages are created with one purpose, and one purpose only. That is to persuade web visitors to click on a call-to-action button and get them to buy your products, sign up for your newsletter, make reservations, or download your e-book. 

With one primary goal, a landing page is a far superior option for increasing the conversion rate of any digital marketing campaign than a homepage on its own.

As you can see in the illustration above, a homepage doesn’t have just one focus – it contains more than a handful of CTA buttons and links. It’s perfect for showing an array of products or services to your visitors at once. 

On the other hand, a landing page is built for a different purpose. It is a lot more minimal in design and contains a single conversion goal. This is to help get your message across quickly and acquire more leads or make more sales. A landing page is meant to simplify the navigation for users, guiding them to that one call-to-action button. 

Because it eliminates any distraction from fulfilling that one goal and is specifically designed to turn visitors into customers, using a landing page can also reduce your cost per acquisition. Now, who wouldn’t want that? 

To learn more about the importance of landing pages and find out how our digital marketing team can help your business, visit our digital service page: Landing Pages. 

Ready to build a high-converting landing page? To get you started, below are some best practices to follow. 

 

Landing Page Best Practices

When it comes to creating landing pages, there are no hard and fast rules. Of course, you want your landing page to stand out from the rest. You want it to be unique to your brand and not have cookie-cutter content. We do, too.  

However, like with anything else in digital marketing, it’s important to know the fundamentals like the back of your hand. This allows you to have a strong foundation when building a landing page.

Once you get more comfortable and start to understand what your audience likes to engage with, you can then break the rules, experiment, and break the rules some more. Just keep in mind what your landing page goal is and find the best way to get the highest conversion rate. 

 

Here are ten best practices to give you a head start. 

1. Keep Your Message Consistent from Ad to Page  

A landing page is where users land when they click on an ad or a link in an email. They clicked on the ad because you clearly made an offer they could not refuse. So make sure you’re sending users to a page that communicates the same message as your ad. 

If the landing page doesn’t match their expectations, your visitors will quickly bounce off and leave the page. You lose their attention, you lose a sale.    

To avoid a lost conversion, ensure that your ad and the corresponding landing page feature the same offer and convey the same message in the same brand voice. To put it simply, the offer and the ask need to be identical. 

For example, if you’re running a social ad for an online music class and offering a free trial, don’t ask for payment details on the landing page. Always follow through with the same offer to effectively increase your conversion rate. 

2. Use Clear, Conversational Language 

Great copy doesn’t make it obvious that you’re trying to sell something. If your copy is shouting “BUY ME”, people are more likely to click away from the page than click on your CTA button.

Use clear, compelling language that everyone can understand. This helps establish a human connection with your visitors, encouraging them to engage further with your landing page and convert. 

Look at every single element that requires copy – from the headline to the call the action. Make sure the language you use is relevant and one that people can resonate with. For a more detailed guide, read our blog article More Than a Button: How to Create High-Converting CTAs. 

Generally, it’s best to keep your copy short and easy to read. If the product or service you’re offering demand longer copy, consider using bulleted lists or, better yet, infographics if relevant. 

3. Keep the CTA Above the Fold 

To increase clicks, your call to action needs to be visible on the screen before your users scroll further down the page.

It seems like the obvious move, but you’d be surprised how many digital marketing campaigns don’t succeed because the CTA is too far down the landing page.

Along with the call the action, keep other important elements including the headline and unique selling proposition (or USP) visible by placing them above the fold. These elements need to be the very first thing people see when they land on your page. 

4. Less Is More 

Sometimes, less is more. And this is certainly true for landing pages. 

Picking up from the previous point, it’s crucial that the information that your visitors need to see from the get-go is placed where it’s highly visible. But this DOES NOT mean you should over-crowd the top half of your landing page with a hundred different elements.

Keep. It. Simple. 

Remember, a great landing page must focus on a single conversion goal. To keep users on the page, remove site navigation elements and other unnecessary distractions that might force them to bounce away. 

Don’t be scared to use white space and bold colours. Use relevant images or videos to make your page visually engaging. Play around with typography, see what works best to effectively call out your unique selling proposition and highlight your call to action. 

5. Highlight User Benefits With Visuals 

Show how your product or service works in a real-life context using visuals. Use still images, demo videos, or animations to captivate your audience and literally show what’s in it for them when they click the CTA button. 

Keep your visuals straightforward, relevant, and on-brand. Similar to the copy, your visuals need to resonate with users and are easy to digest. 

The hero image section above the fold is the best place to show your product or service in action. 

Looking for video experts to help elevate your landing page? Check out the solutions our team can provide by visiting our digital service page: Video Marketing. 

6. Use Authentic Social Proof

People on the internet are becoming more and more savvy. They can see marketing BS from a mile away. 

People trust other people’s opinions. On a landing page, including real social proof like customer reviews and testimonials can help visitors feel more confident and reassured about engaging with your business. 

7. Make It Snappy

Whether we like to admit it or not, we all have a short attention span. 

Nobody likes to wait for a page to load – ain’t nobody got time for that. If your page is taking more than three seconds to load, you risk losing potential customers.

Improve your page load time by removing unnecessary elements. Every imagery, every copy, and every element on your landing page needs to serve a specific purpose. Avoid using fluff and content that will only slow down your page. 

Make sure you optimise all your images and videos and test your page load time using Google’s Page Speed Insights. Follow Google’s speed recommendations to ensure a smooth, enjoyable experience for your web visitors.  

8. Create Mobile-Responsive Content 

This may come as no surprise, the majority of internet users today consume digital content on their smartphones. According to Oberlo, mobile accounts for just over 58 percent of web traffic worldwide. And this number is projected to grow over time. 

To hit your mobile conversion rate target, you need to design a mobile-responsive landing page that adapts to smaller screens. 

Optimise text, images and videos, layout and design for mobile users. For a more detailed guide on how to create mobile-responsive content, read our blog article: 3 Ways to Create Mobile-Responsive Content. 

9. Test, Test, Test 

Understanding the fundamentals and following best practices are great and all. But how do you truly know your landing pages are working? 

Testing helps you take a deeper dive into your landing pages. It allows you to see what’s working and identify any roadblocks that may be stopping you from achieving your conversion goals.

The beauty of digital marketing is that you don’t have to rely on gut feeling alone to make decisions. Who wants that kind of pressure? 

You can collect data to help improve your landing pages in multiple ways.

Use heatmaps to track visitor mouse clicks and scroll activity on your page. This lets you identify what people are engaging with and what can use some work. 

Another way to collect data is through A/B testing. Test multiple page elements including CTA button designs, headlines, visuals, lead capture forms, and more. This allows you to see what your visitors resonate with and engage with the most. 

10. Let Someone Else Do the Heavy Lifting for You 

Knowing how to create a landing page is certainly a flex.

But if you are just starting your online business, have limited resources, or are just simply short on time, asking for help may be a more ideal option for you. 

At DGA, we have digital marketing experts that are ready to do the heavy lifting. We can plan, build, and test high-converting landing pages to support your campaigns – from developing content to tracking and analysing results, we’ve got you covered. 

 

If you’re thinking about using video marketing to strengthen your brand and set yourself apart from the herd, the time is now.

Video content has quickly become a hot commodity for marketers in recent years. And the popularity of video continues to skyrocket. So if video is not already a part of your digital marketing strategy, it may be time to reassess.

If you’re new to video marketing and don’t exactly know where to begin, you’ve come to the right place! In this guide, we cover video marketing fundamentals and the best strategies to get the show on the road.

Are you already familiar with video marketing but you need to brush up on a few skills? You’re welcome to use this guide too! Use the links below to jump to specific sections that matter the most to you.

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What Is Video Marketing

Video marketing is the use of video to increase brand awareness, generate excitement and engagement around products or services, educate customers, and drive sales.

It can sometimes overlap with content marketing, but video marketing can also be an entire business marketing strategy in and of itself.  

Video marketing has been around for over a decade, entering the digital marketing landscape around 2005 when YouTube was launched. What has changed ten years later is how important video has become for every online platform and how easy it has become to consume. 

Producing videos is also now more accessible and more cost-effective than ever before. Today, you can produce high-quality videos using just your smartphone and share them online – all in one day if you so desire!

 

Why Is Video Marketing Important 

Sure, we’ve come a long way when it comes to creating and sharing videos online. But video marketing is more than just hitting the record button. Without the right strategy, your video may never reach the right audience.

That’s what this guide is for – we’ll show you exactly how to build an effective video marketing strategy and set you up for success. But first, let’s talk about why video marketing matters.

1. Video Consumption Is Soaring

People are watching more videos online than ever before. Wyzowl’s data shows that, on average, people are spending 19 hours a week watching videos online in 2022. To compare, people only spent an average of 10.5 hours a week consuming video in 2018 – that number has almost doubled in just four years! 

Did being cooped up during the pandemic have anything do with the increase in video consumption? Perhaps.

But Wyzowl survey findings suggest that online audiences truly have a strong preference for video beyond entertainment purposes, with 88 percent wanting to see more video content from the brands they follow in the future. 

2. Video Content Is King on Social Media

This may come as no surprise: the demand for video content on social media also plays a huge part in the rise of video marketing.

According to Sprout Social video marketing stats, over half of marketers agree that video is the most valuable content type for achieving social media marketing goals. And it’s not hard to see why.    

People love watching videos on social media. In fact, when asked about their favourite type of content to engage with from brands on social media, consumers pointed to video. This was the result of a survey that Animoto conducted in 2018 but it still rings true today. 

Why exactly is video so popular among social media users? We can give you three reasons: 

1. Video is dynamic and engaging 
2. Video is very easy to consume 
3. Video is shareable

 

Of course, major social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok have always focused on video content. But Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn are also now putting more emphasis on video to meet the demands of their users. 

According to recent video marketing statistics, people watch one billion hours of videos on YouTube alone and generate billions of views every day. You read that right. Billions.

So if you’re not already one of the 62 percent of businesses using YouTube to post video content, you might be missing out on more than a handful of marketing opportunities.   Needless to say, YouTube is the most popular platform among video marketers with 88 percent of them planning to include the platform in their video marketing strategy. Followed by LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

3. Video Increases Brand Awareness and Fosters Trust

Effective video content allows brands to build a deeper connection with their audience. The dynamic nature of video draws people in and provokes a more emotional response than with text or images alone.

That’s what makes video such a powerful marketing tool – 86 percent of marketers are choosing to include it in their digital marketing strategy with the majority saying video has helped them increase brand awareness. 

These marketers have seen the potential of video content not only to gain brand exposure but also to build long-lasting customer trust. Why does this matter? Trust is the number one factor in nearly every purchasing decision for a customer.

Sure, video marketing can produce a solid ROI for your business, but it can do more than that. It can help you foster and maintain trust with new and existing audiences. When a customer trusts your brand, they’re more likely to commit to purchasing your products or subscribing to your services.  

4. Video Boosts Conversions and Sales

Beyond building brand awareness and trust, video marketing can help businesses boost engagement and conversion rates, and ultimately increase sales. 

According to Wyzowl, 87 percent of marketers say video marketing has helped increase their web traffic. That’s because video content increases page quality and time spent on the page, making it an effective SEO tactic. 

Video is also a powerful lead generation channel, with 86 percent of marketers reporting that video has helped them generate high-quality leads. This shows how video can positively impact a brand’s online presence through interactive, meaningful visuals. If audiences see great content, they’ll keep coming back for more. Need we say more? 

Let’s not forget the impact of video on sales. 81 percent of marketers say that video has helped them directly increase sales. Think of video content as a sales pitch. It connects salespeople (aka brands) with prospects and educates them about products and services.  

In essence, video marketing is an incredibly effective tool throughout the entire customer purchasing journey – from brand awareness to closing a sale and to delighting customers beyond the conversion stage. 

How to Create an Epic Video Marketing Strategy 

Before you hit the record button, you first need to have a solid video marketing strategy in place. Like any digital marketing strategy, the first step is to define the purpose of your video.

Don’t waste your time and money by creating video content blindly – having a clear purpose will save you and your team from re-shooting and re-editing. In short? If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. 

To kickstart the process, ask yourself a few questions. Why are you building this campaign? What’s the purpose of your video? Who is your target audience? How will you measure success?

Now, let’s take it step-by-step… 

Step 1: Define Your Audience

Who are you marketing to? Knowing your target audience is the key to a successful video campaign. This step helps you understand who you’re talking to, what kind of content they’re interested in watching, and where are they mostly spending their time.

The age-old approach is to create buyer personas of your ideal customers. Go through any marketing data you have on your customers and identify patterns. These include age, gender, location, interests, where are they consuming content online, and video content preferences.

Defining your target audience leads to a clearer understanding of who they are and what their needs are. This will make it easier for you and your team to produce video content that meets those needs. 

Need a hand getting or understanding your audience insights? Check out our service page: Strategy to learn how our team of experts can help. 

Step 2: Outline Your Scope and Budget 

Arguably the least exciting part of digital marketing is setting a timeline and a budget for your campaign (unless that’s your jam), but it has to be done.

Regardless of how big or small the video project is, it can be expensive and time-consuming. So, save time and money with a proper project management plan. Have a solid timeline in place for every step of the process to avoid any mishap and headache from start to finish. Nothing and nobody is perfect – make sure that you plan for delays and unexpected changes to allow you to still deliver and meet deadlines.    

As we’ve mentioned earlier, you don’t need fancy, expensive equipment to produce high-quality videos today. The advancements in smartphone technology have made it very easy to shoot and edit videos at home or in the office. 

However, you need to think about what specific type or types of video you want to share online for your campaign (we will cover examples of marketing videos later in the article). This will dictate the resources you will require to make that happen and help you set a budget for your video or videos.    

Step 3: Choose Where You Want to Distribute Your Video 

Think about which online platform is best for your video campaign and which one will help you achieve your marketing goals.

Using audience insights and data analytics, identify what users on that platform are searching for and what they are most interested in watching. To dive even deeper, take a look at what your specific audience is watching on that platform. Are there trends you should be following?

When choosing a platform, you need to consider a few things including average watch time, video size and sound limitations, budget and paid promotion.

There are many places online to publish your videos. Below are a few examples and some best practices to follow for each one. 

YouTube

There are so many platforms to publish videos online. The first one that probably comes to mind for most people is YouTube.  

As discussed earlier, YouTube is the number one video hosting platform and garners billions of views every day. If you didn’t already know, it’s also the second most popular search engine next to Google.

If you want to expand your reach through video marketing, YouTube is no doubt a great place to start.

Best Practices:

• Create a channel layout that is easy to recognise and clearly communicates what your brand is all about
• Organise your content using playlists  
• Publish video content regularly (even better if you post on the same days every week or month) 
• Write attention-grabbing, click-worthy video titles 
• Design custom YouTube thumbnails for your videos 
• Include your brand logo on your videos
• Write detailed descriptions 
• Add closed captions 
• Optimise your video tags

Facebook 

A social media giant, Facebook saw the demand for video content in 2016 and has put emphasis on video ever since. 

Facebook tends to favour brands that use video. This means that if you post a video, your page is more likely to show up on a customer’s newsfeed.

Studies also show that videos get more engagement on Facebook than text or images alone. According to Biteable research findings, a video ad received 480 percent more clicks than a still image!

Best Practices:

• Avoid slideshows of images, text montages, and looping videos 
• Don’t be afraid to post longer videos if relevant (3 minutes or longer; ideal for episodic shows, live streaming, and more)
• Keep brand awareness videos fun, light-hearted, and ideally less than a minute long  
• Consider using a 1:1 or 9:16 ratio for mobile users 
• Post frequently and regularly
• Post authentic, meaningful content 

 

Instagram   

There are so many opportunities to hook audiences on Instagram. Another social media giant, Instagram has a lot of in-platform features and tools that are practically designed for video marketing and social selling.  

The biggest challenge that marketers face on Instagram is breaking through the noise. Because the platform is so saturated with video content, it can sometimes be hard to hook your target audience right off the bat. 

However, if you provide your audience with something they can resonate with and truly value, you’ll start building a stronger online presence and get more engagement.

Instagram has four different video formats that you need to keep in mind:

1. Reels: short videos (15 to 30 seconds) 
2. Stories: short 15-second videos that disappear after 24 hours 
3. Instagram Video: used to be called IGTV, these videos can be up to 60 minutes long 

Best Practices:

• Share original video content 
• Show your brand’s personality 
• Post frequently and regularly
• Considering collaborating with influencers  

 

LinkedIn

A surprise to many, LinkedIn users absolutely love consuming video content. When posting videos on LinkedIn, however, you need to remember that users on this platform are professionals who are networking and job searching. 

Best Practices:

• Share what you know through video that can help other people in your network 
• Post industry and company news through video
• Publish broadcast and important discussions from industry events

Step 4: Select the Right Type of Marketing Video for Your Audience 

When choosing the types of videos to create, the most important thing to remember is that they each need to fit a purpose.

Each video you make needs to fit the stage of the marketing funnel you’re targeting and point back to your marketing goals.  

Another thing to keep in mind when selecting the type of video you’ll make is the message you want to get across to your audience. Not sure where to begin? Below are examples of marketing videos to kickstart the process.  

Types of Marketing Videos 

1. Explainers
   • Short videos explaining how your products or services work 
   • Explainer videos can also be used to highlight a concept or showcase how to do a specific task 
2. Brand Videos 
   • Showcase company vision and mission
   • Typically created as a part of a larger ad campaign
   • Creative way to build awareness around your company or brand
   • One of the main goals of brand videos is to create intrigue    
3. Product Demos 
   • Show how your physical product works 
   • Tour of a software 
4. Video Ads and Promos
   • For the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, video ads should focus on sharing your brand’s values and story 
   • For the decision stage, video ads should have very clear and strong calls to action to drive conversions
   • Promote sales and discounts
5. Product Reviews and Testimonials
   • Digital word-of-mouth
   • Great way to build customer trust
   • Highlight customer sentiments, business awards and successes to prove credibility 
6. Educational Videos 
   • Instructional or how-to videos 
   • The main goal is to teach your customers how to use your product or service to help solve a problem they may have
7. Infographics 
   • Great for social media as infographic videos are extremely shareable 
   • Fun and entertaining way to prove that you know your stuff 
8. Event Videos
   • Highlights from conferences or industry events 
   • Round table discussions about relevant topics 

Step 5: Identify How You Will Measure Success 

One of the most satisfying aspects of digital marketing is that you can measure success. It’s no different for video marketing.

Once you’ve defined your video marketing goals, you need to identify which metrics to track to help you do three things: 

1. Let you know what’s working and what isn’t
2. Let you find ways to improve your video to help you accomplish your goals
3. Helps you discover new video content opportunities

 

It’s important that you track the performance of your video marketing efforts so you can pivot and make adjustments when you need to. This allows you to reach your goals much more efficiently. 

Below are some popular video marketing metrics to get you started.

1. View Count 
2. Play Rate 
3. Social Engagement 
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR) 
5. Bounce Rate 
6. Conversion Rate 

Roll Camera 

Phew! That was a doozy – congrats if you’ve made it this far! Needless to say, there is a lot to video marketing.

Creating high-quality, visually appealing video content is one thing. But creating video that resonates with audiences, creates an emotional impact, and drives sales is another thing. 

Video marketing is more than just hitting the record button, posting it online, and crossing your fingers hoping it will reach the right audience. It takes practice, patience, and a lot of experimenting. 

It can be overwhelming at first but video marketing is so rewarding once you get it right. And as the popularity of video continues to skyrocket, making it a big part of your digital marketing strategy is a no-brainer.  

Need additional resources for video marketing? Let us do the heavy lifting for you. At DGA, we have expert digital marketing strategists and video marketing gurus to help you reach your goals. To learn more about how we can help, check out our digital service page: Video. Prefer to chat over the phone? Feel free to give us a call!     

Did you know only 2% of online shoppers convert on their first visit to an e-commerce store? 

The cold harsh truth is that most people who visit your website for the first time leave without making a purchase. Maybe it’s because they aren’t ready to commit yet or they simply get distracted before clicking the ‘Buy Now’ button (our attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s after all).  

In general, first-time visitors leave without converting and rarely return to your website when they don’t have a reason to. But here’s a secret: there’s a way to bring them back.  

Retargeting gives you a second or maybe even a third chance to re-engage your past visitors by reminding them of your brand and products after they leave your website.

To put it in a nutshell, retargeting uses simple tracking codes that allow you to show highly relevant ads to visitors when they visit other web pages or scroll through Facebook and Instagram. 

Ultimately, ad retargeting strategies can help increase the visibility of your brand. And by reaching prospects and potential customers that have already expressed an interest in your services or products, retargeting is a surefire way to get them to buy. 

Need more convincing? Read on for retargeting statistics that just might blow you away.

 

Retargeting Statistics You Need to Know

Here are five statistics that will make you strongly consider implementing retargeting into your digital marketing strategy:

1. According to Wishpond, retargeting ad campaigns perform ten times better than regular display banners.
2. Criteo saw a 43% increase in conversions with retargeted ads.
3. According to CMO, 25% of online shoppers enjoy seeing retargeted ads because they serve as reminders of the brands and products they were already interested in.
4. A Pew Research Center study on privacy found that 47% of consumers are happy to share their information for better deals.
5. MotoCMS reveals that retargeting can reduce cart abandonment by 6.5% and increase sales by 20%.

 

 

Retargeting vs Remarketing: What’s the Difference?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s answer the burning question: what’s the difference between retargeting and remarketing? 

‘Retargeting’ and ‘remarketing’ are often used interchangeably because they help you achieve the same goals.

Both target people who already visited your website and showed interest in your products. Both re-engage people are most likely to convert. Both help you build brand awareness and increase visibility.

While they have a handful of similarities, retargeting and remarketing use different digital marketing tactics to accomplish these goals. 

Retargeting uses paid ads on websites, social media, email, and other platforms to target audiences who have visited your web pages or your social media profiles.On the other hand, remarketing often uses email campaigns to re-engage old customers who have already done business with your brand. To learn more about remarketing, visit our digital service page: Remarketing.

 

How Retargeting Works

So how exactly do retargeting ads work? 

After leaving your website, a visitor will start to see your targeted ads while browsing other online stores, reading a blog post, or scrolling through Instagram. How is this possible?

Retargeting ads use simple pieces of code placed on your website to track a new visitor’s browser cookies. Their cookies will then alert the retargeting platform you are using – Google Ads, AdRoll, or Facebook Ads, for example – to display the most relevant visual or text ads as they browse other websites or scroll through social media. 

Any code placed on your site to run retargeting campaigns will not collect or view personally identifiable information including email addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers.

To dive a little bit deeper, let’s talk about the two main types of retargeting: pixel-based and list-based.

 

Pixel-Based Retargeting

Pixel-based retargeting is a great way to keep your products at the forefront of any anonymous visitor’s mind. When a visitor lands on your website, a piece of JavaScript code (aka a pixel) drops an anonymous cookie on their browser.

The pixel acts like a stamp on an online user’s digital passport – it shows that they have travelled to your website or browsed your landing page. 

When the visitor leaves your website, the cookie nudges the retargeting platform you’re using to show specific ads to that visitor based on the pages they visited.

Pixel-based retargeting wastes no time – it re-engages lost customers almost immediately after they leave your website. Because they already showed interested in your products, these customers might be more inclined to visit your site again and complete the purchase after they see your ad.

 

List-Based Retargeting

If you already have an extensive list of email addresses in your database, you may want to take advantage of list-based retargeting. 

The process involves uploading the email addresses to your chosen retargeting platform. The platform (Facebook Ads, for example) will then identify users on the network who own those email addresses and display ads only to those users. 

List-based retargeting gives you full control over what kind of ad is shown only to a specific audience based on information that you’ve already collected and online behaviour traits. Because it is highly customised and controlled, this hyper-targeted strategy gives you the best chances for clicks and sales. 

However, it is worth noting that list-based retargeting requires a bit more time to execute. You’re in charge of uploading and maintaining the list of email addresses. We recommend using this if you have a smaller budget. If you’re looking for a more timely and automatic strategy, then opt for pixel-based retargeting. 

Both pixel-based retargeting and list-based retargeting have their own sets of advantages as well as disadvantages. Choose the strategy that best suits the goal you want to accomplish. 

 

Complement Your Digital Marketing Efforts With Retargeting 

When done right, retargeting can be an extremely powerful digital marketing tactic in driving any type of conversion. Whether you’re looking to build brand awareness or increase sales, retargeting ad campaigns can help you get there quicker and cheaper than a regular online ad.

It’s news to no one that having an online presence is a necessity for any business and brand in today’s digital age. Out of all the channels and tools that can help you build a strong digital marketing strategy for your business, social media has the most eyeballs and ways of keeping users engaged.

Just take a look at the stats:

• In 2021, over 4.26 billion people globally were on social media. That’s over half of the population and this number is projected to increase to almost 6 billion by 2027.
• According to Search Engine Watch, 71% of consumers are more likely to base their buying decisions on what they’ve seen on social media.

Yet many social media experts will tell you it’s not about having a profile on any and every network. There’s a lot that goes into knowing, reaching and engaging with your target audience. In other words, you need a specialized social media strategy that serves your business goals and complements your business’ overall digital marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll break down the ins and outs of building a social media strategy.

• What is a social media strategy?
• The differences between a social media marketing, content and engagement strategy
• 6 steps for building a social media strategy

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy outlines your social media goals, tactics and the metrics you will be using to track your performance. It is the plan that guides how you create and post content, and engage on social media.

Tactically, this can include everything from resource allocation, establishing content and engagement guidelines, developing campaigns, and determining when and how frequently you will post.

While this might seem overwhelming, it does not have to be complicated. It is best to keep your social media strategy simple and specific to your brand. With meaningful data tracking, keep in mind that you can keep tweaking and gradually building upon your strategy to make it more effective over time.

Social media marketing, content and engagement

It may help to think of social media strategy broken up into three distinct areas:

Social media marketing

A social media marketing strategy is your starting point and throughline in directing your social media activities. It involves bringing together foundational elements like your target audience and brand identity before developing campaigns and producing content. Author and digital strategist Julie Atherton calls this approach “ABC” for an audience, brand, and campaign.

In the age of Tiktok, there’s a real temptation to be reactive to what is trending. Having a strategy that underpins everything you do will keep you grounded and help you determine what makes sense for your business.

Content

Content is where the rubber meets the road in engaging your audience, representing your brand and tracking your performance. A content strategy focuses on formatting, production and outputs.

Content creation requires planning and research into the campaigns, topics, and formats that will most effectively reach and engage your audience. You will also have to consider your messaging, tone, and the specifications you will be using for each social network. Lastly, tracking how your posts perform and analyzing the data serves as crucial information to optimise your content (i.e. telling you what’s working and what’s not)

Engagement

Social media offers a completely different and exciting way for brands to engage with their audience and customers. They provide a two-way street for businesses to promote their products and services, and for customers to publicly interact and influence how brands present themselves and what they offer. 

An engagement strategy is how you manage your community and grow your following. While certainly related, this is not to be confused with engagement as a metric, referring to the number of times people took an action on your post. These include clicks, shares, comments, or reactions. Social environments require responsible and responsive customer service and thoughtful ways of generating interactions. What are some unique valuable offerings you can share with your social media audience? Some examples might include educational content, free downloadable digital products, or giveaway competitions.

What are the steps for building a social media strategy?

• Set realistic goals

Taking the time to define specific and achievable goals will have a big payoff in guiding your strategy, budget, and day-to-day activities. It helps to start with a big-picture objective that answers why your business is active on social media and what you want to achieve. 

According to the 2021 Sprout Social Index, the most common goals for social were increasing brand awareness (58%) and increasing community engagement (41%). Others include generating leads and sales, learning more about your target audience, or growing your following. While you may want to achieve all of these, less is more, as each will involve different tactics.  

From there you will want to outline your goals according to their relevant metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), your resources, and your timeframe. Using the S.M.A.R.T framework is always helpful here.

• Learn about your target audience

To understand who your target audience is and what they want, start by defining their key demographics (age, gender, income, interests, etc.). From here, you’ll want to spend time doing market research through online surveys or focus groups. Defining a buyer profile and having buyer insights will help you to create a buyer persona — a picture of your ideal customer. While the aim is to narrow down, you can have more than one persona, which will allow you to capture different demographics, insights, and needs.

• Decide which social platforms work best for you

As we’ve covered, you want to avoid being present on all social platforms for the sake of it. How do you choose the best channels to reach your audience? Research which key networks your target audience is spending the most time. It will also depend on what most intuitively suits your business and the type of content your produce. For example, Instagram is popular among younger audiences and is a great visual platform to showcase your products and connect with influencers. However, if your ideal customers are industry professionals, you would benefit more from LinkedIn, as a platform that provides businesses with a way to connect with both B2B and B2C communities. 

• Plan out your content

For each social platform you choose, you’ll want to create a separate yet coordinated plan for your content. Each platform has its own tone, so it’s important to determine the tone of your brand and how you want to speak on each (i.e. formal or informal, sense of humour or more serious?).  Some other helpful tips include coming up with content themes or buckets; creating a content calendar, and scheduling your content to take advantage of optimum days and times for networks and ensure you’re keeping up with the pace of social media with consistent posts. 

• Connect with and manage your community

Connections on social media can lead to great communities that build awareness and engagement with your brand. But this kind of community takes time and nurture, and the key to building it is to be responsive. Responding to queries and comments quickly, with the aim of being helpful and positive in a way that fosters human-to-human connection will not only help you avoid a crisis but will nurture trust. Another tool for connecting with your community is to ask questions and seek feedback or input on a product through polls or surveys. 

• Measure and assess your results

Take full advantage of the tools social media platforms offer to help businesses track analytics. You’ll not only want to see how much traffic your social media accounts drive to your website but what posts people are engaging with the most. You’ll be able to identify trends related to particular topics and content types, and what generates the most interest.

Once you gather these insights, it’s time to reassess what’s working and what isn’t, adjusting your strategy and setting renewed goals across key metrics (e.g. new followers, interactions, visits to your website).

Sources

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-strategy-for-your-business
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/social-media-strategy
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/podcasts/podcast-016-practical-social-media-strategy-julie-atherton
https://www.forbes.com/sites/goldiechan/2022/03/28/how-to-think-intelligently-about-social-media-strategy-in-2022/?sh=6d8b8097919c
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/20/how-social-media-influence-71-consumer-buying-decisions/

Establishing a business online comes with its own set of challenges. You need to build a brand strategy, launch an e-commerce website, create a social media presence, connect with your audience… the list goes on. But don’t worry! The list of digital marketing tools available to help you grow online is just as extensive. Whether you’re a small business just starting out or a well-known brand, you’ll need digital marketing tools to help you stand out and flourish online. There is a multitude of tools to choose from, but here are sixteen of what we think are essential to add to your digital marketing toolkit.  

 

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1. Social Media

You’re spoilt for choice with so many social media marketing tools available today! Need help discovering fresh content? Or are you looking for tools to help manage and schedule posts? Here are some of our favourites to get you started:

Buffer

We can’t stress this enough: managing all your social media marketing efforts in one place is a huge time-saver. And Buffer makes it so simple (and fun) with its clean and simple interface. Honestly, it’s a game-changer! From planning and scheduling to tracking performance and engaging with followers – Buffer really lets you do it all.

Hootsuite

If you didn’t already know, Hootsuite is the world’s first social media management platform to ever exist. Launched over ten years ago, Hootsuite knows the ins and outs of social media management. Its famous dashboard interface makes it easy and fun to plan, create, and schedule content. You can also use Hootsuite to track the performance of your social media content from calculating ROI to tracking public conversations about your brand.

SkedSocial

If you’re trying to grow your social presence primarily on Instagram, SkedSocial is the perfect tool for you. SkedSocial is an all-in-one Instagram tool that allows you to schedule posts, visualise, and plan your feed. It also allows you to publish to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Snapchat.

BuzzSumo

Post buzzworthy content with the help of BuzzSumo! This tool lets you discover what content is popular by topic. For content marketers, this tool is a must-have. Discover new keywords, find trending topics, and gather shareable content ideas that your audience will truly love! BuzzSumo also allows you to find influencers and other brands that are similar to yours – this is a great way to grow your connections.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media management tool that automatically curates your feed with fresh content and does the scheduling for you! It also lets you monitor and A/B test content, which makes it simpler to see what engages and excites your audience across different social networks.   

It’s more crucial than ever for businesses to develop a successful social media strategy that drives brand awareness and healthy ROI. To learn more about growing your business with social media, visit our Digital Service Page: Social Media Marketing.

 

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2. Email Marketing and Email Automation Tools

For over a few decades, email has been one of the most effective ways to attract prospects and retain customers. And yes, email is still going strong and is here to stay. If you’re interested to learn more about email marketing, check out our blog article: Let’s Unpack the Importance of Email Marketing. For now, let’s take a look at a few email marketing and email marketing automation tools to help you plan and execute successful campaigns!

HubSpot

A longstanding digital marketing superstar, HubSpot is one of the most trusted customer relationship management (CRM) platforms today. But their product, HubSpot Email Marketing, is what we need to put a spotlight on. This tool makes it easy for digital marketers to send and automate emails. You won’t be disappointed with its drag-and-drop email builder, ready-made templates, and simple yet powerful scheduling and email automation systems.

Moosend

Moosend is a user-friendly and affordable all-in-one email marketing and email marketing automation solution. Perfect for businesses that are just beginning to build their mailing list, Moosend is equipped with everything you need to kickstart your email marketing efforts. With Moosend, you can build beautiful, on-brand emails as well as optimise customer journey with its segmentation and personalisation capabilities. It also lets you keep track of your marketing campaign performance with real-time reporting and analytics!

MailChimp

Well-established in the email marketing world, MailChimp is a tool worth trying out. It’s an all-in-one email marketing and automation platform that allows you to manage mailing lists, build custom email templates, and orchestrate your email marketing campaigns! 

Every digital marketing strategy needs to include email marketing and email automation. With the right tools and know-how, email marketing can be an effective profit-building tool by providing subscribers with content that matters to them. Learn more on our Digital Services Page: Email Marketing.

 

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3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tools

As the digital marketing landscape becomes increasingly competitive, SEO is crucial to keeping your brand seen and relevant. Optimise your SEO efforts and keep your website at the top of the search results pages with these SEO tools below. 

SEMrush

Tried and true, SEMrush is a powerful SEO tool to add to your belt. It allows you to take a deep dive into your target keywords by search volume, difficulty, CPC, and trend. You can also explore new search terms to rank for and uncover opportunities with the tool’s breakdown of keyword variations and related keywords.

All In One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO is one of the most powerful WordPress SEO plugins in the market. It is chock-full of user-friendly features designed to help you easily optimise your website pages and all your content for search engines.

Ahrefs

An SEO staple, Ahrefs makes it easy to discover keyword ideas and new opportunities for search. It also lets you check any URL’s top organic keywords and identify any website’s top-ranking content.

This type of competitive analysis can give you an SEO advantage when coming up with keywords to rank and content ideas for your own website. Ahrefs also makes it easy to spot any areas or content on your website that could use some jazzing up for search.

Practice search engine optimization or SEO to attract more high-quality traffic and grow your revenue over time. If you want to read more about improving online authority, visit our Digital Service Page: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  

 

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4. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Tools

Drive high-quality traffic to your website that convert with CRO. There is a lot of work involved in optimising web pages and creating engaging content that appeals to the right audience. Luckily, there are a number of tools that can help make CRO a breeze!

Unbounce

Turn your web visitors into paying customers with Unbounce! Thanks to its landing page builder smart features, you can easily tweak, publish, and A/B test content to maximise results. Want to hear something cool? Unbounce combines data and AI to let you create custom landing pages quickly and easily – say goodbye to creative and writer’s blocks! If that doesn’t convince you to try Unbounce right now, we don’t know what will…

Hotjar

Once your landing page is built and your content is up to snuff, you now need to know where your visitors are and aren’t clicking. And there is a tool to help with that. Hotjar lets you get a real-time visual record of your web visitors’ actions and behaviours on your pages through heatmaps and screen recordings. They enable you to monitor and track how much your web pages are being viewed and how visitors interact with your site. You can literally see right there and then what needs to be tweaked to increase conversion. 

Google Analytics

This list isn’t complete without Google Analytics. It’s a powerful and user-friendly tool that every digital marketer needs to add to their toolkit. Best part? It’s totally free! With Google Analytics, you can track how long visitors stay on or bounce from your web pages. It also enables you to see if visitors complete specific goals from a path that you set, and how online users are getting to your website. 

When it comes to effective CRO, you need to make sure your website is working smarter, not harder. Attract visitors and keep them coming for more with not only beautiful, but relevant web content. Want to know more? Check out our Digital Service Page: Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

 

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5. Graphic Design Tools

Don’t overlook the power of good design when it comes to improving your digital marketing. And no, you don’t need to be a Photoshop guru to create beautiful content! Below are three user-friendly tools to help elevate your online presence with eye-catching graphic design!

Canva

Need to create a brand logo, graphics for social media, or maybe an email newsletter but don’t have much of a graphic design experience? Canva may be the tool for you! Canva is a graphic design platform that has made life easier for digital marketers, social media managers, and content creators. It includes free templates for any users to get creative! Pick and choose from a library of beautiful graphic elements and photos. It also allows you to use your own graphics if needed.

Venngage

Venngage is an infographic creator for users of any design skill level! Create custom infographics or any other visuals for your website to engage visitors and entice clicks. With Venngage, you can customise any infographics with your own branding and using built-in graphics. Elevate the look of your website and improve clickthrough rate with good graphic design. There’s more to website design that meets the eye. Want to learn more or need resources? Visit our Digital Service Page: Performance Website Design. 

 

 

Got a mobile-friendly website? That’s great! But your efforts shouldn’t stop there. Go the extra mile by optimising all your digital content for mobile.

Here are three ways to help you create truly responsive content that is easy to consume on all mobile devices.

At Your Fingertips: Why Mobile Matters

We can all agree that mobile has revolutionised the way we live. It has become an essential part of our everyday lives, changing the way we communicate, socialise, learn and shop.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we spend countless hours glued to our smartphones scrolling on TikTok, sending memes to friends, or buying things online purely just to cure boredom.

When mobile started gaining popularity, web designers introduced responsive design to adapt websites to smaller screen sizes. This helped thousands of businesses cater to mobile users.

However, having a successful online presence today requires more than just having a mobile-friendly website. Your digital content needs to be created and optimised for mobile, from webpage headlines to social ads, to provide users with the best possible experience no matter how large or small the display size is.

Why is mobile optimisation important? The majority of digital content consumption now happens on mobile devices. As of May 2022, mobile accounts for just over 58 percent of web traffic worldwide (Oberlo, 2022) and this number is projected to grow over time. In Australia alone, there are over 19 million mobile phone internet users (Statista, 2022) – that’s over 73 percent of the total population!

Despite these impressive stats, some marketers have yet to optimise their websites, online ads, images and other digital content to reach and engage mobile users. If you think that’s a bit of a shocker for 2022, we agree.

With so many digital tools at our disposal today, it’s fairly simple to ensure that a web page or an online ad is mobile-friendly and fits nicely on a mobile device. But if the buttons are too small or
the images take forever to load, it’s not truly mobile-responsive.

How to Create Mobile Responsive Content

Ready to create responsive content that looks great and is easy to consume on mobile devices?
Here are three tips to get started:

1. Optimise Text

Eye Tracking Patterns

Before you can start writing content for mobile, first you need to understand how people read on their devices. You can use eye-tracking heatmaps to see what your users are paying attention to and what elements they are fixated on. You’ll quickly learn that the way users read on a mobile device is very different from the way they read on a desktop screen. On a desktop, users are drawn to the content that’s placed on the top-left section of a page. And most users view the page from left to right, then further down (Digital Marketing Institute, 2020).

On a mobile device, users don’t solely focus on the upper left section of a web page as shown in the data above. The pattern shows that the eyes focus on the centre, top half, and upper two-thirds of a page (Neil Patel, 2020). This suggests that every element needs to be optimised to ensure that nothing gets missed.

Copywriting for Mobile

Now you know what sections of a web page users are drawn to, let’s talk about how to write content that is optimised for mobile and that will get the most engagement.

Here are three key things to consider:

1. Punchy Headlines

Keep your mobile headlines short and to the point so they don’t engulf the entire screen and overwhelm your users.

According to Buffer, the ideal length of a headline is six words. Research reveals that we don’t only scan the body of a web page, we also skim headlines. We tend to absorb only the first three words and the last three words of a headline.

So, keep it to six words if you want to maximise the chance that your entire headline gets read. If you can’t cut your headline down to six words, just keep in mind how your headline could appear and be read on mobile and adjust accordingly.

2. Short Summary

Consider including a summary at the top of your posts. A summary makes your content more snackable and shows your readers what to expect.

You can do this with a short paragraph at the top that clearly outlines what the post is all about. If it’s a longer piece, consider adding clickable bullet points or graphic elements that act as the table of contents that easily direct users to specific sections of the article.

3. Content Chunking

Make your mobile content easier to read and keep users engaged by grouping related content into easily digestible “chunks”.

Use images, graphics, typography, subheaders, lists, white space, and short paragraphs to break up your mobile content into snackable groups.

In addition to chunking, you may want to consider using shorter, more precise words in your mobile content. The fewer and simpler words you use, the smoother the reading experience will be.

2. Optimise Images and Videos

Images and videos are a powerful way to make your content more engaging on mobile devices. We are visual creatures, after all.

Photos, graphics, memes, GIFs, short videos, and more add a visual punch to your content that keeps users hooked. But don’t just publish an image or a video on your web page and call it a day. You need to optimise these elements for mobile. Otherwise, they could take too long to load or take up too much screen real estate and render them pointless or illegible.

Optimising Images: Relevance and Load Speed

Think about relevance when creating and picking images. There’s not a lot of room to work with on a mobile display, so use the screen real estate wisely. Only use images that are relevant to your brand, topic, or content to keep users. Anything on the screen that is unnecessary and irrelevant simply becomes a distraction.

In addition to image relevance, you also need to think about load speed. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your content is if it takes too long to load on the screen. You need users to see your content quickly – slow load times can drive users to drop off the page and increase bounce rates.

Here are a few tips to ensure your images load speedily:

• Use compression to make your large image files smaller without compromising appearance. Photoshop is a great tool for this. There is also an array of free image compression tools online that you can try such as TinyJPG.
• Use responsive resizing tools to make sure your images look great and display quickly based on device resolution, orientation, screen size, network connection and page layout. Embedly has a tool called Display that can help you achieve this.
• Preview your content on a mobile device to check and see if your images are displaying correctly and quickly.

Optimising Videos:

Mobile video consumption is on the rise and is quickly growing every year. Want to encourage mobile users to watch your videos? Here are two tips to follow:

• Make sure the text in your videos is legible on mobile devices. You should also consider having a transcript of the video for accessibility and for users that prefer to read than watch. A transcript will also help increase the SEO value of your page.
• Embed third-party video hosting services like YouTube or Vimeo on your website to ensure bitrates, compression, and more have already been optimised.

3. Optimise Design

Last but certainly not least, you need to optimise the design for mobile. Remember, creating beautiful content is just step one. You’ll have to take steps and tweak some elements on the technical side to make your content work for mobile.

Mobile-Friendly vs Mobile-Responsive

Notice that we’ve been using the terms mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive. While often used interchangeably, mobile-friendly design and mobile-responsive design are two very different things.

Mobile-friendly content is a shrunken-down version of what you would see on a desktop screen. This allows users to view and engage with the content, but it doesn’t necessarily make it a pleasant experience. For example, a mobile-friendly landing page may fit a smaller screen but the CTA buttons usually become too small and the text is often hard to read.

On the other hand, mobile-responsive content has been redesigned and reformatted to reproduce what you would experience on a desktop screen. Clickable items are enlarged, images and videos are resized and reformatted, and text is snackable and easy to read whether the device is in vertical or horizontal view.

A truly responsive website design provides an exceptional experience that gives your users a reason to interact with your brand and keep coming back.

Less Is More

When it comes to effective mobile-first design, less is more. Review your web pages and determine what needs to stay and what needs to go.

Sidebars, for example, work great on a desktop to facilitate the buyer’s journey and make it easy to navigate a website. However, on mobile devices, sidebars are a distraction and take up precious screen real estate that will only get ignored.

Navigation menus and other elements on your website may also need to get axed for mobile. Just like with text, images and videos, review the structure and layout of your website and other digital assets on your mobile device. See it from a user’s perspective and identify what’s worth keeping and what isn’t.

Don’t Lag Behind

Your efforts shouldn’t stop at creating a mobile-friendly website. To drive traffic and engage mobile users, you need to optimise all your digital content for mobile devices. Mobile usage is quickly outpacing desktop. You need to keep up with trends to provide users with an excellent online experience and safeguard your business for the future.

Want to find out if your website is mobile-responsive? The DGA team is ready to help. From conducting a website audit to building high-performing website experiences, we’ve got you covered.

 

For decades, marketers had one strategy in mind: reach a wide audience with paid ads. In a digital arena, this strategy simply just won’t cut it. 

Technologies evolve. So do the worldview and desires of customers.

Short-term, profit-maximising strategies shouldn’t be the only thing businesses should focus on anymore. Instead, businesses should increase the time and resources spent on understanding customers’ behaviour and where they spend their time online. 

2020 proved that a strong marketing strategy is critical to safeguarding the future health of your business. But we know how overwhelming it can be to navigate this ever-changing digital landscape when you’re growing a business.

We’ve put together a list of strategies to help you strengthen your digital presence and grow your business in an online marketplace. To make it simple, we’ve broken it up into three categories:

       

What Makes a Good Strategy?

First things first, let’s outline the three key elements required to build a good strategy (HubSpot, 2018): 

1. A thorough diagnosis that defines a challenge
2. A clear guiding policy for dealing with the challenge
3. A set of practical, coherent actions to accomplish the policy 

Keep this list handy. If you’re lost or start to feel overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, let these three steps guide you and keep you focused on achieving your business goals. 

Digital Marketing Strategy: The What, Why and How

A digital marketing strategy is a blueprint that helps businesses build an online presence through various channels including social media, websites, blogs, paid ads, and organic search to reach and engage with customers. 

A good digital marketing strategy enables you to increase brand awareness, foster relationships with customers, and attract prospects in the right place and at the right time. 

What’s awesome about digital marketing is that you can tweak your efforts and make incremental changes in the process to make them more effective over time.

Running a digital marketing campaign without a strategy is like trying to hit a moving target. For your digital marketing efforts to be successful, you need to plan your strategy before doing anything else. You need to:

1. Define your prospective customers
2. Identify your goals
3. Determine what digital marketing tools you’ll need 
4. Watch your competition
5. Review the channels you’re currently investing in and evaluate existing assets
6. Audit existing owned, earned, and paid media campaigns 
7. Monitor, track and measure progress

Now, let’s look at a couple of digital marketing strategies that will help propel your business forward in an online marketplace.

Grow Brand

1. Let’s Get Social

There are 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, with users spending an average of 147 minutes per day (Statista, 2022). 

 

Looking at these impressive numbers, it’s safe to say that social media is a popular online activity. And if you’re not using social media for your business, you might be missing out on opportunities. 

 

Social media platforms are constantly adding and updating new features to keep users engaged. They also continue to introduce new tools to make it possible for businesses to create more seamless shopping experiences. 

 

For example, Instagram Shopping allows businesses to create a digital storefront where users can browse products. This feature enables users to easily shop a brand’s photos and videos throughout Instagram and lets them check out directly in-app. It’s a no-brainer – setting up storefronts on social media is a must for e-commerce brands. 

 

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn now favour quality over quantity. They foster authentic connections, meaningful conversations and community. With that in mind, use social media platforms in creative and meaningful ways to share images and videos that resonate with your audience rather than just initiate a one-way interaction. 

 

Want to learn more? Visit our Social Media Marketing service page

2. Create Immersive Experiences With Video

Video popularity online is on the rise. It’s dominating all major social media platforms and is driving a significant amount of growth for businesses today. 

Tried and true, a digital marketing campaign is more effective when a video is used. Using the right approach, video marketing can improve brand perception, increase engagement and boost conversion rates. 

The trends we’re currently seeing with Instagram and TikTok suggest that you don’t need to invest a lot of time and money to create effective video content. This, of course, depends on your industry and your goals. In most instances, as long as your video content is well-executed, delivers value and is personalised to your target audience, it should create a ripple effect. 

What’s great about videos is that they can serve different purposes across multiple channels. This not only cuts down production costs but also improves ROI.

For example, a 3-minute product video that illustrates features and benefits can be cut down to a bite-sized length for an Instagram ad. It can be posted on YouTube to increase brand awareness and attract new leads. The video can be uploaded to your website to improve SEO. You get the drift – video content is very versatile.   

Video is increasingly becoming the most important medium to tell a brand’s story. Ready to tell yours? From writing scripts to editing footage, we can produce video content that will help drive your next digital marketing campaign. Check out our Video Marketing service page to learn more

Grow Traffic

3. Don’t Overlook Email Marketing

Email generates a whopping 4200% ROI (HubSpot, 2022), making it one of the most effective ways to attract and retain customers. And with over 4 billion daily users, it’s safe to say that email is here to stay. 

Whether it’s through a monthly newsletter or a drip campaign, email marketing allows you to deepen your connections with customers by providing them with relevant and valuable content. 

Not only can email marketing help you build a clearer brand and convey your business value to customers, but it can also be a powerful profit-building tool if done right. 

When building an email marketing strategy, keep in mind that each customer is unique. So should the emails you send them. 

There are tools available today that can optimise and automate personalised, targeted email touchpoints for you. This makes it even simpler to deliver your message to the right people, at exactly the right time. 

Read our blog article on the importance of Email Marketing to learn more about the different types of email and best practices to get you started.

4.Reach More People with Paid Search

Organic digital marketing fuels long-term impact. But sometimes, it simply isn’t enough. When you need traffic fast, paid search ads will deliver profound results much faster than organic marketing can. 

 

To put it simply, paid search advertising is a form of digital marketing where you pay for your products or services to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google, for example. The higher your bid is for a particular search term paired with how relevant the ad is to a user, the more likely your ad will appear on their search results. 

If you want to target high-intent prospects, pay-per-click (PPC) ads are the way to go. A strong PPC strategy enables you to cherry-pick your prospects wherever they may be in their customer journey.

This allows you to show prospective customers ads they want to see. And when you show an ad with a relevant message to the right people at the right time, it is more likely to get clicked.  

To make sure that your efforts don’t go to waste, thorough research must be conducted. Reduce your ad spend and maximise ROI by tapping into consumer data and leveraging high-intent keywords to drive high-quality traffic to your website, increase conversion rate, and grow revenue. 

Make every cent count with full-funnel pay-per-click services with our team of experts. To learn more, visit our Paid Search service page

5. Tell Your Story With Content Marketing 

Simply put, content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content through social media, blogs, podcasts, and brochures among many others. 

People are attracted to great content that tells a story. As long it’s relevant to them. That’s why quality content marketing is such an effective tool for building an engaged audience. But what exactly is ‘quality content’? 

Quality content is content that is authentic, relevant, engaging, and optimised for search engines. More importantly, it’s tailored to your target audience. Before you can start producing content, you need to first and foremost understand your audience.

A great way to do this is by creating buyer personas. Having this information on hand is vital to creating content that is more likely to deliver the most value. 

It’s important to remember that people who are not ready to purchase today are unlikely to change their minds because they engaged with a single piece of content from your brand. For content marketing to deliver results, you need to produce quality content consistently over time. 

Ready to take a deeper dive into content marketing? Visit our Content Marketing services page

6. Keep Investing In SEO

Old but gold, SEO or search engine optimisation, is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance, clarity and structure of web pages to rank at the top of organic search results.  

Most online users discover and access content through organic search. If your web page is not optimised for SEO, it will be buried deep in the search engine results pages. And if your web page doesn’t appear on the first page, there’s a very high chance users won’t find it. You lose visibility, potential leads and conversions.   

There are several ways to optimise your website for search. These include reviewing and improving the speed of your site, implementing designs that include attractive and interactive elements, displaying calls-to-action higher up on the page, publishing long-form content, and ranking for multiple semantic keywords. 

And don’t forget to optimise your website for searches on mobile! Run your website through Google’s mobile-friendly test. Review the results and identify what needs to change.  

We’re here to help you improve your online authority and outrank your competitors with SEO. Check out our SEO services page to learn more

Grow Conversion

7. Work Smarter With CRO

It’s probably safe to assume that the goal of your business website is to increase revenue. To achieve that goal, you need visitors to engage with your website and guide their decisions efficiently. How? That’s where CRO comes in.

Conversion rate optimisation or CRO is a strategy designed to increase the number of visitors who take a desired action on a web page or an app. A desired action can include clicking on a link, adding a product to the shopping cart, signing up for a service or filling out a form. 

If you want to attract and keep qualified traffic, you need to work smarter, not harder with an optimised conversion process. Get the most out of users you already have by learning what makes them convert. Then, leverage this data to help you turn visitors into paying customers.

CRO involves a lot of tweaking, testing and measuring. Don’t have the resources? That’s where we can help. To learn more, visit our CRO services page.

8. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your prospects with the end goal of earning their business when they’re ready. 

A strong lead nurturing strategy will help you create long-lasting relationships with your customers built on trust and loyalty. 

Every step of the customer’s journey should be included in your lead nurturing process to get the most out of your digital campaign. When developing this process, you should aim to push the users to the right path depending on their intent.

For example, users that download an e-book might not be ready to make a purchase yet. But to stay top of mind and build more trust over a period of time, you can send them a series of emails with the goal to educate, inform, engage and convert. 

Utilise a customer relationship management (CRM) tool such as Email Automation, HubSpot and Pardot to help you manage your company’s relationships and interactions with customers. These tools will drive revenue much more quickly and allow you to pivot into new revenue areas by taking messages more efficiently to an existing pool of contacts. 

Interested in learning more? Check out our Lead Nurturing services page

9. Automate Your Efforts

Succeed in today’s competitive digital space by utilitising a marketing automation platform to run significant parts of your business. 

Assess automation platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and HubSpot against your goals. Choose the right platform for your business and commit to it. 

Customers in today’s digital landscape now expect experiences that are personalised to them. Anything generic will be left unnoticed. A highly tailored approach to audience segmentation can only be achieved at scale with automation.

 

Are you ready to explore the world of digital marketing further? Talk to our team of experts about your needs, challenges and goals. To learn more about how we can help, visit our Digital Services Page.