There’s a lot involved in creating a fully fleshed-out digital marketing plan. And in marketing, answers are never black and white. A campaign that works amazingly well for one business can totally fail in another.
A smart business leader knows the importance of continuously improving their marketing strategy and testing different approaches to see what works. So with that in mind, here are the 10 Top Strategies for Optimizing Your Digital Marketing Strategy.
1. Don’t lose track of profit by over-emphasizing vanity metrics
When evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns, there are a lot of different metrics to consider. So many that it can be easy to lose sight of what’s most important: profit. Ultimately, the goal of marketing is to generate results for the bottom line, so revenue or ROI should be the most important data point that you track and optimize for. You can track this as return on ad spend (ROAS).
While there are many metrics that can be helpful to track and analyze – cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per acquisition (CPA), click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate – none of these are as important as net profit.
Only focusing on vanity metrics can trick you into investing in the wrong campaigns.
Here’s an example:
Campaign A – has an excellent click-through rate, affordable cost per click, and gets tons of impressions…but has a very low ROI once you look at the profit generated down the pipeline.
Campaign B – has a very high cost per click and poor click-through rate…but the leads convert much better, actually giving you a higher ROI.
If you don’t track ROI, Campaign A looks like it’s performing better, and you’d end up doubling down on the wrong one.
2. Decide how to attribute ROI for marketing campaigns
Now that you’ve decided to start tracking ROI, there’s something else you need to decide too. There is more than one way to attribute ROI for marketing campaigns, and it’s important to sort this out in order to budget properly.
Here’s why it can get confusing: most people don’t purchase immediately from the first touchpoint of a marketing campaign…there might be a time delay before the purchase or multiple touchpoints from different campaigns involved. Which campaign do you attribute the sale to?
Two approaches are to attribute the ROI to either the first interaction…or the last interaction before the sale. For example, you attribute the sale to the first ad they every saw. Or alternatively, that website page they looked at right before they bought.
There are pros and cons to each approach, but the most important thing is to apply it consistently. Always do it one way, or the other. Flip-flopping between the data will make your data largely useless. If you’re not sure which approach to use, try attributing to the first interaction. It’s a good approach for most businesses.
3. Reduce or reverse abandonment
There’s a general rule of thumb in marketing that it costs 5X as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.
Similarly it’s much easier to close a customer that was already previously interested in your products then it is to close a customer that’s new to them and looking at them for the first time. Some low hanging fruit that you may not have considered: create an automatic abandoned cart email that goes out within the hour of someone almost purchasing but not finishing.
If you succeed in getting 10% back…that’s a 10% increase in your overall conversion rate!
It can even be as simple as:
Hey I saw you almost bought this product but didn’t… Here’s the link to finish making your purchase and to receive the product by Friday.
4. Use dedicated landing pages
One way to set up your marketing to help you better track and analyze the results is to use dedicated landing pages. You can try creating one for specific products, different segments of your target market, or even for specific marketing campaigns/channels. Doing it this way allows you to more easily compare results(to see which marketing campaign performs the best, or which part of your target market you should focus on).
5. There is no do, only try (test fast, fail fast)
Pardon the inverted Yoda quote. It’s helpful to realize that when it comes to Marketing there’s no such thing as “OK let me go out and generate some new sales”. It’s almost never that direct. The more appropriate perspective Is to think about your marketing like a series of educated guesses that you make and then check. Then based on those results you make some new educated guesses and check those results, and you repeat this process ad infinitum.
This will help you have realistic expectations when it comes to your marketing strategy, marketing budget, etc.
6. Eliminate points of friction in your sales and marketing pipelines
As a general rule in digital marketing, if somethings difficult for people to do they won’t do it. Often you can improve conversions in your sales and marketing simply by removing friction and making things easier. Take a look at your process from lead generation to close of the sale and see where you can remove steps, make things faster, or make things take less work.
For example, maybe on a promotional flyer instead of someone having to type in a long web address manually You use a QR code that lets them pull up the information instantly. Or maybe one they’re purchasing a product via the website you can remove some of the fields of information they have to fill out to make the order. It can even be something as simple as increasing the text size or layout of the information on your pricing page to make it easier to read.
7. Identify which messaging style resonates with your target market
There are a couple different approaches to marketing communications. You can focus on the problem the customer has in the associated pain points. Or the aspirational benefits that your product provides. Or maybe your business helps consumers avoid a scary negative outcome.
When you figure out how to best market your business, it’s helpful to figure out whether the type of messaging that resonates most with your target market is about avoiding a negative outcome or achieving a positive outcome. Whether they respond well to fear-based marketing, or not.
9. Pin down your main customer communication channels
It’s not always possible to be everywhere at once, So it’s worth prioritizing the marketing and Communication channels that work best for your particular business and target market. Sit down and ask yourself:
- What channels Will I use to interact with customers?
- Which channels do they prefer?
- What kind of response time do they expect?
- Which social media platform do they most frequent?
- Do they expect a more casual or a more formal/professional communication style from you?
10. Optimize (everything) for mobile
As of August 2022, 59.4% of all Internet traffic was through a mobile device. So it’s important to make sure your marketing strategy is fully optimized for mobile devices. This means websites as well as everything from marketing emails to promotional PDFs. If it’s not fully optimized for mobile you risk creating a bad experience for the majority of consumers!
Schedule a free consultation with SalesOptima Digital to start improving your digital marketing today.
