Every savvy business owner is on top of their marketing spending. You don’t invest unless you can clearly measure the ROI and CPA. With 74% of SEO strategies delivering little to no results, you may be thinking twice about how you allocate your digital budget and the marketing campaigns you undertake.
It’s not that digital marketing doesn’t work, it’s that you and your team are likely making one of the common mistakes below. Not to worry as all mistakes can be resolved and your dismal results can be transformed into powerful growth strategies!
#1 Keeping Your Digital Marketing Campaigns In-House
It’s an exciting time to be alive as we have the power of knowledge at our fingertips. We can perform an online search for anything we wish to learn, including online marketing. You aren’t alone if you assigned your social media or all digital channels to a tech-savvy employee. However, knowledge is only power if you have an in-depth understanding of how to create targeted and measurable strategies.
Unless you can invest in hiring a dedicated digital marketer, you’re likely to be part of the 74% who fail. The internal employee you assigned SEO to is going to be putting in their best effort but they simply don’t have the training required to succeed.
While there are best practices and foundational elements, strategies evolve at lightning speed. Whether in-house or provided by a digital marketing agency, you need a trained marketing specialist who can create a measurable and cohesive multi-channel strategy.
#2 Your Website Needs An Upgrade
Important aspects of every business are the last time a website redesign was rolled out. Or an update on all company imagery and media on all digital marketing channels. Keywords and meta descriptions are areas where most business owners consider done once it is on the website but that is not the case.
These are just a handful of elements that fall through the cracks, all of which are vital to successful SEO. Most of which are also vital for user experience and last but not least your marketing campaign.
Even if you love your current website layout and design, websites should be redesigned every 2 or 3 years. This ensures your design is aligned with the most recent search engine algorithm changes.
Your website is your online hub, it’s where all your digital channels link back to.
Your marketing agency will:
- Audit your site’s organic SEO
- Audit your site’s speed
- Test mobile responsiveness
- Perform a user-friendly assessment
- Create a keyword strategy
- Create a link building strategy
- Evaluate web pages for cohesive branding
- Evaluate the quality and originality of the text
- Suggest updates, changes, and redesign
- Create landing pages for marketing automation and lead generation
- Create cohesive off-page strategies
- Update your website constantly and methodically
#3 Keyword Confusion
The concept of keywords sounds simple, but it’s quite complex.
For example, if you own and operate a hair salon in Queenstown, you would presume that “hair salon” is your best keyword. Unfortunately, this might not be the right choice.
Make no mistake, “hair salon” has the highest search rates, but it also has the highest competition. Unless you can afford the PPC costs of the most competitive keyword in your industry or content strategy budget to compete with the biggest brand in the industry, the most obvious keywords aren’t the right keywords.
It’s time to get more specific focusing on your targeted specialities and online search intentions—not just your general product, service, or industry. Staying with the example above, this might include keywords that include words such as:
- Curly hair
- Grey hair
- Kids
- Beards
- Ombré
- Men’s grooming
Your marketing expert will vigorously analyse a spectrum of keywords, selecting ones with high search and low competition. This includes analysing your competitor’s keywords and selecting short and long-tail keywords to identify a competitive mix.
Once targeted keywords are identified, they will be strategically used on your:
- Website
- Blog posts
- Offsite articles
- PPC ads
- Social media marketing
- And other online channels
Above we mentioned that keywords must be strategically placed. While it’s easy to think “the more the merrier”, adding too many keywords can damage your SEO. Quality content balances your keyword placement and keyword mix.
#4 No Local SEO Strategy
Even if you serve a large region or offer your products or services globally, a local SEO strategy is required. This includes adding the city/region you are located to your website footer—but it’s so much more!
For example:
- Creating location landing pages that are targeted to the primary cities you serve.
- Optimising your Google My Business listing with keywords and targeted strategies.
- Optimising industry and area/service-specific profiles with keywords and targeted strategies.
- Creating strategies to ethically increase your online reviews.
- Targeted strategies to increase local check-ins, event confirmations, and online activity.
- Adding Name Address Phone Number (NAP) citations to your website, social media, and review sites.
#5 Leaving Out Lead Capture And Automation
Does the thought of creating email marketing funnels make you cringe? Many small business owners are comfortable sending out a monthly opt-in newsletter. Or create a series of post-purchase automated emails. However, you aren’t alone if you have yet to adopt a larger lead capture strategy.
An important consideration when setting up a marketing funnel is to stay away from spam!
It takes the average consumer 7 marketing touches to convert. With a targeted inbound marketing strategy, you can capture more leads and track where they are in the sales journey.
Every strategy is unique, so you may email more frequently the week or two after leads opt-in, and gradually taper off. However, not everyone will receive the same emails, as the content will be targeted to the opt-in demographic.
Here’s a common lead capture outline, set up by a trained social media marketer:
- Determine the hyper-targeted audience niche you want to capture. For example, not just mums, but mums between the ages of 25 and 35, with children under the age of 5, who prioritise wellness.
- Create a meaningful or solution-oriented free gift to entice leads to opt-in. Suitable candidates are items like a coupon code, an eBook, or a tips list.
- The next step is to start thinking of online advertising. Create a Facebook lead ad that captures email addresses for hyper-targeted demographics. Consider a google ad to a landing page as an option with more detailed information and Facebook ad that links to the same landing page too.
- Perform an A/B split test to identify which images and headlines capture more leads. It is crucial to be able to put numbers behind your marketing efforts. This will help you make better decisions in long run.
- Send out the “Welcome” or confirmation email after the subscriber opts-in, with the free gift attached.
- Create a targeted follow-up email marketing funnel that continually recategorizes leads by actions. For example, they may switch to a new list after they make their first purchase, by the internal links they click, or by how often they open your emails.
- Set up a Facebook retargeting campaign to maintain brand awareness beyond your emails.
- Continuously analyse how well your lead capture ads, pages, and sales funnels are performing.
#6 Measure Your Performance
Unlike many forms of real-world marketing, digital channels are easy to track, and campaigns are easy to measure. If you can’t clearly identify the CPA and overall ROI of your current campaigns, the strategy needs to be revised.
This includes measuring KPIs such as:
- Website traffic
- Landing page traffic
- New leads
- New followers
- Comments
- Likes
- Shares
- Cost per click
Marketing KPIs aside, you can gather in-depth data points that may:
- Better engage with your demographics
- Help you identify new demographics
- Modify your products and services
- Create new products or services
Searching For A Digital Marketing Agency In Queenstown?
If your current strategies don’t deliver or their results are dismal, we invite you to reach out to Queenstown Media. Our trained and tenured team takes a data-driven approach to deliver rapid and consistent results. We will help you increase your Google page rank, capture more leads, and grow your business.