All you want to know about how to do Digital marketing starting from keywords research, website planning and optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, lead generation, leads nurturing, optimizing website for mobile and how to create, analyze and refine Internet marketing strategies, everything covered in one ebook. Click here to download
Introduction
The moment you think about marketing these days the first thing that pops up in your mind is to go online. You very well know how crucial digital marketing strategy has become these days and how ineffective & expensive traditional marketing methods are becoming. I need not explain it in detail. Let us see what you are going to learn in this article.
Whether you are a student who wants to learn the basics of digital marketing, a working professional who wants to re-acquaint yourself with the basics or a business owner who is just getting started with digital marketing, this article will be your step by step guide to set up and implement a successful internet marketing strategy.
The article will guide you through the essentials of digital marketing starting from setting up a keyword strategy to analyzing & refining your strategies and further, will help you effectively market your business online whether you are a doctor, a tailor, a property broker or a marketing agency.
“Digital marketing as the name specifies is marketing over the internet through various digital devices.”
The Bottom Line
“You have your product or services that you want to sell, there are people who need various products & services to resolve their concern and there is the internet binding both of you.”
Now, there are a few things that you need to work upon to get your business online such as getting a website for which you need to construct a keyword strategy to maintain the relevancy of your website on search engines and for its better usability. So, a few things that we would be doing in digital marketing primarily are:
1. Constructing a keyword strategy
2. Optimizing the website for its visibility
3. Creating a Blog and marketing offers
4. Promoting content through Social media
5. Converting website Traffic into leads
6. Nurturing leads with targeted messages
7. Optimizing the marketing for Mobile
8. Analyzing and Refining strategies
How to Construct a Keyword Strategy
What is a Keyword?
A keyword in digital marketing is defined as a word or phrase used by a person to gather information on a topic online. Usually people enter the keywords in search engines like Google, Bing or social media sites like twitter, facebook, linked in and so on to hatch the information they are looking for.
Why do you need to create a keyword strategy?
Day by day, the number of people finding business online through keyword search is increasing. This is a good signal for marketers who want to extend their business and increase their reach. They can optimize their website and social media profiles around the keywords that are related to their business and are most frequently used by the people to get the required information. Now, when the people will search for information using these keywords, their chances of getting found go higher which eventually brings more and better quality traffic to your website.
It is little bit complicated to decide as to which keyword is bringing the relevant traffic, yet you have got some amazing ways to find out the popularity and competitiveness of certain keywords. Besides, you can also test and analyze how different keywords are driving people to your website. When you have got the tools like web analytics which enables you to find out which keywords are bringing what traffic, you can always go ahead and trim down your keyword list to the best few.
Marketers need to make sure that right people are finding them and they are not wasting money on useless clicks.
So, let’s go ahead and see how to figure out as to which keyword will maximize your potential to bring relevant traffic from search engines. Keyword research is an ongoing process that gives you insights on product demand and industry trends. You can grow your organic traffic and can prevent spending money on Pay-per-click campaigns through comprehensive keyword research.
How to construct a keyword strategy
Now, the idea is how to construct the keyword strategy. Here are a few very basic steps that need to be followed to have an effective keyword strategy.
• Create a short list of 4-5 keywords relevant to your business
Obviously, you cannot use your brand name as your keywords if you own a small or medium sized business. So you will need to make a list of keywords that are related to the product and services you are offering. While doing so think as if you are the consumer who needs certain product and is looking for the information.
• Build keywords based on relevance and intricacy
Avoid using words or phrases in your keyword that are very competitive as that will make it harder to rank well in search engine results. Rather use keywords that are less competitive and more distinctively related to your business. The competitiveness of a keyword increases with the increase in volume of searches on that keyword as greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. As far as determining the competitiveness of a specific keyword is concerned you have a number of tools at your disposal such as Google keyword Planner tool and others.
Two things that need to considered while deciding about keyword is its relevance and search engine results that it gives. Keeping both in mind, you need to make a balance between the two. Suppose your keyword is very relevant to your business but people are using some other word to find the information, it will not give you the desired results. Similarly, if your keywords are giving you good results on search engine pages but are not relevant to your business then that is a waste of clicks and money because visitors are not going to find anything that they thought will be there and will finally leave your website.
• Design and optimize your website in accordance with your keywords
It is not that you have chosen the keywords so you need to fit in them into your website. However, you need to optimize your website to use the mentions of your keywords at requisite places. Let’s take the images on your website as an example; they should include alt text that reveals your keyword strategy.
How to optimize your website for visibility
Now when you have some relevant keywords in your bank, you would certainly want to increase your visibility for those keywords on the search engine ranking pages. The digital marketing tactics that you make use of to do so is SEO i.e. search engine optimization.
For your business to be found by the consumers through search engines, you should set a goal to be on the first page or in the first few result pages. Things have becomes quite easier now than couple of years ago and the entire credit goes to the social media. A Google+ business account that you have created is quite helpful in your SEO efforts, for instance. This is why you are asked to optimize all your social media profiles so as to include updates with major industry keywords.
As per Google you should target the audience while designing the website and not the search engines. Besides, the new panda and penguin updates have made it clearer than ever. Keeping this in mind, let’s go ahead and know more about SEO in order to optimize your site.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization refers to the collection of techniques and practices that allow a site to get more traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc).
Categories of Search Engine Optimization
There are two categories of SEO
1. On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO simply refers to the text and content on your web site pages. Despite of the fact that on-page SEO is responsible for only 25% of your website ranking in the search engine results, it’s worth tackling as can be improved quickly.
2. Off Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to optimization strategies outside of your website’s design such as link building with authoritative sites through relevant content. You need to spend some time to improve in off page SEO.
Eight Components of On-page SEO optimization element
1. Page Title
Page titles are the text at the top of the browser window in a web page. They act as the title of the page, which is presented in search engine. You can find and edit page title in your website’s HTML. The text surrounded with the titletag is your page’s title. Here are some rules to have some very effective page titles:
• Include Keywords
• Keep it precise. Unnecessarily longer page title will not be seen in your web browser or in Google search results. Too long page title tends to adulterate the significance of keyword mentioned.
• Try placing keywords close to the beginning of the title starting from the left.
• Do not include too much of numbers and characters in it. Make it readable and easily memorable for the audience.
• Include the name of your company at the end of the page title.
• Use different page titles for each page. This is how you can utilize all your relevant keywords in driving more and qualified traffic to your website.
2. Meta description and Meta Data
When you put in a keyword to search for the information, the text that you see as the description of the site is called Meta Data. It’s good to include the keywords in Meta data as they attract the searcher attention and indicates if the search result is related with the query of the visitor. You don’t find your Meta description on your web page.
If you will not use the Meta description for any web page the search engine will automatically pick up the content on your web page and will show that as the Meta description. It is not used for any SEO purposes. A short summary of the web page at the top of the pages source code in a Meta description tag is Meta data.
3. Headings
Heading is perhaps the piece of text appearing larger or more prominent than other text on the page. This can be verified by checking the HTML code of the website if they include text with an h1, h2, or h3 tag surrounding it.
Usually, search engines take the text in the headings as the keywords which is why you are asked to include keywords in your headings if possible. Besides, as far as importance of the headlines as per the keywords are concerned, is given in ascending order first h1 tags, then h2 tags and so on. Even h4 and h5 tags do exist but are taken as the regular text when it comes to their influence on keywords. It is advised to use h1 tag only once however, if required such as in case of blog posts or so, you can include h2 or h3 tags as paragraph titles.
4. Images
Images adds to the value of your content however you should keep few things in mind while adding a image to your content which are as follows
• Use keywords in the file name of your image in order to bring relevant traffic from image searches. You need to separate the keywords in the file name with a dash (-).
• Never forget to associate text with pictures as search engine read the text and not the images.
• Images are found to be wonderful source to engage the consumer however too much of image will slow down the loading of the web page, negatively affecting both the consumer and search engine optimization.
5. Domain Info
The older your domain is the more importance search engine gives to your website .An older domain registration is a sign of commitment to the website, which in turn is a signal that the site has lesser probability of being spam.
6. Moz Rank
MOZ Rank is used to measure the overall online authority of your website which is why a higher moz rank is a good sign. One thing to be noted here is that MOZ rank is an important factor of both on-page and off-page SEO.
7. Google Crawl date
Google updates the information related to your website such as keywords and other SEO factors after crawling it. This is why frequently crawling of site by Google is supposed to be a good thing. The best way to get Google crawl your website is to produce and publish fresh content on your website more frequently.
8. URL structure
The web address of the web page is called its URL.URL structure of the website talks about the tactic behind interlinking of different URLs. Improving URL structure is a little bit complicated task however a skilled developer by your side can significantly sort out the issue.
Stay away from keyword stuffing
Keywords happen to be a very crucial component while practicing digital marketing however it does not mean you go ahead and stuff your entire content unnecessarily with too many keywords as not only it can be bad experience for your site visitors but even search engines have invented n numbers of ways to detect such behaviors. Besides, a good SEO strategy is the one that abides by search engine rules giving visitors a better reading experience at the same time.
How to improve Off-Page SEO
As discussed previously, Off-page SEO refers to the overall authority of your website or what other website speak about yours. Websites with higher authority are supposed to rank higher than those with lower authority.
Website authority mainly gets influenced by inbound links. Linking of a page on your website by any other website is called inbound links. It is good to have more and more inbound links and it’s even better to have inbound link from the websites with higher authority.
Now how to get the inbound links? Simple! Create high quality and original content which will lead other websites to obviously and willingly link it to the content on their sites. Besides, sharing content on social media and optimizing it for search results increases the chances of pulling more and more inbound links towards you and leads to better visibility also.
How to create a Blog and marketing offers
Publishing content on the web has become easier with blogging platforms like wordpress and blogger. Up till now this article has helped you gain a better understanding of your business keywords and know how to optimize your website for search engine. Now we will go ahead and see how we can attract more visitors to our website. We all know how efficient blogging and other content like EBook and webinars are in bringing consumers to our business online.
Approach towards Blogging
While writing a blog forget about the fact that you are doing it for marketing purpose; think as if you have to spread authentic information and knowledge about the related topics to the masses, just like the way a magazine or a newspaper writer would do through their articles or columns . However, you can always keep your blogging around your keywords but the quality of the blog should never be compromised. Besides, never use industry jargons that only your employees will be able to understand. Like you did while making the keyword strategy, try including words or the phrases in your blog that are most frequently used by the people to describe or find your business.
Before you start Blogging!
There are various tools paid and free that allows you to easily publish your content. However, you need to keep certain things in mind while going ahead with business blogging. First thing first your blog must be a part of your business website.
By introducing fresh and new content with the publishing of the articles blogs tend to maintain the dynamism of your website. Even search engines prefer to give higher ranking to websites which constantly add fresh and new content. This in turn brings a huge traffic to your website and finally leads to an effective lead generation for your business.
Blogging Platforms to consider
There are so many blogging platforms for your business such as wordpress, drupal, posterous and so on. With the help of these platforms you can easily update and add content to your site as you need not to know HTML code. You can do it all yourself without needing to wait for a webmaster to do so.
Key Components of a successful blog Post
There are so many things that need to be considered while creating a blog in order to drive more traffic to your website and convert them into leads while educating the customers at the same time. Let us go through the key factors essential for a great blog post.
• A gripping Title for the Post
The title of your article is like the entrance of your home and a first impression for the audience. Hence, make sure you are making your purpose of the article clear in the title as in what is the article all about. People love high quality informative article which lets them to learn new things and they eagerly share it on their social networks as well if they like your content. Besides, for search engines compatibility, you are advised to use the relevant keywords in your title. You always have a prospect to write an SEO friendly article without compromising on its content.
• Suitable content and proper formatting
While writing your content think yourself as the visitor and then go ahead with your content. Make sure the article is easy to read. Instead of throwing the information in bulk try using header tags and bullet points to branch off the content into different sections and make it more readable. Take care of the formatting part at the same time. A poor formatting impacts very badly on your reputation. Ask anybody in your team to review the post before you publish.
• Add Multimedia Content
Adding a relevant multimedia content to your blog makes it more interesting and customer friendly. Not only it is soothing to the eyes but also adds value to your content as they say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. If not much, try adding at least one image with each blog post. Besides, infographics, slideshow presentations and videos are some good examples of other multimedia content that you can feature.
• Include links
In-text links have proved to be quite beneficial for the both the sides businesses and the consumers. On the one hand where businesses get more opportunity to extend their products, consumers gets a lot of information they were hunting for. Reader get to have a more in-depth knowledge of what they are interested in and marketer at the same time get to have more leads in their banks as the links naturally point to their internal and landing pages to help them generate more leads from their content. Hence, try including in-text links where relevant.
• Call-To-Action
Yes! Calls-To-Action is a very important component that you need to include in a a blog. The blog content that you are going to publish must contain an applicable call-to-action to help increase lead generation.
Deciding the matter of your Blog
See! It is a fact that you are doing business blogging to promote your product but at anytime during your blog you should not reveal it. Instead think from a consumer’s point of view and try figuring out the fact they are hunting for and include that and other ongoing industry issues in your content. People around the world check in your website as they are looking for some information of their need; try to identify this need of the consumers and decide the purpose of your blog. There would be so many questions your customers have asked from you, try to answer 10 most common of them through your blog posts. Do this once a week for a few weeks and you will have the foundations of a great blog.
After first few weeks are over, go ahead and use your blogging analytics to measure the impact of your different contents. Depending on the response of the consumers to the different contents you can optimize your blog for its content. If some of your posts have received relatively higher number of views and inbound links, try including more about these topics in your further content explaining these in details.
Don’t forget that your blog should reflect your expertise and passion.
Contents Other Than Blogs
Although worth still blog post is not the only type of content that does wonders in digital marketing. There are other content resources as well like eBooks, research reports or whitepapers that are found to be quite useful in generating leads. Besides, non-text based contents like videos, webinars and slideshows are considered to be a great source. They not only educate and entertain the audience but posses a great ability to achieve information exchange, which happens to be a critical point in the sales cycle. Information exchange here is the process in which the visitor fills out the lead capture form to access the resource.
As far as producing the content is concerned, you should not select to do so randomly. Try making use of marketing analytics for this. It not only helps you pick the right kind of content you should produce but also optimize them based on results. For instance, marketing analytics lets you know as to which content is successful in generating leads for you and which type of content is bringing what part of the audience. Based on these calculations you can you can prioritize the contents to be published. For instance, if an eBook on a particular topic is driving more customers than that of a webinar, then it’s surely the eBook you need to concentrate on to drive more conversions.
How to promote content through Social media
Social Media has proved amazing in generating revenue for those who can leverage it to dole out business content and increase the community of their brand proponents. It provides a common platform for everybody to communicate directly with each other be it customers, prospects, businesses or their employees. Social media drives content distribution and brand visibility online to a great extent.
Today, when new social media outlets like Google+ and Pinterest are there ready to impact the social media landscape, you still need to focus on the major social players like Facebook, twitter and Linked in. Besides, make sure you have all your marketing analytics at the right place before you start your social media campaign in order to measure all the pros and cons. Moreover, while leveraging social media, you must be aware of what industry-related conversations are happening online and when to respond. In order to monitor your industry and business mentions in social media and know what’s happening where you can make use of various tools like Google alerts and hootsuite.
How to go about twitter for business
Twitter is an online social networking and micro blogging outlet which lets you send and receive text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as tweets. Based on the conversation that’s going there at twitter among the people about your business and the industry, you can decide on whether you should sign up with it or not.
If you have decided that yes you want to be on twitter, go ahead and sign up for a free account. Let me make you aware with certain points that need to be considered while setting up an account with twitter.
• Your twitter’s username should be the name of your business.
• Use your business logo as the profile image for your account.
• Create a custom twitter background that provides additional information about your
Business.
• Use tools like TweetDeck to find out potential customers that your business should follow.
How to go about Facebook for business
Facebook is a wonderful source for building a community of brand proponents and increase viral marketing with more than 800 millions monthly active users. In order to leverage Facebook, the first thing that you need to do is to setup a business page.
For more in-depth information on Facebook, read DSIM’s article on How to Optimize Facebook for Ultimate Results https://dsim.in/blog/how-to-optimize-facebook-for-ultimate-results/
How to go about LinkedIn for business
For it is specifically aimed towards professionals, LinkedIn happens to be the best network to rely on when it comes to generating leads for your business. In fact, a recent study of 5,000 businesses by Hubspot revealed that LinkedIn’s visitor-to-lead conversion was 2.74% i.e. almost three times higher than Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%) combined. With more than 259 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn serves as a wonderful platform for lead generation if you know the tactics.
The first thing you need to do is to set up and complete your personal and company profile with LinkedIn for your Business. You must not forget to optimize your information while setting up these profiles by adding links to your website and blog.
After your profile is created, you can go ahead and explore LinkedIn’s other tools that are widely used for marketing. Here are five main features of LinkedIn that will help you with lead generation and customer acquisition.
LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn Answers is one of the most wonderful tools that help you establish yourself as thought leader and generate potential leads. In this section, people ask industry related questions and get counsel. You being the industry insider possess a lot of helpful knowledge about the industry that you can share with them. This is the way you can also kind of promote your blog posts or other content giving helpful information to the users who are looking for it. The only thing you will need to ensure here is that all your educational contents are optimized for lead generation and are linked to your answers.
LinkedIn Applications
LinkedIn Applications is a place where you can find and add various interesting apps that will help you improve the user experience on your LinkedIn page. Besides, you can also setup simple polls in order to find out about the opinion of your audience on a certain topic. You can add an app that draws your recent blog posts onto your LinkedIn page as that will help you generate more business leads.
LinkedIn Groups
Joining Groups on LinkedIn should not be confined to your industry as joining outside your industry will let you expand your reach and grow your business. It helps you in generating potential leads not only within your industry but even outside it.
LinkedIn Advanced Search
It is an amazing tool for sales people, people looking for jobs and B2B owners. There is a search box at the top that says advanced you only need to conduct a search for your target company. After you get the search results, click on the company you are interested in. You will see a box at the right hand side that will show your first connections and your second connections. Leave the first connection and click on the second connection link. Now you will get a list of names of people at your target company. You will find a list of your shared connection at the bottom of the profile. It is an easy task from there on. You just have to ask your friends to introduce you to the people you want.
LinkedIn Direct Ads
You can drive prospects to various destinations such as your landing pages, LinkedIn groups and so on through LinkedIn direct ads, which is an advertising program by LinkedIn. It basically works the same way as Google paid search ads work. You create ads and follow all the process the way you do it in case of Google Adwords then you bid on how much you will pay LinkedIn if someone clicks on your ad.
Aforesaid were the five primary ways you can use LinkedIn to generate leads for your business. However, before you start with lead generation on LinkedIn, make sure that your professional LinkedIn profile is properly optimized keeping leads in mind.
How to convert website Traffic into leads
Now after performing all sorts of steps to bring in the traffic to your site you can see that a large number of traffic is being driven to your website however they are not getting converted to sales, which is your concern now.
As of now your customer is at the top of the sales funnel. We need to move them down converting the visitors into leads and finally sales. For this you need a gripping offer for your prospects, a relevant call-to-action to promote it and a landing page with a form where visitors will submit their information. Finally, evaluate and repeat the entire process. Let’s discuss the conversion process in details.
• Pick the offer
Being something that initially attracts the attention of the visitor and let them to fill out the form on your landing page, offers are supposed to be the most important part of any campaign. Make sure your offer is targeting the sales lead that you want to attract. For instance, if you are dealing in electronics then your offer should say something that will attract those who want to buy some electronics. Or say you are an SEO consultant, you should create offers that appeal to Businesses wanting to improve their website’s visibility in search engine ranking pages.
There is no hard and fast rule for offers. You can experiment with it and see what’s working. Besides, you can take the help of web analytics to know which offer pattern is doing great and can learn to make good offers from it. The offer form is actually the conversion starter for the sales team, keeping this in mind you should design the offer form so as to make a sale.
• Create Calls-to-action
Calls-to-action are actually a buttons or links that attracts the user attention and send the visitors to the landing page. After you have created the offer create a few gripping calls-to-action for the offers as they cause the lead generation. An effective call-to-action helps you convert a large number of your website visitors into leads.
• Create a landing page
After the visitors click on the call-to-action they are directed to the landing page where they fill in their information for the product or service they want. It is the place where visitors are converted to leads for your sales team to follow up with. Besides, Lack of links makes it harder for visitors to figure out the way they will avail the offer, hence make sure all your calls-to-actions are perfectly created and are linked to the related landing pages well. Moreover, after the customer had filled their information on landing page they should be directed to the thank you page where they can access the offer.
Try being clear and specific while describing your offer in the CTAs and the landing page. Your key matter should always be clearly conveyed. There should be a clear description of the offer on the landing page, if possible with an image and bullet points that are easy to flick through. For instance if you are offering an eBook for free make sure you mention the theme of the eBook in the offer. For instance, if you are offering a free eBook on some ‘abc’ topic, say download a free EBook on ‘abc’. Make sure ‘abc’ here is clearly conveyed.
• Evaluate and repeat the process
No restrictions are imposed on you to measure and experiment. Go through the marketing metrics such as the click through rate of your CTAs, conversion rates of your landing page and the leads generated and find out new ways based on the most successful ones. In order to come to the fact that which elements helped best in achieving the goals, you need to test different offers, CTAs and landing pages. Have the courage to test different variations; it will not hit your campaign as you can anytime switch back to the older version if that worked better. This is how you will be able to find the best ways that does wonders for your business.
Lead generation can’t say is not a big deal but yes if you have all your tools at the right place and have the courage to experiment new thing based on marketing metrics it’s not that far. One more thing! Experiment is a wonderful idea but it should not be baseless. You should always take help from the marketing metrics to experiment and find best ways to conduct your campaign.
How to nurture leads with targeted messages
After putting in so much effort you generated the leads however due lack of proper follow up the leads are not getting converted to sales. If you are not building relationship with your leads you are flushing away your entire effort. That is why we suggest you to follow up the leads through targeted messages. Lead nurturing is actually nurturing your relationship with your potential customer by sending targeted, relevant and useful messages to your potential customers from time to time. The idea behind is to let your customers themselves come to you and say they need your product.
Lead nurturing helps you make your leads sales-ready leads. It is a system that lets you send an automated series of emails to the leads at the starting phase and getting them converted to sales ready leads before you hand them over to your sales team. So many surveys in the past have revealed that only 5 to 25 percent of your website traffic wants to do business with you and the rest are actually the researchers. It is sales nurturing process through which you make the customer feel the need for your product and incite their purchase decisions. Besides, measure and analyze about how your leads are getting converted to sales; ask yourself questions like how long did it take, does the sales cycle differ for various types of purchases. Answers to such questions will help you make some effective lead nurturing campaigns and utilize this marketing channel to qualify leads and help your sales team.
Email Marketing As a Business Tool
Email marketing not just helps you to nurture the leads but also helps you grow your database, closely follow key metrics and conversion best practices.
Build a list of email receivers
Most of the marketers whether they are experienced or fresher, face the common challenge of creating opt-in opportunities. By giving the customer an option to put in their e-mail address while filling up the form on landing page, you are kind of taking a permission to send them e-mails. Besides, don’t forget to give them a reason to opt-in for receiving emails. Let them know what is it in your offer that makes it so valuable and what unique and interesting information they will be receiving through your email newsletter. While doing so however make sure you use a language which is easily understandable by your audiences and send emails to only those who have explicitly opted-in.
Content of the Emails
Now when you have the list of people you need to send mails to you need to decide about the content of the email. First thing first emails should be relevant to the interests of your recipients. Keep in mind the offer that initially brought them to you and follow up with them on that interest to further engage them.
Make sure you are doing proper personalization. Don’t forget to use a real email sender name and adding a personal signature. Personalize the email in a way that the recipients remember how and why they visited your website. For instance, begin with “thanks for subscribing to our email newsletter” or” you recently participated in our webinar”.
You email should not seem as if you are talking about your product instead it should seem as if you are solving the issues of the recipients. Whether it is the email body or the subject line, make sure they add value.
Relying on image is not a good idea. Sometime your customers are unable to comprehend what it is all about if your email is one large image only. Use image as additional content in your email. Make sure your message contains enough text to put across the value.
Be consistent while sending the emails and stick to the time gap in which you have been sending emails whether daily, weekly or monthly, to set the right expectation in recipients.
Convert potential leads to potential customers
Make sure your each marketing message is associated with a goal to be achieved. Clarify it as to what should the e-mail recipients is supposed to do when he opens the email. Are you inviting them to go through your new eBook or asking them to share an offer on social media.
However if your goal is lead generation then include a call-to-action in your email that links to a landing on which the consumers can reconvert and select to further engage with your company themselves. Since they are already your leads, you can inform them more about your offers on the product they are interested in. They might not be interested in it right now but you can still continue nurturing them with broader offers.
Besides, the landing page is part of your email campaign. Hence make sure your landing page and the email offer are well aligned with correlated language and images.
Measure your email performance
There are many metrics that can tell you about the performance of your marketing emails such as delivery rate, unsubscribe rate, list growth rate, open rate, click-through rate, email forwarding rate, etc. Here we will discuss about few primaries of them.
• Click through rate(CTR)
Click through rate is a data that tells you about the customer response and lets you know how many of them clicked on your link in the email. CTR tells you about how gripping your offer and the email messages are. This is why you are suggested to keep experimenting with different offers, call-to-action, subject line and timing to perk up your CTR.
• Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who have unsubscribed to receive your emails. It is not a very reliable metric as many times users simply stop opening your e-mails instead of going ahead and unsubscribing to it. That is why you do not get the clear picture about how many active users you still have as in those who still open your e-mail messages.
• Conversion rate
It is one of the best metric that tells you about how effective your email campaign was.
The higher it is, the more compelling and relevant your offer was for the consumers.
But you also need to consider the factors other than your email message while talking about the efficacy of your offer such as the landing page. Try experimenting with different landing pages based on the customers’ response. To measure conversion rate you need to integrate your email platform and your marketing analytics.
It is not just the emails you can nurture your leads through social media or other platforms used by consumers as well. This is why you are suggested to start thinking about behavior -based communications, those that get initiated based on the full history of interactions of your leads whether on your site or off your site.
This was all about following up with your potential leads and engaging them constantly to move them down the sales funnel through lead nurturing and email marketing.
How to optimize your marketing for Mobile
Knowing the fact that sales of mobile devices will increase by 26% by the year 2015, one can easily guess how important mobile marketing is from both a marketers and users perspective. With this, we need to be a little more specific while optimizing our marketing strategy for mobile devices. You need to create a mobile -friendly content strategy for consumers to find it useful and easily accessible if you are marketing on mobile web.
First thing first you must optimize your website for mobile viewing. You need to keep two things in mind while making your website mobile friendly for viewing, which are
• Setting up Mobile Redirect
Good thing about mobile marketing is that you can set up a mobile redirect by creating an entirely different version of your website meant for mobile viewers. Through this feature, a line of code is placed on your website’s homepage to determine the size of a visitor’s browser screen. Based on the screen size, the visitor is redirected to the site meant for their device.
• Using Mobile CSS
You have one more option other than redirect option that is the use of mobile CSS to make your website mobile friendly. CSS helps you change the way your website is organized and displayed just on mobile devices.
While going ahead with any of these two options you will need to tailor the content on your site depending on their importance. You can go ahead and include the key information that the visitors are looking for. Keep it as precise and useful as it could be. For instance you can keep the certain information prominently visible or rest less robust depending on their usefulness.
Significant elements to be optimized for Mobile
Now when you have optimized you website for mobile friendliness, you also need to work o certain areas for an effective mobile marketing such as
• emails
• calls-to-action
• landing page
• downloads
• videos
Now when it is known to everybody that how the usage of mobile devices like i phones, androids and others are increasing day by day, you must bring change in your online marketing strategy and make it more adaptable for mobile devices.
Mobile bandwidth cost is expected to rise and so marketers should try developing light weight ways to engage mobile users. Instead of asking users to stream a longer video, provide them with a clean text summary of the video if they are using a mobile data connection. Help them conserve mobile bandwidth.
Up till now we have learnt how to create and implement various digital marketing strategies, now it’s the time to make them more efficient. In the next step we are going to find the best way to use all the techniques we have learnt. Now we will learn how to assess the efforts and impacts of various marketing campaigns within given time frames, compare them and find out the best one to go well with your business.
How to analyze and Refine strategies
Now when you are at the bottom of the sales and marketing funnel you should start thinking about reviewing the performance of your each marketing activities, identify those which are successful and get rid of or modify those which are not giving results. This section of the eBook is going to tell you about reviewing some metrics to monitor and ideas for refining your digital marketing strategy.
Guidelines for Analyzing & Refining Internet marketing strategies
• Execute an Analytics plan
To start analyzing your digital marketing strategies, you need to have your analytics program in place. Web analytics is great tool designed to help you analyze website traffic.
• Identify prospects
You need to identify the opportunities while reviewing your marketing activities. Do you want more lead generation? Do you want more traffic to hit your blog? Whatever, you want; you need to figure out what are the areas you need to get better and work accordingly.
• Set a metric for good results
Setting a metric that quantifiable and involves a set time frame will give you better results. For instance: “Increase X blog Traffic over the next X days.”
• Filter your strategy
Now, depending the on different data that you have got through web analytics modify your campaign to implement those activities more and more which were effective and minimizing the implementations of those which are not giving results.
• Assess performance
Now after you have created a change in your campaign depending on the data, find out if that change is working for you. If not, then go ahead and try something different that could have been done here. Whereas if it worked for you, stick to it. However, in any case, you need to keep monitoring the metric to ensure that the improvement has a long-term effect.
Important Metrics that are to be tracked
There are some key factors that need to be kept in mind for your refinements to have a big impact. Before we go ahead and start improving the marketing activities, let’s first thrash out the relevant metrics.
• Marketing Grade
Marketing grade tells you about the information to guide you through any optimization process. Instantaneously discover the weaknesses and strengths across your marketing funnel.
• Traffic
Web Traffic tells you about how many people flocked your website and what conduits drove the most and least traffic. This knowledge helps you make iterations and launch a campaign that will augment visits.
• Leads
What part of the traffic is getting converted to potential leads and finally to potential customers. Ideally this number should relentlessly amplify to guarantee a steady flow of revenue.
• Customers
You should always be comparing your campaigns and conduits with the number of customers you achieved. You need to know about the sales that you closed this month and compare it with the data of previous months.
• Potential Keywords
To run your campaign successfully you need to know which keywords are bringing in the large part of traffic to your website and use these keywords further to drive more and more traffic to your website. You can take the help from Google analytics to know more about keywords and their impacts.
• Cost of drawing each new customer
You must keep a track of the amount that you pay to draw each new customer. You are suggested to focus more on inbound marketing rather than on outbound marketing methods in order to save a lot of money.
• New and Repeat Visitors
Both the types of visitors are good for your business whether they are new or the repeat visitors. If they are new visitors it means that they have searched you while looking for the information they wanted and repeat visitor means that you have given them a good reason to come back. You need to find a balance between the two.
• Effectiveness by Conduits
You might get traffic spurts from press releases and news coverage but that should not be your goal. Your goal should be to focus more on long term results. Figure out which conduits are bringing in more traffic to your website. Work on them.
How to work upon improvement
We have discussed so many things up till now. It is time to discuss about how you can improve on them. Let me share a few ideas to work upon improvement of these steps.
• Keywords
Figure out which keywords are bringing in the large part of your traffic and use them frequently. Try their variations. You have got tons of ways to do this as each page on your website can incorporate different keywords.
• On page SEO
You are always asked to make changes to on-page factor if that can boost visits to your website. You can go ahead and try different on-page SEO factors like page title, Meta description and headings. For instance you can experiment with different page title to see if they can drive more traffic to your website.
• Conversions
Try out different patterns of the conversion forms that are your landing pages. Make relevant changes to its content, image and the layout and see if that gives you good results so that you can use them further to drive more traffic to your website.
• Content Strategy
Web analytics lets you know as to which content is driving most part of the traffic to your site. This can help you focus more on the content that’s giving good results or improve your promotion of other contents.
• Social Media Promotions
Weigh up as to which social media stream is driving most part of the traffic and generating more leads, and can use them accordingly. You can focus on the successful social media platforms and at the same time can also improve the one which are not doing well.
• Lead Nurturing & Email Marketing
There could be a chance that you are not sending the mails at the right time or the calls-to-action that you have in your mail are not suitable for the audiences. Hence, keep experimenting and testing.
Afterword
Now, you know the ways, you have got the tools at place you only need to go ahead with the correct implementations, measurement, analysis and further implementations.
Although for starters things might seem a little bit complicated however if you tackle each digital marketing tactic step by step, you can make it more manageable and see results very soon.
Hopefully, this eBooks have helped you understand how digital marketing can perk up your overall marketing plan and help you accomplish business growth.
Now, you know how to construct keyword strategy, build up your SEO plan, convert traffic into leads, nurture leads to make sales and analyze & refine all these techniques in order to get even better and improve results.
Now it’s the time to give your Business even better exposure, so go ahead, create and implement your digital marketing strategy, step by step.
