5 Digital Marketing Strategies to Ring in the New Year

Where did the time go? The new year is fast approaching, and it’s time to reevaluate your business’ overarching goals and strategy. We’ve found and created many helpful guides this year, and would love to give you one to summarize what you’ll need to focus on when January arrives! Between Content, SEO and PPC, there’s a lot to keep in mind for revamping your digital marketing strategy and growing your business beyond your expected successes.

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Up Your Content Strategy Game

It’s not enough to simply have a website, you need to have a stellar website. And on that stellar website, you need to have captivating, engaging, compelling content. This may sound daunting if you don’t know where to start, but we’re here to help you succeed! Dive into the 6 rules that you need to follow for engaging content:

1. Get to Know Your Audience

Do your research and find out who your audience is: what’s important to them? How do they communicate with you – and you, them? How do your products and services directly relate to their needs? Take what you learn and transform it into impactful and actionable content your audience can read about on your website.

2. Pique Interest for Your Users

Using a question as a prompt is a great (and easy) strategy to grab the attention of those visiting your site. Is your content compelling? Easy to digest? Relevant to what they’re looking for? Whether your content is light and fun, or on the heavier, more informational side, it should always be easy to read. Be sure to understand the essential keywords that each user is searching and utilize them on your site appropriately. This will help improve your SEO, too!

3. Call to Actions are Key

Brainstorm about your goals for the user experience. What is it that you want them to do? Sign up for your newsletter? Purchase your product? Contact you? Tell them!

4. Are You the Authority?

Everyone wants to be the best in their field. You don’t achieve this by offering boring, basic copy on your website. Take the time to think about what unique insights or expertise you are able to bring to your industry. By educating your user on what makes you the thought leader to follow, you’re able to build their trust and earn their business.

5. Keep it Simple

Your website should never overload or overwhelm your readers. Keep your website copy clear, concise and easy to follow. Break up your content by using headlines, small paragraphs, and the occasional bulleted list. Remember, whitespace is your friend.  

6. Above the Fold Access

How are you prioritizing your content? If your most important golden nuggets are not “above the fold”, you might be losing your website visitors too soon. Be sure to give them what they want without having to scroll too far to find it.  

Need-To-Know SEO

Building SEO strategy for your business is absolutely essential and often requires a lot of technical know-how. Whether you are new to SEO, simply checking in on new knowledge, or are completely revamping your strategy, let’s start with a reminder on why it’s so important.

SEO is what brings visitors to your site organically, by way of making it easier for Google to understand your business and offerings and rank you higher in search results . When you are creating pages on your site, Google is consistently auditing your site’s performance, page speeds and security, favoring the sites that are easy for its algorithm to understand and has favorable historical user data. If Google can’t understand your site, neither will a user. What’s the first step you need to take? Give yourself an SEO audit. This will allow you to create a solid foundation on which your online presence can thrive. Ask yourself these questions as you make your way through:

• Are your sites mobile friendly?
• Are your pages loading quickly, or slowly?
• Do you have duplicate content on your site? How can you consolidate information?
• Are your URLs optimized and easy to follow?
• How is your website structured – are pages prioritized and indexed appropriately?
• Is your website secure by using https?
• Are you in control of the way Google pulls information from your site in their page results?
• Are you telling Google which pages to crawl, and which ones not to, in a way that drives user engagement?

Read through our guide on why you need technical SEO and Content Strategy for a deeper dive into SEO audits and ongoing SEO maintenance to give you the most bang for your buck when using this strategy service in the New Year! 

Stop Wasting Time (and Money) on Bad PPC Reports

For those who utilize PPC, you understand that it’s a “pay to play” service: you have to put money into your ad campaigns to be able to make a profitable return. Knowing that PPC is such an integral part of digital marketing strategy, it often kills us when a new partner reveals to us past PPC reports that weren’t monitoring the right metrics, proposing misleadings ones, or were completely ignoring best practice strategies that would have helped them ten-fold. Think of the time and money this has wasted for them, and countless other businesses!

When analyzing your strategy for the New Year, check in with your PPC team to verify you are following through on the metrics that align with your business goals, and nixing the ones that are too misleading or ambiguous. We encourage you to read a couple case studies we’ve researched to develop a full understanding of why some PPC reports are inflated or misleading, in addition to learning the ones that will be most beneficial to your company. Here at Intuitive, we regularly update our partners on their PPC campaigns and report on the following to help them surpass their goals:

• PPC Basics, like: impressions, clicks, click-through-rate, cost-per-click.
• ROI, including and not including agency management fee. This will help you understand exactly how much bang for your buck your ads are getting you.
• What PPC is doing for you: what did the team do last month, and what are they planning to do this and next month. They should include exactly how they’re using your data to form a strategy.

Time to Mobilize

As you’ve probably already learned from your digital marketing experience through 2018, NOT being mobile-friendly is no longer an option. Times are changing, interfaces are updating, and people are transitioning to mobile at a rate that is no longer alarming, it’s expected.

If your site is not mobile-optimized, you are WAY behind the times, my friend. Let’s make this transition easier for you by showing you why mobile is the way to go, and how to get there. We’ve created this awesome infographic that breaks down some significant statistics on why it matters to be mobile.

Did you realize that over 80% of the world’s population owns a mobile device? Simply in the United States, that’s over 125 million potential consumers. Smartphones offer the capability to search for things using voice or by using chatbots like Siri. People are constantly and consistently on their mobile devices, using them to learn, buy, watch, search for, or play. This is HUGE, because people are no longer waiting until they get home to search for something on their computer, they can simply unlock their phones and go. Let’s get you mobilized. Follow this easy checklist to understand the first steps you need to take in order to get with (and soon, ahead of) the times:

Is your site mobile-friendly?

• Hint: the answer to this better be yes. If not now, then immediately after reading this article.

Optimize your current content.

• Google has tools to help you work with what you’ve already got going on, but you need to make sure your images are compressed to the right size, calls to action are current and applicable, content is engaging, and all videos and links are still working properly.

Boost your page speed.

• Slow loading pages are the easiest way to lose potential customers and conversions. Don’t let this happen! Start with small changes and then get help for the bigger ones.  

Focus on local SEO.

• Mobile consumers search locally – think “near me” searches, capitalize on this market to stand out among competitors.

Put your user’s experience first.

• This means: don’t make them zoom, make your site easily navigable, understand best practices that will give them the best experience.

Google, Bing and Beyond

In the digital marketing landscape, most people now know how crucial it is to have a presence on search engines like Google and Bing. But some stop there. Why? Remember how mobile everyone is? Remember what they’re doing on mobile? Searching and Social Media. It’s time to take your online presence to the next level by getting into paid social markets like Facebook and YouTube. What’s so fun about getting into social media advertising, and what delivers such amazing results, is that they are visual, branding-focused platforms.

Paid Social campaigns are able to extend your reach and build brand awareness beyond the scope of simple search engine advertisements on Google and Bing because they’re not dependent on a user searching specifically for what you’re offering. These platforms are still pay-per-click, so you don’t ever have to pay for your impressions, which means you still get the benefit of an increased branded presence. We encourage you to check out the Digital Marketing Funnel we’ve put together to help you visualize how this strategy can work for you, as a way to complement your already ongoing Google/Bing advertising strategy.

Bring It On, 2019

We hope this digital marketing strategy round-up has been a helpful, clarifying way to prepare yourself, your business, and your digital marketing endeavors for the New Year! Each year brings new and better opportunities to grow your business, and we are honored to have been a part of your next steps. Feel free to reach out to our team at [email protected] if you have any questions!