What would your perfect day look like? Would you wake up, have a cup of coffee and sit down to breakfast with your family and friends? Perhaps you go to work, get some things done, meet with a client or two and have lunch with a colleague. After work, you get some exercise, have a swim with your family and dive into a home-cooked meal with your loved ones. Maybe you head to the pub with your friends for a drink, catch up with some old friends and then head off to a movie or football match. What would your perfect day look like?
So imagine my surprise when I read an article this week that stated the average person spends nearly four hours a day on their phones. As a marketer, I work with businesses and brands to help them grow their reach and engagement through the power of the internet. While the internet allows for nearly limitless engagement opportunities, the phones in our pockets can become distractions from those opportunities. The internet can be a place where we explore, discover and connect with new and interesting things, however, the devices we use to access it are quite possibly becoming a hindrance.
Let’s examine the role of the web in your agency’s marketing plans.
Web Analytics
All business owners and marketers are aware of the importance of understanding traffic to a site or brand and how people are interacting with a space. The internet gives us the ability to see the interactions of users with a brand or business, whether they are website visitors, social media followers or email subscribers. With the help of web analytics tools, we can measure the effectiveness of our marketing efforts and make informed decision about the future of our businesses.
Google Analytics is the most popular and powerful web analytics tool among marketers. With hundreds of thousands of users around the world, it is the go-to platform for business owners and marketers looking to understand user behavior.
In addition to being the most popular web analytics tool, Google Analytics offers a variety of features that can help a business owner or marketer make informed decisions about marketing and sales strategies. These features include traffic measurements, funnel analysis, conversion tracking, audience segmentation and more.
One of the most significant aspects of any business or brand’s digital marketing plan is understanding how to measure the success of their online efforts. Google Analytics offers an entire section of the platform devoted to delivering key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help a business owner or marketer make informed decisions about their digital efforts. This includes things like website traffic, social media activity, email open-rates, and much more.
Online Presence
As we’ve established, the internet can be a valuable tool in any business or marketing campaign. Having an online presence is important for any business or brand, whether you’re a well-established company with a website, or an entrepreneur just getting off the ground with a blog. Having an online presence gives you the ability to build credibility, engage with customers and provide information to people when they want it. It also keeps your customers and potential customers engaged with you, the brand, throughout the lifetime of their relationship.
The best part of any business’ or brand’s digital marketing plan is to establish a strong online presence, grow your audience through digital marketing, engage with new audiences and expand your customer base. The more you can do to establish your credibility as a thought leader in your industry and delight your audience with engaging content, the more likely you are to grow your business.
Responsive Design
With the explosion of screen-based technologies, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, business owners and marketers need websites that work regardless of the device used to access them. With most website builders, creating a fully functional mobile-friendly website is as simple as choosing a template and adding content to it. A responsive design ensures that the layout of a website adapts to the size of the screen being used to view it. This technique allows the website to look the same as it does on a desktop computer or a laptop.
When someone visits your website from a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet, they should see something that is easy to navigate and accessible no matter what device they’re using.
Content Calendars & Keywords Research
In the previous two sections, we discussed the importance of a business’ or brand’s online presence and how that presence can grow their reach and engagement rates. So how, as a marketer, do I help a business or brand establish this online presence and grow their engagement rate? The answer is through content, content and more content! Creating and curating high-quality content that will entertain, educate and delight your audience is a crucial step in growing your business or brand online. You’ll want to make sure you have content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience.
You can start small by identifying content that is already working for your competitors, trying to one-up their content and doing what you can to attract relevant traffic to your website. When you have a small amount of content, it’s easy to track the results of your efforts and adjust your methods as needed.
As you grow your site’s content, make sure to keep track of the most effective keywords and ensure that your chosen keywords are scattered throughout the articles you create. Doing keyword research and finding potential keyword phrases that are both highly relevant to your target audience and have high search visibility is a great way to ensure that your content is reaching your target audience. Some tools, like Google Keyword Planner, can help you find the most profitable and relevant keywords for your site.
Marketing Automation
The last element of any successful digital marketing plan is to have a simple and efficient way of capturing and nurturing leads into paying customers. Without a solid automated marketing strategy in place, even the most beautifully designed and functional website will never be able to achieve significant success.
The key players in any digital marketing campaign include the website owner, content curator, agency and the marketer.
As the website owner, it’s your responsibility to build a website that is functional, user-friendly and contains the necessary resources for people to engage with you and your content. Having attractive, well-designed pages that load quickly and don’t require an internet connection is a great place to start. In addition to looking good, fast pages make your site more accessible to your target audience. If someone is visiting your site from a mobile device, even the slightest delay can cause them to leave.
As the content curator, you’ll want to make sure that the content you provide is both informative and accessible to your target audience. In addition to being accessible, you’ll want to make sure that the content is of good quality so that it will be a pleasure to read. When curating content for your website, make sure that you are using your chosen keywords in your article titles, subtitles and throughout the content itself. Doing keyword research and finding appropriate keywords that represent your content’s topics is a great way to make your content more discoverable.
As the agency, you’ll be responsible for coming up with a digital marketing strategy that fits the goals and objectives of your client. You’ll want to make sure to choose an approach that is effective, measurable and sustainable. You can start small by brainstorming campaign ideas with your client and then expanding upon these ideas to come up with a detailed plan. Developing and following a detailed marketing plan is essential to ensuring that your agency delivers as expected.
As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your chosen keywords are generating the desired results for your client. The better your research and the more you know about your client’s industry, the better your results will be. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to find the most profitable keywords for your client’s industry and ensure that your chosen keywords are appearing in the right places, such as article headlines, descriptions and body copy.
The Takeaway
To successfully grow your business or brand online, you’ll need to take into account not only the technical aspects of having a website but also the mental and emotional aspects. As a marketer, it’s your job to ensure that your client is aware of the value of a website in their marketing mix and how to use it effectively. To start small, build a website that is functional and easy to update. As you grow, make sure to have a content-driven website that is easy to navigate and has high appeal to your target audience.