Did you know that 72% of Americans use some type of social media? That is up from just 5% in 2005.

Given those numbers, it’s no wonder that so many businesses have a dedicated social media marketing strategy. If you’re selling a product or a service, chances are your audience is spending some time on social media.

Marketing on social media can be an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s essential to have a plan in order for it to be effective.

Are you wondering how to build a social media marketing strategy that actually works? Let’s take a look at seven tips to help you off on the right foot.

1. Define Your Audience

If you haven’t sat down and identified your buyer personas yet, this is your highest priority. Before you do anything else, you need to determine who your target audience is. This means defining the age, occupation, gender, hobbies, income, interests, and more of the audience you are trying to reach.

You will want to understand your target audience inside and out. This, of course, includes understanding which social media sites they use and how they use them. Without this information, your marketing on social media will fail to be as successful as it could be.

2. Start Producing Consistent Content

An essential part of the best social media marketing strategy is fresh content. This means that you need to commit to creating high-quality content on a regular, consistent basis. You can come up with topics by writing down some of the most common questions you receive and addressing at least one of these in a blog post every week.

The world of digital marketing is a constantly evolving sphere. You can take a look at seven of the top trends in digital marketing for 2021 here.

3. Create Educational Content

One of the ways that you can build up your reputation as an authority in your niche is to create educational content. This means making infographics, checklists, ebooks, and videos that address the problems your buyers have. When you create content that is legitimately helpful, you’ll find that people naturally share it with others.

4. Focus Your Energy on a Handful of Channels

Rather than trying to have a presence on every single social media channel, determine where your target audience spends most of their time and focus your efforts and energy there. It can be overwhelming to try and build a presence on every single channel at once, as they all have different rules and the etiquette and style vary.

There is a lot of data available to help you understand which channels are right for you. Once you have your target audience defined, work to determine which channels will be the best avenues through which to reach them. For example, a product that is geared towards teenagers and young adults might be best advertised on TikTok or Instagram, while a product that solves a problem for Baby Boomers might be best advertised on Facebook.

5. Set Goals and Stick to Them

If you are serious about seeing results for your business from your marketing on social media, you will want to establish a consistent engagement and posting schedule. While it isn’t exactly a science to have a successful social media marketing strategy, you will definitely benefit from setting goals and sticking with the schedule you create yourself.

6. Use the Available Tools to Measure Your Success

One of the great things about marketing on social media is that there are a lot of different ways to track your success and your weak points. You can begin by taking a look at the traffic that is being driven from social media accounts to your blog or website.

Keep an eye on your posts and get a sense of what people seem to be more responsive to. It’s possible that certain keywords or particular topics are creating more interest than some of your other posts.

After a while, you will begin to get a sense of your average post-performance and traffic. You can then use this information to set goals for key metrics to help build progress over time.

7. Adjust Your Tactics

It’s important to understand that social media marketing for business is a long game. You aren’t going to build up thousands of subscribers on your first day, and it’s going to take time to see the effects on your leads and sales.

Building a following takes time, as does establish your brand and then beginning to see results. Along the way, you can experiment to figure out what works for your brand the best. You might find that tweaking your content, messaging, and channels can make a big difference in the response and engagement of your audience.

Is It Time For You to Build a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Social media is an incredibly powerful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. It is a way to promote your brand, services, or product while also allowing a way to connect with your audience. You will want to make sure that the aesthetic and tone is consistent across your social media platforms and your website, as this helps your audience get a strong feel for your brand’s image and voice.

In this day and age, brands no longer have the luxury of buying people’s attention. Instead, they have to earn it through the creation of high-quality content and a bomb-proof social media marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a passionate consultant to help you take your brand and your marketing to the next level, contact me today!

Over 50% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. Unfortunately, about 73% of leads aren’t sales-ready when they first interact with your brand. Another 79% never convert into sales. About 61% of marketers say lead generation is their top challenge, too. Following the latest digital marketing trends could help you stand out from competing businesses.

You might have an easier time generating leads as a result. Then, you can boost sales, improve your ROI, and grow your business.

Here are seven essential digital marketing tips for success in 2021. With these tips, you can improve your online marketing strategy. You can stand out from the competition to generate more leads.

Give your business the boost it needs with these seven amazing trends today!

1. Live Streams

The use of virtual events increased by 1,000% since the pandemic hit. If you want to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends, start going live. Live streams can help you interact with consumers without hosting large, in-person events.

You can maintain social distancing guidelines without neglecting your customers. 

As you consider these digital marketing tips, consider how COVID-19 has affected consumer behavior. Adjust your digital marketing strategy accordingly. Otherwise, you could miss opportunities to connect with your target audience.

Try to host more live events this year. For example, you can create live videos on Facebook and Instagram. Use live streams to answer consumer questions and connect with your target audience.

Answering the questions your customers are asking can help them grow more comfortable with your brand. As they grow more comfortable, they might decide to try your product or service. Then, you can generate leads and sales. 

You can also use live streams for webinars, workshops, and conferences.

If you’re planning on going live this year, make sure to market your event ahead of time. For example, let’s say you want to host a virtual conference. Create a dedicated landing page on your website to gather sign-ups.

You can use the emails you gather to keep consumers up-to-date about your business with an email marketing campaign. 

2. Chatbots

As you follow these digital marketing trends, it’s also important to look for ways to improve the user experience (UX). A better customer experience can improve customer satisfaction. You could encourage brand trust and loyalty to grow as a result.

Building brand trust and loyalty could help you retain customers.

Take a look at your website. How can you improve the customer’s online experience? Start by adding a helpful chatbot to your site.

A chatbot can answer basic customer questions, even when your store is closed. Consumers won’t have to wait until your doors open to get help. 

If they have to wait too long, they might get frustrated. They might decide to take their business elsewhere. You could lose a lead or sale as a result.

In fact, 88% of online shoppers won’t return to a site after a bad experience. 

Improving the UX on your website could help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. You can increase your clickthrough rate and dwell times. Your SEO rankings could rise, helping you reach more customers.

You can also use your chatbot data to inform your SEO strategy. Determine what questions your customers are asking. Then, create content that answers their frequently asked questions.

3. High-Quality Content

As you use these digital marketing tips, make sure to consider your content marketing strategy, too. A strong content marketing strategy can help you generate more leads. It’s important to make sure your content is helpful and informative.

Create high-quality content that will help engage, interest, and inform your readers.

Experiment with different forms of content, including blog posts, polls, quizzes, and infographics. Here are a few content marketing trends to keep in mind.

EAT

As part of your SEO strategy, consider EAT. EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Including EAT in your content could help build brand trust.

You can build EAT by demonstrating your experience and expertise within your content. Consider adding author bios to your posts, too.

VR and AR

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can encourage consumers to interact with your brand more often. Companies like Ikea and Target already use these trends to show consumers how furniture will appear in their homes. Real estate agencies are using them to create virtual tours of their properties, too.  

Video Content

Video content is an effective way to engage your target audience. 

Convert previous blog posts into short videos. Try different forms of video content, including testimonials, company culture, how-tos, and vlogs. 

Interactive Content

Encourage consumers to engage with your brand by creating interactive content. For example, you can create polls and quizzes. Try interactive infographics and calculators, too.

Interactive content can boost your clickthrough rate and dwell times. 

4. Personalization

About 73% of people expect companies to understand their needs. Try personalizing your content with your target audience in mind.

About 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands personalize. Personalization can deliver eight times the ROI on your budget, too. 

5. Shoppable Social Posts

You can create shoppable social media posts on Instagram to improve your online marketing strategy. Consumers can explore your products straight from a social media post. These posts will blend in with organic content, which could boost interactions. 

6. Voice Search and Featured Snippets

Don’t forget to keep up with SEO digital marketing trends, too.

For example, voice search is becoming more popular. Appealing to voice searches could help you rank for featured snippets. Featured snippets appear at the top of search pages.

You could boost your rankings and generate more website traffic as a result. 

7. Inclusivity

Consumers want to see themselves within your online marketing content. Focus on diversity and inclusivity this year. Otherwise, you might neglect a large portion of your target audience.

They might decide to take their business elsewhere as a result.

Get Ahead: 7 Amazing Digital Marketing Trends for Success in 2021

Keep these seven digital marketing trends in mind when building your online marketing strategy. With these digital marketing tips, you can stand out from the competition. Then, you can generate more leads and sales for success in 2021.

Need help from an experienced digital marketing company? We can give your online marketing strategy a boost. 

Contact us today to get started.

About 74% of leads aren’t sales-ready the first time they interact with your brand. In fact, nearly 80% of leads will never convert. With digital marketing, you can generate leads and sales.

Digital marketing can help you spark awareness, inform and educate consumers, and retain loyal customers for years to come. You can generate leads, boost sales, and improve your ROI as a result.

Wary about using digital marketing services? Here are 10 reasons going digital is a must.

Reading this guide can help you make a more informed decision for your business in the long run.

In fact, you could set your business up for long-term growth and success. Don’t let your company fall behind the competition. Instead, keep reading to discover how digital marketing can give your business a boost today!

1. Accomplish Your Goals

Think about the business objectives you want to accomplish this year. For example, do you want to improve sales and your ROI? Maybe you want to build lasting relationships with customers instead.

With a strong digital marketing strategy, you can accomplish a mix of goals, including:

• Generating brand awareness and recognition
• Build trust and loyalty with your customers
• Gaining more traffic to your website
• Increasing leads, conversions, and sales
• Retaining repeat customers
• Becoming a thought leader in the industry
• Improving your credibility and reputation
• Boosting your ROI

You can work with an experienced digital marketing agency to build a strategy based on your distinct goals. They can help you set SMART goals for the year.

These goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-Driven, and Timely. Establishing SMART goals can help you track your progress. It can also help you determine the best digital marketing services to accomplish each goal.

For example, you might want to consider search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can improve your ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. Reaching the top of the page can position your brand in front of more customers.

You can appear credible by ranking ahead of competitors. Meanwhile, you’ll generate brand awareness and website traffic, too.

Without digital marketing services, however, you could struggle to accomplish your goals. You could use outdated tactics that cost more than they’re worth, too. 

2. Target Ideal Customers

Traditional marketing strategies can make focusing on your ideal customers difficult. You could waste time and energy on people who don’t have an interest in your offerings.

Instead, consider digital marketing services. Digital marketing allows you to target an audience based on demographics and psychographics. You can personalize your marketing messages, which can make it easier for you to connect with customers. 

In fact, over 70% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. About 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

Personalization can deliver up to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, too. You could lift sales by 10% or more as a result.

Precise targeting can help you appeal to your ideal customers, helping you boost leads and sales. 

3. Boost Brand Awareness

If people don’t know who you are, they won’t shop from your business. Consider working with a consultant. They can help you develop a distinct brand.

Then, you can use strategies like SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to boost brand awareness. As people become more aware of your brand, they’ll learn more about your business. Then, you can show consumers the distinct value you can offer.

In time, awareness can grow into recognition.

The next time consumers need your product or service, they’ll recall seeing your brand. 

4. Go Mobile

Consumers who have a negative experience with the mobile version of your website are 62% less likely to make a future purchase. With digital marketing services, you can improve your mobile marketing strategy. 

You can reach on-the-go customers, draw them to your store, and generate more sales.

5. Remain Competitive

Chances are your competitors are already using digital marketing services. Don’t fall behind! Otherwise, prospective customers will think you’re old and outdated.

They’ll turn to your competitors instead.

Developing a digital marketing strategy could help you find a competitive advantage. Instead of falling behind, you can get leagues ahead.

6. Improve Your Reputation

You can also use digital marketing services to improve your brand’s reputation. For example, you can encourage customers to post their reviews online. On-the-fence customers can read those reviews on your Google My Business listing or website.

Happy reviews can benefit your brand’s credibility and reputation. Consumers will trust you more, leading to an increase in sales. 

7. Stay Social

If you want to remain top-of-mind with customers, consider using email and social media marketing. These digital marketing services can keep you in front of your target audience. You can also keep customers up-to-date about your business.

Meanwhile, you can find new ways to engage and excite your customers.

8. Remain Relevant

If you’re not up-to-date with the latest digital marketing trends, it could impact your brand. Instead, you can use digital marketing to remain relevant.

For example, you can use video marketing to engage your target audience. Videos are interesting and easy to consume. They’re a great way to inform people of your brand, products, and services, too!

9. Increase Leads and Sales

You can use different digital marketing services to draw people to your website. Then, you can use eye-catching landing pages to inform and engage your audience. A strong call to action can encourage these visitors to take action.

You could boost leads and sales as a result.

New ways to generate leads and sales pop up all the time, too. For example, you can create Shoppable posts on Instagram. Consumers can shop from your store straight from the app.

10. Improve Your ROI

As you generate more leads and sales, your ROI will improve, too. Then, you can set your business up for growth and success. You can find new ways to improve your business as well, leading to an influx in sales.

Boosting Businesses: 10 Ways Digital Marketing Sets You Up for Success

Don’t fall behind the times! Instead, consider these 10 ways digital marketing can boost your business. With a strong digital marketing strategy, you can experience growth for years to come. 

You don’t have to develop your digital marketing strategy alone, either! Instead, consider working with a pro.

I’m here to help! Drop a line and connect to discuss your digital marketing strategy today.

If your marketing efforts online feel less than stellar, maybe it’s time to take an honest look at what you can do to shine a light on those cobwebs and dusty surfaces. In other words, give your business a bit of a marketing spring clean.

That’s where a digital marketing audit comes in. If you haven’t come across the term before, we’ll use this post to explain what a digital marketing audit is and why your business might need one.

If your feeling trapped in the disappointment of failed marketing campaigns, read on and see how a digital audit might be just the thing to turn that around. 

What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?

A digital marketing audit is an assessment of your business’s digital marketing efforts. Typically, as this is an audit, it’s carried out by someone external to the organization or marketing team so that they can be as objective as possible.

The idea of a digital marketing audit is to mark your efforts in marketing against a benchmark. This enables you to spot areas where your marketing efforts are working well and areas with gaps. 

Once that audit is done, that information can be used to put together a plan to improve your digital marketing strategy. That’s usually in the form of a digital marketing audit report. 

By running an audit and following through by making the recommended improvements, you are allowing your business to get the best possible returns from every dollar you spend on marketing online. 

What Type of Marketing Does an Audit Cover? 

Digital marketing is a broad term. With the advent of innovative new tools and online platforms, that label is beginning to cover an even wider variety of marketing methods. Here is a quick look at what a typical audit covers:

SEO

An audit of your SEO is often split into two distinct parts: on-page and off-page.

On-page SEO is the technical aspect of your website optimization. This is about how well your website is designed for SEO. That part of the audit will ask questions like: are you optimizing for relevant keywords? 

Some of this audit might be manual, but it is primarily an automated audit using the latest SEO tools.

For example, it might include using a Google tool called PageSpeed Insight. This tool tests whether your site is loading too slowly (a slow-loading site will negatively impact your Google search ranking). 

As the name suggests, off-page SEO is everything that is happening away from your website that positively or negatively impacts your SEO.

For example, this part of the SEO audit will look at the number and quality of backlinks you are getting to your website and whether they are for the right keywords.

Again, there are tools such as SEMRush (and many others) that will do this work automatically. They offer a clear insight into how your website is performing and what you can do with off-page SEO to improve your rankings. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is closely tied to SEO because good quality website content is one of the best ways to optimize any website. However, auditing a business’s content marketing needs a slightly different approach. 

This part of the audit will look at your website’s overall content, the types of topics, the bounce rate from visitors, the length of content, and the variety in terms of media used (video, audio, infographics, etc.). 

The audit will include a recommendation to improve the content on your website.

That might include specific suggestions for future topics or improving existing blog posts to increase the readability and reduce the bounce rate. 

Social Media

Social media auditing always offers valuable insights for any small business. It’s often the case that most companies will focus on only one or two social media platforms in the early stage of their business growth.

This area of a digital marketing audit will look at how your business is using social media, the size of your followings, and how engaged your followers are.

It will examine the quality of your posts and marketing promotions and look at ways to improve that for future marketing campaigns. 

This audit will also help you identify gaps in your social media marketing. That might be something as simple as growing a presence on one of the newer social media platforms or improving your existing social media conversations.

PPC and SEM

Another aspect of digital marketing is your paid promotions, either through Pay Per Click advertising (for example, Facebook ads) or Search Engine Marketing (for example, paid ads on Google).

Auditing these marketing methods involves looking at the metrics on your ad platforms. It will help you to see what reach your promotion achieved, your cost per click, and most importantly, your return on your ad investment.

By doing this analysis, you can get recommendations on improving these metrics and giving you better outcomes on your next paid promotion.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a central aspect of any digital marketing strategy. But auditing this area is more than simply looking at how many subscribers you have on your email list.

Auditing email marketing means taking a look at how effective your email promotions are. Specific metrics will help you get a picture of how well your approach is working.

Open rates and click-through rates are two of the most critical metrics that any auditor will examine. This will indicate whether your emails have the impact they should have to turn subscribers into buyers.

How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit

First, establish what you need from an audit. Is there a particular area of your business that you think you need to focus on or are all your marketing efforts below par? Do you need an audit to give you more guidance on what to do?

Audits are best done by an external party, who can bring their outside experience and knowledge into your business and use this to make the best recommendations.

Upgrade Your Marketing Efforts

A digital marketing audit is all about finding the gaps in your marketing efforts and using that knowledge to transform your online promotional efforts in the future.

A good auditor with the right expertise will help support your marketing strategy and bring it up to a level where you can compete with any rival.

Contact us today, and let’s have a conversation about what your business needs support with and how we might be able to help you.  

Do you have a marketing team to handle all of your digital marketing needs but still aren’t seeing improved results? When you’ve tried everything you can to gain success, yet fail, you are in dire need of a brand audit.

A brand audit is not a one-time thing. It is something your business should continuously use to monitor your strategies.

Not sure how a brand audit can help you and your business? Read on to learn all about it.

Why Is a Brand Audit Necessary?

A brand audit for digital marketing checks every single part of your strategy. Once the audit is over, you’ll have a clear understanding of what is right and wrong with your technique, but what is a brand audit?

A brand audit is basically a report that you can hand over to every part of your marketing team/agency. Just like other parts of the business, your digital marketing needs an audit every so often to succeed.

For example, when you think about your sales team, you don’t stick to a single pitch for every type of customer. You need to rework and adapt to the current environment.

From there, you’ll be able to test out different strategies to adjust when needed. The same goes for a brand audit for digital marketing.

You need a brand audit immediately if you have any of the following issues:

• Conversion rates are dropping
• Website traffic is decreasing
• Social media audience isn’t growing or is decreasing
• Content engagement rates are dropping
• Your return on investment (ROI) is in the negatives

When you are dealing with these outcomes, it is apparent that the problem stems from your marketing strategy. To overcome this, an audit is necessary to find the issues.

How to Perform a Digital Marketing Audit

When you understand how to perform a digital marketing audit, you’ll see how it can positively impact your campaigns. You can perform an audit with a marketing consultant or in the following ways:

Website Audit

Because of the digital world we live in today, online websites are often the primary points of conversion. The attention of your consumers gets converted to sales in this area.

When you implement a website audit, you can increase user experience and rank better on search engine results. This is where you’ll learn if your marketing message is converting users or not.

The bare minimum of a website audit includes:

• Checking for essential web pages
• Checking how user-friendly your site is
• Checking which pages are the best and worst converters
• Checking your websites loading speed

These are just the basics as there are plenty of essential checks you’ll want to make.

SEO Audit

The next part of your brand audit project is to check your search engine optimization, aka SEO. SEO should be one of your sources of traffic. If it is not, you have serious work to do.

The must-haves when it comes to an SEO audit check are:

• Checking that there are no indexing problems on Google
• Analyzing organic traffic
• Checking keyword rankings
• Completing a backlink analysis

Keep in mind that every page and article needs to have a title tag, meta description, and URL slug to work accurately with SEO.

Social Media Audit

A social media audit can lead you to answers on whether or not your strategies are effective. The first step to complete this audit is to write down every social media channel you use for your strategy.

You will then evaluate each channel’s performance by checking the audience growth rate, content reach rate, average engagement rate, content sharing rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

You should also figure out which pieces of content are the best performing. This will help you further understand your audience and what they prefer to read/see.

Content Marketing Audit

Content marketing is one of the strongest types of digital marketing because it can deliver amazing results if you do it right. Through a content marketing audit, you can check if your efforts are working or are a waste of time.

The content marketing audit involves blogger content, social content, and even email content. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Gather all content assets
• Identify highest performing content
• Maximize the highest performing content
• Look for content gaps

Your highest-performing content should be linked to other pages for conversion. You can also feature additional content on these posts if it is relative.

By looking for content gaps, you can discover which keywords you are missing out on.

Email Marketing Audit

Businesses tend to overlook their email marketing because they don’t believe it’s that important. This is a mistake you don’t want to make. Email marketing is an intricate part of the entire digital marketing strategy.

Here’s what you’ll need to do during an email marketing audit:

• Analyze click-through-rates and open rates
• Check your copy and header lines
• Work on design and copy
• Analyze an email sequence strategy

Email marketing is a personal way to connect to your audience. It deserves care and adjustments when neccesary.

Do You Need a Brand Audit?

If you’ve never had a brand audit before or haven’t had one in a while, now is the time to get it done. Without a successful digital marketing strategy, you can’t expect to succeed in our technological world.

A brand audit will determine areas that need improvement and areas that you rank well on.

You may be thinking this is a lot for a business owner or manager to complete on their own. Even your busy digital marketing team may not have the time to complete a full audit. Luckily, we are here to help.

We aim to consult businesses on their digital marketing techniques for a higher success rate. Contact us today to get started on your brand audit.