How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy – Fast
When you’re leading an inbound marketing team or you’re the only one on your team, you probably feel the pressure of rapidly deciding how to improve your digital marketing strategy.
While there’s no true “quick fix” that works for everyone, you can put in some up-front work and check out the three ways (below) to improve marketing efficiency. Once you have your workflows smoothed out, keep reading to get 10 fast marketing ideas to get you started.
3 Ways to Improve Marketing Efficiency
It’s hard to achieve maximum digital marketing efficiency in a company of more than a few people. (All those meetings! So many stakeholders!) But these three steps should certainly help you out.
Plan Far in Advance with Research as a Guide
The best way to improve your digital marketing strategy is to plan it out using research and historic data as a guide. Get a full picture of your target audience (age, location, income, interests, etc.) before planning a campaign concept. See which blog content kept people engaged last year. Were there channels that fell short? If so, was it because of poor execution or because your core audience doesn’t hang out in certain digital spaces?
If you don’t have much historic data to work with, employ market research tactics. For example, surveys and competitive analyses help you see what prospects care about the most when making a purchase decision. While you’re at it, create a monthly report so you can track results.
Your marketing plan shouldn’t be chiseled in stone, however. Make sure you continue to monitor performance and pivot as needed. For more planning tips, read our list of frequently asked questions about annual planning.
Improve Communication in Every Possible Way
We’re all about building bridges at Oneupweb. Communication is essential for our digital marketing services, so no department works in a silo. When every person involved in your marketing is aligned – from social to email to paid media experts – your marketing efficiency will improve.
- When possible, choose communication that’s visible to the entire team. Private messages tend to get lost, and they aren’t helpful when someone else needs to be brought up to speed.
- Plan your meetings fully in advance. The designated moderator can send an agenda beforehand so others can prepare and stay on track.
- Document processes, and hold people accountable for following them. While writing down specific workflows, you may even find out you can cut steps and save time.
- If you’re struggling to connect with team members, try these tips to get colleagues to read your emails.
- If you work with a marketing agency and other partners, make sure they provide reporting (e.g., monthly) and explain how the strategy aligns with the numbers.
- Don’t forget to ask your customers for feedback, whether it’s in person, in an email follow-up, or in a survey from an unbiased third party. This communication will make your existing customers feel valued and provide insights for snagging more business.
Focus Your Energy on the Entire Sales Funnel
If your marketing team is strapped for time, you probably have several bottom-of-funnel campaigns out in the world and are hoping to find leads fast. But how much time have you spent on top-of-funnel marketing efforts?
When you connect with people early (the awareness stage of the customer journey) and introduce your product/service and trustworthy brand, they’re likely to think about you first when they eventually need something. Momentum builds until, suddenly, leads are coming out the woodwork. To see an example, check out our suggestions for full-funnel content marketing.
11 Fast Marketing Ideas to Try Out
Even if you’re just getting started in certain digital marketing channels, these ideas can be adapted for your business’s existing strategy and resources.
- Bring more multimedia to your social posts. Engaging branded images, infographics, GIFs/mp4s and videos offer something more interesting than words and links alone. If a share a piece of your content this week, consider re-promoting it two weeks later with a designed asset to catch people’s eye. A content calendar like Oneupweb’s Condario is a good way to keep track of this strategy.
- Host a Twitter chat. Make sure your followers are aware you’ll be live answering questions and promoting discussion.
- Start boosting your posts. Boosting Facebook or Instagram posts allows you to reach people outside your immediate networks.
- Start building an email list. If you haven’t already, start with an opt-in form on your website for a newsletter or other types of email marketing. Transactional emails (post-purchase) and ad landing pages are other places where you can encourage people to join an email list.
- Optimize your homepage and main service/product pages. It can be easy to get caught up in your brand story and let SEO fall by the wayside. Ensure each core page is optimized for a unique group of keywords; then move on to do the same thing to your child pages and blog content!
- Get an awesome backlink. If you can convince an authoritative publication to link back to your website, search engines will be impressed – in their own robot-y way – and be more likely to rank your content high in search results. To get those juicy links, build relationships with major publishers by sharing their content, following/connecting with their editors on social media and being assertive yet patient.
- Host a contest or giveaway. People love free stuff, no matter what. Amplify the opportunity on all your channels to get maximum reach. You may even decide to partner with other businesses to benefit from each other’s email lists and connections.
- Employ cross-channel tactics as much as possible. For example, consider turning some of your organic social content (like a fun, short video) into an ad to reach new audiences. Or, if you get a lot of clicks from an email to a specific landing page, use the landing page traffic for a retargeting campaign.
- Consider a customer referral program. You can decide what the incentive is for customers who refer friends, relatives and associates to your business.
- Provide answers in niche forums. Forums are an often-underutilized space for connecting with new audiences. People are spelling out their problems right there, and you can provide the answer, along with a fabulous brand impression.
- Create video content. Did you know that 95% of people retain information they see in a video, while only 10% retain information from text? While this might not seem like the fastest of fast marketing ideas, even a brief video can pay off majorly. We have more details about the rise of video marketing.
Let Us Handle It (At Least for 5 Weeks)
With the right planning, you can improve marketing efficiency to get the most out of your resources. Because we know how hard it can be to manage marketing on a tight timeline or with a tight budget, we created the Inbound FastTrack Program, which is a five-week digital marketing audit service that provides you with a customized, multi-channel action plan.
Reach out online or call (231) 922-9977 to see how your business can benefit from our FastTrack Program or additional services.
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