2014 has been and gone — did you crush it in your online arena?

Now is the time to pull together the framework for a new digital marketing strategy, and give your business an overhaul for the New Year. Make 2015 your year to reel in new customers, and more of them, with this digital marketing checklist.

Here are some of the most important items to check off on your strategy:

Landing pages

Elsewhere on our blog we’ve discussed how critical a landing page is to your success. You want to send each target market to a landing page that is specifically tailored to them, so you get the highest possible conversion ratios. Don’t make the easy mistake of sending everyone to your homepage!

Researching the competition

If you don’t know what the other players in the market are doing, how can you beat them? Market intelligence on your main competitors can help develop new traffic sources, and is key to establishing your site online. Where do they advertise, do they split test, and can you find out why they are ranking higher or lower than you?

Email marketing

Customers who buy from you are most likely interested in receiving more info from you – so set up an email list. All online companies worth their weight in salt keep in touch with their existing customers. As you probably know, it is far easier to sell to existing customers than track down new ones!

Effective keyword selection

There is not much point going after the term “weight loss” if you are a personal trainer and just starting your own business. Companies with millions of dollars and huge advertising budgets are just fighting too hard to get good rankings for terms like this in the short run. Set achievable targets for keywords that you actually have a chance at ranking for. SEO takes time, and if you’re just starting out, think of it as a building process. Establish your grounds first (what your business is about etc.) and go from there.

Google+ and social media

Google might not be quite as altruistic and holistic as they seem — our research and experience shows that Google looks very favourably upon those who have a G+ page, and use it in conjunction with their websites. Other social media sites can be great sources of traffic if used correctly, but not all businesses lend themselves well to this traffic source, and often most will do better using search marketing.

Site design and layout

  • If your website looks like Craigslist, giving it a makeover will pay big dividends. Here are some things to make sure of:
  • Have an extremely obvious, clear, descriptive call to action — don’t make your audience guess what to do next.

Keep loading times to a minimum — there are apps and software out there which can help reduce load times, and your web designer can do things such as hosting large files on a content delivery network (CDN), instead of on your site to increase speed.

Lastly…

Have your strategy clearly mapped out.

What is the goal for your site this year, how are you going to get there, and what is going to have to be done every day to get there? For help with dominating your industry and crushing it online in 2015 — get in touch with Brisbane’s SEO team — Bambrick — to set up a strategy session.