6 Top Tips for Digital Marketing Success in 2015

We all want to know what the experts are doing to ensure they succeed where their competitors fail.

Let’s look at 6 top tips that will ensure that your digital marketing will put you on Santa’s Christmas list for 2015 and not on his naughty list.

1. Profile your clients and prospects

Take time to build a picture of your ideal client. If you understand who they are you’re much more likely to be able attract them.

First of all understand which of your clients are the most profitable, who benefits most from what you do and who do you just like working with. Sure we’re in business to make money but it makes life a lot richer to work with people you like.

Talk to your clients about their business. What issues do they have? What keeps them up at night? And how do they win business?

Where do they research information online? What websites do they regularly visit and which social media channels do they use regularly?

Take all of this valuable insight and use it to develop your marketing strategy to attract that ideal client. What content will they be interested in? Do they use videos? Read blogs? Where should you post? What SEO keywords should you focus on?

2. Take a multi-channel approach

We all like to consume content in a variety of different ways, be sure to repurpose your quality content in many different forms. In a post-panda world you can’t spin content into a slightly different version but you can repurpose into a different format.

If you’ve written a blog post to help your clients and prospects overcome a common problem then turn this into an online presentation, a webinar, a video and share the slides or load onto your YouTube channel. Be sure to then promote these via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and your other favourite social media channels.

Bonus tip: ensure you ask your clients and friends to share, like, favorite and retweet you for maximum effect.

3. Be targeted

Look back at the profile you created in our first step. What were the keywords and phrases that your clients use to describe your services and what you do for them? This will give you the language and tone of voice you need to use to attract your new clients.

Build this style and words into your content, both online and offline. This will help you ensure you’re maximising the conversion of visitors to enquiries or sales whilst reducing the time and cost of your marketing.

Let’s look at an example:

Imagine you run a website selling the proverbial“Blue Widgets”. Now image that you’re based in London and that your blue widget is very specific to the hotel industry.

Compare the searches for “Blue widget suppliers London” to “Specialist blue widget suppliers for hotels in London”

The search results will likely be very different for the 2 searches, the former will almost certainly be more difficult and expensive to achieve a high search position and the latter may convert to an enquiry more often.

4. Ensure your content connects

Going through the process of understanding your clients problems and how you solve them will allow you to develop the kind of content required to engage your visitors and keep them coming back. After all it’s highly likely that they will visit your website several times before they decide to get in touch.

You will generate genuinely useful content that you can add to your blog and share through social channels. People will want to read it and link to it. All of the things that Google is telling us we should be doing to increase our authority.

Use this content to show how you solve your clients problems and for extra kudos how they can solve certain problems for themselves. This will increase your credibility, prove your value and keep those visitors coming back to your website.

5. Optimise for multiple devices

You’d have to have been living under a rock or a Blackberry executive (sorry, couldn’t resist…) to have missed the explosion in the use of smartphones and the mobile web.

Matt Cutts recently said at SMX West earlier this year that “he wouldn’t be surprised” if, this year, mobile searches outnumbered PC based searches.

If a search takes place on a mobile device it’s obvious that the results will favour sites which are optimised for this user, after all, the search engines are about giving the user the best and most relevant experience. This makes the case for mobile optimisation clear.

There’s no need to invest in a separate website or app, unless you have a genuine business case for doing so. Modern websites should be designed and built to respond to the users device optimising itself for the best experience, whether it be a PC, laptop, tablet or phone.

Whilst I’m sure someone somewhere will tell me differently I don’t believe it’s a good idea or even possible to “retrofit” responsiveness to a website as it’s more than just a case of how it looks. It’s also about “flow” and whether certain elements are even required if a user is on a particular device and this comes down to understanding a visitors intention.

6. Measure and manage

There is an old adage which states “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” And this has never been truer when it comes to digital marketing. In fact digital marketing is head and shoulders above other forms of marketing as to the possibilities for measurement, so don’t throw this opportunity to be on top of it away.

The main tools you will need are Google analytics, webmaster tools and possibly one of the myriad of website and SEO analysers such as Moz or Woorank. If you’re using social media a lot then you may also want to use listening tools such as Hootsuite or Klout.

It’s a whole other article to tell you how to set each of these up correctly so that your collecting the right information. I think it’s safer for me to recommend that you find a local expert who can help you analyse this data and react in the most appropriate way.

About the author

Paul Morris runs his own SEO company in Bristol, UK. He has worked in the web industry for over 14 years and during that time held various positions, from design, development, SEO, account management and business development. This puts him in a unique position to help businesses owners promote and grow their business.