Happy New Year! To celebrate the arrival of 2021, our team of digital marketing experts have a small gift for you: a list of 21 targeted actions and tips for digital marketers to take stock of at this time when it feels like most anything is possible for the coming year. From content creation to pay-per-click advertising, brand messaging to customer relationship management and much more, this blog post touches on an array of topics and strategies that our firm uses to deliver measurable value to our clients (and to further our own marketing efforts!). We hope these recommendations inspire you to take stock of what you accomplished last year, and help you jumpstart and improve your digital marketing efforts throughout 2021!
From Elaina, Digital Marketing Manager
1. Start blogging! Content creation can improve your rankings and fuel your marketing funnel – write, rank and attract leads with content on topics relevant to your audience when they’re ready to purchase.
2. Blog with purpose: for more accurate site indexing by Google, center your writing around topics clusters, not keywords.
3. Boost your Google local search rankings by making comprehensive improvements to the number one local ranking factor in your control: your Google My Business listing.
4. Use UTM tracking codes to attribute your leads and identify your most valuable lead sources – knowing where your leads are coming from can help you invest more wisely and concentrate your digital marketing efforts.
5. Cultivate reviews and improve your online reputation, review quantity and subsequently your local search ranking via automated review generation.
From Phil, Senior Digital Marketing Manager
6. Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) via automated bidding strategies for Google Ads. Google’s algorithms are a very powerful way to show your ads to the right audience at the right time to help them become your customer instead of a competitor’s.
7. Local search listings offer important visibility opportunities. The “local pack” of Google My Business listings display at the top of Google search results so developing an SEO strategy for local search is a powerful marketing strategy to supplement pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns due to the rise of “zero-click” searches. These are search results that answer the user’s query without the need to navigate to another web page.
8. Mobile-responsive websites should be at the forefront of your design and usability strategy. Your website should be functional, easy to navigate and optimized for mobile devices and tablets as mobile searches skyrocket.
9. Explore video advertising, which delivers your ads in front of the right customers using YouTube, the world’s second most popular search engine. A video ad campaign involves an already engaged audience, as they are already looking at the screen when the video ad plays. This type of advertising is a great way to enhance brand awareness.
10. Deliver highly relevant, perfectly timed ads to the right audience when they’re ready to purchase by researching and properly defining your target audience. Understanding the purchasing trends, the needs and pain points of your target audience can help your advertising dollar go farther and produce better leads and lower costs per lead.
From Robin, Co-founder and Chief Content Officer
11. New year, new opportunity for improvement, so run or engage a professional to perform a content audit. There are simple tools you can deploy to determine how existing content is performing (are you drawing eyeballs, interactions and conversions?) and examine your overall content strategy to find holes that you can start filling over the next year with high-quality assets that help build thought leadership and all-important leads.
12. Rev up your email marketing plans for 2021! Email marketing consistently provides a high return on investment. Do you have a new product that you introduced last year? Or perhaps you offer an ancillary service that most of your customer base doesn’t know about. This marketing strategy allows you to cost-effectively remind your customers that you’re still out there, ready to serve their needs in the new year.
13. Update your copyright date on the footer of your website. It’s a small, often overlooked task that can make your website look abandoned or out of date.
14. Enjoy a more secure state-of-mind by investing in website security. With an ever-increasing number of cloud-based applications that keep the site “backups” out of sight, you should have some idea of how each of your core systems is secured, what resiliency measures are in place from your service providers and have a solid security awareness plan for your employees. An ounce of prevention is definitely worth more than a pound of cure.
15. How strong is your drip marketing campaign strategy (and toolset)? Help nurture leads from a variety of sources via marketing automation that consistently displays your thought leadership, incredible offerings and measurable value to drive conversions. The number of solutions available for marketing automation has expanded significantly, with high-powered tools there for any marketer who has the wherewithal to develop the creatives, campaigns and assets that help drive expanded revenue opportunities.
From Rick, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
16. The business world will continue to change, but one question will still remain relevant: Does your website accurately convey your current value proposition and describe all that you offer?
17. Commit to setting up and documenting your sales process leveraging a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Remember the old saying, “The fortune is in the follow-up!” CRM software stops deals from falling through the cracks and keeps everyone in your organization accountable.
18. If you are doing any kind of digital advertising (and you likely should be!), evaluate your creatives and update as necessary. Digital advertising campaigns offer a high level of control and can deliver significant ROI, but must have compelling messaging paired with updated creatives.
19. Review last year’s performance in comparison to your digital marketing objectives. Take a sober assessment of 2020’s marketing efforts and document what worked and what did not work. This will help you invest in higher-performing campaigns in this new year.
20. Perform a comprehensive competitive analysis (limit to your biggest competition if you’re pressed for time). Document and review your competitors who rank online for the keywords that are important for your business. Try our Free Local Search audit here to identify local competitor rankings, as well as how your own business performs in local search.
21. Implement a call tracking product. These systems allow you to attribute calls to their specific lead sources and evaluate where you should focus your marketing efforts based on conversion data, call duration and call recordings.
If you’re familiar with all of us at Bleevit, you know that we always try to go above and beyond in our delivery for our clients. So here is one final (the 22nd) digital marketing tip for you and your business in 2021:
22. Focus on refining your core differentiators and ensuring that the supporting messaging flows through your brand identity, website, collateral, social media communications and digital advertising campaigns. It takes some effort to complete the “Why Us” exercises that help you effectively communicate how you stand out from the competition, but the payback is priceless.
If you have any questions about any of the topics discussed here or our services, please reach out to us. Feel free to schedule a 20-minute consultation here with one of our digital marketing experts.
May 2021 bring great happiness, good health and a wealth of new opportunities to you and your business!
WRITTEN BY
Rick Hogan, CEO & Co-Founder – Bleevit Interactive
Rick possesses over 20 years of digital marketing experience and started Bleevit Interactive with the primary mission of helping local businesses succeed online. When he is not working he can often be found hiking Great Falls, Virginia with his Labradoodle Lily, or sailing the Chesapeake Bay.
If you have any comments or suggestions on how we can improve this post or otherwise want to give us a shout, send an email to [email protected].
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