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Revamp Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Today we will discuss three things you can do to revamp your digital marketing strategy for the new year.
Now, this doesn’t have to be just for the new year. You can do this any time of the year. You can take a pause in the middle of the year, look at the past six months’ efforts, and look at what has been working in your digital marketing strategy and what hasn’t and improve upon what’s been working and use that data and that information to create new campaigns and ditch the stuff that didn’t work.
Maybe you have some time during the holidays, some downtime, and you can review your blog posts and social media channels and see what you can do to get ready for the new year and make your marketing efforts count even more.
Review the Past Year and Repeat Your Successes
One of the first steps you would take to analyze your past efforts is downloading your reports. Okay, so we’re talking about the past year, what happened in the past year with your social media channels, your blog channels, any advertising you did on whatever platform, whether it was Facebook or LinkedIn, and getting your reports.
Compile them, and download them. If you use a social media management platform like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Zoho, those platforms can generate reports for you for the past year. There are some limitations like Facebook only provides data for up to 90 days, and other platforms are limited regarding how much data they save.
A good practice would be to periodically download your reports every three months or so and save them throughout the year. You should be generating monthly analytical reports for all your social media efforts and your blogging, your website, and your advertising campaigns so that way when you’re ready, you can take a look at your past efforts and analyze what worked and what didn’t.
Look at what happened on your social media channels, your blog, your advertising campaigns, and any other marketing efforts you did, including email campaigns, and look at the data.
For example, we can look at our social media profiles and what posts got the most engagement, the likes, the comments, and the shares. What posts on your company feed got the most engagement and comments?
What worked? What posts generated the engagement you’re looking for and the most click-throughs? Look at the campaigns that got the most results you were seeking, such as engagement or leads or traffic to your website, whatever your goals were for your campaigns.
Did your posts include a mix of entertainment humor? Educational, informational, or even direct selling, like brand posts. Was it video that engaged more, or was it images? Did you publish polls that got a lot of engagement? And what type of questions did you ask in those polls?
Did you publish infographics? If you’re taking a look at your blog. Hopefully, you’re using analytics like Google Analytics to track how many page views you got and which blog posts got the highest number of views. And not just views but also session times, how long people spent on a certain page.
And you can do this overall with any page on your website and any blog post. You want to see what your top pages were not only by session but also by session time. And this will tell you, okay, there was content on here that grabbed the attention of your target audience and kept them.
And so take those blog posts. What kind of posts were they? Again, similar to social media, were they educational? Did they have a lot of graphics? Was there a video embedded or did you embed your own podcast in your blog posts? So If you’ve got forms and you’ve got a lot of conversions on certain pages, then you know those pages worked.
Create new campaigns from past campaigns that worked.
And compile the top 10. You can even do the top 20 for the whole year. Take those and reuse these campaigns.
Now, you don’t have to reuse everything, but you can reuse or revamp the graphics and media you created. Take the captions, revamp those, and create new campaigns from past campaigns that worked. Of course, you will apply new goals to your new campaigns.
Take that information to map out a content marketing strategy for the new year.
What did Your Competitors Do?
So another thing that you can do, similar to the first recommendation, is to try something new. and one of the ways to get new ideas is to look at what your competitors did.
What kind of campaigns did your competitors run on their social media platforms, or what kind of advertising campaigns did they execute? What blog posts got them a lot of traffic and engagement?
Now, this takes a little more research to see what your competitors are doing, but there are tools out there like BuzzSumo SE ranking, which I use, which looks at SEO efforts, and other tools that will help you take a look at your competitor’s websites and analyze what they’ve been doing.
Facebook has a tool where you can watch other pages, showing you other Facebook page efforts and their top-performing posts. So take a look at your competitor’s efforts, see what they did that got a lot of engagement and viral buzz, and see if you can create something new from what they did.
Of course, you can’t copy what they did, but you get new ideas based on what your competitors did. And see if you can replicate your competitor’s successes, of course, with your unique messaging and call to action and, of course, your unique creatives.
Try New Platforms
Alright, here’s the third thing you can do to revamp your digital marketing strategy for the new year or month, wherever you are in your marketing for the year. Many of us stuck with the platforms we chose when we researched and decided where our audience was hanging out, whether it was Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIn. But there are not just these major platforms out there. There are a lot of niche social media platforms where your target audience may be.
For example, I use a platform called Alignable. It’s more of a local-based platform. You sign up, there are free and paid versions, and it works like a regular social media platform. You have your feeds where you can post your updates. There are Q&A sections where you can post questions and answers, send messages to people, can post events, and it’s all B2B. But you can target who you want to reach by tagging the platform allows you to add tags to what kind of business or industry you’re in.
But then you add what you are looking for and who you want to connect with. So say, I want to connect with people and technology. I put technology or real estate, and the platform will recommend people and businesses to connect with based on my choices. So that’s a cool program. The paid version gives you expanded reach.
Active Rain
Another one, which is Niche, is Active Rain. It’s a real estate social media platform. And it’s a huge community with real estate agents, home stagers, inspectors, brokers, and anybody in the real estate industry. And you can connect with each other, and there are a lot of resources on that platform that you can use if you’re in the real estate business.
Another very useful networking platform is Meetup. You create an account and create a group, whatever interest it is. For example, I have a group called Digital Marketing for Businesses, where I host online virtual classes.
You can use Meetup just for social interaction. But many also use it for networking and for business purposes. It’s not free. You pay a small fee to host meetups and put all your information there, but it integrates with other platforms. And you can promote your events on Meetup and cross-promote them on your other social media platforms. There are a lot of different interests and people on there. It’s a really good platform to look at for expanding your reach.
In Summary
All right, so that’s three things you can do to revamp your digital marketing strategy for the new year and not just for the new year at any time.
Periodically take a look at your efforts during the year. Look at your successes. Even look at your failures to see what didn’t work, and make sure you don’t replicate those. But you do want to repeat your successes or improve upon them.
Two, look at what your competitors are doing to get some new ideas for your marketing strategy. And three, take a look at new ways where you can reach your target audience. New platforms.
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