There’s no better time than the start of a new year to get organized. To take a moment and reflect on what worked in 2019, and what needs to change for 2020. Is your digital marketing campaign checklist is ready?
If you’re a digital marketer, it’s important to catch the new trends and tactics to reach your audience in different ways.
Today, there are 7,000 marketing technologies on the market. Technology and trends are always evolving, so to help you stay on top of it all, we’ve put together this list.
If you can tick off every item on this digital marketing checklist, then your digital marketing strategy is ready for another great year.
Value Proposition
If you want to drive conversions, building a strong value proposition is crucial. First of all, you need to set clear goals for your business and make a decision. Creating personas for your target buyer will help you to understand their behaviors, emotions and also pain points.
Try to look at your ideal buyers’ perspective before determining the value of your business. Pay attention to the design element as it creates a value. Avoid boring stories because they can’t help you to attract and retain the audience.
Producing high quality content is another tried and true marketing technique. A quality blog adds credibility to your site, brings in new users, and boosts your websites search ranking as a whole. Or you can publish your content on other platforms, in order to raise your brands profile, and introduce new customers to your service.
Most interactions with the Internet start with a search, so finding a way to have your content show up in those search results is a sure-fire way to boost sales.
Video Content Marketing
You can incorporate video into almost every aspect of your digital marketing. Convincing a potential customer to watch a short video clip is easier than convincing them to read your marketing message.
Embed video in your email, your product pages, or your landing page. Anywhere you’re trying to convey a message to a customer, you will see more success with a short, snappy, video clip, than a paragraph of text.
It also gives you finer control over how you want to say things. It can be tough to convey your brand’s identity over text, but with video, it’s a breeze. Quality video content has also been shown to boost your SEO, and does a better job of converting on mobile.
Social Media Marketing
Establishing a presence on one or two social networks (that are popular with your demographic) is the best way to attach a feeling of community to your brand. It’s a unique tool for marketers that allows for a large number of personal interactions, that in turn promote long term patronage.
Social media is also a valuable tool for monitoring feedback. If you change something about your business, or launch a new campaign, you can instantly discover how your users feel about it. And it’s an excellent way to provide customer service, since users often prefer to contact you via social media, rather than work their way through your websites ticket system.
If you want to build a connected online community, your dedicated social media team should make a content plan. Keeping a social media calendar will ease this process. If you don’t want to miss the mark, make sure that your team shares every content on social media channels at the right time and they add this phase to their digital marketing checklist.
When you launch a social media campaign, keep in mind that all the social networks have different requirements in terms of the number of words in the copy, image size, and other specs. For social media scheduling and managing, you can use Hootsuite.
Facebook Ads
Organic reach has been steadily declining on the world’s largest social media platform, in order to counteract this, you will need to invest in paid advertising. Facebook offers a wide range of ad types and making use of this to create a diverse campaign will improve your results.
If you want to target mobile users, then the kings of conversion are ads that keep the user on Facebook. When you don’t make click-through you primary goal, the ‘friction’ of you campaign is lowered and you can expect much higher mobile conversion rates. Lead ads are a great option for this.
Facebook has also recently announced their plans to begin testing pre-roll ads, they will only be available on limited content at first, but it’s one more option to keep in mind for the coming months.
Although building traffic through search engines is a long-term process, it’s a vital part of a useful digital marketing checklist. You need to optimize your content favorably to the prospects who want to find answers for attracting organic, meaningful traffic and improve your search rankings.
The contents you publish should focus on your visitors most asked questions if you want to outrank in the search results. You need to understand the intent behind visitors’ searches to make a good keyword search. Thus you can not only increase the traffic of your website but also attract more qualified prospect.
There are so many keyword research tools, Keyword Magic Tool is one of them. After you find relatively low competition and drive sufficient traffic, optimize your site or post. To make on-page optimization, properly structure your web page or post for search engines to identify your target keyword relevancy.
Off-page optimization focuses on link building and helps search engines to identify how relevant your content is. For further information, you can check these on-page and off-page guides. Now you drive some traffic to your site.
In order to turn your leads into customers, enhance the website experience. Apply the best practices to your site that align with your business goals. Make double or triple checks to be sure that everything is ok. Never ignore the value of the mobile. Your business website needs to be mobile friendly as it’s a Google ranking factor.
Mobile SEO
Google’s mobile-first index is likely to be ready in 2018, so it’s going to be more important than ever to optimise your site for mobile users. Failing to do so could result in heavy penalties that ruin your chances of being found in search results.
The mobile-first index is being run as mobile searches outnumber desktop searches, and the results that are returned have to be compatible with your device, in order to ensure a good experience with the search engine.
We also have to take into consideration the rise of voice search via digital assistants. In order to cater to these searches, we need to consider the type of language people use to perform voice searches, and choose appropriate keywords accordingly.
Personalized marketing is always more effective, and the level of personalization you can achieve with location data is high. You detect when a customer is within a mile of your physical store, then send a push notification to their phone inviting them in, perhaps offering them a discount.
Effective use of location data can create marketing that feels truly genuine. The customer knows the message they’re seeing isn’t being seen by 1000s of other people at the same time, it’s for them specifically.
Email Marketing
The most reliable tool in any marketers arsenal. If you aren’t making use of emails in your marketing, where have you been? It’s the cheapest way to stay in touch with your customers, and it’s often the medium by which they prefer to communicate with companies.
One of the valuable parts of any marketing strategy and important part of a digital marketing checklist is still email marketing. You can get great results without so much effort. Testing small changes such as call-to-action and subject lines can make a significant difference. We analyzed the effectiveness of email marketing one of our blog post previously.
You can support your email marketing effort with a CRM tool to manage your relationships with these contacts in a systematic way and observe the results.
You can use emails to:
● Direct your customers to relevant content
● Recommend products
● Inform them about sales
Influencer Marketing
The Internet has created a new kind of celebrity, there are thousands of them spread across every social media platform, and many other sites. They tend to have a deep connection with their audience, and can provide instant credibility to your brand, should you decide to market through them.
You can have them read ads on their content, wear your merch, or review your services. At the end of the day you have effective marketing that reaches the customer through a credible source.
Artificial Intelligence
The possible applications of artificial intelligence in marketing are far from being fully realised, and over the course of the year we’re sure to see new options become viable. Rather than talk about all the possibilities that aren’t yet practical, I will just say this.
Prepare your business to integrate AI. Collect as much user data as you can, and as the technology matures, use it to supplement your marketing.
Management and Measurement for Digital Campaign Checklist
When you want to find out with which keywords that your customers searching for your product or service, you have so many marketing systems to benefit from. Google Keyword Planner would be a good start. It’ll provide you to find right keywords to use in your Google Ads campaigns but using it will not be enough for your SEO efforts. We compiled the best SEO monitoring tools to help you.
You can find 6 hacks about how to use Google Keyword Planner in the video below:
Email marketing
Email testing and analytics tools will help you to measure your campaigns’ success and effectiveness. With MailChimp, you can create campaigns, automate your workflow and optimize your efforts. If you are looking for an advanced email marketing tool, Mailer Lite can be a great option to add your digital marketing checklist.
Social marketing
To optimize social posting, ads, monitor mentions and measure results you can use Buffer (posting, image, analytics), Mention (monitoring), Sniply (social media conversion).
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
HubSpot CRM, SalesforceEssentials or Pipedrive would be good solutions if you want to track your customers, nurture more leads and control sales process and expand your business. CRM becomes more important every year for sales and marketing. You shouldn’t overlook customer relationship management tools for your digital campaign checklist. Inbound marketing is the new trend for closing deals and it’s all about attracting your prospects and satisfying your customers.
Social advertising, pay per click and display ads are the most common and easily manageable ad models. Remember 70% of the users click on organic search results and paid listings %30 of the time. Through organic traffic, you’ll also get higher conversion rates. Advertising campaigns require additional work and testing to improve results.
It’s a never-ending challenge to maintain a successful digital marketing strategy, there are always new technologies and trends coming onto the scene, and it’s up to you to examine them to decide whether they’re useful.
We hope that something on this digital marketing checklist will make its way into your plans for 2019, and you found some of our reminders helpful. Now you’re ready to get out there and start the new year on the right foot.