While the following list is by no means exhaustive in properly building out a fully developed and vetted growth strategy, these quick tips are a handy checklist for business owners starting their digital marketing strategy:
- Always think about your digital store through a brick-and-mortar lens; after all, your online store is an extensive of your brick-and-mortar store and serves a similar purpose of providing for your customers.
- Never get stale – look to improve design and user experience every 1-2 years. This does not have to be a radical facelift, as this could negatively impact your brand, but your site should be modern and updated with the latest technology.
- Do your research before investing in a digital platform! Take advantage of resources like NetElixir’s white paper guide on How to Choose the Right CMS Platform.
- Differentiate your goals and try to have 1-2 goals for your website, revenue, COGS, and customer. Do not over complicate. Keep it simple and straightforward so you can clearly strategize how to achieve your goals.
- Your budget and ad spend is the answer, not the variable you start with. Don’t guess at the ad spend; set goals and determine variables and budget accordingly to hit those numbers.
- The expected timeline of ROI plays a role in all your marketing decisions. High ROI avenues, like SEO, take a long time to realize profits, which should be factored into your overall strategy.
- Don’t be afraid to survey your customers’ likes and dislikes to know exactly what resonates with them and what doesn’t. Let your customers have input on improving their user experience of your site.
- Parse your analytics and reporting to compare mobile and desktop, as this can help you understand different customer segments. Additionally, you could open mobile-only or desktop-only opportunities if one segment tends to favor a specific product or page.
- Your end audience goal should be a persona build of your high-value customer, as they have, on average, a 3X higher growth potential than your ordinary customer.
- Great content without SEO structure will not get you the results you want. Structured data is the key to capitalizing on great content.
- Use any and all free tools at your disposal, such as Google’s array and LXRMarketplace.
- Do continuous AB testing to know what works and what doesn’t.
- Use custom ID tracking to begin leveraging the LTV of your audience from the first year. If you are just starting out, you won’t have strong LTV, but you do not want to lose out on valuable insights as you continue to grow. Note that this does require some minor coding and analytics work, but it is worth it.
- You should be reviewing Auction Reports and Lost Impression Share reports at least monthly.
- A good rule of thumb is to track performance over different trending periods that vary depending on the marketing asset, such as paid media getting tracked weekly to monthly and organic monthly to quarterly.
Resources to Strengthen Your Digital Marketing Strategy
These key tips can be found in the How to Properly Invest in Digital Marketing presentation made by NetElixir’s Sr. Business Development Manager, Anthony Turco, in a partnership with the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Friday segment.
Request a demo for LXRInsights, NetElixir’s proprietary customer analytics tool, to target, engage, and win high-value customers. Begin growing your e-commerce business with the latest real-time analytics to decode what makes your customers click.
Have any further questions regarding your digital marketing strategy? Contact an expert at NetElixir.
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