Know What You’re Talking About

In order to fully understand the process of digital marketing optimization, you need to know exactly what we’re talking about. Digital marketing tip number one is to get up to speed on our list of 75 Must-Know Digital Marketing Terms.

Develop a POWERFUL Digital Marketing Strategy

When it comes to digital marketing, a strategy is the foundation of all your efforts. Every marketing action you take should tie back to your strategy and each should work as collaborative elements of a skillful marketing machine. Unfortunately, what most marketers refer to as a “strategy” is actually just an amalgam of individual tactics. Digital marketing tip number two is to better understand the importance of developing your own powerful strategy and use it to build a fully functional inbound sales funnel that drives sales.

Keep Your Digital Marketing Strategy Relevant

Once you’ve established a powerful digital marketing strategy, you’re good to go, right? Not really. You should consider your strategy to be a living document that is continually updated based on new information. Our third digital marketing tip is to always keep your strategy relevant to deliver optimal outcomes for your company.

Regularly Assess Business Performance

The performance of your marketing goes beyond the strategy that you implement. In order to determine how your marketing program is impacting your company, be sure to regularly assess your business performance and truly understand where your business is heading.

Nurture Leads Through Their Buyer’s Journey

To develop a highly effective marketing machine, you’ll need to reach your customers earlier in their buying journey than most companies do. In doing this, you’ll be able to nurture them towards a conversion rather than losing them amongst the noise of pushy sales copy and ads. Understanding your unique buyer’s journey and how to approach customers at each individual stage is critical, and rounds out digital marketing tip number 5.

Focus on Results

Nothing you do matters if it isn’t generating results that meet the long-term goals of your company, which is why focusing on results above all other metrics is our next tip. Our guide on results-based marketing explains exactly how to push beyond the limits of traditional marketing metrics (and most marketers’ comfort zones) to deliver the best possible outcomes and move the needle more than ever before. Don’t miss it!

Prioritize Quick Wins

When it comes to getting the biggest marketing bang for your buck, so to speak, seek out quick wins. Your marketing program likely has at least a few tweaks that could be made to deliver a positive impact FAST. As you might have guessed, we have a guide dedicated to discovering quick wins in your company. This may be our seventh digital marketing tip, but it’s a great place to start when starting to actually execute your strategy.

Make Decisions Based on Data

Too many marketers are simply going through the motions because they “know” that the actions they’re taking are what they’re “supposed” to be doing. If you’re not seeing positive feedback in your data, it’s time to make a change. We wrote this article on data-driven marketing for exactly that reason. Read it to discover how to determine what’s working, what’s not, and what you should do about it.

Regularly Audit Your Marketing Program

You built the perfect marketing machine that delivered superb results with very little input from your team, and then it all blew up. It happens to the best of us—but only if we don’t regularly audit the performance of our marketing and work to identify gaps in our marketing strategy. That’s why digital marketing tip number 9 is to regularly audit your marketing program. You’ll learn exactly what to look for and how to stay ahead of the majority of your marketing problems in this powerful guide: How to Conduct a Full Scope Marketing Audit for Your Business.

Track the RIGHT KPIs

While we’re on the subject of tracking your performance, we need to talk about the KPIs you’re tracking. If you’re not tracking the KPIs relevant to your goals and the success of your organization, you’re far less likely to reach them. We created this list of 70 digital marketing KPIs to help you understand what you should and should not be tracking based on your goals. Be sure to give it a study before you draft your next marketing report.

Ensure Your Branding Speaks to Your Ideal Buyer

When it comes to selling your brand to buyers, it’s no secret that aesthetics are important. People learn a lot about your brand without ever reading a word of copy on your website, blog, or social media accounts. You could have the most beautifully designed site with breathtaking visuals, but if it’s not appealing to your targeted audience, then it’s not doing its job. Learn the fundamental rules for branding design to create an effective aesthetic that will help you gain the trust and long-term support of your customers.

Use the Right Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation is a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. You should be utilizing marketing automation software to deliver highly personalized and perfectly timed content to customers as they make their way along the buyer’s journey. If you’re asking yourself, “how the heck do I choose a marketing automation software when there are SO MANY different options?” then you’ve come to the right place. Tip number 11 is to find a marketing automation platform that works best for you.

Focus on Mobile

People are consuming content from their mobile devices more and more each day. Reaching an audience on handheld devices should be a key element to your marketing strategy—simply treating mobile marketing as an extension of your desktop content will not suffice! It’s important for you to understand the core concepts of mobile marketing so you can learn how to properly construct an effective mobile strategy for your company. Failing to do so will leave major gaps in your marketing strategy and give your competition the chance to steal potential buyers!

Establish a Community

Are you having trouble generating leads and building your email list? Using the Challenge Technique is the quickest way to foster a community of individuals that truly want to communicate with your company. By participating in a challenge, they are able to engage with your brand in an intimate, personal way that creates lasting relationships. Learn how to boost audience engagement in five easy steps!

Work With Influencers

Influencers are great at getting your message in front of their audience, but who’s to say that audience wants to hear what you have to say? Choosing an influencer who can promote your brand in a relevant and organic way without numbing their audience to their product placement is a delicate balancing act. That being said, influencer outreach is one of the fastest growing forms of online customer acquisition and, if done correctly, is a truly powerful marketing strategy. That’s why tip number 15 is to work with influencers—in the most effective manner possible, of course!

Follow the Fundamentals of Successful Website Design

A company website is used to educate potential clients, capture new visitors, and support sales efforts. With the ultimate goal of converting visitors to marketing-qualified leads and, eventually, clients or customers, there’s a lot of pressure for website design to be optimized for success.

Test Landing Page Performance Regularly

If you’re not testing your inbound marketing efforts, you’re missing out on leads and conversions. So how can you make sure your landing pages are getting you the highest conversion rates? By testing landing pages and optimizing the results of your research. Utilize landing page AB testing for improved conversion rates and an optimal marketing strategy.

Eat, Sleep, and Breath the Fundamentals

Email marketing is a powerful way to turn leads into customers and customers into loyal brand evangelists. Building successful email marketing campaigns is critical for any company, and it is still the best method of reaching people interested in your business and in what you are selling. Get back to the basics with our 10 Top Email Marketing Best Practices.

Establish the Perfect Frequency

Emailing at just the right frequency is a difficult thing to do. You want to avoid emailing so much that you overwhelm your list and drive subscribers away, but send often enough to keep them engaged in your content and foster a relationship with your brand. There’s no perfect formula for calculating exactly when to send emails, but this guide to email marketing frequency will help you find the perfect balance for your brand and audience.

Prioritize Retention

When done well, retention marketing will boost ROI, profits, and efficiency. Keeping customers around is an extremely important (and, in today’s digital landscape, relatively easy) element of any successful online marketing strategy. While the concept is simple, it’s something an alarmingly small percentage of businesses consider a priority. Developing a retention marketing strategy can put ahead of your competition. So what are you waiting for?

Chase Abandoned Carts

As an ecommerce business owner, there’s nothing more frustrating than when an online shopper abandons their fully loaded cart. But what if I told you there’s a simple cart abandonment email system that you can set up to DRASTICALLY reduce your abandoned carts and get your customers to complete their intended purchases?

Pick the Right Platform

If you don’t publish the right message on the right platform at the right time, you won’t find the right audience. It’s essential that every message you send is crafted for your target audience and posted on the platform that makes the most sense. The same applies to pay-per-click advertising. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are the most-used ad networks—but which to choose? Discover the features that differentiate the two and how to utilize them to drive results for your business.

Use an Engagement Tracker to Optimize Engagement

Keeping up with the engagement on your Facebook ads is critical to achieving optimal results. By implementing a simple engagement tool, you can streamline the management process, save yourself time, and keep your audience of potential customers happy. Tip number 23 is to use an engagement tracking tool to dramatically improve your Facebook ad engagement management and improve your marketing strategy.

Continually Explore New Ways to Increase Conversions

The digital landscape is constantly changing, so it’s imperative that us marketers are willing to learn and adapt. Take time every few months to evaluate your conversion rates across different platforms.

Push Beyond Your Comfort Zone With Advanced Tactics

Most marketers have a basic understanding of the platforms they should have their hand in and the generic skills needed to compete in the market. It’s time for you to learn advanced tactics that will help you participate in a higher level of advertising and be truly successful in your efforts—starting with Facebook.

Develop a Powerful Strategy

Powerful tactics are great, but when it comes to digital marketing, developing a powerful strategy is what will help you find extreme success. As a dynamic and authoritative marketing tool, Facebook is a great place to start your strategic planning. As sophisticated Facebook marketers let’s make a vow, right here and now, to put an end to mindless Facebook ad generation. From this day forward we enter into any and all Facebook marketing activities with a strategy in place—sound good?

Avoid Audience Overlap

So many marketers waste money paying for two (or more) ad sets that fight for the same audience’s attention. Audience overlap is an easily avoidable mistake that no company should be falling victim to. With a few simple tweaks to your existing ad strategy you’ll be able to avoid paying more and receiving less.

Don’t Misread Your Reporting

Facebook (and the rest of the online world) is very unique because it gives us the ability to very accurately track the results of our advertising. The key is knowing how to track conversions effectively and avoid reading the data incorrectly. If you misread your reporting, you will make poor decisions based off of false results and hinder your marketing strategy. Learn how to avoid the most common mistakes in our online guide, The Number One Issue in Reading Facebook Reports.

Create Better Graphics for Your Ads

Digital advertising is SUPER effective … if you know how to create the right ad images, that is. Without compelling visuals, social media ads are not going to be nearly as successful. Not to fear, we’ve come up with a list of some seriously powerful tips that will help take your ads from average to outstanding.

Build Better Landing Pages for Your Ads

We see too many brands spending tons of time and money promoting content or creating ads that drive clicks, then sending them to a boring, confusing, or otherwise disengaging landing page. Don’t fall into this preventable trap—learn how to create compelling landing pages that buyers will love being led to after clicking on your awesome ad.

Move BEYOND Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager’s usability makes it quite easy to get comfortable. That’s why tip number 31 is to move beyond the security blanket it provides and explore the most effective way to create and manage ads—the Power Editor. Facebook’s Power Editor is what the pros use to manage ad campaigns. And as the name implies, it’s a powerful tool to be used in the creation and management of ads.

Learn How to Scale Like a PRO

You should always understand the behavior of a campaign before throwing a ton of money behind it. Scaling Facebook ads is a necessary skill to get the most for your ad spend and increase your ROI. The trick is to make small changes, one at a time, incrementally. Discover all the questions to ask yourself as you go through the scaling process.

Track Cart Abandonment

You should not look at abandoned carts as a flaw in your product, but rather, as valuable insight that can help you understand your shopper. By filling their cart, your buyer has showed you the exact items they are interested in.

Understand Your Threshold for Success

It’s important to understand that just because you CAN conduct a successful and widespread ad campaign, doesn’t necessarily mean you SHOULD. While rapid business growth is (or should be) the dream of every company, it can also be detrimental to its longevity if they aren’t properly prepared for an influx of business. Successful demand generation can cause a massive rapid growth problem. Tip number 34 is to learn how to tackle this problem and deliver on your promises.

Use Social Media to Keep Customers Happy

Social media has become a valuable venting space for disappointed customers to air their grievances. When potential buyers search your company’s name on Twitter or Facebook, you don’t want hundreds of angry tweets and posts to be the first thing they see. If a customer isn’t happy with your brand and takes to social media, it can be detrimental to your reputation. Whether you need to create or refine a digital servicing strategy, or simply skill up teams responsible for social media customer service, you can enable yourself to evaluate the business benefits and work through the operational challenges of providing excellent customer service in social media.

Get Your Company On Board

Inbound marketing improves the visibility of the company (as well as brand perception), promotes customer interaction and higher quality leads, and—best of all—it costs less than traditional marketing by a wide margin. So why is your team resisting the shift? We address a number of reasons you may be having a hard time getting your coworkers to embrace your inbound marketing strategy with gusto in our definitive guide, How to Get Buy-In on Your Content Marketing Strategy. Follow these steps to turn the critics into your biggest supporters.

Focus on Creating a FULL Inbound Funnel

There’s a gap between minimum inbound effort and what it takes to be successful with inbound. It’s not enough to simply build an inbound marketing funnel, you need to create a nonlinear, multichannel path toward conversion to maximize your inbound marketing efforts. Just because a generic buyer’s journey represents a complete conversion path doesn’t make it a full-funnel. A full-funnel gives prospects multiple paths to follow, all leading to the eventual conversion. Tip number 37 is to create a full inbound funnel to maximize your marketing potential.

Establish a Strategy for BLOGGING

logging is a valuable tool for businesses to spread brand awareness, generate leads, and create lasting relationships with their customers. But without a strategy, you’re just typing words onto a website that most people on the internet will never see—especially the ones you want to reach the most. When done correctly, blogging has the potential to generate massive amounts of traffic to your website. Learn the fundamentals of a powerful blogging strategy and tools to implement to take your blogging from 0–60.

Eat, Breath, and Sleep Blog Post SEO Fundamentals

As marketers, SEO can feel like the bane of our existence. The minute you’ve figured out Google’s latest algorithm, they go and change it again. But have no fear! Our SEO how-to, A Clear Guide to Ranking Success, will help you get your content ranking in no time.

Always Be Educating

The most important aspect of inbound marketing is providing educational resources, particularly in the awareness stage, to offer value to your buyers in the hopes they’ll one day become customers. It’s crucial that you create relevant content for the sake of your sales team, marketing team, and potential leads.

Establish a Clear Marketing Message

Developing a clearly defined marketing message is more important than many marketers understand. When it comes to effectively reaching your consumer, you need to be able to communicate with them on as personal a level as possible. There’s an art form to crafting compelling marketing messages that will help you reach your audience most effectively. Discover how to communicate to buyers in a way that makes them feel like the message they’re consuming was created just for them.

Produce More Content in Less Time

Creating content can feel intimidating at times, especially if you have a limited staff of copywriters. If you asked a non-writer to create a 3,000-word blog or an entire ebook they would probably start sweating on the spot. Did you know that there’s a way for your non-writing staff members to contribute content without typing out a single word? Are you interested, because I bet they are! Your staff members are your most valuable resource for content creation. Don’t let their aversion to writing prevent them from imparting wisdom on their role within your company.

Understand the Process of Ranking

There are tons of ranking factors that Google uses to evaluate your content and, subsequently, decide where it deserves a spot in the search results. In order to implement a successful SEO strategy, you must first understand how Google keyword ranking works.

Learn Your Content CAC

With a clear picture of your content marketing CAC, you can determine whether your results are worthy of additional investment AND you’re able to showcase your results to the executives to get the buy-in you need with accurately calculated reporting.

Understand How to Do B2B Content RIGHT

While there is plenty of content being created every day, most of it never gains any traction. In fact, 55% of B2B marketers report a lack of understanding when it comes to what makes for a successful content marketing strategy.

You want to learn how to make B2B content marketing WORK for your company. Read B2B Content Marketing [The Definitive Guide] to optimize your B2B content marketing strategy and have new leads knocking at your door.

Get Consultative

Consultative selling is about offering a prospect value upfront with no obligation. We’ve abandoned the traditional “sales pitch” approach in favor of a process where we work cooperatively with potential clients to see if we’re a good fit. Tip number 46 is to provide value through consultations. We strongly believe in giving potential clients as much information, strategies, tactics, and guides as transparently as possible, with no obligation for them to retain our agency’s services.

Use Highly Effective Content/Collateral in Your Sales Process

Marketing collateral has long been an important part of getting prospective customers to know, understand, and trust your brand enough to buy from you. Our sales team and marketing team work hand in hand to deliver value to our audience, earn trust from our prospective clients, and convert those that represent a good fit for a partnership into mutually beneficial client engagements. Achieve the same streamlined results from your sales and marketing efforts by implementing a holistic approach to your sales and marketing programs.

Understand Where to Use Inbound vs. Outbound

Participating in both inbound and outbound sales helps you prioritize marketing campaigns and sales initiatives to improve conversions. That’s why tip number 48 is to build or improve your current inbound AND outbound sales strategy to maximize results.

Optimize Your Outbound Approach With Inbound

As explained in tip #48, it’s essential that inbound and outbound sales efforts are integrated to achieve optimal results. Using inbound marketing techniques to enhance your outbound sales strategy could be exactly the holistic approach your company needs. Read about how we do this when emailing prospects in our guide to sales emails: Get a Prospect to Open Your Sales Email.

Establish a Highly Effective Sales Process

Abandon the traditional “sales pitch” approach! A documented sales process establishes a common framework and language for your team so that everyone understands the progress and status of each opportunity in the pipeline. Find problems from one stage to the next and find a solution so that your sales process is highly streamlined and effective.

Use Social Selling

Not to be confused with social (media) marketing, social selling focuses on one-on-one interactions between salespeople and prospects (rather than broadcasting your sales message). It has proven extremely effective for B2B sales, but there are plenty of opportunities for B2C salespeople to implement social sales as a part of their larger sales strategy as well.