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5 Steps to a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

1. Know What You Want (& Set the Objective)

Nail Your Mission:

·         Define your business’ overall mission/objective first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan.

·         Answer this question: what is the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (for example do you want to position your company as the go-to online provider for computer parts in Europe)? This is your mission.

Set & Measure Your KPIs:

·         Get specific with your KPIs by identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.

·         Get realistic with your KPIs by analysing your previous digital marketing efforts first – this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.

·         Identify a method to help you measure each of your KPIs – for example, will you use Google Analytics to measure your conversions, your individual social media analytics to track engagement or a tool like BuzzSumo to assess the success of your content marketing?

·         Here’s a handy KPI template for you to steal: (Insert goal, e.g. ‘Increase traffic’) by (insert figure)% in (insert number of months).

·         Before you begin planning your KPIs find out which metrics matter most to your CEO.

2. Analyse Your Past (& Learn From Your Mistakes)

You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) go into the planning period in the dark. Analysing your digital marketing strategy’s past success and failures can help focus you on setting the best KPIs for your business. You, therefore, might want to complete step one and two together.

Choose a time period you’d like to analyse (it’s best to set this time period as the same length of time you plan for your new strategy) – for example decide on whether you’re going to analyse the previous year, quarter or month.

How to Analyse:

·         Determine the time period you would like to analyse and set your Google Analytics calendar to match this timeframe.

·         Try out Google’s Benchmarking Reports in your Analytics account to compare your progress to your competitors.

·         Don’t forget to analyse your competitors’ strategy too – create an analysis spreadsheet of their online activities (you can use SEMrush to identify the SEO strategy of a competitor, i.e. what keywords are driving the largest volume of organic traffic to their website. It can also be used to compare the organic and paid traffic of different websites so again quite useful to see how aggressive they’re being with their paid spend.)

·         Ask yourself this question at regular intervals: is there anything else I need to analyse that I haven’t thought of before – e.g. should I be testing the times I post my content or the types of images I use?

3. Remember Who You’re Talking to (& Speak Their Language)

Don’t let the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach. You already know who your audience are (at least we hope you do) but sometimes they’re the first thing a digital marketer can forget amidst the KPI setting, budget fretting and channel selection.

You’re not going to make this mistake – not this time. Instead you’re going to put your audience at the heart of your strategy, cater to their emotional needs and satisfy their deepest desires. How? Through the creation of well fleshed out and well thought out personas, of course.

Develop Useful Personas:

·         Start with the basics and note down all the demographic information you know about your target consumer – like age, gender and location.

·         Then dig a little deeper and Identify the problems you can help your target persona solve.

·         Delve into their emotional desires, goals, aspirations and fears and document all of the factors that could make them tick (think about their conscious and unconscious desires).

·         You can dive deep into the ‘Audience Reports of your Google Analytics account to identify key characteristics of your target persona like age, sex, career, etc.

·         When creating your personas this is the perfect time to identify the people who will be of influence to them – these will be the influencers your strategy should target.

4. Identify Your Means (& Stick to Your Budget)

Three things are important for identifying your means: these are your budget, your digital channels and your team (or people). It is important to take stock of all of your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next period.

For example, now is the perfect time for creating an audit of your existing digital channels and to decide whether you’re going to outsource specific sections of your digital marketing and whether you need to set budget aside for a new hire or two.

How to Identify Your Means:

Your Budget:

·         Define your overall digital marketing budget.

·         Look at the historical data of what has worked before (for example, have any specific channels brought you quality leads at a low cost?)

·         Decide whether you will use paid promotion (for, example Adwords or paid ads on social media).

·         Allocate a specific portion of the budget for each digital channel you want to use for paid promotion (delve into your Analytics to help you assess the most cost effective digital channels with the largest reach and conversions and the lowest Cost Per Click).

·         If a certain element of your paid promotion strategy isn’t bringing you the results you desire, revisit it and invest the allocated budget figure into the channel that’s bringing you the best results.

Your People:

·         Look at your current team and assess what you are capable of achieving (be realistic here and ensure that no-one will be over stretched or over worked).

·         Identify whether you need to hire more people and whether you have the means to do so.

·         Decide whether all of your digital marketing activity will take place in house or if you’ll need to outsource some elements to a third party agency.

·         Get each of your team members to review their digital marketing activity and brainstorm a few ideas for their future strategy (the more autonomy your employee has in their role the more they’ll be on board with your new plan).

Your Channels:

·         Review your current digital marketing channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to invest in any new ones (this depends on where your customers are and the time you have available).

·         Clearly articulate what each digital channel is trying to achieve.

·         Make sure you have at least one KPI attached to each of your digital channels.

5. Make the Plan (& Don’t Stick to It)

‘Create a plan and don’t stick to it? But, but, what do you mean?’ Before the panic sets into the most organised of digital marketers let me explain…your plan is never going to be perfect from the outset. Not every assumption you make is going to be correct.

And although you’ve taken every care to craft a carefully constructed plan based on a set of insightful assumptions and analysis you still can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave. It is, therefore, essential to continuously measure and monitor your strategy’s performance and to change elements where needed.

Create Your Digital Marketing Calendar:

·         Try creating your timeline using Google Calendars – that way you can share it with your team members and allow them to edit it where necessary.

·         Highlight the key campaigns you’ll create and promote throughout the year and allocate a timeframe for each.

·         Document the digital channels needed to ensure the success for each campaign.

Review Your Strategy & Identify Changes Needed:

·         Create a measurement and monitoring plan (this should fit in with your KPIs).

·         Check the success of the individual elements of your strategy at continuous intervals.

·         If something is not working (i.e. you’re not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out) isolate the different elements and try to identify what is not working (e.g. is it the time you’re posting content or the taglines you’re using for your ads?).

·         Revisit your previous analysis, personas and budget allocation and try something new.

·         Create a clearly defined KPI for your new venture.

Google Panda 4.0 Hit Sites Blocking CSS & JavaScript

Joost published a blog post showing how some of the sites he hit by Google Panda 4.0 and in one case, unblocking the CSS & JavaScript resulted in the site returning to its normal rankings.

Joost wrote, "they’ve returned on almost all of their important keywords. Just by unblocking Google from spidering their CSS and JS."

Well, I have an issue with this for a couple reasons:

(1) Panda is an algorithm and it needs to run again for it to have an impact. So first, you need to theoretically unblock your CSS & JavaScript, then wait for GoogleBot to crawl to pick it up, then Google needs to process all of that, and then Panda has to be rerun.

(2) I haven't seen enough evidence from the community to prove this to work.

(3) More of his supporting evidence is Google recommending you don't block CSS & JavaScript at SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago. Google has been saying that for years and years. They just keep saying it.

The truth is, a lot of sites that may have benefited or took a hit from Panda 4 actually saw reversals a week ago (last weekend). We have a story on that over here. So something did happen with Panda 4 but Google would not chime in about that.

I think it is unrelated to the blocking or allowing of CSS & JavaScript.

Robert Charlton, moderator of WebmasterWorld, wrote in the WebmasterWorld thread:

He associated a site's drop with its accidental blocking of CSS and Javascript files. This was shortly after Google had announced its new Fetch and Render feature in Webmaster Tools. Assumption is that this is now being used in the page layout algorithm. Unblocking CSS and JS appeared to produce quick recoveries.

This kind of association is entirely consistent with algorithmic changes I've seen over the years, where Google has been quick to make use of a capability that we first see in a reporting feature.

Got SEO Basics? 5 Tips To Boost Your Organic CTR

There’s no shortage of new digital marketing channels these days — and while they are innovative, exciting, and fun to experiment with, they can also distract you from SEO basics that can deliver performance gains. Your organic click-through rate (CTR) is a great example.
A simple page title tweak could take you from driving 2% of consumers to your landing page, to driving 20%! But today, your organic CTR can be affected by several different elements. Below we’ll take a look at five factors in your control:

1.  Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Ranking

Marketers everywhere are chasing after Page 1 organic rankings, but is there much of a difference between Position 1 and Position 6? Or Position 2 and Position 7? The short answer is “yes”!
Studies conducted by Nielsen Norman Group report that web users view the screen in an F-shaped pattern, and spend 80% of their time looking at information above the fold (the portion of the screen viewable without scrolling — usually rankings 1-5).

Based on these data, one could infer that rankings above the fold are seen first and more often — and that users may be more likely to click on these listings simply because of their navigation behavior.
Clearly, while ranking on the first page is great for achieving brand visibility, you need to get your website to rank above the fold to begin seeing substantial traffic gains.

Performance Tips:

• Strive to achieve organic rankings closer to the top of the search result pages (above the fold), as these positions can drive higher CTRs.
• Focus your e-commerce organic strategy on developing informational based content. SERP listings for informational search queries above the fold are less cluttered and will have a better chance of attracting the user’s attention/click.

2. Title Tag

The title tag defines the title of your web page (or other web document), and is typically the text that appears as a blue link on search engine results pages.
A page’s title can greatly influence whether or not a searcher clicks on your page in the SERPs, and it has the power to make or break your organic CTR. Be sure to take the time to carefully craft your title tags.
Below is a great example of a well-crafted title tag by The Boston Calendar. Let’s examine what they’ve done right:

• The title contains the target keyword (“boston calendar”) close to the front of the tag, which is great for grabbing the user’s attention, and can even give rankings a slight boost.
• The title is 45 characters long, and safe from truncation. Google usually truncates a title snippet that exceeds 65 characters.
• Several of the words in the title match the user’s query — this causes them to be bolded in the SERPs.
• The title is in the same “voice” as the brand, which is great for delivering consistent messaging across marketing channels.
• The text, “events that don’t suck,”  evokes emotion and creates curiosity.

Performance Tips:

• As you develop your tags, focus on the following important elements: character length, word choice, and query match.
• For increased organic clicks, try adjusting your page titles to be more relevant and/or enticing to click. But do not remove your target keywords as it could impact your organic ranking.

3. Meta Description

Meta descriptions help users understand what your content is about before they see it. While they don’t directly impact organic search rankings, they can greatly influence whether or not users click through to your website. Given that, never overlook meta descriptions for high priority pages.
In fact, you might want to think of meta descriptions as free advertising — it’s basically an opportunity to get your message out each time your listing is displayed in the SERPs. However, keep in mind that sometimes Google doesn’t display the meta description in a SERP snippet, and instead uses other sources like publically available data and/or the content of the page.
Take a look at the below meta description by Wicked Wine Candles. What are they doing well in this example?

• The meta description contains the target keyword (“wine bottle candles”), which matches the user’s query. As a result, these words are bolded.
• At 154 characters long, the entire meta description is displayed in the search snippet. Google typically truncates meta descriptions that are greater than 160 characters.
• The copy describes the company’s products in their style and voice.
• The call-to-action references a promotional offer for free holiday shipping.

Performance Tips:

• When you write your page meta descriptions, be sure to focus on character length, word choice, query match, and the call-to-action. 
• For special times of year, like the holiday season or your peak selling periods, adjust your meta descriptions to be more relevant, and reference upcoming deals and/or product promotions.
• Try to leverage paid search to continuously test and tweak your ad copy to find what works best.

4. URL

The URL is another area where SEOs can influence what is displayed in the SERPs, and in turn, affect CTR. Back in August 2009, Google tweaked its algorithm to improve how they generate site hierarchies (i.e., breadcrumb navigation) that display in SERPs. (See example from NewEgg.com below.)

With the introduction of rich snippet markup (detailed information intended to help users with specific queries) webmasters can adjust their URL snippets to be cleaner while providing context to queries in the SERPs.
For instance, the landing page in the Walmart.com example below leverages semantic markup for breadcrumb navigation. As a result, the display URL provides valuable context and additional clickable navigation options.

Performance Tips:

• When developing your URLs, pay attention to areas such as the folder structure, word choice, query match, and breadcrumb navigation snippets.
• Ensure your site follows a well-organized folder structure and site hierarchy that leverages standard navigational tools such as breadcrumbs.
• Be sure to mark up your pages with breadcrumb information for search engines.
• For special times of year, like the holiday season or your peak selling periods, consider adding a section of your site dedicated to seasonal content, such as Christmas Gifts. Integrate this section into the main navigation of your website. These elements could then be displayed in the URL within search results, attracting users whose intent is shopping for the holidays/seasonal items.

5. Rich Snippets

It seems like rich snippets are here to stay, and they can help boost your CTR.
Since Google introduced rich snippets, all three of the top U.S. search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) announced joint support of schema.org, which “provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.”
Essentially, website owners can add HTML markup to a web page that allows search engines to identify specific elements on that page and, in some cases, display those elements in search results. (In Google’s case, this often takes the form of rich snippets.) Google has made numerous updates to their algorithm since the introduction of rich snippets, resulting in more and more being displayed in search results.
By marking up your HTML accordingly, your landing pages may be displayed in SERPs with rich snippets that can help draw a searcher’s attention. Many companies have already implemented structured data markup throughout their websites.
For instance, the below Overstock.com page is marked up with several different types of product-related structured data markup, including breadcrumbs, aggregated product reviews, and product pricing.

Authorship is another type of rich snippet that can help your brand stand out in the SERPs. Not only does it distinguish your content, but it also helps readers find the other content you have published on the web.
As you can see in the below example, Matt Cutts’ website is tagged with Authorship markup. It displays his Google+ photo in the search results.

Performance Tips:

• Mark up any and all applicable pages on your website with structured data markup. Visit Google for more information on the different types of markup formats and content types.
• Use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to test a specific page’s markup and see a preview of how the page might appear in Google search results.

Surely, more new and exciting digital marketing tactics will emerge in 2014. And while I encourage you to explore them, be sure you cover your SEO basics first. That includes fully optimizing your CTR. Be smart — take a closer look at the CTR factors in your control, and make the necessary adjustments. It could help you net some performance gains.