Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
2019 Digital Marketing Checklist
With new and constant developments to our digital marketing world, it’s becoming even more important to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies. Therefore, at the Good Marketer we have prepared a Digital Marketing Checklist to prepare you and your business for all your digital marketing needs.
1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Your target audience is key to anything marketing related. Being able to segment your target audience down to their demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural aspects will help you to understand who the customer is and how you can better market your product / service to them.
Top tips on how to go about doing this is to research your current customer base. In other words, look for common characteristics, and narrow these down to a few specific details you want to target.
Another important thing to do in relation to knowing your target audience is to look at what your competitors are doing, see who they are targeting and see if you can find another niche area that they aren’t covering.
2. KNOW YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION
A value proposition is a summary explaining to your customers how your product or service will benefit them. In other words, it lets them know what your product/service does. A value proposition should be able to immediately grab the attention of your customer which will help you increase your product awareness and percentage of sales. Knowing your value proposition will differentiate you from rival competitors, improve your market share and improve not just the quantity but the quality of potential leads as well.
When creating your value proposition, start off by identifying your customer’s main pain points. This will help you to map out product/service’s key features and will aid you in connecting these two points together. Another top tip is to differentiate yourself as the unique and preferred provider of this product/service so that customers know that you will be the go-to company for this!
3. KNOW WHICH MARKETING CHANNELS TO USE
Nowadays there are so many different marketing channels available to use. Common digital marketing channels you may be aware of include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Display Advertising, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Social Media, Email and so on.
However, it’s important you do your research and make sure you tailor your marketing campaign to your product or service at hand to optimise the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. Here are some good articles and links to find out more about which marketing channels are best to use for you: Marketing Channels by Marketing91; What are Marketing Channels & Intemediaries; Choosing the Right Marketing Channels for your Business
4. KNOW IMPORTANT SEO TECHNIQUES TO INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of improving the page/site visibility through organic search results to ultimately improve your overall website traffic. By having an optimised website, this will improve your site’s rankings in the search results and increase traffic, which in turn can result in more customers and potential leads.
A few Search Engine Optimisation techniques you can use to draw more people to your website are to break up your content with visual imagery or videos, optimise your page loading speed and to start using outbound links. There are also some free tools which will help you score your website SEO efforts, for example, Alexa and Website Grader.
5. KNOW SOCIAL MEDIA BEST PRACTICES
In 2019, there are 3.2 billion social media users globally, which equates to roughly 42% of the population (Emarsys, 2019). Therefore, social media marketing is a great marketing tool to leverage in raising awareness of your brand and business.
Important top tips when using social media marketing is to engage with your audience. Social media is a two-way medium, therefore taking time to build a relationship with your audience and encouraging them to comment / like will boost your posts even more.
Make sure you measure your posts and social media activity. There are numerous analytics tools for example Facebook has their own tracking tool, alternatively you can use platforms such as Hootsuite, Hubspot or Brandwatch.
6. KNOW EMAIL MARKETING TIPS
Email marketing is a great way of reaching potential customers and retaining loyal customers by keeping them updated with news and updates.
Key email marketing best practices are to use email monitoring and tracking tools such as Mailchimp and Litmus to be able to analyse the effectiveness of your email campaigns and see which areas of the email you can improve. Including call to actions within your emails are also key to convert your potential customers into potential buyers. In addition to this, remember to personalise your email through maintaining a copy of your customer list!
7. KNOW HOW TO TRACK YOUR CAMPAIGNS AND MARKETING DATA
Although this point has been briefly mentioned earlier, being able to track your campaigns and analyse your marketing data are really important. Without knowing how many people you’ve reached and how many people have bought your good or service, there will be no way to know how effective your marketing efforts have been. Therefore, ensuring you can track your data, but also implementing some key KPI and target goals will definitely make you a digital marketing pro!
If you want to track data, then tools like Google Analytics, Google URL Builder will be perfect for this. Alternatively, you could always store your data in an excel sheet if the previous suggestions don’t appeal to you
