3 Need To Know Digital Marketing Tips for SMB’s

Digital Marketing is no longer a brand new concept. However it is continually updating and advancing, and there are a few critical elements to Digital Marketing that you need to have implemented yesterday. We speak with friends, family and clients alike who are overwhelmed and intimidated by the concepts and the rapid development of the industry. You must tackle Digital Marketing straight on and create a strategy, this post will provide you with three simple and bite-size approaches for your business.
Growing your business is your number one goal and we want to use our expertise to help you reach your potential, rather than feel like you are running around chasing trends like chasing children.

1. Mobile Digital Marketing

Google has confirmed that more searches are now conducted on mobile devices than on desktop. Your website must be responsive across different screen sizes, specifically mobile. There is an increasingly varied selection of screen sizes that your consumers may be using, you may always work on your 13” screen, however, consumers could be viewing via a 24” desktop, a mobile or a tablet device.
On a day-to-day basis, individuals are conducting everyday tasks through their mini pocket sized computers. Consumers are searching for answers to just about anything, 16% of searches Google sees every day are new. Your consumers expect your site to be responsive across multiple devices, if it is not, they will not stick around. 61% will leave immediately and head to another site (probably your competitor) if your site does not optimise or show them what they are looking for.
Consumers are not only researching your site on mobile, they are buying. In fact, according to Google, 46% of purchases are online and only 44% are in store. If your site is not mobile optimised and consumers are leaving your site, you are ultimately losing potential sales.
A fun fact for you, Google CEO Larry Page focuses on mobile so heavily that he encourages his engineers and product managers to spend at least one day a week working solely from a mobile device. If you do not create a mobile and responsive strategy your business will get left behind but more importantly you could be losing out on potentially $2.5m in lost sales every year.

2. SEO is alive & kicking

If we read one more blog or whitepaper or tweet claiming SEO is dead I will not be held responsible for our actions. These myths are derogatory to our livelihood so apologies if we seem slightly frustrated. Whilst search engines and Google are still our go-to starting points, SEO will still be incredibly important, and can you imagine a world without Google, because I know that we can’t. Google is continually adjusting its algorithms, which ultimately means as SEO experts, we are constantly adding new skills to our belt and sharpening our tools in order to create results on search engine result pages. We have written about this before in a specific meta is still alive blog, if you haven’t already, be sure to have a read. As long as search engines exist, there will be the need for data interpretation and optimisation. SEO is a continual piece of work, if you believe SEO can be completed like a game of chess, you are rudely mistaken, SEO is ongoing.
As already mentioned, consumers are researching on search engines every day, 45% of purchase research starts on a search engine. In other words, every day you have the opportunity to be the answer consumers are looking for, or even better provide the answer to their question. As mentioned, Google is continually updating its algorithms, some even go unnoticed in the industry, others create a splash and business learn the hard way by receiving a penalty. Funnily enough, there was a new algorithm update last night, these algorithm updates create waves across industries generating winners and losers.
Here I want to confirm that SEO is not singularly Google, your campaign must be prepared for other sites including Bing, some optimising factors are similar across different search engines.
A fun fact for you for SEO as well, YouTube is the second most popular search engine with over 3 billion searches a month. When we say SEO is never over, this is what we mean, you must be represented and optimised on every platform, social networks included.

3. How can you manage what you can’t measure?

As embarrassing as it may be, we are not ashamed to admit that data excites us. Richard, our CEO & AdWords aficionado, gets incredibly animated when his AdWords dashboard tells him that he has successfully turned £1 into £20. Digital Marketing is fantastic and what is even more exciting is seeing the results. Which leads onto our third and final tip, create measurement metrics. Digital Marketing is continually changing, therefore you must be able to measure your success and failures in order to manage, update and improve your marketing efforts. The first step should be creating your Google Analytics account, if you already have one, even better.
Absorb all the information available in your analytics account, and understand which pages received the highest number of views and engagement and create more content like that. It is worth noting that creating content, impeccable content should we say, will get consumers to your website. Which type of content is completely up to you, How-to blogs, comparisons, expert pieces, infographics, tweets, status updates, images, you get the idea. By measuring the success of the different types of content you can focus your future efforts on the pieces of content that receive the most traction and engagement.
Most prominently for us digital geeks, how can you manage what you can’t measure? There are so many different elements that will result in increased brand awareness, some methods may work better than others, for example, if you are selling fashion through eCommerce, platforms such as Instagram may be more successful than LinkedIn profiles.
Once you have discovered which content and platforms work best for your business you should test your tactics. You can test fonts, images and so much more, to understand their success via the likes of Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate Optimisation. You also have the opportunity to implement A/B split testing where you can compare two particular elements against each other to discover the most profitable, then improve that one to test further.

Summary

To summarise, being mobile friendly and having a responsive website are two critical elements of your digital campaign that you should implement straight away if you haven’t already, you can check your mobile responsiveness here. I cannot reiterate the importance of offering a mobile friendly experience, designed for your consumer not for a robot. Your online experience could be your consumers’ first interaction with your product or service through your website, the age old saying that first impressions count is just as important when it comes to your website. Your website represents part of the whole experience, creating content, blogging and building brand awareness are all essential elements to your business. Understanding the strongest elements of your marketing can help you improve these over time. SEO has changed from simple keywords to the intent of the keywords, the discovery attached to them and the needs of the consumers, the focus, therefore, has shifted significantly to long tail search terms. Creating a unified strategy is essential when you are creating a content strategy, create one that is effective and measure its success to improve it further.