With the digital landscape evolving quicker than ever, it is important to know where to invest your digital resources, time, and money to be able to succeed in the digital landscape. It’s not enough to simply put more money into digital advertising in the hope of generating more business. You have to employ a holistic strategy that works at different levels to show the right message to the right audience at the right time.
In this article, we’ll discuss tried and true strategies and tactics that have proven to be highly effective in growing countless businesses' digital presence and overall ROI.
Actionable Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While SEO is nothing new, it is a tried and true digital marketing tactic that works really well with the right balance of applied strategy, patience, and a keen understanding of doing the basics really well. Comprehensive SEO strategies basics include, but are not limited to:
- Consistent — and targeted — content creation
- Technical SEO improvements
- Optimizing on-page text and meta descriptions
- Link building
- Continuous keyword research
Following the outlined strategies above will absolutely help increase your website’s organic visibility, which is a huge component in getting more traffic to your website; ranking well for search terms that potential customers are looking up will give you a distinct advantage over your competitors. While time consuming, putting in the extra effort to do regular keyword research allows you to craft on-page content that not only search engines can crawl that increase your rankings over time, but that humans can also discover and understand in a meaningful way. And it’s one of the only mechanisms of digital marketing that continue to pay dividends after you stop doing it.
Finally, because search engines are constantly evolving and being updated, staying on top of how they interact with your website is integral in long-term success. Finding the balance of technical and practical application of SEO best practices can be a cumbersome process, it is a crucial component in any digital marketer’s toolkit.
Targeted Paid Media
Paid Media is running ads on various digital platforms with the core focus of sending traffic to websites, getting websites to convert at higher rates, or even building brand awareness. There are even different channels you can advertise on: Search (Google and Microsoft), Display (Google & Microsoft), Social (Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, etc.), are all common examples of different forms Paid Media can take. Promoting your content or website through various ad placements offers businesses of any size to choose a budget at any scale to start engaging with potential customers.
A big benefit of Paid Media is that the results can be instantaneous, where beginning to rank well for search terms using SEO can take weeks or even months on average. With that said, it is ideal to invest in both SEO and Paid Media campaigns and not have to choose one over the other, as they are able to compliment one another when trying to generate more website traffic and leads.
Another strong case to be made for Paid Media is taking advantage of the ad platform’s unique bidding strategies and custom audience building capabilities to send highly qualified traffic and leads to your website. It is all about getting the right ad in front of the right audience at the time they are searching for solutions they need. Platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads are evolving all the time to use machine learning and AI to be able to better predict where a customer is at in the sales funnel, so you don’t have to do the heavy lifting of seeking them out one by one; simply change the platform’s goal to match what your goal with the advertising campaign. Whether that’s building your brand equity, reaching the most people to amplify your message, or selling more items on your website, Paid Media is a must to invest in.
Regular Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Increasing the amount of traffic to your website or app is one thing, but increasing the amount of leads, conversions, or sales is a whole different story. That is where Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, comes into play. CRO is effectively finding new tactics and strategies that lead users to take a specific action on your website you deem valuable; that could be certain link clicks, on-site purchases, button submissions, or newsletter signups. Like the name suggests, you are trying to effectively increase the overall conversion rate of your website. There are numerous ways to achieve this, but some of them include:
- A/B testing different content (text or pictures) to see what users engage with more
- Changing the colors of CTA (call-to-action) buttons
- Having content or buttons users can engage with early on a page without having to scroll
- Highlighting customer testimonials
- Reducing the amount of required fields on form fills
The great thing about CRO is that you can try a rotating combination of the listed strategies from above over time to see what has the biggest impact with your customers to increase your overall conversion rate. It is advised that you start slowly though, as you need to have enough time and data to decide whether an experiment was successful or not before moving on to other forms of testing.
Harness AI For Scalability & Productivity
With the recent surge in artificial intelligence (AI) interest, digital marketers would be missing out on some very helpful tools and insights that AI offers if not taken advantage of. AI can be used to better execute, scale, and produce strategies around each of the different forms of digital marketing tactics that have been previously mentioned.
For example, if you are looking to scale your SEO strategy, you can use generative AI tools to help you find new keyword ideas where you want to increase rankings, build custom content plans that you can execute quicker, and use predictive analytics to help guide future performance of your SEO efforts.
If you are looking to grow and optimize your Paid Media accounts, you can use AI to help write more engaging headlines and descriptions in your ads, perform keyword research more efficiently, and do a competitive analysis based on businesses that offer similar goods or services. Furthermore, AI-driven forecasting helps optimize resource allocation and ensures better ROI for both SEO and Paid Media campaigns.
Where CRO is concerned, AI can help establish very detailed and custom customer profiles that you can use to optimize content on your website to increase their engagement rates. AI can also be used to build out new and interesting experiments to better understand how your customers interact with your website.
It’s evident that there are many pathways to improve your digital marketing efforts. The first steps that should be taken are to create a long-term SEO plan, invest in Paid Media channels that complement your SEO strategy but that also strives to engage with your core audience, and optimize your website based on data collected from website experimentation over time.
