Gnooko Blog Posts

Modern digital marketing involves sorting through a lot of data. The more successful you are, the more data there is. Data includes visitors to your website, Likes and Follows on social media, and viewers who become leads. These leads who need to be nurtured and eventually converted into sales, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To be successful at marketing, you need to be able to manage all this data effectively.

Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to help you do that. These tools are called marketing technology and range from marketing automation to social media management to analytics tools and more. Do you want to be successful in promoting your brand? Your best bet is to gather together all the marketing technology tools you need and assemble them into a Martech stack. A Martech stack is a group of digital tools that function together and help you manage your marketing strategy.

Of course, there are all different kinds of Martech stacks you can put together, for a variety of different needs. Here’s how to choose the right one for your business.

Determining Your Needs

Every company is different, so ideally, every Martech stack should be different as well. Even all-encompassing software platforms generally only address one aspect of your business. Fortunately for you, there are literally thousands of different software applications out there, each with a different purpose and focused on meeting different needs. In fact, at the current count, there are over 6,000 different tools, according to a recent report by marketing technologist Scott Brinker, who quantified and categorized all of them by focus and function.

Obviously, you don’t need 6,000 different marketing technology solutions. But which ones do you need?

What you need to do first is take a long, hard look at what your company’s overall needs are, and what you need to do to meet them.

Define goals and objectives of your marketing strategy?

What do you want to accomplish, and how do you intend to go about it? Do you want to focus more on social media? Content creation? E-mail marketing?

Ideally, you’ll have some combination of those and others, but it’s still important to know just how much of your resources you plan on devoting to each, and how important they’ll be in your overall strategy.

Available Resources

There are also questions like how big your company is, whether you’re B2B or B2C, what kind of resources you have at your disposal (not just money, but personnel, tools, expertise, infrastructure, etc.), and whether you plan to perform certain tasks in-house or outsource them to another firm.

Once you’ve thoroughly analyzed your company and its marketing needs, you can start determining what kind of software tools you’ll need. For instance, Customer Relationship Management software helps you sort through customer data and interactions to facilitate future interactions and sales.

Marketing Automation software keeps track of customers’ interactions with your content to determine when they’re ready to be converted to sales. The functions are similar, but serve different needs, for different types of companies. Which one best suits you?

The Greeks said, “Know Thyself.” This is as important with companies and organizations as it is with individuals. The more you know about who your company is and what it needs, the better you’ll be able to assemble a Martech stack that works for you.

Choosing Your Tools

Once you’ve figured out the basic type of marketing tools you need, it’s time to choose specific ones for your company. Again, there are several factors to determine this, based on who and what you are.

Think about your decisions carefully. There are a lot of marketing tools out there that you can download for free.

Unfortunately, most of these don’t have the functionality you need to sustain an actual business. Similarly, there are plenty of tools which cost an arm and a leg and come with all sorts of bells and whistles that your company doesn’t need and will never us

Strategy Alignment

Your marketing technology solution should align with your initial overall company objectives and digital strategy.

How do you accomplish this? First, you do your research. Look online at what options are out there and find reviews of the various products, to get a feel for how they function and whether they’re aligned with your strategy.

Talk to peers in your field as well, to see what they use, and if they’re satisfied with them. Will what works for them also work for you?

What are some needs that are specific to your company and not your competitors, which your marketing technology also needs to meet? Many products also offer free demo versions, or limited-time trials, which allow you to test the product out for yourself and see if it’s right for you. Consider all your options when deciding.

Building Your Stack

Once you’ve completed your research, it’s time to start building your marketing technology stack. That is, assembling all the different programs, platforms, tools, and applications your company needs to achieve its objectives, and putting them together into a single, comprehensive hub from which you can perform all necessary marketing tasks.

Start with the foundation: the biggest, most important tools in your arsenal. These are the ones on which your entire digital marketing strategy will ultimately be built. Here are a few of the things you’re most likely to need

A Social Media Hub 

A social media hub is a single dashboard from which you can monitor and control all your different social media channels. One of the most popular is HootSuite, which lets you track posts, comments, mentions, and more across all different social media platforms, and measure the overall effectiveness of your content in each location.

Using a social media hub will allow you to put all of your different social channels, across all the different platforms, under one roof. You can easily take a single piece of content and tailor it separately for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, posting it all three places at the touch of a button.

You can also manage comments and other interactions from a single location, engaging with your audience and responding to questions and other concerns. It’s also great for listening, which is very important in social media marketing.

By listening to what your clients and potential clients are saying via social media, you’re in a better position to address their needs and concerns. By listening to what your competitors are saying on social media, you can get a better idea of what you’re up against and keep from falling behind.

HootSuite allows you to monitor important conversations on social media to aid you with listening.

E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing can be a tricky business. Messages sent to people unsolicited and en masse aren’t likely to be read, but will instead go straight into the recipients’ spam folders. This is more than just a waste of effort: in many places it’s illegal. Canada has very strict anti-spam laws, which can result in fines of over $40,000 per e-mail sent in violation. Furthermore, these laws apply not just to Canadians, but to any communication being sent into Canada.

Therefore, keep that in mind when adopting an e-mail marketing platform. The right platform will not only help you manage a variety of different e-mail lists effectively and in accordance with the law, but also allow you to create informative, eye-catching e-mails to send to them, and schedule them to go out at a specific day and time. Then, it will monitor how many people opened those e-mails vs. how many were deleted unread, and how many actually clicked through to get to your website, and which links they ultimately clicked.

Content Management

Similar to your e-mail platform, except this one will allow you to manage blogs, videos, and other types of content. It can help you determine keywords, build content around it, set tags that help its search visibility, and more. You may want a tool that also hosts your blog for you, or you may decide on something separate, depending on your needs.

Marketing Automation

This will help you generate leads and nurture them into sales. It keeps track of how users are interacting with your content and gives them each a score based on those interactions. Someone read your latest blog? That’s one point. They clicked through on an e-mail? That’s another point. The program then tracks these points and uses them to determine when a lead is ready to be converted to a sale. Each time they pass a threshold, it bumps them to the next level of the funnel, and can also trigger specific content to be sent to them automatically, based on what they’re showing interest in. As mentioned before, you can also choose a CRM platform, if that’s better suited to your needs.

This is how you keep track of how successful your marketing strategy is. Many of the aforementioned tools may have their own analytics built in, but it’s also helpful to get a single, all-encompassing analytics program, to keep track of everything. It allows you to monitor how many people are reacting to various pieces of content and aspects of your marketing strategy, so that you can see what’s working and what isn’t, and tailor your future actions accordingly.

Once you have the basics in place, you can look at smaller, more specialized marketing tools and programs, which do small tasks that you may need or want in your company. But get the big things out of the way first. They’re the foundation, and everything else is just furniture.

You may find that your marketing technology needs change as you go along. One piece of software may become obsolete, a new trend may require a new trend to address it… Or your company’s goals and direction may simply change, to the point where CRM is more suited to your needs than Marketing Automation now.

Don’t just switch a major tool in your Martech stack at the drop of a hat, but be aware of your own evolving needs, just as you’re aware of the needs of your audience and customers, and know how to take care of both quickly and efficiently.

The right Martech stack will make marketing both easier and more effective, and help you raise revenues and drive sales. And while individual tools may change, the stack should last you for years to come.

gnooko Digital Marketing

Robert (Rob) Burns is the Managing Partner of gnooko Digital Marketing. Rob is a recognized specialist in digital business development strategy and its implementation. Rob has over 20 years’ experience advising companies of all sizes in various business development, sales, and marketing roles. In addition to global conglomerates, Rob has also assisted small and medium sized companies with digital marketing strategy, solutions, tactics and implementation.

In today’s digital world, it’s important to keep up with technology in order to advance your business. If you’re not actively promoting your company online, then you’re not reaching as wide an audience as you could, and you’re likely to be left behind by your competitors. This is why digital marketing is so important.

Of course, digital marketing is a pretty broad term. It can encompass a myriad of different things, from digital strategy to website technology to social media to content marketing and SEO, and much more. The process can be daunting if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why it’s so important to implement a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your brand.

“Decisions about strategy and tactics become a lot easier when you know your customers, your competitors, your competencies and resources as well as market trends.” ~ PR Smith

Why Have a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Often, people mix up strategies with plans. Both are important, but they serve different functions. A strategy provides the what, why, and where of your digital marketing efforts. What are you doing? Why will this be effective? Where will you concentrate your efforts? A sound strategy can help you target customers more effectively, get them to your site, create high quality leads, and nurture them until they become sales.

A plan, on the other hand, is all about how you’re going to do something: things like creating content, posting to social media, building your e-mail list, etc. A strategy will evolve over time, but a plan doesn’t. If parts of your strategy aren’t working, you change them based on results and implement something that you hope will be more effective. If a plan isn’t working, you simply get a new plan.

When you put the time and effort into creating a strategy and a plan to direct your digital marketing efforts, you can have so much more success than if you simply go in unprepared. A strategy enables you to focus on the bigger picture of what’s best for your organization as a whole, while a plan lets you look at the details.

How can digital marketing help your company meet its overall goals? How can it help you increase revenue and improve your bottom line? That’s the business approach to a digital marketing strategy. Here are seven tips for implementing an effective digital marketing strategy and planin your company.

“Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief – WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?” ~ Simon Sinek

Build Your Strategy

Start with the “why”. This is very important and often overlooked. When any new marketing trend arrives on the scene, it’s the temptation of a lot of brands to adopt it merely because everyone else has. However, while it’s important to stay on top of trends and not get left behind, if you jump on a bandwagon without knowing why, or what you intend to accomplish, then at best you’re just wasting resources, and at worst, you may be actively harming your brand.

When blogs started to become popular, every company suddenly had to have one. Unfortunately, many failed to post on their blogs regularly, and site visitors who came looking for up-to-date answers would instead be greeted with a post from two or three years ago, prompting them to look elsewhere instead. Then when social media first came to prominence, plenty of brands started a Facebook page, just because it was the thing to do. But without knowing what kind of things to post, or how to gain followers, their actual social media presence was minimal, and had little impact on their leads or sales.

In order to avoid these pitfalls, it’s important to begin by creating a strategy. What aspects of digital marketing are best suited to your company? What kind of content will you create? What areas will you focus on? On which social media platforms do you need to have a presence, and what will you do there to increase your overall visibility? In digital marketing, a comprehensive strategy is the difference between success and failure.

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” ~ Pablo Picasso

Outline Your Objectives 

Once you have your strategy in place, it’s time to determine what, exactly, you want to achieve with digital marketing. Take the time to outline your objectives. What are your ultimate goals? How will this particular digital strategy help you to accomplish those goals? What’s the best way to implement this strategy to maximize your success? What kind of content should you post, where, and how often? The better you’re able to answer these questions, the more effectively you’ll be able to implement your digital marketing strategy.

“1. Listen to your target audience. What do they value? What’s important to them? 2. Craft the way you engage and communicate with this audience around those content triggers. 3. Repeat.” ~ John Hall

Know Your Audience

Who, exactly, are you trying to reach with digital marketing? Who’s your target audience? Who’s your ideal customer? What are they interested in? What problems do they have, and how is your company best positioned to help solve them?

Create buyer personas to help you target your audience more effectively. Make basic outlines of who your ideal customers are: their position in the company they work for, their responsibilities, average salary, education level, etc. Think about what questions they might have about your company or your industry at different stages of their buyers’ journeys, what they’re Googling as they research each stage, and the problems you’re looking to help them with.

Then create content aimed specifically at those personas. Answer the questions you’ve outlined, address their problems and concerns, and position your company as the solution. Doing this allows you to target your audience more effectively and more personally and helps you understand better who they are and what they’re looking for as you create content for them.

Another important step in knowing your audience is to research what search terms they’re using with regards to your company and industry. What keywords are most effective in leading people to your site? What keywords are most effective in leading people to your competitors’ sites? What exactly are people looking for? Once you have that information, create content around those keywords that addresses your audience’s issues and points them in the direction of whatever they were looking for in their searches.

“Content marketing is not only different from advertising, it’s the opposite of it. Advertisers inject themselves into other relevant media, hoping to be noticed. Content marketers attract their audience by being relevant. It’s pull versus push.” ~ Andy Crestodina

Create Content

Once your objectives are outlined, it’s time to start working towards achieving them. Now we move out of strategy and into planning territory. In digital marketing, much of your planning will involve content creation. Almost anything you create for your brand counts as content, in one form or another. Blogs, videos, white papers, and eBooks are content, of course, as are your social media posts, from quick tweets to informative memes. E-mail blasts are content as well. Even paid ads on Google, Facebook, and other sites are part of your content.

No matter what kind of content you’re releasing, it’s important to build it around what your target audience is looking for with regards to your brand. Look at prominent search terms for your field or industry. Keep your finger on the pulse of trending topics related to your brand. Find out what questions people are asking, and what problems they’re looking to solve. Then, create content around what your research.

By giving people what they’re looking for and addressing the issues that are most relevant to them, you’ll more effectively be able to draw people to your site and your social media channels, get them invested in what you have to say, and ultimately turn them into leads and sales.

“When your marketing is credible, you begin to build a relationship with your audience based on trust. When you gain their trust, you can influence their buying decisions. The more trustworthy your content experiences, the more effective your content marketing becomes.” ~ James Mathewson, Mike Moran

Engage Your Audience

One of the main things that sets digital marketing apart from other forms of brand promotion is the opportunity to engage with your audience directly. If you have a blog or a YouTube channel, people will often comment on your posts, providing feedback, asking questions, or just letting you know they’re there. On social media, comments are even more prevalent, as well as messages, tweets, and more.

When people engage with your content and your brand, it’s important to respond to them. If they have issues or questions, do your best to answer them, or direct them to someone else in your company who can give them the help they need. If they provide feedback, thank them for their contribution and let them know you’re listening.

Of course, you may also receive comments from trolls: people whose sole purpose in commenting/interacting is to stir up trouble. They may post vulgar diatribes, or just plain lies, among other things. If you do receive these negative comments, your best course of action is not to respond at all. But if you do, always respond professionally.

Finally, if you’re not receiving comments and feedback, or not getting as much as you’d like, encourage more of it. Ask your audience questions. Open up the floor to personal stories and anecdotes relevant to the topic of discussion and get them to post theirs in the comments.

By engaging with your users directly, you get to show them that you’re more than just a faceless company. That your brand consists of real people, who really care about them and their issues, and are interested in what they have to say. This will go a long way towards driving people to your brand and building up an environment of awareness, trust and action, which will ultimately should increase your sales.

“Business goals feed into KPIs, so hitting and exceeding your KPIs will eventually contribute to achieving your goals and ultimately contribute to the success of your business.” ~ Ian Dodson

Look at Key Performance Indicators and Metrics

Once you’ve started releasing your content and engaging your audience, you need to gauge its overall effectiveness with regards to the objectives you outlined in the first section. One way to do this is to identify and measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

KPIs are measurable values specific to your company that can help you gauge your success or failure. Are you getting the results you want? For digital marketing, your KPIs can include things likethe number of people being converted to sales through your website, how much each lead costs you from one particular source as compared to another, the percentage of sales that are coming from your digital marketing efforts, and your overall Return on Investment (ROI).

KPIs can sometimes be confused with metrics, but they’re not the same thing. A metric is more focused on specific actions you take in digital marketing and the results they yield. Important metrics can include things like who’s opening the e-mails you send out, who’s clicking on your website, and much more.

“There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation –and a risk.” ~ Peter Drucker

Evolve Your Strategy

If your latest metrics are telling you that more people are visiting your social media profiles than your blog. What do you do with this information? You can start by looking for other metrics that show you what content is most popular on your blog, so that you can create more in that vein to drive your numbers up. You can also look at what specific content is playing best on social media, and see if you can integrate more of that into your blog.

You can promote your blog more on your social media channels and with email marketing, in the hope of tapping into those resources more. Or, you may want to put more focus on social media instead, if that’s where your audience seems to be concentrated.

There are plenty of options, but the most important thing is to use the information at hand, on what’s working and what’s not, to help you evolve your digital marketing strategy and make it more effective over time.

Implementing and maintaining a digital marketing strategy is no easy task. There are a myriad of platforms to explore, and a myriad of facets to take into consideration. Without a solid strategy, your efforts will have little effect on your bottom line, and may even do more harm than good. But if you channel the resources available to you and work to build a solid, comprehensive digital strategy that tracks the entire sales cycle from beginning to end, then the sky’s the limit.

gnooko Digital Marketing

Robert (Rob) Burns is the Managing Partner of gnooko Digital Marketing. Rob is a recognized specialist in digital business development strategy and its implementation. Rob has over 20 years experience advising companies of all sizes in various business development, sales, and marketing roles. In addition to global conglomerates, Rob has also assisted small and medium sized companies with digital marketing strategy, solutions, tactics and implementation.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is somewhat enigmatic. It used to be that all you had to do was make sure your content included the right keywords, relevant to your brand and field, and a higher keyword density would help raise your site to the top of your audience’s search results.

The key to good SEO is focusing on people first, then on search rankings. The most important issue is whether your target audience likes the content you create. If they like it, Google will like it too.

“SEO is a long-term investment, and every company needs to be prepared to invest in the work of SEO over the long term. Frequently publishing unique and valuable content is the first step, but the ongoing work of SEO will be continually promoting that content, building social media channels, and building the overall brand by developing relationships with reputable websites and blogs.” ~ Jayson DeMers

Unfortunately, there are people who don’t abide by this maxim, and instead try to abuse the system. This type of SEO seeks to boost sites’ search rankings artificially, by filling pages with nothing but keywords, over and over, without any meaningful content attached to them. To combat this, Google and other search engines have had to crack down, creating algorithms that will weed out those false positives, and even penalize pages whose keyword density was too high, by giving them a lower search ranking.

Over time, as unscrupulous implementers of SEO have continued to find loopholes, Google has continued to update and evolve its algorithms for search result rankings. Because of that, a lot of people over the years have said that search engine optimization is dead. It’s not. It just has a different form than it did ten, five, or even two years ago. So how can you improve SEO for your brand in 2018? Here are some best practices for search marketing.

“You can’t fake it. To be quite blunt, search engines are getting smarter and smarter. Be genuine. Spending money to trick a search engine (buying links, keyword stuffing, link wheels, etc.) will just be a waste. Focus on building a quality user experience instead.” ~  Neil Patel and Ritika Puri

BUILD YOUR STRATEGY AND KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

As with any inbound or content marketing tactic, your first step is to outline a strategy for how to succeed. What, exactly, are your goals, and how can you use SEO to help achieve them?

Once you’ve got that figured out, your next step is to figure out how best to reach your target audience. For that, you need to do a little research. What’s on their minds? What do they care about and want to know? More specifically, what are people searching for with regards to your field, your industry, or your company? What search terms are leading people to your site, currently? What search terms are leading people to your competitors’ sites?

“My rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider.” ~ Dave Naylor

Taking the audience knowledge to greater detail. In addition to market research about your audience, develop audience segments, or personas by reaching out to your audience and interviewing them, listening to them, asking questions about:

• Why and how they make their decisions about the services and products they buy
• What is important to your audience at the different stages of their research, consideration and decision making stages
• How they define a successful outcome
• Having them expand on their responses. This will help discover valuable insights, those ‘nuggets’ of information that can really get the content deep-thinking started and understand their real needs and behaviors. These insights will also help with focusing on high quality terms and phrases they use throughout their entire research and decision making process
• The attributes or behavior about your company would cause them to not want to work with you or not buy your services
• Describing their buying journey in detail
• When they finally decide, what is their decision-making criteria for that decision. What evaluation criteria and path did they choose?

One of the best approaches is to interview your clients and future clients and then align them in segments which will evolve into your personas. Not just demographics, but insights into their approaches, processes, behavior and how they choose a ‘fit’.

“The most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence.” ~  Adele Revella

Google has tools that can help you discover this, and there are other tools around the web as well that can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your audience’s search preferences. Design relevant, high quality content around these insights and keywords, and it will help drive more people to your site.

Create Worthwhile Content

“SEO and content marketing are BFFs. Traditionally, SEO aims to create content that attracts search love, whereas content marketing aims to create content that humans love… or find useful or valuable. But in a world where social sharing is more important than ever… shareable content is key to long-term SEO success.” – Ann Handley

This tip will always be relevant, no matter what the year. Google’s entire purpose is to provide its users with the most worthwhile, most up-to-date content. Black hat SEO seeks to circumvent that, which is why the algorithms are in place to begin with.

One of the best ways to boost your site’s ranking is to provide users with meaningful content. Instead of stuffing each page full of as many keywords as possible, choose a few of the most relevant ones and build a blog post around them. The algorithms will recognize the value of what you’ve created and its usefulness to a certain section of Google users (i.e. your target audience), and rank your post higher in searches for those specific keywords.

Be Up to Date

Google wants its content to be not just relevant, but current. The world changes quickly, and no matter what the subject, a page that was posted in 2016 won’t be as relevant (or appealing to Google users) as a page that was updated in 2018, which in turn won’t be as relevant or appealing as a page that was updated, say, last month.

In determining where to rank your site, Google checks to see how recently it was updated, and how often it’s updated. If you’re constantly providing your audience with new, relevant information and content, then you’re more likely to rank higher in search results than if you only post sporadically, or if your site hasn’t been updated in a year or two.

This is why it’s important to be continually creating new blogs, new videos, etc. Not only does it establish your site as being current and relevant, but the more pages of content you have on your site, the more opportunities your audience will have to find you.

Establish Links

Google wants to establish that your site has been around for a while and proven itself to be worthwhile and relevant. Therefore, preference will generally be given to sites that not only have existed for a few years, but been active throughout that time, and, most importantly, been linked to consistently by other established websites.

Linking is a very important part of Google’s search algorithm. When other established, high quality sites are linking to pages from your site consistently over time, it shows that you have something worthwhile to offer. Unfortunately, it takes some time to establish yourself in that regard, so if you’re a relatively new site, you may have to be patient.

There are ways of getting other sites to link to yours, such as collaborating with them on a project, but to be fully legitimized on this front takes several years of continual posting, linking, being linked to, etc. If you’re not yet established on this front, then start right now.

Of course, the question is, to whom should you link? Choose companies and sites whose business is adjacent to yours, but not actively competing with you for customers. That way, you can establish a mutually beneficial relationship without risking driving potential customers to your competitors’ sites, or helping to increase their audience.

Aim for Rich Answers

One relatively recent addition to Google’s search results is the “rich answer” box. You’ve probably seen it. When you search for song lyrics, the box will contain the first couple of verses and a link to the rest. When you ask a question, the box will have a basic answer and a link to the site where it came from, which presumably covers the question in more depth.

In terms of actual search rankings, the site in the rich answer box often isn’t first. But its perceived relevance to your query gives it a place all its own, which in turn makes you much more likely to click on it.

So how do you get your site into the rich answer box? Well, first of all, only a select few search results even offer rich answers at all. A fair amount of those that do are just song lyrics. However, apart from that, the most common ones provide straightforward answers to specific questions.

So, think about common questions that people might have in your field or industry, and create content that addresses those questions. Getting a box all your own can be very helpful in driving people to your site.

Optimize for Mobile

An ever-increasing percentage of Internet users now choose to browse through mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets. Google recognizes this and will often give priorityto sites that are optimized for mobile users.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the same as it used to. A few years ago, optimizing your site for mobile browsing meant cutting down on pictures, videos, and other files that made the page take longer to load. Now, as devices have improved, that’s not nearly as much of a factor.

However, there are still a few things to keep in mind. Using HTML5 instead of flash plugins (Adobe is ending support in 2020), which aren’t always available on mobile devices. Also, don’t use pop-ups, which are even more difficult to navigate through on a phone than they are on a PC. Seeing them may cause users to leave your site as soon as they arrive, increasing your “bounce rate,” which in turn is detrimental to your search ranking.

Finally, make your buttons and links large, clear, and easy to click. Mobile users, especially those with fat fingers, often have trouble with this, which can make your site difficult to browse.

Review and Adjust

These are just a few of the trends that are dominating search engine optimization in 2018. Keeping up with them can be difficult, as Google’s specific algorithms are a closely guarded secret. Often, the only way to know for sure what changes have been made to their approach is through trial and error.

However, some things never change. There will always be preferential treatment for high quality, up-to-date, relevant content. If you continue creating that regularly, you’ll have a significant advantage. As for the trends that do change, just do your research to find out what’s working best at the moment.

By staying up to date with the latest search marketing trends, you can gnot only drive people to your site more effectively, but help them to stay there and explore further what your brand has to offer. A strong, current approach to SEO will help you drive web traffic, increase lead generation, and ultimately drive sales for your brand.

Robert (Rob) Burns is the Managing Partner of gnooko Digital Marketing. Rob is a recognized specialist in digital business development strategy and it’s implementation. Rob has over 20 years experience advising companies of all sizes in various business development, sales, and marketing roles. In addition to global conglomerates, Rob has also assisted small and medium sized companies with digital transformation strategy, solutions, tactics and implementation.

The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

gnooko’s new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy, outlines a number of steps that can be taken when using your digital presence to promote your company. The first of those steps is performing an audit, which we explore a bit in this blog post. If you want to know more about it, and learn about what happens after the audit, click the link at the end of this post to download the complete white paper.

In today’s world, most companies have at least some form of digital or online presence. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to use it effectively. Some organizations maintain a website, a blog, a Facebook page, etc. without really having any idea what to do with it, or any specific goals in mind.

Therefore, if you want to improve your digital marketing efforts, your first step is to perform an audit of your current digital tactics. This will help you understand what you’re doing, what you should be doing, and the path you’re currently on. Here’s a brief guide to performing a digital marketing audit.

Take Stock of Your Digital Marketing Presence

What digital tactics are you currently using, and how effective are they in generating leads, sales, and revenue? Take stock of everything. Maybe you have a Facebook page which has hardly any followers and very little engagement. Perhaps you have a blog that you haven’t posted on in six months. Maybe your website hasn’t been updated recently, and has broken links, outdated information, isn’t optimized for mobile users, etc.

Keep in mind, your digital presence includes more than just the content you create and release. Your company may be listed on Yelp or a similar website, where people can review your business and post comments about their experience with you. People may be posting reviews of your products or services on these sites. Are the reviews more positive, or more negative? Include this data in your audit.

Now crunch the numbers. How many people are you reaching with each of these digital tactics? How many people from, say, your social media channels, are ending up on your website and its landing pages? How many are clicking links, only to find them broken? How many are accessing your site via a mobile device?

Most importantly, of the people who do read your blog, follow you on social media, etc., how many have turned into qualified leads? How many of those leads have you in turn managed to nurture into sales? This will help tell you just how effective your current digital efforts are.

Gather Audience Data

You’ve gathered information on your own company and efforts. Now it’s time to look at your audience. It’s very important to know who your audience is and what they want. If you’re a B2B company, then look at the decision makers in the companies you target. What social media are they most likely to be found on? What content do they consume predominantly? Will they respond better to short bullet points and how-to’s, or in-depth analysis? How do they research a problem online?

With this information, you’ll be better equipped to target them more effectively with your digital content. If you’re writing long, in-depth blogs to an audience who would rather skim bullet points, then you’re wasting your efforts. If your audience spends its time on Twitter, but you’re concentrating most of your efforts on Facebook, then you’re not connecting with them as well as you could. The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to reach them with your digital marketing.

Identify Issues

Now that you have your data, it’s time to figure out what it means. What are you doing right? Where could you improve? Which of your efforts aren’t working as well as they should? What areas are you not exploring, which could have potential if you did?

On the other hand, which of your efforts are yielding the results you want? Where are you seeing the best turnaround? Which content is the most effective? Which social media channels get the most interactions? Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses, based on your data findings.

Create a Strategy

You now have all of your data, it’s time to put it to use. Create a digital marketing strategy, using what you’ve learned. Put more focus on your strengths. Work on the areas where you’re lacking. Create the kind of content that your audience is most likely to respond to, and develop a social media presence on the channels where you’re most likely to connect with them. Redesign your website, to fix broken links, optimize for mobile traffic, and generally make it more aesthetic and more user friendly, based on your findings. Do what it takes to reach your audience where they are and increase your lead generation, sales conversion, and overall revenue.

Once you’ve performed your audit and created your strategy, your job isn’t done. It’s an ongoing process, which you’ll do regularly over time. When your strategy is in place, perform another audit to see where you’ve managed to improve, and where you still need work. As technology changes, marketing evolves, and even your own industry changes, it’s important to evaluate your marketing methods continually, so you can optimize your tactics and generate more sales and more revenue.

An audit is just one step in your digital marketing strategy. To learn more about implementing digital marketing in your organization, download our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy.

Robert (Rob) Burns is a digital business development specialist in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Rob prefers to discuss a business strategy with his clients before talking about any technology, marketing or digital tactics.  Once Rob understands a client’s business objectives, he will then advise them about gnooko services and solutions: including Digital Marketing Strategy, Audience Segmentation and Persona Development, Website Design and Development, Search Marketing and SEO, Social Marketing and of course Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Marketing Technology.

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SWOT Analysis and How It Can Be Used to Improve Your Marketing

gnooko is proud to announce the release of our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy. One of the things we talk about is the SWOT analysis and how it can be used to improve your marketing efforts. This blog contains a small preview of the help contained therein. To download the full white paper and explore a variety of different digital marketing topics in depth, click the link at the end of this blog.

SWOT analysis is a great method of analyzing your business and how it’s performing at any given time. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Between those four things as they apply to your company, you can get a pretty good idea of your successes, your failures, and how you can improve going forward.

You can also use SWOT analysis to evaluate specific aspects of your company, such as digital marketing. Here’s how you can improve your digital marketing strategy using the tenets of SWOT analysis.

Strengths

Start with what you’re doing well, and what is important to your company: i.e. your critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs). There are a number of analytics tools that can help you determine this. How many people visit your website each month? How many followers do you have on social media? What’s your e-mail list like? How many leads are you generating?

Of course, it’s about more than just numbers. Are people interacting with your content in a meaningful way? When people receive your e-mails, do they open them? Do they click through to your website? Are your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) keywords effective in helping people find your website as they’re looking for help in your field?

Look at all of these numbers and statistics and determine which ones you’re happy with, and which ones are important to your digital strategy and goals. Those are your strengths. That’s not to say that there isn’t still room for improvement, but these are the areas where your efforts are most effective, and getting the best overall results.

Weaknesses

Now that you’ve determined your strengths, look at the results of your analytics again. Which numbers aren’t you happy with? Which statistics are lower than they should be? Which areas need improvement? Those are your weaknesses.

This too extends to more than just individual numbers, though. Maybe all of your individual marketing tactics are doing reasonably well. You’ve got a great social media presence, a popular blog, and plenty of people on your e-mail list. But somehow, you’re just not generating the leads that you should be, and your sales are falling short of your goals.

That in and of itself is a weakness in your digital marketing strategy, but it’s also indicative of another, underlying weakness, which is causing this failure to meet your goals. Find this weakness and figure out what can be done about it. At what stage of the buying cycle are you falling short? Do you have a huge audience, but still find yourself not generating very many leads? Do you have plenty of leads, but find it difficult to convert them to sales? Pinpoint your weaknesses and ask yourself what you need to do to improve in those areas.

Opportunities

One way to overcome your weaknesses is to look for new, unexplored opportunities that can be implemented in your digital strategy. And one of the best sources of opportunity is new technology.

Technology evolves very rapidly, especially when it comes to marketing. And as it does, it creates new ways to market your company. For instance, maybe there’s a new social media platform that your company isn’t on yet—but that your customers are. Now you have a new way of reaching out to and connecting with them.

You should also look at what your competitors are doing, and others in your field. And more importantly, look at what they aren’t doing. Is there an area of marketing that’s not being explored very much in your industry? Your organization could fill that hole. Maybe it’s video marketing. All of your competitors have blogs, but not many of them are making videos. By focusing on video production as part of your own marketing plan, you have the opportunity to stand out from the competition and reach people in a new and unique way.

Threats

Now that you’ve identified your opportunities, what’s to stop you from pursuing them and improving your overall digital marketing results? There are always threats to your company. It’s important to be aware of them.

The biggest threat is likely to be your competitors. What are they doing that you’re not? What do they do better than you? Maybe their prices are lower. Maybe their social media channels have more followers than yours. Look at their digital marketing tactics carefully, as well as the results they’re getting, and determine the areas where their success might be a threat to yours.

Technology can be a threat too, if you don’t use it correctly. If you continue to stay on top of evolving technology and use it for your company’s benefit, then it’s an opportunity. However, if you let yourself fall behind, then it becomes a threat. Or if you attempt to implement a new technology and do it badly. Are there ways in which the technology you’re using is dragging down your digital marketing strategy?

With the SWOT analysis, you can significantly improve your approach to digital marketing. Focus on your strengths, identify and eliminate your weaknesses, take advantage of new opportunities to grow and improve, and be prepared to overcome any threats. By performing this analysis regularly, you can achieve your goals more effectively and improve your overarching digital marketing strategy.

This is just one aspect of a much larger digital strategy, though. To learn more about the benefits of SWOT Analysis in digital marketing and other ways of integrating digital tactics into your company, download our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy!

Robert (Rob) Burns is a digital business development specialist in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Rob prefers to discuss a business strategy with his clients before talking about any technology, marketing or digital tactics.  Once Rob understands a client’s business objectives, he will then advise them about gnooko services and solutions: including Digital Marketing Strategy, Audience Segmentation and Persona Development, Website Design and Development, Search Marketing and SEO, Social Marketing and of course Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Marketing Technology.

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