Marketing a website and, to a larger extent, a brand in 2021 is no small feat. To do so successfully requires a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. This includes the right marketing tools and the right team to meet your business objectives and online marketing goals.
If you want to fail online, don’t make a plan.
As the old adage goes, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” Business owners, professionals and organizations who wish to succeed online need a digital marketing strategy in place as technology and competition continue to increase.
Hiring a digital marketing agency to help you with lead generation, SEO services and a data driven content strategy is the best and most efficient way to reach your target audience and out perform your competition.
However, if you are a startup, a small business owner, or even if you have an in-house marketing team, you may prefer to look at a “hands on” DYI approach. This is a worthwhile venture if you have the time, energy and technical inclination to learn the skills and platforms needed.
To that end, we will discuss six factors affecting your current web presence and online brand experience. This includes your website, blog posts, social media marketing, brand awareness, content marketing, videos, email list, reputation management and any ongoing marketing and advertising campaigns.
This is by no means an exhaustive or detailed list. These six online marketing areas, when properly addressed, can improve your bottom line. You accomplish this by increasing your brand’s visibility, targeted traffic and customer service levels to turn a prospect into a loyal customer or client.
1. Review Your Competitors
Ironically, your online competition can be one of the most insightful marketing tools available. You can simply review what your online rivals are doing to outperform your current marketing efforts. This allows you to quickly pivot your own activities to match and surpass them.
The most basic way to do this is to take time to search your industry niche in Google and other search engines to find common strengths, and weaknesses, between those who are outranking you in search results.
This may be a better web experience, like a responsive web design, or specific functionalities like forms, downloadable white papers and web tools that capture your customer’s attention. These features provide them with a deeper level of interaction by using inbound marketing techniques.
You can also review what your competition is doing on social media. Usually a brand focuses on one or two social channels that they find fits their niche the best. This is often because whoever is managing the social media presence for the brand is most comfortable on a specific platform and/or that they know their customer base is there.
To speed up the manual research process, you could use a powerful online marketing tool, like SEMRush, that does a lot of the heavy lifting. It allows you to do quick competition analysis that includes many deeper details as well.
2. Perform a Website Audit
An automated website audit tool can provide invaluable information about your website’s overall health. It will provide detailed results across a wide variety of factors affecting your website’s rankings and visibility online.
Many audit tools are able to scan your competitor websites at the same time, so you’re able to gather some comparative data about your website in relation to your competition.
The best web audit tool we’ve encountered is SEMRush.com. It has many tools available for your marketing efforts, especially for research, auditing, SEO factors, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and PPC research that goes far beyond Google Ads data.
Search Engine Optimization is largely a relative game. In essence, you just need to know where your competition’s strengths and weaknesses are and then you outperform them for each factor. In some cases, you can see very quick improvements and others can take weeks to months to achieve. Keep in mind that SEO is a long term digital marketing strategy.
A website audit can help determine key issues with your On-Page SEO and also some Off-Page factors, including your back link profiles.
Is SEO important? Absolutely – SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics)
At BlindDrop.com, our team uses three separate audit approaches, including two automated audit tools and a manual review by our SEO experts. This manual review can unearth concerns that automated tools cannot detect.
This combination of audit tools and manual review provides some of the richest feedback on your digital marketing strategy. It shows you where your website currently is and what you need to do to immediately improve its standings. Get your free website audit today.
3. Add New Marketing Channels
You have, at this point, reviewed your competitors and done a website audit to learn what needs to be fixed on-page. Next, you can look beyond your website to those top level marketing profiles and channels for your brand.
This can include video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo, social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp, TikTok and LinkedIn. Building a branded profile and remaining active on these channels will help you reach your targeted audience and build social signals, which in turn help your search rankings.
Each of these social media channels requires a different marketing approach. So, ensure that your brand’s messaging remains consistent, but that your content is tailored to that specific audience on each platform.
You can also look for key industry websites that allow you to create an account and add a profile. These often have a review feature included, such as sites like Yelp, TrustedPros, HomeAdvisor, Manta and Cylex. A good point of reference is to find those industry review sites that your competitors are already listed on. Then your job is to claim your own listing and make it better than your competition’s.
Above all of these channels is your Google My Business profile. It is your main way to communicate key information about your company or organization to Google’s apps, including Google Maps and Google Search.
4. Add Marketing Automation
Your marketing campaign and team members will benefit from using time-saving marketing automation tools. These may tie directly into your website’s functionality, or be a stand alone program or SAAS (Software As A Service).
Examples of these include chatbots for your website and social media channels, like Tidio, HubSpot, and LivePerson. For email list management services like Aweber, ConstantContact and MailerLite.
With these tools, you can collect email addresses from leads as they join your email list. From there you can send automated emails as part of your ongoing email marketing campaigns. This continues to grow your email list of targeted buyers.
Effective emails can quickly improve your brand’s reach and bottom line when you can regularly contact a group of people already interested in your products and services.
And finally, social media posting tools such as HootSuite, Buffer and Loomly can help to research, post and track your social media activities.
It is no surprise that 94% of marketers use social media for content distribution. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics)
As with all aspects of your brand, be consistent. Leverage these tools to maximize your strategic planning to save time and energy. Use their scheduling features to create a continual flow of newly posted content each week.
One caveat is that we recommend only taking on those tools and activities that you can commit to with a consistent schedule and dedication. This rolls into our next topic of discussion, customer service and Reputation Management.
5. Improve Your Online Customer Service
One of the quickest and surest ways to increase your digital marketing strategy is to improve your levels of customer service online. This is one area that at least some of your competition are already lacking in.
You can improve your customer service by:
- Improving your website’s User Experience by improving navigation, custom tools and content flow.
- Being consistent in your messaging, responses and activity across all channels.
- Being responsive to any and all feedback through your website, social media channels or industry-related profiles.
- Be particularly responsive of your third-party reviews on Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook, etc. These reviews can make or break your brand’s image and reputation online. For more information about how you can improve your review and reputation management and get more 4 and 5 star reviews, visit or Reputation Management services page on BlindDrop.com.
6. Hire a Digital Marketing Consultant
If you are too busy for these first five ways to improve your digital marketing strategy, then we recommend you hire a SEO Consultant & Digital Marketing Strategist. If you want to save the most time, energy and focus, then choosing a marketing consultant is clearly the quickest way to improve your digital marketing strategy.
By consulting with any true expert in any industry, you will gain an informed perspective and valuable information of which you would otherwise not have knowledge.
You will save time and energy by hiring a Web marketing specialist. This professional should also be an SEO specialist who has a general, yet strong, grasp of relevant web design services.
Learn more about our SEO Consultant Services.
If you would like to save time, energy and money, you can receive a no-obligation, free web audit from BlindDrop.com, a local Cochrane and Calgary Web design company. Our audit process is based on three auditing methods to ensure you receive the best overview and details to help your digital marketing strategy improve as quickly as possible.
