It’s never too early to start planning your digital marketing strategy for next year. Your competitors are already looking to gain any edge they can within the marketplace. There’s no time to sit back and get complacent about your current position. So, start pulling together your relevant digital marketing learning resources and start laying out next year’s plan.
Don’t repeat the content strategy from 2018 and assume you’ll have the same success rate in 2019. While there are benefits to your strategy, trends change and you have to keep up. There’s always more you can do to expand the reach of your company brand across different platforms. Be willing to go back over your current strategy and shake things up and incorporate fresh ideas.
Decide What You Want to Accomplish In 2019
You’ve read your data, invested the time in learning about your audience, and have a ballpark estimate of your 2019 digital marketing budget. Now it’s time to figure out what you want to achieve during the next year.
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Common Goals For Businesses
- Increasing foot traffic in physical stores
- Getting more people to make purchases online
- Increasing the number of people signing up for your email lists
- Selling more of a specific product line
- Growing overall sales through the year
- Attracting a different type of audience
- Improving your brand position in the marketplace
Setting clear goals help you refine your targets and gain a clearer understanding of your 2019 game plan. What didn’t you accomplish in 2018 that you hope to find success in during 2019? What areas of your business do you want to strengthen? Where are you continuing to miss out on opportunities?
It may not be possible to go all the way up to #1 in your sphere if you’re currently ranked #58. A more realistic goal might be improving 10 to 20 positions in Google over the next year. Decide how aggressive you want to be and schedule your time, resources, and budget to make it happen.
It’s not possible to account for every eventuality in business through planning. You can do everything you can to line up good digital marketing learning resources to aid you in your quest. Doing this gives you a better chance of achieving new heights for your company during the upcoming year.
Go Over Your Analytics Data
You’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not using analytical tools to evaluate your current marketing tactics. It doesn’t help to shell out money for advertising and other digital marketing placement if you have no idea how well your content is performing. Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) you can review
- Click-through rates on your digital ads (Facebooks, Google Ads, Instagram)
- The Google quality scores on your landing page and the relevance of keywords in your ads and content
- How much traffic your ads generate
- Conversion rates once visitors land on your site
- How often your social media posts get shared
- Positive reviews you’ve received
- The number of visitors your landing page receives from social media outlets
- How often your company’s brand comes up in discussions about products or services you offer
How well do you understand the tools you’re using? Make sure you’re referencing your digital marketing learning resources for your analysis tools and leveraging them effectively
Create Your Target Audience
What type of audience is being drawn in by your recent digital advertising efforts? Do they match the customer persona profiles you drew up? It may be time to shift your tactics if you’re not pulling in your intended target audience.
You may be pulling in precisely who you set out to draw at the start of the year but changed your business priorities. That may have your company looking to shift their focus to a more appealing audience.
Follow Your Audience
Make sure you’re set up to reach your audience once you’ve figured out who you want to target. On some channels, this means creating a new demographic to engage. Do research on the typical customer in your store and make an audience that looks like your customer. You can identify buying habits like time of day to research online or even their zip code. With your RMS, POS, and website analytical tools, you can create your store’s unique buyer persona.
Once you have your audience built, make sure they see your brand online in those places. That means being willing to break out of your comfort zone and finding new ways to create content that appeals to them. You can’t be content with the occasional dry website update and expect to keep people engaged.
Evaluate the Habits of Your Visitors
Retailers with a good website should have a good picture of their customer interaction online. If not, it’s time to evaluate review your analytics. At the end of the day, you need to find out which customer inquiries through your website turned into sale in your store?
Outside of the retail industry, service-oriented companies should be reviewing similar insights. How often do visitors provide you with viable information for future contacts? What advertising efforts lure in visitors who take advantage of your service? How many of them end up losing interest and abandoning your site after only staying a short while?
You can’t begin to set goals if you have no idea what’s currently working. Analyzing and understanding what’s happening with your digital marketing efforts help you start your 2019 digital marketing strategy.
Document your Social Media Strategy
Use the information you gathered from reading your analytics and analyzing the habits of your target audience to shape your efforts here. You need to back up your strategy with numbers due to the sheer number of social media platforms on the internet. Here are a few of the more popular spaces you should be considering.
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Yelp
Most of these platforms allow you to purchase ads to go along with the content you create. Younger audiences gravitate towards visual mediums, while older ones find themselves drawn towards more in-depth content. Will you get a bigger payoff spreading yourself around as many spaces as possible, or focusing on building up your brand in one or a few niche places?
What spaces bring more traffic to your website? How well do they work in allowing you to push visitors to visit your business in person? It pays to do thorough A/B on your ad and content output and measure the feedback before letting it go live. Doing this legwork could prevent you from wasting money and time on an effort your audience ultimately deems unappealing.
Improve your Website
Social media gets so much focus when it comes to digital marketing that it can be easy to overlook the needs of your website. Don’t neglect the home page! Here are some tips on how you can make sure visitors have a great experience once they hit your landing page.
Invest in more personalized website experiences for your visitors. How well are you doing giving each visitor to feel like they matter? Every visitor should see information tailored to their likes. Here’s where you might start looking into adding different AI and machine learning tools that learn your visitor’s habits and adapt to it.
What about your layout? Your website should be a good reflection of your and distinguish yourself from competitors. Go for a clean, fresh feel that’s easy to navigate. Here are some other tips to keep in mind when considering a revamp for 2019.
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
- Your landing pages should have information visitors want
All content should be SEO-optimized for premium rankings in search engines
Change Things Up
Start by experimenting with videos to post on your website or share on social media. Rethink the posts you’re putting up and whether they have the intended effect. Try to find new and unique ways to interact with your audience. Let your customers know you appreciate positive reviews and make sure those with negative experiences realize you’re listening. Don’t compromise your brand. Staying authentic to your story is critical for customer loyalty.
You need to look beyond the big-name spaces like Facebook and be willing to experiment with newer platforms. Don’t be caught unawares by shifts that leave you behind your competitors.
Consider pairing up with local influencers to promote your brand. Choose people who appeal to the audience you’re looking to attract. It’s an effective way to bring in more traffic to your website and showroom.
Document your Budget
How much of your company revenue should you commit to your digital marketing budget? Most companies spend an average of 5% to 15% towards these efforts. Your final estimate should take the following factors into account.
- What do you consider a successful ROI?
- Will you be keeping your efforts in-house or hiring an outside firm to manage things?
- Are you planning to increase your marketing efforts on social media?
- What type of balance are you looking before between paid and organic traffic results?
- What tools will you use in your efforts?
- How much do you want to spend in remodeling your web and social media output?
The answers to these questions will help shape where you focus your dollars. Businesses more interested in organic results will need to find creative new ways to shape their content. That means spending more to create quality videos or hiring experienced writers to create optimized content for your web and social media sites.
Make room in your budget for more Facebook advertising if that’s where your audience spends most of their time. Boost your Google Ads budgets if you’ve had a decent amount of success from different campaigns. Sense a trend? Find what works and allocate your budget on the things that work and the lessons you want to learn.
Watch your Digital Advertising Spend
Try not to spread yourself too thin. Most small businesses must contend with limited resources. Use the information you’ve gathered on your audience when deciding where to focus your dollars.
You should always know how much you’ve directed towards any portion of your marketing. It’s very easy to bleed money by not keeping track of how your ad spending fluctuates due to increased traffic or wasted dollars in an unsuccessful media space. Redirect your money if it doesn’t appear you’re getting the ROI you’re expecting.
A Marketing Firm Who Can Execute Your Vision
It takes a lot to execute a digital marketing strategy successfully. A lot gets lost when you’re also trying to manage the day to day aspects of your company. It’s often not possible for a small company to spare the necessary workforce towards online marketing efforts.
MicroD takes care of all this legwork and leaves you to what you do best. We provide you with everything from email marketing to managing your website and social media output. Our company works to execute the vision you lay out and come up with the hard tactics necessary for success. Contact our digital marketing team to start planning your 2019 digital marketing strategy.
