How is your digital marketing strategy working out for you? If you don’t have one, you’ve got enormous potential with an untapped market to discover. If you do have a digital marketing strategy but you’re not doing as well as you should, keep reading to find out what to do about it.

Point A of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Marketing should be simple, right? You understand your business. You understand your clients. You know how to keep your business running right. You’re the expert in your field. But your marketing is falling flat. What’s worse, there’s no black-and-white reason you can see to point out WHY it falls flat.

So what’s the trick?

So many business owners we work with feel this way. Either you don’t have time to keep up with your digital marketing, you don’t have the expertise to design your website or you just don’t know where to start developing a digital marketing strategy.

And actually it’s as simple as just that: knowing where to start.

So start here: Know your numbers. Know your competitors. Know your data.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Know Your Numbers

We all love telling stories. Clients literally lean in when you get going on a good story. They are instant friend-finders.

But if no one can find your story, you’re not finding any friends.

Website Traffic

Picture yourself on stage giving a Ted Talk. How packed is your auditorium? How many people are listening to you? Are they leaving mid-speech?

Your website traffic gives you a snapshot of your auditorium — your market. Know how big your audience is.

Social Media Traffic

Websites tell a static story, and that’s important. But your social media ups the game by making that story interactive. Knowing your social media traffic and activity numbers tells you how influential (or non-influential) you are.

Website Ranking

These numbers are going to help determine the third type of number: Ranking. There are a few key indicators to know, such as:

your page rank — Where you show up in Google’s search results

your trust score — How trustworthy is your site (backlinko.com goes a little more in depth here)

your backlinks — links on other sites that “link back” to your site

Keyword Ranking

These are the words web users type into the search field to find your site. The higher you rank with a specific keyword, the higher your site will show up on the search results list.

Take a few minutes to Google the keywords for your business. Then plug them into Google Rank Checker (free!) to get your current keyword ranking.

Email List Size

The size and organization of our email lists is also very important. If you have several thousand active email addresses that you’ve collected (with permission from the owner, of course) you can use email marketing in a very effective way.

How big is your list, and how do you have it segmented so you can easily identify how to target these customers?

2. Know Your Competitors

You probably know who your competitors are. But do you know what they’re doing?

Remember SWOT Analysis from business school? This would be the time to whip that out and aim it at your competition. Super simple, and it gets you inside their heads!

• What does that company do better than anyone else?
• What do they need to improve on?
• Who do they influence really well? Not so well?
• How strong is their marketing message? Where is it weak?
• What do you do better than they do?
• Where is their audience?
• How do they reach their audience?

Write up a persona of your competitors. Describe them as if you could walk up and introduce yourself.

Tool Tip:

Google Alerts — Free. Alerts your inbox anytime your competitor is mentioned online.

3. Know Your Data

I love the story of the lead generation project we did for a golf construction market leader. The company’s 1,300% increase in website leads in 1 year began with reviewing data. That’s right — knowing your data.

Over the year, the growth for this market leader (yes, they were already the market leader) all stemmed from that first set of data.

Here’s how you can do it with your business.

Record your Activity

Look back over the past 12 months and record every marketing activity your business performed. Don’t forget to include current performance as well. No fancy tool tip, just use a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Gather the Results

Next — and this can be difficult sometimes — record the results.

Now, many times, small to mid-sized businesses don’t have the manpower, the know-how or the technical expertise to record marketing results. If this is you, don’t worry. Do the best you can.

Organize the Data

Once you’ve gathered your numbers, analyzed your competition and recorded your data, get it all organized. Your goal here is to have a clear picture you can paint for your marketing agency. Again, stick with a good Excel layout so it’s easy to use and to keep updated.

Now you know where you are

You’ve just armed yourself with the three most important “knows” to boost your sales with a solid digital marketing strategy.

And don’t get frustrated with inefficient agencies or ineffective marketing strategies. If you can tell us exactly where you’re beginning, we can give you the road map to your goals. It’s what we do.

 
Hey – Don’t forget to follow all six steps to a successful digital marketing strategy!