By focusing on what’s most important marketers can improve digital marketing performance, producing predictable and repeatable results.
There’s always something shiny and new in digital marketing, ready to distract digital teams from focusing on what’s most important.
What’s most important may depend on your specific business and budget, but the fundamentals hold true not matter your context.
Businesses that dominate digital have developed the following five capabilities:
- Analytics
- Search engine marketing
- User experience optimisation
- Customer relationship management
- Content
Dominate digital doing these five things from Clue
Analytics
Analytics are the foundation of everything we do as digital marketers. They should inform your digital strategy and be used to continuously optimise performance. This means moving beyond vanity metrics and being clear on what lead indicators matter most. Having people to interpret the data and provide actionable recommendations is critical to not just know what did happen but what will happen.
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager correctly is a good start. Those more advanced can look at implementing a customer data platform and developing capability in predictive analytics.
Here are some tips on how to setup Google Analytics for your business.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Successful marketing starts with being discovered. It’s all about location, location, location. And for us that means search engines.
Google wants to provide people with the best results possible. It does so by looking for websites and content that is relevant and from a reputable source.
The art and science of search engine optimisation is to improve a brand’s organic rankings by building authority, demonstrating the relevance of your content and being seen as trustworthy website by Google (and other search engines, of course).
Building a brand’s relevance, reputation and social trust is long-term play. Like compound interest, results increase exponentially over time. Leading brands also use search engine advertising to appear at the top of the search engine results page, quickly.
Businesses that dominate digital invest in search engine marketing to make sure they’re present at moments of customer intent.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
Increasing the percent of people who complete an action on your website – be that buy a product, call the business, or sign up for a service – is the most efficient way to grow your business.
People visiting your website have already shown intent. The task of the marketer is to increase their motivation and decrease friction on the path to conversion.
We do this by improving the user experience and iterative testing. If this is an always is done consistently, you’ll always be increasing the volume and value of conversions.
Lots of little wins can result in big gains.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Customer relationship management is all about improving the customer experience and increasing lifetime value.
Doing so is about creating intentional and personalised experiences for your customers. This is done by understanding your audience, mapping their journey, identifying and prioritising pain points, then designing solutions to delight customers.
Customer relationship management takes place across many channels. The most common however are email and SMS. While not necessary, leading organisations are now using marketing automation software, customer data platforms and data integration to provide personalised experiences at scale. This can be cost prohibitive for smaller businesses, but it’s worth establishing good foundations now as software will become more accessible in coming years.
Content
While analytics is the foundation of everything we do, content is required to do everything. And few businesses have the ability to have an inhouse brand newsroom at their disposal. Yet in a world where the competition for people’s attention is fierce, quality content is what will make the difference. A key lesson from business that dominate digital is to ensure content is resourced appropriately from the outset of a project or program.