5 Ways To Boost Your Digital Marketing In 2020

A new decade means new opportunities for marketing and growing your business.

In this article, (kindly written by and all credit to Sam Frost),  we are going to cover 5 effective strategies that you can use to boost the performance of your digital marketing in 2020 and beyond.

Remember, the business that doesn’t get found by its target customers will always struggle to make sales!

 

1. Ensure You Have Correct Analytics & Tracking Installed

A common mistake that I see business owners make is not having the right analytics and tracking setup installed on their websites.

Being able to track metrics like:

* Where your visitors come from (both geographically and in terms of channels like social media, organic search etc)

* What they look at on your site

* How many turn into inquiries and sales

are all incredibly valuable.

 

Why? 

 

Because this allows you to better understand what is working (and what isn’t) when it comes to your digital marketing.

Once you understand this, you can then prioritise the channels, strategies, demographics and geographic areas that are performing best for your business.

I see far too many people try to “swim upstream” against the current of how their business naturally operates and grows, by chasing marketing opportunities that aren’t well aligned to their audience and overall strategy.

Correct use of analytics and tracking will help you to solve this problem. At a minimum, you need Google Analytics installed on your site. However, I also recommend using Google Tag Manager (to make things like tracking email or phone button clicks easier) along with Google Search Console to assist with SEO.

A good tracking setup makes identifying opportunities and eliminating “losses” so much easier. 

 

2. Understand Your Value Proposition & Benefits

Many businesses spend far too much time promoting features, as opposed to benefits.

The truth is that most people don’t care that much about how many features your product or service has; they care far more about whether or not you solve the pain or answer the question they have.

In my experience, the feature-focused way of marketing generally stems from a poor understanding of the value your business brings to the market.

If you don’t understand your value in the market, then it is far too easy to fall back on feature-based marketing (or - even worse - price-based marketing).

Therefore, make it an objective in 2020 to develop and refine your “value proposition”, and then ensure you weave that into every element of your marketing.

The easiest way to start is to ask yourself “what problem am I trying to solve for my target customer?”

Off the back of this, you can look at the benefits your product/service offers to solve that problem.

You will need to spend lots of time and energy “shining the stone” of your value proposition ... but it is one of the most valuable marketing exercises you can undertake.

Remember the following saying - “in the absence of value, I question the price”. 

 

3. Understand the Value of a Lead

Along with understanding your value, it is critical for marketing success that you understand what a lead (or even a sale) is worth to your business.

One of the best advantages that digital marketing offers us as business owners is the ability to track metrics, and track leads and sales back to the channels/campaigns we are running.

By understanding what a lead or sale is actually worth to your business, you will be able to combine this with the data you collect doing your digital marketing to determine what elements of your marketing are profitable, and which need further attention.

Understanding lead value will also help you to build confidence to be a bit more confident and bold in your marketing.

It may well be that by spending a bit extra each month on Facebook Ads, or Google Ads, or content marketing, you are able to generate substantially more leads.

As long as these are costing you less than they are worth to your business, then you are “in the money” (in a mathematical sense, at least).

Understanding this will also make it easier to eliminate marketing methods that aren’t working well for your business - it is not uncommon to see campaigns or strategies that are driving leads/sales at a cost that is higher than what that lead/sale is worth.

If this is the case, you either need to refine what you are doing, try to increase the value of a customer (to rebalance the maths in your favour) or stop what you are doing.

4. Build Longevity - future proof your marketing with content and audience building

One of the most appealing aspects of digital marketing (at least to the many business owners I speak to) is the amount of opportunities there are to leverage ad platforms and other technologies to your advantage.

For example, remarketing - those ads that chase you around the Internet - has been a true boon for business owners worldwide.

Now I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. As part of your ongoing strategy, you should be leveraging tools like remarketing on Facebook and Google to your advantage.

However, I also think it is critical to future-proof and build longevity in your marketing.

Let’s take remarketing as an example. It is all predicated on a website visitor’s browser being hit with your remarketing pixel (e.g. Facebook pixel or Google remarketing tag).

Imagine all of your marketing & sales funnel is built off the ability to do this kind of tracking and targeting (and I have met a fair few people who are basically dependent on this).

What would happen if you lost this ability? How would your business survive?

A change to privacy law, for example, could require you to seek permission before you track and remarket to a site visitor. How many people would actually bother to permit this?

Therefore, I believe the best ways to future proof and build longevity in your marketing are:

1. Place a focus on developing and publishing quality content that answers your audience’s questions and solves their problems. Distribute this across as many channels as you can dedicate time to (and as many as make sense for your audience). If remarketing disappears overnight, or Facebook decides to double your cost per click on your ads, that doesn’t mean that those burning questions and pain points will go away! Good content will drive people to your site via organic Google searches, social media and more.
2. Develop an email list. There is an old saying that “the money is in the list” - and I certainly subscribe to that philosophy. An email list is much harder to take from you than a social media audience, or an ad campaign. You can take your audience with you anywhere with a good email list.
3. Build a brand. Think about an internationally recognised company like Apple. If they disappeared off Facebook or other social media tomorrow, would their business dry up? No, because people seek out Apple directly. They know Apple, they see Apple on a daily basis, and they go directly to Apple for their needs. I’m not saying try to become the next Apple - but do put emphasis on building a brand and business that people come to directly when they need the solution you offer.
4. Dedicate more time, more regularly 

 

It’s no great secret (and comes as no surprise to anyone) that marketing - even digital marketing - is time consuming for business owners.

It can be an enormous challenge to find enough time in the day to run every aspect of your business ... hence why marketing often falls by the wayside.

However, if you are going to do one thing in 2020 to grow your business online, then I encourage you to make it dedicating time each day to your marketing and growth.

You don’t need to spend hours writing blog posts, or making videos, or posting on social media.

You do need to allocate some time, however.

Even 15 minutes a day in a consistent fashion is better than letting your marketing slip.

In that time, you could make some quick posts on social media, and possibly even squeeze in a new article or blog post every week or so.

As you start to see results building, you can then justify dedicating more time to your marketing as well.

I genuinely believe that being methodical and diligent in your digital marketing is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. Consistency is key!

For more information, visit my site at www.samfrost.co.nz 

Thanks to Sam Frost for letting us publish his article on the Spotty Lizard website.