Digital marketing is an ever-evolving channel. What worked 20 years ago might not work today. For instance, 20 years ago, majority of the web traffic was desktop and today it’s mobile.
Text content dominated the internet until early 2000s and today it’s all about video. Needless to say, YouTube + Netflix accounts for over 50% of the web traffic worldwide.
Today, people spend more time on social media than anything else. That’s exactly why you need to level-up your digital strategies every few years.
So here’s a quick recipe to revamp your digital marketing strategy. It’s crafted primarily for those who already have a digital media presence.
However, I believe this to be useful even if you have an abandoned website, or do not have a digital presence at all.
1. Design
- Redesign your logo to match the new design standards (a flat minimalist logo, maybe?).
- Update the logo, favicon, and app icon of your website.
- Update your social media profile pictures.
- Update your social media ads with new creatives.
- Use high-resolution images in your design.
- Enhance your website design with new stock photos to give a fresh new look.
- Refresh your social media ads.
- Refresh your media kit.
- Stop using Adobe Flash in your web pages.
- Enable dark mode for your mobile app.
- Consider a dark mode for your website as well.
2. Marketing
- Plan your content hierarchy before fresh content creation.
- Do a competitive analysis based on the current industry players.
- Identify content and keyword gaps.
- Create fresh content to fill up the content and keyword gaps.
- Consider search intent for the targeted keyword when creating new content.
- Redefine your sales funnel.
- Monitor your organic search traffic trend. Tip: Google is still the number one targeted traffic source for most websites.
- Add retargeting campaigns in your digital marketing strategy.
- Create a business blog.
- Create listings on major online directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. (smaller directories pull data from larger ones).
- Update and optimize the directory listings you already have to make the information consistent.
- Ask your customers to leave reviews on Google Maps, Facebook, Yelp, and the likes.
- Testimonials on your own website are great but make sure that they are credible and genuine.
- Monitor and reply to online reviews to show users that you ‘care’.
3. Development
- Redesign your website (if it’s more than 4 years old) to meet the new web standard.
- Improve the website architecture so as to enable effortless navigation by users and seamless crawling by search engines.
- Improve the site navigation of your website in such a way that all the web pages are accessible within 3 clicks from the homepage.
- Update robots.txt to reflect the latest website architecture.
- Add an SSL Certificate to your website as it’s embarrassing to show your users as your website is “Not Secure”.
- Improve the user experience of your website by putting yourself in your visitor’s shoes.
- Make sure your website is responsive and is optimized for mobile phones.
- Use larger font to improve the reading experience of the users.
- Improve the permalink structure of your website to reflect the best practice (short = better).
- Optimize your website speed (ideally the page loading speed must be < 2 seconds).
- Fix technical errors on your website suggested by top website performance analyzing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, WebPageTest, GTmetrix, etc.
- Update your website’s content management system (CMS), plugins, add-ons, etc.
- Add a content delivery network (CDN) to supercharge your website (or at least add a caching plugin).
- Switch to a better web server (ideally one with a better server response time).
- Set a preferred domain (with or without WWW) for your website.
- Add traffic analytics to your website as you can’t improve what you are not measuring.
- Use a heat map on your website to see on what elements the users are spending time.
- Use data from your traffic analysis and heat map to improve the conversion rate of your website.
4. Content
- Blog posts. Social media posts. Images. Video. Podcast. It’s all content ā find out what works best for you.
- Create more pillar content as it gives better ROI.
- Publish case studies with real numbers.
- Create infographics about your industry.
- Add visual content (images, charts, infographics, videos, etc.) in your blog posts when it’s relevant and useful.
- Add more details to your existing content when it’s required.
- Add videos in your content marketing efforts as people prefer to learn about a new product from an article or video instead of a paid ad.
- Rewrite old pillar content that are 4 years old.
- Refresh pillar content that are less than 4 years old.
- Update the call-to-action of your old pages so as to reflect the new offers, products, services, or business.
- Update numbers and data on your web pages (and blog posts) as they become inaccurate over time.
- Repurpose the content in different formats like infographics, ebook, slides, etc.
- Brainstorm new topics based on analytics data and competitor analysis.
- Create an editorial calendar.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
On-Page SEO
- Do a content audit.
- Create a list of your existing content.
- Get the traffic sources of your website.
- Find the top performing pages on your website.
- Pull data (click-through rates, rankings, keywords, etc.) from Google Search Console.
- Identify pages with high bounce rate.
- Identify pages with maximum backlinks.
- Identify pages with maximum time on page.
- Identify the content formats (listicles, infographics, micro-posts, etc.) that worked and didn’t work.
- Revamp your content marketing strategy based on your findings.
- To improve your SEO.
- To increase audience engagement.
- To improve your conversion rate.
- Create a strategic content map to deliver the right content at the right time to the right people.
- Content mapping lets you outline how every single content relates to and supports the customer journey.
- Connect each piece of your content to a specific stage of the customer journey.
- Visualize new opportunities to meet the needs of your customer.
- Create a buyer persona which is essentially a research-based profile of your targeted customer.
- Use the buyer persona to describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the problems and challenges they face, how they make a purchase decision, etc.
- Visualize the journey your customer takes on their way to doing business with you.
- Identify what content works best in each phase of the customer journey.
- Create a log of the content that you already have.
- Map existing content to the relevant phase of the customer journey.
- Create fresh targeted content to fill the gaps.
- Consolidate duplicate URLs with canonicals.
- Identify pages that’s generating zero traffic.
- Delete (or redirect) obsolete pages or pages that don’t have any value.
- Remove (or redirect) duplicate content.
- Tweak your SEO tags (title, description, and focus keywords).
- Optimize your images (file name, size, alt tags, alt-text) to bring more targeted search traffic.
- Restructure the heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) of your pages to make it more reader/search friendly.
- Update the focus keywords of each pages to reflect the current search intent of the keywords that you are targeting.
- Update and republish your blog posts.
- Fix broken links and pages.
- Improve internal linking of your pages to improve the site architecture and reduce the bounce rate.
- Give search engines additional information about your content by adding schema markup to your web pages.
- Refresh the sitemap of your website to reflect the new website architecture.
- Claim your domain property on Google Search Console.
- Improve the click-through rate of your top performing pages by tweaking the titles and description.
Off-Page SEO
- Publish guest posts on authority blogs in your niche (even if it’s nofollow).
- Gain backlinks from different domains.
- Get backlinks from old authority websites in your niche.
- Update the links on your social media channels.
- Integrate Digital PR in your backlink strategy.
6. Paid Advertising
- Remove low-performing ads, keywords, and landing pages.
- Reduce ad spending on low ROI placements like in-app ads, display ads, pop ads, etc.
- Refresh your ad copies and creatives.
- Run Google Ads for your business (no matter what your business is) as Google still dominate the digital ad industry.
- Buy local search ads on Google.
- Try Facebook and Instagram Ads.
7. Social Media
- Update the business profile on your social media pages.
- Recheck the social media account settings ā to make use of new features.
- Stop pushing content to ALL platforms out there.
- Stop promoting ALL platforms.
- And stop creating content in ALL formats.
- Ignore the social media platforms that are not performing and focus only the ones that works for you.
- Add “Short Videos” in your marketing efforts.
- Make use of “LIVE” on Facebook and YouTube.
- Share useful content from other websites as well when it’s useful and relevant for your target audience.
- Verify, update and revamp your Google My Business profile.
- Try influencer marketing as they offer better ROI than celebrity endorsements.
- Boost your social media presence by buying social media ads (especially if you are new).
- Partner with non-competitive brands that targets similar audience for win-win partnerships.
- Build an email list as email is still one of the best things on the internet.
Have I missed something? If so, do get in touch or tweet me @maheshone.
Your friendly neighborhood blogger,
ā M
