6 New Year’s Resolutions For Your Digital Marketing Strategy

As the year comes to an end, you’ll naturally be starting to think about your Digital Marketing Strategy for next year. If not, you should be! Here are six New Year’s Resolutions to help improve your digital strategy.

Start Planning

Step one of mapping out your Digital Marketing Strategy is starting to plan. Think about what worked well for you this last year, and even historically, and how you can use your learnings to influence your marketing from now on. Planning and being organised will take the strain off your to-do list when you’re back after the New Year celebrations.

Your Marketing Goals should mirror your overall business goals. By preplanning, you’ll have plenty of time to align your content across multiple digital platforms such as your Website, Social Media Accounts and Email Campaigns.

Paid Social Media Ads

Just like most marketing methods, on Social Media, you’ve got to pay to play. Pay to Play means, to get the most out of the platform and reach a broad audience, you need to assign some Marketing budget to put towards paid advertising.

You can run Ads across most Social Media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Take some time to think about where your target audience is most likely to be spending their time and start there. If you choose to advertise on Facebook, then you can promote the same Ad on Instagram with one single budget on their Ads Manager platform.

Optimise Your Website

Optimising your website should lead to an increase in quality traffic and, ultimately, conversions. There are two main ways of optimising, the first being mobile and the second being for SEO.

Mobile Optimisation means that each page of your site works just as well on mobile as it does on a desktop, meaning users can browse seamlessly between devices. Mobile optimisation is critical as over half of all web traffic is now on mobile.

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation and is what determines where your website appears in the search engine results listings. SEO includes everything from the speed your pages take to load to the content you upload. Give your site a little audit to ensure you’re optimising as best as you can for both points.

Training 

If you’ve got some downtime before the New Year, then how about investing in some digital marketing training? There are several courses available either for free or usually for a reasonable amount, online or face to face, that could really help your marketing going forward.

Before you sign up, think about where your marketing weaknesses are and what will support your business best. Do you need to improve your Social Media efforts, or perhaps it’s your copywriting skills? It may not even be you that needs the training; maybe an employee could do with a refresher.

Maximise Google My Business

Google My Business is a tool that allows businesses to manage their online presence on Google. More often than not, the information that you list on your Google My Business will be the first thing any potential customers will see. Google My Business allows you space to add your opening times, locations and website as well as imagery and services.

It’s often the case that businesses set up a Google My Business account as a quick win when they set up and subsequently forget it exists. You must keep on top of the information that you share online, especially Google and make it as easy as possible for your customers to find and engage with you.

Instagram Stories 

Instagram Stories, and Facebook, to an extent, are a great way of engaging with your customers throughout the day without committing to sharing a post on your grid. Stories last for 24 hours and come equipped with engagement driving stickers such as Polls, Q&A’s and Countdowns. More and more, Instagram users will log on to the app, scroll through stories and then bounce off. They appeal perfectly to short attention spans without the need to worry about vanity metrics such as the number of likes or comments. Furthermore, Stories can often be a more authentic piece of content which will connect the viewer to the business and start to build rapport.

With just 15 seconds per segment, you must use your time wisely and be creative. Despite the ability to ‘hold to read’, too much text will be off-putting, so consider playing around with videos. If you have more than 10,000 followers, you can add a ‘swipe up’ URL. If you’re new to Instagram Stories, then try playing around on your personal account first!

It doesn’t need to be #NewYearNewYou, just take some time to make sure you’re getting as much exposure as possible – in the most efficient way.