#Goals. We’re not talking about relationship goals, squad goals or workout goals. This trendy hashtag is taking on a whole new meaning as it relates to digital. Whether you want to drive website traffic or improve online engagement, here are some ways you can reach your digital goals.
Drive website traffic
For a website itself to be valuable, marketers must use a combination of push and pull tactics to increase website visits among qualified users. Inbound tactics such as social media marketing, content marketing, pay per click advertising and search engine optimization aim to increase online visibility and drive valuable website traffic through direct links. More traditional tactics such as print media, direct mail, and more can also be a successful way to supplement these digital marketing efforts by creating a surround-sound effect. Ensuring quality website visits, many channels like Facebook and Google Ads offer strategic targeting capabilities that can be leveraged when placing ads online. Additionally, creating a consistent experience throughout the consumer journey, from promotional pieces to the website, will help avoid bounces and gain consumer confidence that should help contribute to conversions.
Improve online engagement
Engaging with consumers online is a great way to build and maintain positive relationships. Social media is one of the most popular channels that allow brands to have meaningful conversations with an engaged community. It can be as simple as asking questions and responding to comments, or something more sophisticated, such as a contest that gets users excited about an offer. Allowing brands to reconnect with users that have previously visited your website, remarketing offers another effective way to engage audiences. Remarketing advertisements can be surfaced on social media, like Facebook, or even search engines and their display networks. While remarketing is a very ’in your face’ tactic, content marketing is a more subtle approach to engaging audiences online. Through valuable content, such as articles or infographics, content marketing works to attract and educate individuals based on lifestyle, life stage and current financial goals.
Enhance website experience
Providing an engaging and interactive website experience can help brands keep visitors on your website longer and encourage return visits. This type of interaction can build consumer loyalty and value. Using personalization to customize a user’s website experience based on previous browser activity, geographic location or known traits is a great way to make your website content more relevant to the user. This type of customization benefits users, but it is also good for business, as promotions are targeted to specific interests and therefore more likely to prompt conversion. Additionally, maintaining a robust blog is another great way to improve your overall website experience. If planned appropriately, it delivers fresh content regularly and supports SEO, while giving visitors valuable information and a reason to return.
Conform to ADA standards
ADA conformance is currently one of the top trending digital priorities, and for good reason. It is driven by an effort to make websites equally accessible for all users, including those with disabilities. Making your website conformant against current ADA guidelines protects your business from potential lawsuits, but it improves the overall website experience and usability for all visitors. Because websites are constantly being updated, ADA conformance is an ongoing initiative. Be sure to prioritize and plan regular site scans to stay in alignment with these standards as your website evolves and guidelines evolve.
Increase rankings in search results
Achieving prominent rankings in search results is key to online visibility and ensuring that individuals looking for your products and services discover your brand. This requires a research-based search engine optimization strategy that is consistent with current best practices. Developing a successful SEO strategy involves planning your site architecture around target themes, and infusing optimal keywords and phrases into website meta data and page content so that it is valuable to both visitors and search crawlers. It also entails creating valuable content – from product details to educational information – that will align with consumers’ needs and search queries. For competitive topics and keywords, a targeted pay per click campaign can supplement organic SEO traffic and attract audiences on specific search terms.
Improve tracking and conversions
With digital, marketers have the ability to track a variety of online activity including user behavior, conversion sources, and much more. Setting up custom tracking with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager can help businesses better understand how consumers are engaging with your website, helping to identify what is working and revealing opportunities for improvement. It can also identify common conversion sources, which can be used to inform your overall marketing strategy and budget allocation to different channels in an effort to maximize advertising dollars. Regardless of the promotional platform, to maximize conversions, visitors should be driven to a strategic landing page that eliminate unnecessary page elements to focus the user on the offer and objective.
Redesign a website
Updating the look and feel of a website is one of the most common initiatives businesses take on to achieve a variety of goals. But there is more to it than just developing a more modern, responsive design. One of the most fundamental aspects of a website redesign is the content management system that it is built on. This will ultimately determine the level of customization you can take on, site features, functionality, integrations and ease of ongoing site management. As an essential initial step in any design, a site architecture and wireframing strategy should be developed, since these tactics work together to outline a blueprint for the website. Another important component of a website redesign is content. When the overall site strategy and design changes, copywriting is often critical to align with the new format, represent the brand and support search engine optimization. Finally, before launching your new website, ensure that you have selected a reliable and secure hosting partner to deliver the best possible user experience. Also consider creating a launch campaign or website tour to generate awareness and excitement, as well as orient users to the new website.
Stand out among competitors
With so much marketplace clutter, it can sometimes be a challenge to stand out. Having a strong brand, understanding of the competitive landscape, and remaining visible to consumers is essential to effectively competing. Branding and positioning – from visuals and values to personality – are extremely important to establishing a distinct voice in the market. Professional copywriting can also help tell your brand story and engage users, while incorporating SEO keywords to support your positioning in search results relative to competitors. For hard-to-rank keywords and phrases, using pay per click adverting in combination with SEO is a great way to further increase your brand visibility among other businesses. And if you don’t even know where to start, performing a competitive review is a great way to evaluate what other competitors are doing online – from products and promotions to the overall consumer experience – and identify opportunities to better compete.
Create consistency online and offline
Establishing a consistent experience across all channels is essential to maintaining a strong brand, building consumer recognition and generating overall trust with your audience. Running disjointed advertisements online and in print, or on other more traditional marketing channels, can create uncertainty and interrupt the consumer journey. Instead, marketers should develop an integrated marketing campaign that uses the same imagery and messaging across all promotion pieces and channels. While it seems like a large initiative, creating reusable branded templates can make developing integrated marketing campaigns easier and efficient.
Depending on your objectives, ZAG offers a variety of digital strategy, design, marketing and technology solutions to help you achieve them. Learn more about our services, or contact us to discuss your digital goals.