How To Significantly Improve Your Online Marketing

With today’s economy, it’s important for small businesses like yours to be creative and efficient… especially when you don’t have HUGE marketing budgets or teams of people to help you!

Here are 5 things I have learned to significantly improve your online marketing:

1. Measure Everything

If you are doing any sort of online marketing, you need to be tracking your website traffic and conversions properly.

Google Analytics is your friend and it’s free! Trust me, the data you collect is oh-so-useful to identify your ideal target customer, understand, and better reach them.

Here’s just a few things you should be measuring…

-Should you be spending more time on Pinterest (or another social media platform)?
-Are you converting lookers into buyers?
-Which pages and posts are most read? Write more on those that are popular!
-How many visitors do you have to your site – each day, each week, each month?

If you don’t know these answers, you will once you start using Google Analytics. Want more reasons to use Google Analytics? Read my ‘Top 7 reasons to use Google Analytics on your website’.

2. Improve A Lot Of Things, One At A Time

Have you ever heard the saying, “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: One bite at a time!” It’s important to break down something big into manageable small tasks, so that the task isn’t so overwhelming and can be accomplished sooner.

As a busy business owner, you can easily get overwhelmed by focusing only on the big things. The key is to create a master list of tasks and then break each task down into ‘smaller pieces’ that could be improved one small task at a time.

For example, if you are looking at updating your existing website or blog you could break it down into small tasks such as:

-Creating an eye-catchy HEADER
-Determining which main SITE NAVIGATION is most important for your reader
-Understanding which COPY your reader gravitates most towards. Not sure, get Google Analytics.
-Determining which FONTS are your favorites. Not sure, a great place to start is www.dafont.com
-Collecting the style of IMAGES you love.
-Gathering AD PLACEMENT ideas. It’s always great to show your designer examples of others sites with ad placements that you like and would like to emulate.
-Deciding on the sort of FOOTER you would like.
-Creating an INSPIRATION BOARD to collect all of your favorite ideas, concepts and styles! A lot of our clients provide us with a Pinterest Board – this works great.

It’s important to work through each task individually.

Some improvements will be simple (and if you know how, you could even make these improvements at each stage yourself), others might be harder (such as improving the footer) and will need a professional to handle this for you.

This is also why we’ve created 10-Minute Marketing posts – these are quick, online marketing actions that you can start doing immediately and with just 10 minutes of your time! These help you break down an overwhelming task, into small, doable time bites! You can check out a couple of these here and here.

3. Look For Interesting Topics/Stories

If your site has quite a bit of copy (and you’re measuring what is most popular/read), you’ll know the types of topics that lead to interesting stories for your readers.

I use readers’ questions that I’ve received via email and social media to help me create interesting stories. When I see a similar question asked multiple times, I know there are a number of other people that would like this information as well.

Another good way is to conduct a survey. Back in April, I conducted a survey “What would you like to see on Your Marketing BFF”. Once I reviewed the data, I had all kinds of popular topics to pull from. Note: The most important thing is that when you get your data back, start looking for interesting topics and stories to write about!

4. Become A Curator

Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing, and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest.

By bringing together other people’s content you can create resources that your audience will find useful. Here are five models of content curation:

1. Aggregation is about pulling together all the relevant information about a topic into one location. Example: B. Lovely Events
2. Distillation is the process of curating information sources into a more digestible format. Example: Toot Sweet 4 Two
3. Elevation is the act of compiling lots of smaller pieces of content to identify a long-term trend. Example: 12 Logo Design Trends of 2014-2015
4. Mashups is blending original and curated content into a fresh, original take. Example: What Your Company Logo Says About Your Brand (infographic)
5. Chronology is the creation of a timeline of events about a topic. Example: Pinterest Case Study

5. Focus On The Important Things

When looking to significantly improve your online marketing methods, it is important to remain focused on the key end goals of GROWTH and PROFIT. Never lose sight of these goals – everything that you do to improve your business should tie back to these.

 

Cover Image Source : O My Darlings