While you can set goals for your business at any time of the year, starting at the beginning is a great way to track how you performed throughout 2023 alone. One thing that we can continually improve upon is our digital advertising strategy as this advertising medium is constantly changing. Because we’re living in the digital era, digital marketing has become imperative to the success of your marketing and advertising plan.
If your goal is to focus on improving your digital advertising this year, but you’re not sure where to start, we’ve curated a list of 5 tips to get you started!
5 ways to improve your digital marketing this year
Whether consumers are on their phones or their computers, nearly everyone is utilizing the internet every day. This can include their work emails, personal emails, social media platforms, online shopping, games, exercise sites and apps, video streaming, and more. With all of these options available, there are an unlimited amount of ways for you to reach your target audience digitally.
To take advantage of all this potential and improve your business’s digital marketing and advertising capabilities, we recommend considering these tips:
1. Learn more about your target audience
There is an unlimited number of ways to reach potential consumers. It can get overwhelming, expensive, and difficult to track if you try to use them all. Therefore, you must understand your target audience as fully as you can.
Knowing age range, demographics, location, purchasing patterns, online habits, etc., can help you curate ads to attract their attention on the right platforms. For instance, knowing how each generation shops in 2023 can help you get more insight into what platforms will help you expand your organization’s digital reach. Consumers in the Millennial and Gen-Z age range will have online habits that include time on apps like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and other online shopping sites and apps. Gen-Z and Baby Boomer consumers are more likely to be reached through shopping searches, TV ads, and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Ways you can find your target audience and learn more about them include:
- Social media engagement
- Utilize online surveys
- Perform and/or analyze market research in your industry
- Study your competitors
- Create a target persona for further study
- Determine who’s not your target audience
- Always revisit and revise based on new data
- Take advantage of Google Analytics
2. Enhance and target your SEO to reach more consumers
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great way to ensure that your content has high searchability for your target audience. If you’re not using the right keywords, potential consumers aren’t going to be able to find you through a simple internet search. While paid ads are a necessary and great option to reach them, SEO is a way to do it organically, and when website traffic is organic, it’s not cutting into your marketing budget.
To ensure your website can rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), you must have a strong SEO strategy:
- Perform thorough SEO keyword research and use both long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords
- Search engines only read text, so, it’s important to use text in “navigation and links,” keep URLs short and simple, and optimize your page’s loading speed as well as avoid dead and broken links and duplicate content
- Consumers are always looking for something specific from SERPs. So, you need to consistently post search-engine-optimized content, as well as pay attention to the SEO of each page on your website through headings, titles, meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and URLs
- Make sure your content includes external links, internal links, and backlinks, and are attentive to content length and added multimedia
How much attention you give your SEO strategy will equate to how high you will rank on SERPs and how easy it is for your target audience to find you!
3. Invest time in the optimization of your landing pages
Landing pages, according to Semrush, are “a webpage designed to persuade users to take one specific action.” Users can get there through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, social media posts, SERPs, etc., with a main goal in mind whether it’s to purchase a product, find specific information, sign up for something, and the list goes on. Because they’re there for a specific purpose, it’s important that the landing page can easily fulfill that need.
When website visitors have to dig for the thing they’re looking for when they reach the landing page you set up, there’s a good chance they’ll move on, and you lose a conversion. Landing pages need to include a catchy headline and subheading, supporting copy, forms (for “lead-generating landing pages”), and a call to action. It’s also important to pay attention to SEO for landing pages by taking actions such as:
- Performing thorough SEO keyword research and using primary keywords, secondary keywords, and semantic keywords
- Writing search-engine-optimized title tags (aka meta-titles), alt tags, meta-descriptions, and headings; and including internal links and thoughtfully labeled images and videos
- Writing SEO-friendly URLs
- Optimizing the performance and page-loading speeds of the pages
- Including backlinks
- Including negative keywords in Google Ads to increase conversions
4. Discover which digital platforms are right for your business
As previously stated, there are a lot of ways to market and advertise digitally. It’s not likely cost-effective or an efficient use of your time to try to use them all. Understanding your target audience on a deeper level will help you determine which platforms will be right for your digital marketing plan.
Based on what you discover, there are a variety of platforms you can use, including:
- Google Ads
- Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Reddit) and running social media ad campaigns
- Email lists
- TV ads
- In-app ads through Apple and Google Play
In addition to running ad campaigns and creating an online presence on the right platforms for your audience base, it’s important to run ad performance analytics, too, through things like website performance, ROI, conversion rates, etc. Some platforms will help you keep track of multiple performance analytics in one space, but most platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads) provide you with a space to run those analytics yourself.
5. Get creative with your website
Rebranding your organization and redesigning your website are great ways to modernize your look, create consistency across platforms, become more recognizable, incorporate web development trends, and stand out against your competition. “Logos, company colors, designs,” fonts, and even a mascot are great visual elements you can include throughout your website, social media platforms, and ads.
By investing in your brand, you will be able to better capture the attention of your target audience, hold that attention, and help them remember you in the future!
The bottom line
We’ve officially entered 2023 and it’s time to leave your outdated digital advertising strategy behind. By following these tips and investing in your digital marketing, you’ll be able to watch the performance of your organization grow throughout the year.
Get in touch with us for help bringing your brand to the next level!