10 Tips to Help You Improve the Performance of Your Online Marketing Campaign
It’s safe to say that our online world is growing fast. Experts estimate that Google alone indexes around 30 to 50 billion web pages, with around 200 million active websites worldwide.
Of course, if you’re running an online brand, those figures might seem pretty daunting. After all, how can you make sure your small business stands out in that endless crowd of other sites?
Launching the right online marketing campaign can be a great way to get more eyes on your brand, but that’s often easier said than done. With every business jostling for visibility, only the most effective tactics will give your brand a leg up.
Tips to Improve Your Online Marketing Campaign
Not sure where to start? Let’s take a look at ten tried-and-tested strategies to streamline your online campaigns.
1. Get to Know Your Target Audience
If you don’t know who you’re targeting with your campaign, you may as well skip the steps below and throw in the towel. In order to increase your effectiveness and your ROI, every aspect of your campaign needs to be tailored to your audience. To get a feel for them, make sure you have answers to the following questions:
- Who are your target customers?
- What is their demographic information?
- What are their goals?
- What problems are they struggling with?
- How do your products and services solve those problems?
- Where do they spend their time online?
- What factors convince them to try a new product or service?
- What kinds of hobbies and interests are they involved in?
- What competitor products and services are they buying?
If you haven’t done so already, one great way to start narrowing down your target audience is to create detailed buyer personas. You can use these to understand your customers as you tailor your content.
You can also try some market research, or you can use free tools like Google Analytics to get a sense of the demographics of your current audience. Last, but not least, don’t hesitate to reach out to your existing customers for surveys and interviews to better understand them!
2. Set Clear Campaign Goals
It’s hard to tell if your marketing campaign is succeeding if your goals are too nebulous to understand. How can you tell when you’ve reached your destination when you don’t know where you’re headed?
Take some time on the front end to decide what you want to get out of the campaign. Are you looking for more direct sales, or do you want to get your hands on better leads? Do you need to increase your audience engagement, or are you trying to ramp up your revenue?
Once you have this overarching goal in mind, don’t forget to set a few smaller milestones to help you measure progress. This is easier when you manage your campaign performance with key performance indicators (KPIs). Tracking these smaller metrics can help you understand where you’re making progress and where your campaign is struggling.
3. Invest in Content Marketing
If there’s one part of your campaign strategy you should invest significant time, money, and effort in, it’s content. Note that when we say “content,” we aren’t just talking about website content and blogs, though those are important as well. These days, content can be anything from infographics to white papers to TikTok videos to online seminars.
Content is the backbone of any campaign. It’s impossible to make real progress when your content is subpar—or, worse, when you’re not sharing new content at all.
Great content tells the world what you do and why they should be interested. It allows you to tell powerful stories, connect with your customers on an emotional level, and encourage your audience to stick around for more. What’s more, it can improve your conversions, position your brand as an authority, build brand awareness, and increase your visibility online.
If you don’t feel like you have the expertise to craft high-quality content on your own, partnering with an expert is an investment worth making, especially because content creation tends to be one of the more cost-effective marketing strategies.
4. Research Your Competition
Your competitors may feel like an ongoing source of frustration when you’re trying to position your products in the market. However, they’re also a rich source of information about your audience and the strategies that succeed.
Use your direct and indirect competitors as case studies by analyzing everything from their website to their social media to their content and topics. Which of their tactics seem to work, and which don’t? What content and keywords are they focusing on, and how is their audience responding?
Competitor research isn’t always easy, but there are plenty of free online keyword and analytics tools that can help you get started. From there, consider placing your data into a competitive matrix to identify areas of improvement in your campaign.
5. Partner With a Specialist
Most of the items on this list require you and your team to have a fair bit of marketing experience and expertise—which may not always be the case. If you don’t consider yourself an expert, struggling through the research process and the trial-and-error effort you’ll need to succeed can be tough.
That’s where a marketing expert comes in. Outsourcing your marketing efforts to an experienced team can be a great way to get the results you want without wasting time and energy learning to do it yourself. Even better, it can help you improve your online marketing performance much faster than you could on your own.
Note that you can outsource as much or as little of the work as you choose. Digital marketing experts offer a huge range of services, from content marketing to SEO to conversion optimization. For the best results, make sure you’re working with a Google Partner like the experts at grizzlymarketing.com.
6. Take Advantage of Automation Tools
While digital tools can’t replicate the expertise of a marketing pro, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of automation tools that can help you with some of your simpler marketing tasks. This is especially true when you have more money than time, or when you want to focus on a few specific marketing channels.
Depending on what you’re looking for, you can find a huge range of digital tools to help.
Email automation tools, for example, can send out your emails on a regular schedule or after a customer performs a specific action. Social media tools can help you publish consistent content on a schedule, referral tools can solicit reviews on your behalf, and lead automation tools can help you follow up with the best leads fast. You can also find pricing automation tools to help you track competitor pricing, and ad tools to help automate your display ads.
Do your research to find the right tools for your brand, as a little automation can help you scale your marketing efforts fast.
7. Do More A/B Testing
A/B testing, also called “split testing,” is an easy way to compare two different versions of the same content. In campaigns that rely heavily on content like emails and landing pages, this simple tactic really works.
When you’re struggling to pinpoint what moves your audience to convert, this kind of testing is a great way to get objective insights. Is your audience reacting well to the video on your landing page, or do they like the infographic better? Are more people clicking on a button that says “Get Your Free Guide,” or is the “Learn More Here” a better option?
Even the smallest changes to your content can have a huge change on conversion rates, and the changes worth making aren’t always obvious at first glance. Though A/B testing takes time, especially because you’ll want to experiment with just one variable per test, it’s crucial for deciding which tactics to invest in.
8. Ramp Up Your Social Media Engagement
No matter what kind of campaign you’re running, social media is a great way to spread your content online. Cost-effective and simple, social media campaigns are a great way to build brand awareness and quality inbound traffic.
Better still, with around seven in ten Americans using at least one social media platform, there’s no better way to get your content to your audience right where they are. This, of course, goes back to knowing your audience: make sure you have accounts on whatever platforms on which they spend the most time!
In other words, staying active on social media platforms can help you connect with your audience on a regular basis, keeping your brand at the forefront of their mind. Liking, sharing, and commenting on the posts of customers, fans, and influencers can help you build even stronger connections online.
While it might be hard for busy entrepreneurs to stay active on a regular basis, don’t forget that online tools can help you with part of the process. Setting up an editorial calendar can help you keep track of upcoming content, and free automation tools can be a great way to send out consistent posts. As stated above, you can also hire a marketing professional to manage your account on your behalf.
9. Let Fewer Leads Slip Through Your Fingers
No matter how effective your online marketing campaign is, there will always be times when leads escape you. However, there are several strategies that can help you shrink this number.
Retargeting campaigns, for example, are a great way to remind your customers about what you offer once they’ve left your site without buying. This can be a great way to catch distracted customers who have already shown interest in a specific product. With retargeting via Google, Facebook, or other ad programs, ads for your product will show up on other websites as the customer browses.
You can also catch prospective customers by setting up abandonment strategies. This is effective if a user abandons your website before signing up, or if they leave their cart without buying. In these cases, you can set up an email campaign that triggers after they’ve abandoned your site, reminding them of the waiting purchase.
10. Revisit Your Online Marketing Strategy
Online marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” tactic.
The digital landscape is always in flux. New social media platforms pop up all the time, new search engine algorithm updates come down the pipeline, and audience interests change and grow. In other words, the strategies that work today aren’t guaranteed to work tomorrow.
That’s why it’s important to revisit your ongoing campaigns every now and then to see what still works—and what doesn’t. If you hope to succeed in the long-term, you’ll need to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and continue trying new strategies going forward.
To that end, try scheduling a post-campaign analysis to review your work on a regular basis. This is a great way to use data from finished campaigns to improve your next ones.
Get More Out of Your Online Marketing Campaign
While any online marketing campaign is better than nothing at all, it’s safe to say that knowing which tactics to use can have a huge impact on your success. From A/B testing to competitor research to automation, it’s crucial to get your hands on the most effective strategies. As you work to define your goals and optimize your campaign, don’t forget to reach out to a marketing expert for more specific tips for your brand!
Looking for more tech and business tips for your brand? Be sure to take a look at our other content for additional insights.
