Digital Marketing Strategy

The best strategy depends on whether you have an eCommerce store or if you need to generate leads. However; the fundamentals remain the same.

The tactics you will use for those two objectives are quite different. See the details below.

There are two primary tactics for attracting prospects to your website. Free and Paid. Both are discussed below. We refer to these website visitors as 'traffic'.

Our strategic approach is to leverage free sources of website traffic as much as possible. Most free traffic is generated from Google as a result of SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is the art of building an authoritative reputation with the search engines that your website is trustworthy, reputable and offers users a positive experience when visiting. Does your website do this?

You can check your website 'authority' with these third party tools:

(we have the paid versions of these tools and would be happy to give you free access to your ratings)

• Ahrefs. Their authority rating is known as DR (Domain Rating).
• Moz. Their authority rating is known as DA (Domain Authority).
• Majestic. Their authority rating is known as TF (Trust Flow).

Generally, the higher your site is rated, the more free traffic it will receive.

If the budget allows, we also suggest testing paid traffic.

Paid traffic offers the benefit of providing rapid results. If you setup a campaign today, you can start seeing results as early as tomorrow.

ALWAYS START WITH A LOW BUDGET.

We like to start with a test budget of $5.00 per day. $10.00 at the most. This is because you must test your advertising messages and the targeting to make sure you have the settings dialed in.

And once you have a campaign that is working well, paid traffic is highly scalable.

The biggest players control the the majority of the market. They are:

Google Ads. Google charges you only when prospects RESPOND to your ad and visit your website. Costs range wildly from industry to industry, but generally are between 50 cents and two dollars per response.

Facebook Ads. Facebook owns Instagram, so both are included from within the FB advertising platform. Facebook charges you when prospects VIEW your ad. They charge you per 1000 views, with costs ranging quite a bit, but generally from $5.00 to $10.00 per 1000 people reached. The actual cost per response varies too much to quote an average here, and it is always prudent to test with a small budget (i.e. $5.00 per day).

None of the major advertising platforms require a commitment to campaign duration. You can start today, and quite tomorrow.

When we meet with you to discuss your marketing, we will advise you which platforms are worth testing for your business.

If you are thinking about making changes to your website content, or updating the design, you should first review any CRO data which exists from tools like those listed below. This data will prevent you from making unnecessary changes, and also point you to the issues that truly require attention.

The 'conversion rate' of your website is the ratio of prospects who take action. For example, if 100 people visited your website, and 4 called you or purchased, this would be a conversion rate of 4%.

Your conversion rate is not set in stone. There are many things you can do to improve your conversion rate. We refer to this improvement process as CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization.

Conversion Rate Optimization is a specialized skill set within the field of marketing.

Like any trade or profession, practitioners of CRO have their own tools, methods and education path.

The process for optimizing your conversions involves a diagnostic process to determine why your prospects will not take action. e.g. What is stopping them? Anxiety? Distraction? Are they simply not ready to move forward? Our CRO students have a checklist of the most common reasons why prospects don't convert.

Einstein said: "half the solution is in understanding the problem."

This is very true for marketing. If we can diagnose what is causing friction in the conversion process, the solution is often just common sense and at that point even novice marketers are able to formulate hypotheses on how the problems can be solved.

We also teach them how to use the most popular CRO tools which are on the market.

Like any profession, CRO has it's own set of tools, including:

Google Analytics. This free software tool from Google must be configured to track important events which influence the conversion process.

Google Tag Manager. This free tool gives the CRO practitioner to track events which are not possible to track using Google Analytics alone.

Google Optimize. This free tool allows you to conduct A/B testing to automatically determine the best version of your website. Popular test subjects are pricing, images & sales copy.

Screen Recordings. Hotjar is one of many paid tools that we use which allow us to create videos of our prospect's computer screens (or phone) as they navigate through our sites. These videos offer qualitative insight into the conversion process and are invaluable in diagnosing why prospects get stuck.

Call Tracking. Callrail is one of several paid call tracking services we use which allow us to trace phone calls back to specific ads. This data allows us to cut ads which result in traffic, but which do not result in phone calls. If your business relies on phone calls, call tracking must be used temporarily to optimize campaigns, and even website changes.