Digital Strategy to Maximize your Marketing

Use this Digital Strategy to Maximize Your Marketing Budget

Marketing dollars are tight, and we all want to maximize the return on our marketing budgets. So how can you determine the best digital strategy to get the most from your marketing spend?

Now, we all know there are tons of different ways to actually get traffic. There is a vast array of various digital marketing strategies you could employ to generate traffic to your website, get more customers and increase sales.

But there’s one strategy that is by far the best. It’s like the low-hanging fruit of digital marketing strategies, the easiest one to implement that will get you, new customers.

The Smart Digital Strategy: Optimize Your Website

This simple strategy is called website optimization. The idea is to optimize your website so you will rank higher in the Google search results. This strategy has been proven over and over to generate new customers and get more sales.

I like this digital strategy more than others because it capitalizes on the fact that a person doing a Google search for a specific product or service is doing that search with intent.

In other words, to perform a search, a person has to physically go through a set of actions once they’ve decided to search for something. Whether they pull out their phone, sit down at their computer, open Google, or type in the search bar, there is a specific intent behind their behavior.

Other strategies are passive. They count on someone to see their ads on Facebook or other social media, for example. The ad’s target has done nothing and might not even be thinking about your product or service. When they see your ad, they don’t already intend to look into what you have to sell.

Also, in serving an ad to someone on a social media network, you’re in essence interrupting them from doing what they went to that social network to do. And it wasn’t to see your ad. It wasn’t to learn about your product or go to your website. They were doing something else.

This means your advertising has to be engaging enough that it stops them in their tracks, pulls their attention away from what they were initially interested in, and persuades them to go to your website.

Compare how difficult that is too engaging someone who is already looking for what you have to sell. These people want to find an answer or a solution to a problem. They want to find a product or service that they’re ready to buy. And they went to Google to find someone who could provide it.

There’s a massive difference in these customer’s mindsets and how they behave compared to those on social media. The people on social media who see your ads aren’t warm leads, unlike those actively searching online. The searchers are hot, scorching leads. They’re going online. They’re looking for a service. They’re looking for a provider.

The people who will win their business are the ones who are listed on the first or second page of the search results because no one is going to the 30th. Just evaluate your own behavior when you’re searching for something online.

If you don’t find what you want on the first or second page of the results, you’ll go back to the browser and start over. You’ll try a different keyword to see if Google will give you results related to what you’re actually looking for.

And that’s the behavior of all consumers. That highlights the importance of appearing on the first and second pages. There’s a vast pool of people ready to buy that are your potential customers, but they may never find you because you don’t show up on the first or second page.

This is why optimizing your website is the most powerful strategy you can implement. The power comes from the fact that it leverages the behavior and intent of the people who are searching on the keywords related to your business every day.

And best of all, we have the data to back it up. We don’t have to guess if these are potential customers. We can actually look at the numbers. We can analyze the data of how many people are searching for any specific service, any specific product, any specific keyword in any single area, whether it’s nationwide, statewide, citywide. We can actually see how many people are searching for a dentist, a lawyer, a roofer, or anything else you can think of.

Google provides all this data. We can do a little research and determine what’s viable to do in an SEO campaign. The numbers will tell us which keywords to optimize to make a difference in a business.

This is so very different from using a content marketing strategy or building a brand on social media. Using those strategies, you won’t quantify your results or know how much business those strategies generate.

Make Trends in Digital Advertising Work for You

I like the optimization strategy because it seems everyone has learned all about social media and other platforms. Since people are using all these different mediums to advertise, it has created less competition on the SEO side.

They’re all rushing to advertise on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, podcasts, or in newsletters. But if everyone’s advertising, shouldn’t you?

Consider why people are racing to advertise. One reason is that it’s easier for business owners to understand the concept of ads than SEO.

And optimizing a website isn’t as visible as ads. So when people see their competitor advertising, they feel compelled to respond with ads of their own. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are more in your face than SEO optimization that operates behind the scenes.

But by focusing on the visible advertising opportunities, they miss out on opportunities available through SEO campaigns. Those businesses that work to optimize their sites will reap great rewards compared to what their competitors get. Let others go with the trend to advertise. You’ll benefit by going in a different direction.

SEO Done Right Will Give You Key Analytics You Can’t Get Anywhere Else

Another powerful benefit you get by going with an optimization campaign is getting a ton of analytics and data. That you can use to move on to other digital strategies once you capture the audience. Once you are dominating your placement on the first page of Google’s search results. You have the data you need to feed advertising and content marketing campaigns because you’ll know how people find your website and how they interact with it.

Which opens up many possibilities for you. You can retarget the people who visit your site. Or use the data you collect to build a profile of who your ideal customer is. When you start advertising on social media, you can use that data and those demographics in that platform. You’ll be able to define your exact specific audience and only pay to serve ads to them.

So the other digital strategies build from this first one. As you collect more data, you’ll be able to layer additional digital strategies until you have a cohesive full-on 360 digital marketing strategy.

And it doesn’t matter if your business is service-based, sells a product, or has a personal brand. This strategy will work for you.