Online marketing help has arrived!
You’ve just got your new website or your new webshop. Everything has been delivered neatly, exactly as you had it in mind. Great! Now it’s time to get to grips with the online marketing of your site or shop, because you want to stay successful in the long run. Now you’re thinking: online marketing, where do I even start? You consult your best friend Google and soon read about terms like SEO, SEA, SMM, link building, back linking, meta descriptions, keyword analyses, duplicate content, Google penalties, Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Analytics, Adwords, Adwise… The list is endless! You’re tearing your hair out, because you genuinely don’t have time to properly get to grips with all of this. You think: HELP!
No panic, Marco’s here to help
From now on, I can help you with this. My name is Marco Hofkamp and I’m the new online marketing specialist at Webba. With knowledge and experience in the field of online marketing, a love of writing and a level of dedication you wouldn’t believe, I’m strengthening the team to help people like you out of a tight spot. This past year I worked in the marketing department at WILDLANDS and ATLAS Theater. There, among other things, I took charge of the content strategy and development of the social media channels.
Online marketing tools, especially for you
In this blog I’d like to share a number of tips with you, to give you some tools to help you find your way better in the wondrous world of online marketing. I’ll give tips on a few areas you can apply yourself right away. If you’d like to know more, feel free to get in touch with us.
1. Measuring is knowing, guessing is losing
The single most important part of making action-driven (marketing) decisions about your webshop or website is Google Analytics. Measuring is knowing and guessing is losing! Using a so-called tracking ID, Google Analytics keeps track of all the visitor data for your website or webshop. The tracking ID is a piece of code that’s implemented on the back end of your website or webshop, and it sends a signal for every action a visitor performs on your site. You can then set goals in Analytics that matter to you. This could be downloading your brochure, contacting your company, or purchasing your service or product. Unfortunately none of this happens automatically — you have to set this up yourself in Google Analytics. So always draw up a measurement plan for yourself first, before setting your goals and measuring points. A measurement plan forces you to think about your goals and makes it clear to yourself what your goals are and how you’re going to measure the result. You start with your business objective: what do you want to achieve with your website or webshop.
Online marketing tactics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Next, in your measurement plan, you determine the tactics you want to use to generate more traffic and/or sales. This could be through advertising (SEA), being easily found in Google (SEO), social media (SMM), and so on. After that, you link important indicators (KPIs) to your tactics. These KPIs are metrics that tell you how successful your tactics are. Examples of important KPIs in online advertising include, for instance, the number of clicks your ad has generated — this is your click-through rate (CTR). Your conversion rate, the number of actual sales or goals achieved, is of course also a KPI you absolutely must measure.
The better you’ve mapped out your goals and how you’re going to measure them, the easier it becomes to interpret your data and turn it into action-driven decisions. See, for example, that your ad has a very low CTR? Then you know your ad isn’t performing well and that you need to tweak it. See that a large percentage of your visitors drop off somewhere in the order process? Then you know there’s an obstacle there that’s holding back conversion. These are important insights that are indispensable for all your online marketing choices!
2. Keep your SEO up to date and stay relevant
Content: the topic you get bombarded with online whenever you search for online marketing or SEO. And that’s actually quite fitting. Your content, after all, determines an enormous part (40%) of how well you score in the Google search results. Google’s algorithms keep getting smarter. By now they can already determine whether the content on your website is relevant to your visitor. If your content isn’t (sufficiently) relevant, Google penalises you by making your website or webshop poorly findable or not findable at all in the search results. That way you won’t even get close to that coveted first page.
Treat every page as a landing page
One way to stay relevant is to treat every page of your website as a landing page. Imagine you have a webshop. You’ve got a new product in your range and you’re writing the product page for it. You’ve done a keyword analysis and determined which keywords you’d like to be found on. In this case, let’s use the term ‘new product’ as an example. On your landing page you need to take your visitors through the story of this new product. Make sure the content matches the reader’s expectations exactly. So write a title and a clear intro about your new product, so the reader immediately gets the information they expect.
The same applies to all the content on your pages. Whether it’s a product or service description, a blog post, a contact page — treat them all as landing pages. It’s also important to keep your content up to date. As the virtual age of your highly relevant page increases, so does its findability. However, you do need to make sure the information on your page stays up to date, so every now and then you’ll also need to adjust, add to or perhaps remove content. Read more about relevant content in the blog content tip: don’t say what you do, say why.
3. Social media; what to ask yourself before you start
Social media is one of the many parts of online marketing. There’s a good chance you’ve racked your brain over social media at some point. What should you do with it? How do I use it effectively? How do I make sure I improve my business results with the help of social media? First of all, it’s important to know that social media isn’t equally relevant for every business. So decide in advance exactly what you want to use social media for. I too often see company pages sharing bone-dry posts every day about topics nobody wants to read about in their free time. Sometimes even multiple times a day, to the point of tedium. For example, I once worked with a party specialising in waste processing. They often posted about facts and the latest trends in waste separation, waste deals made by municipalities, or the rules for separating waste. How boring do you want it? Facebook isn’t a waste-sorting guide, so don’t treat it like one! For them, a shift in content strategy was therefore no unnecessary luxury.
Social media isn’t an advertising leaflet
People are on social media almost always in and for their free time, because they enjoy it. So make sure your social media content adds something and fits with that ‘enjoyable’ experience. So it’s worth asking yourself what sector you’re in and to what extent people actually want your posts. You need to find out what your target audience enjoys and finds interesting. Do you have a very specific topic that’s only interesting to a small target audience? Then there’s a good chance you won’t build up a huge number of followers. That’s not a disaster, because there are plenty of other online channels you can use to reach your target audience well! So always determine first who your target audience is, how they want to be addressed (tone of voice) and what you want to achieve with social media. Do you just want to inform your followers, do you want to prompt them to take action, do you want to generate traffic to your website, or do you want to share fun developments about you and your company? This determines the angle of your content strategy.
Know your target audience
When you want to use social media, it’s important that you can put yourself well in your followers’ shoes. What do they find interesting? You can measure this within the statistics environment of your company page. Look, for example, at how often a link in your post is clicked, what the reach of your post is, and of course how many likes and/or shares your post generates. Often this is also a matter of trying and then measuring. A rule of thumb I use myself is: do more of what generates a lot of results and do less of what generates little. Reach, clicks and likes are very good indicators of whether your content resonates with your followers. Social media is, among other things, a good way to get to know your target audience better because of this. After all, you can even start a conversation with them!
Questions about online marketing? See you soon!
I’ve just breezed through 3 of the 1001 online topics. Hopefully it’s answered a question you had. There’s also a good chance, of course, that it’s raised more questions than it’s answered. I mentioned it earlier and I’ll close with it again: do you have questions about your content, online marketing or social media use? Feel free to get in touch and then we can take a look at it together!