How Digital Marketing Can Transform Your Business Online Presence
Elevate your online presence with insights on digital marketing from ‘How Digital Marketing Can Transform Your Business Online Presence’.
How to Do a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing
Staying ahead of the competition is a highly effective way to grow your business. It involves knowing the ins and outs of your competitors to identify ways you can outperform them to engage and influence customers.
A digital competitive analysis is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. It helps you understand the digital strategies of your competitors so you can leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses to build and grow. Plus, you don’t need expensive third parties to help you do it, everything can be done in-house if you know how.
So let’s look at how you can analyze a competitor so that you can use the USPs of your business to gain that all-important edge. In this blog, we will cover
What is a competitive analysis
Why you should do a competitive analysis
What a competitive analysis includes
The different types of competitive analysis
Competitor analysis tools
To help you get on your way, we’ve created a competitive analysis tracker to download so you can monitor everything and turn knowledge into actionable insights.
What is a competitive analysis in digital marketing?
Competitive analysis in digital marketing is a process that researches competitors to identify strengths and weaknesses. It examines the strategies companies use for marketing, pricing, product development, and distribution to gain insights.
It will help you to keep on top of trends in your sector and identify digital strategies that will drive brand awareness, customer engagement and, most importantly, revenue.
Why should you do a competitive analysis in digital marketing?
What is the purpose of competitive analysis? Well, the scope of your competitive analysis can vary depending on what you want to discover. What you analyze can be as broad or as focused as you like.
For example, you may want to focus on optimizing your website. For this, you would look at competitors’ websites to look at their content, UX, and lead generation strategies. What you learn can then help you to apply new CRO strategies.
There are many benefits to conducting an analysis which include:
Identify barriers and opportunities in a market
Identify your value proposition and how it differs from competitors
Highlight where competitors are not delivering or have weaknesses
Target the most effective digital strategies in your marketplace
Identify new customers and territories
Uncover market trends
See the potential for a new product or service
Establish a benchmark to measure your performance against
What does a competitive analysis include?
A competitive analysis in digital marketing means that you analyze the different platforms of each of your competitors and see how they contribute to growth. Ultimately it’s about benchmarking against your competitors.
Determine competitor types
Not all competitors should be treated the same. Split them into categories based on their level of competitiveness.
Primary – These are your direct competitors that sell a similar product or service to your audience e.g. Asos and Boohoo.
Secondary – These companies offer a similar version of your product or service (low or high-end) to a different audience e.g. Target and Gucci.
Tertiary – These brands are related to you but don’t compete with your product/service or audience e.g. Red Bull and Patagonia.
Segmenting your competitors like this will help you see how they relate to your business.
Why Choose DMI?
Profile your competitors’ target customers
Understanding the audience of your competitors will tell you a lot about a business. It will help you to understand who they target and the digital channels they use effectively to do that.
The best way to find out about their customers is to see who the brand is appealing to. You could find this out by looking at
Their mission statement or ‘About Us’ section
Social media messaging and interaction
Blogs and free downloadable assets
Webinars or podcasts
Customer reviews or user-generated content
By reviewing the goals, content, and interactions of your competitors, you’ll learn more about their audience. This will help you develop tactics that differentiate you from the pack.
Apply the 4 Ps of marketing
The full marketing mix is crucial to any digital marketing strategy. It will help you to analyze your competitor’s marketing tactics to gain insights into your activities.
Product – What are they selling? What do customers like about their product or service? What makes it a successful product or service? What features or product(s) does their product have over mine?
Price – What price model do they use? Is it a one-off payment or subscription-based? What makes the price point attractive?
Promotion – How do they promote their brand and offerings? What digital channels are they most active in promoting? What tactics do they use to promote?
Place – Where do they sell? Are they active online or do they have brick-and-mortar stores or branches?
You can gain a lot of information from this process, so you should focus on the areas you want to know about. Include any quantitative data to refer back to along with qualitative.
Find best practices
Your top competitors are successful for a reason, they have tested and tweaked their strategies across digital platforms over time. This means they have developed best practices you can learn from.
For example, maybe your competitors see success by marketing on TikTok. Through competitive analytics, you can see the presence of your competitors and if a majority are using it, maybe it’s something you should consider.
Or you can see that a number of your competitors have climbed up the rankings on SERPs like Google or Bing. This probably means they are using SEO to optimize for searches using popular keywords and phrases.
Tip: Check out this SEO keyword research toolkit to see how you can do the same!
Use a framework for analysis
What method you use to analyze your competitors depends on what you want to know.
For example, you can use SWOT analysis once you gather all the data if you want to discover new opportunities or threats in the marketplace. This will also help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.
Another framework to consider is Porter’s Five Forces. This looks at the market forces in an industry such as the threat of new entrants and substitutes, bargaining power of substitutes, competitive rivalry, and bargaining power of suppliers and new buyers.
Graph of Porter’s Competitive Forces
Graph of Porter’s Competitive Forces
You can also use a growth share matrix developed by Boston Consulting Group that looks at your products or services against the competitive landscape. This is split into four areas (Star, Question mark, Cash cow and Pet) based on growth and market share to drive analysis. This video below uses Coca-Cola as an example to demonstrate the framework.
Organize your data for analysis
Group any data you collect on your competitors in an organized way. This will help you go back and refer to any data points to gain insights for future digital activities.
This is particularly important when gathering data from many competitors as it will help you to check areas of similarity to identify opportunities. Criteria to analyze include price range, social media activities, lead generation tactics, content marketing initiatives, first-time visitor offers, etc.
Become a world class digital marketer
What are the types of competitive analysis?
There are several types of competitive analysis depending on your company and needs. Each one will focus on a niche area that you are looking to analyze and improve to drive targets and KPIs such as leads, revenue and brand awareness.
These are the main types that focus on key digital marketing channels, but you can also analyze email (check out our ultimate guide to email marketing for guidance) or the UI and UX of a website.
PPC competitor analysis
A PPC competitor analysis involves finding out the keywords or phrases your competitors are bidding on. The ultimate goal is to create PPC campaigns that drive results and are better than your competition!
You can do this by studying the types of ads they are using and in which networks or platforms. Are they paying for expensive keywords or conversion-focused phrases? Or is their PPC focused on brand awareness?
You can also review their landing pages to analyze messaging and CTAs. Are they creating custom landing pages for every campaign or relying on a few money pages? Knowing this will give you an idea of your competitor’s aims and budget.
Check out our case study of Airbnb’s digital strategy where we saw how they balanced their paid search needs with those of the brand.
SEO competitor analysis
This type of analysis helps you determine what SEO keywords your competitors rank for. This will help you understand their area of focus and figure out how to compete in the battle for keywords.
A few techniques you can use are to:
Compare website performance e.g. page speeds
Find keyword gaps
Compare backlinks and where they get them
Look at strategies on how they rank for more keywords – e.g. do they have a blog or resources section?
Examine top pages and traffic
Tip: download our SEO keyword toolkit to help turn all your research into content you can use.
Social media competitor analysis
Social media is a powerful tool for any business in driving customer engagement and leads (especially since social commerce became more widespread). It’s important to know where your audience is so you can target them effectively across social platforms.
Conducting a social media competitor analysis will help you see what social networks your competitors are on and the number of followers and demographics they target.
You should also look at post frequency, when they post, type of content posted e.g. videos, blog links, etc. Also, look at their content themes or buckets so you can see the topics they discuss.
Interactions with customers through comments can also be revealing and engagement rates can help you see what posts resonate more with their audience.
Tip: Download our competitor analysis tracker to track how your competitors are using social media.
Competitor analysis tools
There are many competitor analysis tools out there to help you. This will make your data collection simpler, more accurate, and more efficient. A few examples of the best tools specific to key areas are:
SEO Analysis
Ahrefs – check top performing keywords of any website and get estimated keyword traffic
SE Ranking – shows paid and organic search performance and keywords
PPC analysis
SEMRush – can perform a site audit, show competitor’s keywords and a backlink analysis
Spyfu – researches your competitors’ most profitable keywords in PPC campaigns
Google Ads Auctions Insight – allows you to compare your performance with other companies that are bidding in the same auctions
Keyword analysis
Similarweb – provides information on web and channel traffic, uncovers keyword trends, and reveals engagement metrics
Social media analysis
Sprout Social – you can measure follower growth, engagement, hashtag trends, conversions, and paid content performance
Facebook ad library – allows you to search for ads that are run across Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta products
Become a Successful Digital Marketing Strategist
Put digital strategies at the heart of your business to drive awareness, leads and revenue. DMI’s Digital Strategy course will help you understand your customer and brand story, hone your financial and team management skills, optimize your digital channels and become a digital leader.
What are the Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2023?
As customers become more discerning about the products and services they buy, there’s also a global cost of living crisis that brands will need to plan for in 2023.
That means it’s more important for brands to be transparent and think about their messaging and research or tweak their strategy in the coming year. It also means that marketers need to know the trends coming down the line so they can plan and take advantage of any new developments.
To help you kick 2023 off with a bang, we’ve talked to industry experts on our podcast to identify the most important trends. You might also like to watch our Trends webinar on more key points to watch in 2023.
Read on to find out the 2023 trends for
Within social media and influencer marketing we look at TikTok and business, the rise of creators, and also of SuperApps.
In B2B marketing we hear about the value of video content, how to conquer social selling, and curated content.
Content marketing looks set to see more connections, creator + brand partnerships, and the evergreen need to create valuable content.
You’ll hear a lot about marketing automation in 2023, not least in available tools and the much-anticipated GPT-4.
Martech is also set to keep growing, CRO will take a further lead. And the metaverse will not be going away.
1. SOCIAL MEDIA AND INFLUENCER MARKETING TRENDS
There are some really interesting trends down the line in 2023 for social media. In fact, it’s an area of marketing that will see significant change and brands need to keep up to have a presence and use the platforms effectively.
TikTok continues to evolve and dominate
TikTok has become a big player in the social media marketing realm. And that’s not set to change in 2023. TikTok generated $4.6 billion in 2021, a 142 percent increase year-on-year with 1.8 billion monthly active users predicted by the end of 2022 reported The Business of Apps.
It’s not just for consumers or creators that TikTok is making inroads. The platform is focusing on usability for businesses and improving targeting options for advertising which will make it a bigger and better platform for brands in 2023.
“One of the things that we’re gonna see from TikTok next year is the simplicity around business tools. They’ve already been making waves in improving the usability for businesses around their ads dashboard. I’ve been looking at some of the new targeting options they’ve launched for their ads, which are brilliant,” says Alison Battisby, a social media consultant with Avocado Social.
TikTok new ads manager targeting
TikTok new ads manager targeting
Decentralizing social media to create a ‘super app’
The changes at Twitter have shone a lens on the vulnerability of social media platforms. Customers are moving away from wanting to engage with billionaire-led platforms and instead have control over their content and data.
Battisby thinks that “we are moving towards a need for the decentralization of social networks. Some of the new and exciting platforms that we’re seeing include Mastodon, which is seeing a huge amount of downloads over the last couple of weeks. And it’s an interesting tool because it is built by the masses.”
Other apps are in the works like BlueSky, which is being developed by Twitter’s ex-CEO, Jack Dorsey. More an infrastructure than a platform, the company describes it as “a new foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience.”
The ‘creator economy’ will grow and change
As brand awareness becomes more of a focus on social media (as opposed to pure lead generation), marketers need to find creators that have a voice and fan base (small or otherwise).
It can be a challenge for brands to create content that engages customers in a time-starved world. That’s where content creators come in and that doesn’t mean high-level influencers. It can mean employees, customers, or even subject matter experts in a niche area.
“Since COVID we’ve seen a new social media culture that focuses not on the number of followers, but on the content itself, in this era of what they’re calling ‘recommended media’. I believe this pushes brands even more to work with influencers and content creators,” says Neal Schaffer, social media leader, and author.
The emergence of content creator funds on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch means there’s an incentive for creators to put time into creating content a brand could take advantage of.
“30% of 18 to 24-year-olds and 40% of 25 to 34-year-olds consider themselves content creators ”
HubSpot’s 2022 State of Consumer Trends report
2. B2B MARKETING TRENDS
B2B marketing can be seen as boring or at least less exciting than its B2C counterparts. But that need not be the case. As a B2B company, it’s important to be creative in your marketing and use the channels and tools available to be memorable.
Video, video, and more video
As marketers, we all know the power of a great video campaign as a way to inform and connect. After all, 86 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 92 percent value it as an important part of their strategy (according to Wyzowl research).
The same research showed the variety of reasons businesses use video with the top being explainers followed by social media videos and presentations. The top three channels companies use are YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Purpose of videos created
Purpose of videos created
For B2B companies, video can play an important role in the sales and marketing cycle. This is particularly true on LinkedIn as video has become more popular on the platform and offers a way to connect with and influence customers.
“LinkedIn has become a place where people can quickly create user-generated content. People do it to varying degrees of slickness. Your mileage will vary depending on your style and budget. But I think it’s added a lot of personality to that platform, and it’s made content more shareable. (Video) is a great way for you to act like a maven, like a connector,” says Stephen Walsh, co-founder of Kineo and Anders Pink.
Read our blog ‘9 Ideas for Social Media Videos’ to get some inspiration for your video campaigns!
Empower teams to use social selling
Social media is an effective way for brands and their sales team to connect with customers. This is particularly true for B2B companies that have longer sales cycles and rely on digital channels to provide useful and relevant information.
But there’s a difference between posting content that pushes a sales message and using content to engage and create connections. Social transformation expert and author, Julie Atherton believes that’s what will drive success for businesses in 2023.
“I think there will be a clear demarcation between businesses that empower and support their teams to use social media effectively in relationship-building and those who see social as another channel to push sales messaging through,” says Atherton. “Some organizations are fearful of giving control, or allowing individuals to get their personality out there.”
Why Choose DMI?
An appetite for curated content
While companies put a huge focus on creating original content, it can also be effective to share curated content.
If the content is relevant, it can drive conversations and demonstrate that your company is interested in solving an issue or sharing information rather than just selling.
“If you’re reaching out with something informative and insightful, it doesn’t matter too much whether you’ve created that content. I think (curated content) can be an efficient way to provide some learning and insight, and show that you’re a trusted person who can add value. As a B2B strategy, it can be very powerful,” says Walsh.
Types of useful content you can share include:
Industry news
Third-party research
Press releases or announcements
Interviews (video and blogs)
In-depth features
Podcasts
3. CONTENT MARKETING TRENDS
The Content Marketing Institute found that while 78 percent of marketers have a strategic approach to managing content, only over half have a documented content strategy in place to reference. That’s a mistake in today’s content-hungry society.
Use content to drive connections
We know as marketers that content can be used at all stages of the marketing and sales funnel to provide information and solutions. But content can do more than that.
In 2023, you should use content to make connections and build communities. As customers become more interested in the value and ethos of brands, it will be companies that foster and seek out connections that will succeed.
“While social media and email marketing still have their place, for me, it’s communities that are driving the majority of my sales. People are seeking community. They want to reach out and get support from other humans,” says Kate Toon, founder of Stay Tooned.
“And it’s really important that the leader of those communities needs to be on the same page. People want to feel like they are buying from (companies with) similar values that align with their own.”
Refine and define creator/brand partnerships
There’s a lot of noise online, which equals a lot of content. Some of the content out there is great, but a lot is aligned with the wrong influencer or not targeted at the right audience. That’s where a good content creator/brand partnership can come into play.
Many creators want to grow and expand in 2023. This means they are looking for brand partnerships (rather than just sponsorships) that align with their content so posts feel natural and companies offer guidance and support, not just leave them to it!
For many creators it’s not primarily about the money, other aspects matter too as shown by Deloitte research.
What content creators are looking for in brand partnerships
What content creators are looking for in brand partnerships
“Brands should be looking more to influencers and user-generated content to help them appear, and be seen through the noise. Not from their own voice, but from the voices of others,” says Neal Schaffer.
Balance your content to offer value and not just sell
Over half of marketers cite a large increase in the demand for content according to marq’s ‘Content Effectiveness’ report in recent years. But it’s not just about having more content, it’s about having content that provides value to prospects and customers.
“I think you have to create your own content and have your own voice. But you can balance your content marketing budget with more curated content than people realize,” says Stephen Walsh.
“It shows that you’re tapped into the world and “our ideas are the only ones,” or “it always has to be something coming from us,” that you’re connected, and paying attention to trends. That sends a good signal to buyers that you’re part of a community, and it’s not just always me, me, me,” concludes Walsh.
Download Free Skills Checklist
10 Tips on How To Kickstart Your Digital Marketing Career
Download
4. MARKETING AUTOMATION TRENDS
As companies collect more data and need to execute more tasks to implement effective marketing campaigns, automation tools offer a way to automate routine and repetitive tasks at scale.
A shift to signal-based marketing
In 2023, there’s going to be a shift in mindset from technical-based marketing to anticipation marketing. This will enable marketers to anticipate what customers want and then feed it into automation processes.
This new mindset will now only make things more efficient but will enable personalization. This applies to platforms like Google Ads and also seems to be where Facebook and other social channels are heading.
“In digital marketing we’ve been collecting data, observing behaviors, and now what we’re looking for are signals. They might sound like the same thing, but they’re slightly different. Behaviors reflect interests, whereas signals are where the audience is kind of telling you what they want,” says Cathal Melinn, PPC and eCommerce specialist.
Become a world class digital marketer
Importance of automation tools
Gartner predicts that by 2024, organizations with IT teams that understand the needs of customers will outperform other organizations’ customer experience metrics by 20 percent.
This understanding will rely on automation tools for internal processes and to enhance customer experience. These include marketing tools for CRM, social media, advertising, lead management or email.
“(One trend for 2023) is the increasing use of tools for automation and personalization at scale. Doing that is difficult unless you understand the data you have, put that data into a tool, and use that to automate your communications to consumers. This could be automating things like ‘the next best action’ based on what customers have done in the past and what they might do next,” says Ken Fitzpatrick, CEO of the Digital Marketing Institute.
Artificial Intelligence and the launch of GPT-4
You may not have heard of GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4) but it’s a cutting-edge tool that can help marketers automate many tasks.
Developed by OpenAI it is a text-generation deep learning model that is trained through content available online. It’s used for questions and answers, text summarization, machine translation, classification, code generation, and conversation AI.
According to Clark Boyd, a Digital Strategy Consultant it could open up new opportunities for marketers. “We’re going to start seeing specific business applications (with GPT-4). There’s a lot of funding going into startups at the minute that is trying to build, for example, social media content generation tools. So, you could just put in a bit of information about your brand, and these tools would come up with 50 ideas for your content, and you just drag and drop the ones you’re most interested in.”
You can listen to our podcast on ‘The Art of Copywriting’ to find out more about the impact of AI on content marketing.
5. MARTECH TRENDS 2023
Marketing technology – Martech – software is used to create, execute, manage, and measure the performance of content (online and offline), campaigns and experiences. It’s an effective way to streamline customer journeys and implement omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Martech spending will keep growing
Martech spending in the U.S. will pass $20 billion in 2022 for the first time, up 15 percent year-on-year according to eMarketer. This spending is due to companies investing in technology that will enable them to gather and store data, use this data to make decisions, and implement those decisions.
Interestingly, B2B companies account for more than 30 percent of that spend, and this share is expected to grow moderately over the next couple of years to $8.5 billion in 2024.
B2B Marketing technology spending
B2B Marketing technology spending
“It’s so hard to keep up with the Martech industry. What we’re continuing to see is, we work with a platform, we learn something, we find that there’s a gap, and then the next year, or six months down the road, there’s a new technology platform that fills whatever that gap is. We know that it’s massive,” says Chris Coomer from Neil Patel Accel.
CRO will no longer be about experimenting
Every company wants to improve its conversion rates online. This means more traffic, more sales, and more revenue right?
Up to now, many marketers have experimented with conversion rate optimization (CRO) and used many methods of testing. However, Chris Coomer believes this era of just seeing what happens is coming to an end as it’s not just about chasing the result.
“I think CRO has been viewed in a silo. It’s been how we get from A to B. I think everybody’s starting to look more holistically and clients are getting more intelligent with what they want to see,” he says.
“(As an agency) we’ll do something, we’ll get a better conversion rate, but how does that impact the client’s bottom line? How does that impact user experience? The questions being asked are forcing us to migrate into that larger viewpoint.”
Metaverse growth is slow but brands will still play
The metaverse caused a stir in 2022 and will continue to in the coming years, but growth has been slower than expected as profits plummet and costs mount.
Despite this, Alison Battisby believes brands will start to think about what their strategy is for this new era of immersive virtual communication world in 2023.
“One of the biggest telltale signs (of a new chapter in social technology) is Meta’s commitment to the metaverse, and how they are going full guns blazing towards building these virtual domains and existences. It’s gonna take years to change people’s behaviors and get used to this new offering but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to see some interesting innovation in the space.”
“Nike recently announced that they are going to allow people to design their own trainers, and sell those or wear them in the metaverse. I think next year we’ll see a lot of big brands make a commitment towards the metaverse,” concludes Battisby.
Read ‘What Digital Marketing Skills Do You Need for Web 3.0 and The Metaverse?’ to find out more.
2023 Marketing Trends Wrap-up
2023 is going to be an exciting and challenging year for marketers! External circumstances mean that brands need to think carefully about their messaging to engage their audiences and align with creators and influencers that have the same values.
These developments show the constant evolution of marketing both in terms of technology and strategies. Check out ‘The Next Big Digital Marketing Trends in 2022’ blog to see what we predicted for this year.
You have time to think about which trends matter to you and what ones you can take advantage of in 2023. Happy planning!
If you need more insights into 2023 digital marketing trends, check out our fantastic webinar on 2023 Trends.
5 Benefits of Having a Digital Marketing Strategy for 2024
Digital marketing offers enormous opportunities for businesses to expand their reach and target the right audience at the right time, especially using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
But with a lot of opportunity comes a lot to consider as your audience has multiple touchpoints to discover and communicate with your brand. That’s why it’s essential to have a strategic digital marketing plan that’s aligned with your business plan in 2024.
It’s about being clever with your budget, being effective in using your resources (human and otherwise), and knowing as much about your audience (future and existing) as possible. It’s not enough to just use ChatGPT to figure out new blog posts, now is the time to immerse yourself in the opportunities offered by AI.
If you’re reading this and think you don’t need a digital marketing plan or the plan you used in 2023 will be enough, you could lose out to brands that are busy planning right now.
Do you still need convincing? Here are 5 key benefits of having a digital plan to steer your marketing activities in 2024.
Improve efficiency
Gain insights
Boost productivity
Know your audience
Increase ROI
1. Improve efficiency
If you look at any company – big or small – there will be areas that need improvement in terms of efficiency.
Maybe you have multiple tools in place to track data across departments when an integrated system would allow everyone to access the same data in a few clicks. Or perhaps you’ve not optimized your paid media campaigns because nobody on the marketing team has been given responsibility for the budget or task.
When you plan for your marketing activities, you have the time to audit what’s gone before. You can gather reports and talk to team members to discover what’s worked well and what’s creating barriers. It’s also a great way to see opportunities to avoid action duplication which can be a drain on time and money.
Being efficient is about having a plan to optimize what’s working in terms of your SMART business objectives e.g., driving leads or revenue and abandoning processes or policies that may hinder growth.
Top tip: AI technologies can easily handle menial and repetitious activities such as data input, separating leads, and content creation. Try using Advanced Data Analysis in ChatGPT to analyze data exported from your marketing channels, and then ask specific questions about that data. Even basic tasks like organizing tables of data, turning big swathes of text into neat lists or tables, etc. with ChatGPT are a great way to save time.
Stimulate your creative process with ideas from generative tools like Clause, ChatGPT, and Midjourney. Just remember to treat its output as that of a keen but inexperienced intern!
“AI and machine learning offer brands and marketers an opportunity to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing. Those gains can be applied to internal functions that customers never see and/or to external things that are customer-facing.”
Why Choose DMI?
2. Gain insights
Marketers have stored a lot of data from which to gain insights to inform campaigns and messaging. The flip side is that sometimes there’s too much data and not every company has a data scientist or analyst in-house to help figure out which data is useful.
Taking the time to create a plan can help marketers identify areas where they are losing customers (e.g. click-throughs from a social media ad to the website). It could also help to understand what campaigns or activities have helped drive conversions (e.g. including relevant downloadables on blogs to drive data capture).
With GA4 having replaced Universal Analytics, marketers need to get up to speed and create custom reports that can drive better insights in 2024. Understanding the new features and reporting on GA4 (and any others you may use) will be crucial to helping you understand your customer journey and the best way to drive visits into leads.
Top tip: AI can help organizations eliminate any guesswork by using its research capabilities to develop a more effective marketing approach and open up new marketing opportunities. Many analytics tools have an automated insights section to highlight variances in traffic, conversions, and engagement. For example, Google Analytics now offers natural language search for insights, so you can just ask any question about your web or app users and most of the time it will pull out the answer.
Live Webinar Series – Revolutionize Your 2024 Digital Marketing Plan with the Help of AI – Sign up today!
3. Boost productivity
Along with improving efficiency, a well-thought-out plan can help boost productivity. When Harvard Business Review conducted research with B2B companies in 10 industries worldwide, they found that commercial productivity leaders focus on three areas.
They refine their go-to-market model
They raise productivity on the front line to make every sales rep an A-player
They identify efficiencies in sales and marketing support
To do that, these high-performing companies focus on knowing the factors that drive productivity, what can be done to improve them, and if the right resources and staff are in place to achieve those goals.
All of these require a forward-thinking plan that understands where the company is, where it’s going, and where it needs to be.
Top tip: AI tools can help automate many jobs so you can redirect your time and energy to more difficult and strategic tasks. For example, chatbots can provide customers with 24/7 access to solutions.
Become a world class digital marketer
4. Know Your Audience
Your marketing campaigns will only be successful if they talk to and reach the right audience. There’s no point putting time and effort into creating a great campaign if you don’t have your buyer personas and digital channels in mind.
Planning can help you to reflect on your customers. You should ask yourself questions such as
If leads or conversions have decreased, why or on what channel has that happened?
What type of reviews or feedback have you got from customers?
What is engagement like for your email campaigns?
How are your targeted paid campaigns performing?
Have you changed or optimized your SEO strategy for customer search queries?
These types of questions will help you dig into what’s changed over the past 9 to 12 months. We all know customer behaviors and preferences change quickly, so it’s up to you to research, plan, and try to predict to drive engagement.
Top tip: You can use ChatGPt to create buyer personas alongside audience research data by using Ubersuggest or SparkToro.
““AI is not another new website or social media network, it’s a tectonic transitional moment. We’ve had a few moments like this in business history, and I think we’re on the precipice of one now.”
Live Webinar Series – Revolutionize Your 2024 Digital Marketing Plan with the Help of AI – Sign up today!
5. Increase ROI
Return on Investment (ROI) is a crucial metric for marketers. It measures the profitability of an investment and lets you know whether a campaign or tactic has been successful.
That way, you can ramp up marketing activities that give you a positive ROI and abandon those with a negative one. Knowing the ROI of social media and content marketing activities can be particularly helpful.
Some ways to increase or improve ROI are:
Set goals
Track related KPIs
Identify areas of improvement
Develop high-value and relevant content
Use different channels
Improve user experience
Use automation tools
Tracking ROI across channels will help you identify what really drives revenue rather than focusing on vanity metrics. Make sure to do this on a regular basis to keep on top of activities.
Top tip: Tools such as Google Ads and Meta use conversion data and audience insights with AI functionality to show your ads to the people most likely to convert. When set up correctly and you undertake strategy refinements, testing, and optimization, AI-powered campaigns can drive better performance.
Build a Digital Marketing Plan for 2024 using AI
With 2024 around the corner, it’s crucial to have a plan in place for all your digital marketing activities. Our upcoming live 4-part webinar series will help you create an in-depth roadmap and explore the best practices and tools (including AI) to craft an innovative and highly effective digital marketing plan for 2024. Save your spot today!
Leveraging PPC for SEO – Using Google Ads to Help Inform Organic Keyword Decisions
In a recent post on digital marketing acronyms my partner, Chuck, broke down PPC and SEO – pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization – and how they are both part of SEM, or search engine marketing. And while SEO and PPC – in this post I’m referring mainly to Google Ads – are separate search tactics, they work best when coordinated together. So, it’s time to break down those silos – if they exist – and gather your paid and organic search teams at the conference table!
First, let’s back up a bit… back in late 2016, Google changed up the look and functionality of the search engine results page (SERP). They removed the right-side ads and placed them at the top and bottom of the organic listings only. They did go from three to four ads on top, however, providing one more opportunity to get your paid ad above the fold. Now, with ads on top, they blend into the organic listings more than ever. If you can rank organically for non-brand terms and leverage Google Ads for the same terms, you can effectively dominate the first SERP. This is a huge opportunity, though not an easy thing to accomplish. That said you certainly can take advantage of Google Ads to further your SEO results.
Here’s how…
Faster keyword research with Google Ads insights
When it comes to SEO, we spend a good deal of time researching which keywords and phrases we should optimize a website around. While it used to be that we could dive into Google Analytics and see organic traffic broken down by keywords, we now see (not provided). This data has been shielded by Google since late in 2011 as part of their privacy initiatives, but really, it’s likely just a way for Google to boost their paid search business. Call me a conspiracy theorist. It’s okay that Google’s got financial motives. I get it. I’d probably do the same thing in their shoes and it just means we need to be creative.
Here’s what we look at when it comes to keyword research:
- Competitors – what are your top three or four competitors optimizing their website for? We certainly don’t want to copy exactly what they are doing but we want to be aware of what might be working for them.
- The current website content – what is the existing (or planned) messaging of the site? How is the brand speaking to products, solutions, and services that are being offered? While we can certainly make adjustments and recommendations to product or service positioning, we often need to work within an existing brand messaging framework, and often this leads us to certain keywords and phrases – at least as a starting point.
- Keyword competition – how competitive are the keywords we want to rank for organically? We certainly want keywords with decent search volumes, but if we populate our list with only those keywords with large numbers of searches, we will likely be spinning our wheels trying to rank. A combination of competitive and not-as-competitive keywords is a good way to go but determining which variations can be challenging.
- User intent – what we think we want to rank on for keywords versus what users are actually searching for can often be at odds with each other. A very basic example would be a client that provides real estate consulting and training. If we conduct a search for “real estate consultants” here’s what we get:
You can see right away that the first thing that Google does is show you some ads for real estate consultants designed to build your real estate agency and then an ad for real estate project management. It then dives into local real estate offices based on what Google has learned [through it’s own Ai] is the typical intent of the user (when conducting this search for “real estate consultants”). Google is showing results for users seeking realtors. In this case Google is telling us this keyword needs further refinement for our client’s usage. In other words, we may want to use this keyword, or we may not, but we should try different variants to get closer to the user our client is seeking.
In our standard SEO service, after the site has been optimized for our selected keywords, we begin to collect and monitor data in Google Analytics. Depending on the traffic volumes to the site on a monthly basis, collecting an amount of data needed to make informed decisions can take some time. For most of our clients, this can be 3-4 months. Armed with this data, we analyze keywords for:
- Number of impressions – we certainly want our keywords to be shown in Google for organic searches and when this happens, we get an impression. The more impressions we get, the more Google is showing our site for that keyword search.
- Click through rate (CTR) – when someone clicks on a search result for our website, we get a click. The click through rate (CTR) is determined by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. Needless to say, we want decent CTRs, which comes with ranking well. Usually, ranking in the top 5 will get you CTRs above 5% and below that the rate tails off significantly.
- Bounce rate – when someone clicks on a link at Google and hits our site, we want them to hang around and dive deeper into the site. This tells us that they are finding value from clicking and that our site is delivering what they expected to find. If they hit our site and go right back to their Google search, we get a bounce. The bounce rate is calculated by the total number of one-page visits divided by the total number of entries into a website. Needless to say, we do not want high bounce rates, but often time if we find our keywords are showing high bounce rates that we need to make adjustments.
- Average session duration – How engaged are organic visitors is also something we like to track. If this metric is low then we ask are we attracting the right users.
All of these metrics around keywords – as we build our list, and after the fact – can be identified with metrics we can get from Google Ads data. The beauty of Google Ads in these instances is that we do not need to 1) optimize a website and/or 2) wait several months for data to inform our decision making. The speed at which we can gather data in Google Ads can make a big difference.
Put some budget aside and create a Google Ads campaign, breaking down Ad Groups to reflect the key sections of your website. This might be product or service groupings. You can then add in keywords and create ads to cover them.
Be sure to A/B test your ad messaging, using keywords, and unique ad appeal, as this is another thing that you can test quickly with Google Ads. It will help you make informed messaging adjustments on your main site.
It’s likely that within just a month or so of Google Ads data collection, you’ll be able to make some inferences on what keywords are resonating with your target audience. Then you can make the adjustments in your SEO efforts.
—
If you’d like to discuss PPC or SEO with us, please feel free to reach out any time. Free, no obligation consultations are welcome!
Save Time – 7 Steps to Fast, Quality Content
Do you ever stare at your computer waiting for a moment of pure genius to strike? Does it take hours or days to come up with one piece of good content?You’re not alone. If we could snap our fingers and make quality content appear, we’d be millionaires. Unfortunately, we don’t have any magical tricks to share with you. But we do have a few techniques that will help you become faster and better at producing quality content.Here are some things to consider:
1. Keep a Topic List
The task of deciding what to write about can take up a significant amount of your time. Who has time for that?
Keep a running list at work or on your phone with topic ideas. Sometimes these ideas strike when you’re on the treadmill, filling up your coffee, or answering client questions.Speaking of client questions, these make for great content topics. Your content should add value, not create noise, so answering questions that are important to your clients is always a great idea.
2. Make a Plan
Now that you have your list of topics, create an editorial calendar for your content. Sure, it may seem like a lot of work upfront, but just think how much time you’ll save later!Make it a goal to line up 3-6 months of topics. Schedule these topics on a content calendar to plan your content around seasons or industry events.That said, plans can be broken. If something significant happens in your business or industry, your content calendar can be adjusted.
3. Begin with the End in Mind
Before you start your content, begin with the end in mind.What do you want your reader to walk away with? What action do you want them to take?When you start with the end result, it’s easier to work backwards so you know exactly what to write about.
4. Spin Current Content or Topics
Not every piece of content needs to be a new idea, process, or stroke of genius. Chances are you have great content right now that you could spin with a new title. Then refresh the body of the article by stating the same thing in a different way.You may be surprised how a client or customer relates better to the same information stated with a different approach.
5. Make It Short and Sweet
High-quality content isn’t always long content. Enough said.
6. Don’t Write and Edit at the Same Time
The biggest mistake content creators make? Trying to make it perfect the first time.Get it all out and come back to it later. Don’t be alarmed if it seems like a jumbled mess when you’re finished. This is normal.When you come back to it later with fresh eyes, you can focus on sentence structure and grammar. The hardest part is getting the content out, so don’t let editing become a distraction.
7. Give Yourself a Time Limit
Whether you give yourself an hour or the entire day, you’ll use the time allotted to complete your task.Enter the Pomodoro Technique.If you’re looking for faster ways to knock out great content, try giving yourself a time limit – say 25-30 minutes. When your time is up, take a quick five-minute break and begin another 25-30 minutes of content creation or editing.
By giving yourself a time limit, you’ll stay focused and produce more jaw-dropping content faster.
Need help creating convincing content for your audience? At Digital Marketing Burst, we specialize in helping businesses deliver consistent, high-quality content on schedule. Get in touch today to learn more about our creative content services.
How to Determine the Best Content Length for SEO
What’s the best content length for SEO? That’s probably one of the most asked questions of online marketers and content creators.
As you might expect, the magic number varies quite a bit depending on whom you ask. Don’t worry, though. I’m here to help by sharing some ballpark numbers to aim for.
Let’s start with some research from Hook Agency, which claims the best content length for SEO in 2023 is between 1,760 and 2,400 words:
Let’s face it. That’s a lot of copy. So, here’s another question: Is all that effort you put into writing your awesome posts worthwhile?
For many of us, it takes a solid two or three hours to create a piece of good content that approaches the 2,000-word mark.
Is more content better for SEO? Or are you wasting your time?
Few people can plop in their chairs, bust out a 2,000-word article in an hour, and get on with their day.
Could it be that your 2,000-word articles aren’t even worth the time and effort you put into them? I’ll answer that question for you.
Then, I’ll give you a surefire formula for not wasting your time when you write articles—a powerful method to help your articles rank on top.
If you’re ready to stop wasting time, start ranking high, and optimize your content length for SEO, read on.
Long vs. Short-Form Content: What Works Best?
Here’s a short answer: It depends on your goal.
Every piece of content you publish has a different purpose.
Long-form content (usually over 1,000 words) can be great for in-depth articles, guides, and white papers. This type of content allows you to dive deep into a topic, provide valuable insights, and showcase your knowledge and expertise.
Additionally, long-form content tends to perform better in search engines, but that doesn’t mean Google favors higher word counts.
On the other hand, short-form content (300 to 600 words) can be great for social media posts, certain blog posts, and email newsletters. Short-form content lets you convey a message quickly and succinctly. It’s also more shareable.
Now, if you’re talking about content length and SEO, the answer’s a little more complex.
Ahrefs suggests you should be asking what length best satisfies searchers’ needs.
According to Ahrefs, the best content length for SEO depends on what’s ranking. You also need to look at what format is ranking (for example, guides, listicles, or tutorials). From there, you can create a search-focused outline by identifying content gaps.
Ahrefs has a keyword explorer tool to help with this, but you may prefer to use Ubersuggest.
Aside from SEO, creating content that resonates with your target audience, provides value, and aligns with your goals is essential.
Are You Using Google Ads?
Stop wasting money and unlock the hidden potential of your advertising.
- Discover the power of intentional advertising.
- Reach your ideal target audience.
- Maximize ad spend efficiency.
The Definitive B2B Marketing Guide
Did you know that 77 percent of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was complex or difficult?
That’s a big opportunity for marketers like you. Make that journey a little easier and reap the rewards of connecting with your target audience and driving conversions.
A winning business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy makes all the difference in landing loyal customers. I’m here to help you take your B2B game to the next level with this definitive B2B marketing guide.
By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll understand how B2B marketing works and how to use different B2B marketing strategies. I’ll review some B2B marketing best practices so you can hit the ground running.
Get ready to win at B2B.
What Is B2B Marketing?
B2B marketing is where a business sells products or services to other companies. It could be marketing something like software, web hosting services, or cloud computing packages.
In practice, this means reaching out to other businesses, developing relationships, and selling your products or services to them.
To position themselves as the best solution, B2B businesses might write post blogs, white papers, case studies, or display ads to appeal to their ideal clients.
Additionally, research from LinkedIn shows B2B marketing leaders are increasingly turning to in-person events (60 percent), video (59 percent), and thought leadership content (57 percent) to generate leads and grow their businesses.
See How My Agency Can Drive More Traffic to Your Website
- SEO – unlock more SEO traffic. See real results.
- Content Marketing – our team creates epic content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic.
- Paid Media – effective paid strategies with clear ROI.
Embracing B2B marketing can help you:
- Boost exposure: B2B tactics help businesses build brand awareness and build a strong brand reputation by sharing valuable expertise and insights on products and services.
- Build loyalty and trust: Developing targeted content is a great way to build enduring relationships with current and potential customers alike. Win them over by addressing their pain points and providing them solutions to those problems. This allows you to position your brand as their go-to for anything in your niche—and there’s a lot of long-lasting value to that.
- Target your marketing efforts: B2B marketing allows businesses to focus their efforts on a specific target audience, ideally decision-makers within companies. This helps businesses key in on the right people with their messaging and strategies.
Examples of B2B companies that nail B2B marketing include HubSpot, Dropbox, and Stripe. I’ll tell you more about what each does well—and how you can learn from their success—later in this piece.
B2C vs. B2B Marketing
As you might expect, B2B and B2C marketing have different approaches to reaching customers.
B2C businesses usually aim to connect with their customers emotionally by addressing their needs, desires, and pain points. B2B marketing focuses more on practical needs like cost-cutting, improving efficiency, and security, though focusing on a prospective client’s pain points does pay off.
The way you build relationships with customers is also different in learning how to market B2B. B2C businesses are more transactional, while B2B businesses focus on building relationships, networking, and direct outreach.
The B2B and B2B sales cycles also vary. B2C sales cycles are usually shorter, as they rely on customers making quick decisions rooted in emotion. B2B sales, on the other hand, take longer since the decision-making process is more complex—filled with pitches, product demos, and relationship-building.
Developing Your B2B Marketing Strategy
Creating the right B2B marketing strategies can be a major challenge. Whether you’re learning how to market B2B products or how to market B2B services, it’s especially important to identify the best tactics and techniques to reach your target audience.
In this section, I’ll explain how to approach your B2B content marketing strategy so it resonates with your customers and helps you achieve your business goals.
Define Clear Objectives
If you want a solid guide for your digital marketing strategy, it all begins with setting clear objectives. If you don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve, you’ll have no idea if you’re on the way to achieving it.
Is your company just starting out and looking to build brand awareness around your products and services? Are you somewhat established and looking to pick up the pace of growth? Each scenario will call for different objectives.
Be specific and realistic with your goals, and make sure they make sense for your business. For instance, don’t shoot for crazy growth numbers like increasing leads by 60% in a quarter or tripling your social media following in a month.
Those goals might make perfect sense for your business, but they’ll be all but impossible to achieve. In marketing, we talk a lot about SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound).
For instance, following the SMART method, your B2B marketing goals might look like this:
- Specific: Increase the number of memberships you sell by 20 percent.
- Measurable: To ensure you’re on track, you can monitor your progress using monthly sales figures.
- Attainable: Based on historical data, a 20 percent increase is realistic and would help you meet your overall goal of increasing revenue.
- Relevant: Selling more memberships fits with the larger objective of increasing revenue.
- Time-bound: To stay on target, you plan to achieve this 20 percent increase within the next six months.
This SMART goal is a great tool for keeping your efforts focused and effective while providing clear criteria for measuring your progress along the way.
Create Multiple Buyer Personas for Effective Targeting
To make sure you’re pursuing the right potential customers, it pays to create customer personas. After all, the most important part of any B2B marketing approach is understanding whom you’re targeting.
In a B2B sense, a buyer persona is a fictional prospect within a company whose traits match those of your ideal buyer. Think everything from their title to the level of autonomy they have to make decisions on behalf of their company. I like to think of personas kind of like characters in a book.
How do you work them into your B2B marketing strategy? By developing multiple buyer personas according to where your customers are in your B2B marketing funnel—in other words, whether they’re just becoming aware of your product or service, considering it, or ready to make a decision.
Doing so allows you to identify the unique needs and pain points of your different customer segments. With that comes a better customer journey. In fact, a successful personalization program boosts customer satisfaction by 20 percent and sales conversion rates by as much as 15 percent.
With these detailed profiles, you can personalize your B2B marketing strategies to resonate with each customer group, craft more compelling messages, and better position your products and services.
Key traits to work into your buyer personas include:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Occupation
- Marital status
- Education
- Geographical location
- Challenges
- Hobbies and interests
- Goals
- Fears
- Pain points
- Values
Ready to start crafting your personas? HubSpot has some free templates to help get your project off the ground.
Identify Your Buyer’s Journey
What steps does a potential customer go through during the decision-making process? Once you answer that question, you can use that as a definitive B2B marketing guide and create content around it.
Your sales reps get only 5 percent of a customer’s time during the B2B buyer’s journey. That’s why developing content that speaks to them at every stage of the journey is essential.
Much like the B2B marketing funnel, the buyer’s journey starts with awareness, moves on to consideration, and finishes with a buyer pulling the trigger on a purchase.
To personalize your B2B marketing strategies to each stage of the buyer’s journey, create a customer journey map. This is a visual representation of the steps and touchpoints customers go through when interacting with a company.
The Ultimate Guide to Paid Media
When you create a piece of valuable content, whether a blog post, eBook, or webinar, you want to promote it to as many people as possible.
If you need to reach new customers and get the edge over your competition, paid media is an excellent option.
The fantastic thing about paid media platforms is that there are so many of them to consider. No matter who your target audience is and what you want to sell, you can find the perfect solution for your business.
If you’re asking the question, “what is paid media?” I’ve put this paid media guide together to help. We’ll look at the different types of paid media, how to create ads people want to click on, and how to implement the perfect paid media campaign.
What Is Paid Media?
In a nutshell: paid media is any marketing channel you spend money to feature on.
The digital marketing channels you use to promote your business can be split into three categories; paid, earned, and owned.Earned media is unpaid publicity that your business gets from other people and websites. For example, an editorial in a publication, a blog post created by an influencer, even social media shares and mentions from your customers.
Owned media is content that your business manages and controls. This includes your website, blogs, social media accounts, and any documents you create.
Paid media is when you pay a third-party company to promote your message on your behalf. This includes channels like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and video advertising on platforms like YouTube. You can choose from several different types of paid media depending on your marketing strategy.
Types of Paid Media Marketing
A clear advantage of paid media is that many different platforms and ad types are available. This means that if you know which websites, social media platforms, and devices your target audience use, you can easily reach them.
Here are some examples of paid media and the benefits of each.
Search Engine Advertising
Search engine advertising is when you pay to promote your ads in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com.
You choose the keywords you want to appear for, state how much you’re willing to bid, write your advertisement, and the search engine does the rest.
Search engine advertising, also known as search engine marketing, is fantastic for targeting specific keywords and phrases. As a result, you can use adverts to appeal to people who are ready to buy, increasing your chances of a successful sale.
If you’re willing to bid enough money for a keyword, you can appear right at the top of the first page, above the competitors you outbid and the organic search results.
Display Advertising
A display ad is a paid media ad that uses images, video, and text to encourage visitors to click on a link to a website.
Display advertising can take the form of banners on a website and sponsored advertising, but the most well-known type is Google Display Ads.
The Google Display Network consists of over two million websites and mobile apps that businesses can display their ads on—reaching 90 percent of web users worldwide. When someone clicks on an ad, Google Ads and whoever hosted it share the spoils.
What are the benefits of display advertising? As display ads are image-led, they’re great for targeting people scrolling on their mobile phones. These people might not have the time to digest a text-based ad, but a bright and colorful ad will encourage them to stop scrolling.
Display advertising is also excellent for raising brand awareness. As customers see the same ad repeated across various websites, they gradually become more aware of your business.
As the average person needs to see a brand at least seven times before they make a purchase, this increases the chances of conversions in the future.
Paid Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is big business. The global market is currently worth a massive $207 billion, and this is set to grow in the future!
Paid social media advertising is advertising on social media platforms like:
- TikTok
- Snapchat
The Power of SEO: How It Can Transform Your Online Presence
In today’s digital landscape, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a pivotal role in determining the success of your online presence. Here’s why SEO is so crucial for businesses and individuals alike:
-
Enhanced Visibility: SEO ensures your website ranks higher on search engine results pages, driving more organic traffic and potential customers to your site.
-
Targeted Audience: By optimizing your content with relevant keywords, you attract users genuinely interested in your products or services, increasing conversion rates.
-
Credibility and Trust: Appearing on the first page of search results establishes credibility in the eyes of users, making them more likely to trust your brand.
-
User Experience: SEO focuses on improving website performance, speed, and mobile-friendliness, creating a seamless and enjoyable user experience.
-
Long-Term Strategy: While paid advertising may deliver instant results, SEO’s long-term approach ensures sustained growth and cost-effectiveness.
-
Beat the Competition: Outranking competitors in search results positions you as an industry leader and gives you a competitive advantage.
-
Global Reach: SEO allows you to reach a broader audience and expand your business beyond geographical boundaries.
-
Adapt to Changing Algorithms: SEO specialists keep up with search engine algorithm updates, ensuring your website remains relevant and optimized.
In conclusion, SEO is not just a marketing strategy; it’s an essential investment that can revolutionize your online success. Embrace the power of SEO and watch your digital presence thrive.
