Top Trends in Digital Marketing for Lucknow Businesses: What Works in 2024
Discover the best digital marketing strategies for Lucknow businesses in 2024 and stay ahead of the competition!
5 Essential Tips for Achieving the Best Digital Marketing Outcome in India
In today’s competitive market, businesses need effective digital marketing strategies to stay ahead. This blog provides essential tips and techniques to help Indian businesses and startups achieve outstanding digital marketing outcomes. From leveraging local SEO to mastering social media marketing, discover the best practices and insights tailored for the Indian market. Join Digital Marketing Burst as we guide you through the ultimate digital marketing journey for success in India.
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.”
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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.
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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.
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