After a year of adapting to the new normal, it’s safe to say that COVID-19 has forever transformed our world, including the online one — from the way we work to our new consumer habits, a lot has changed in the last twelve months. However, as vaccines become more widely available, soon we’ll find things falling into place, and a new “new normal” will emerge.
Many businesses faced considerable challenges in 2020, and for most, a liferaft came in the form of a robust digital marketing strategy. But what qualifies as an effective digital marketing strategy, and how do you put one together?
For starters, conducting an audit of your entire online presence and strategy from the past year is a great way to begin your new digital marketing journey. Then, after doing so and figuring out what worked well and what didn’t go as expected, you can focus on the following practices to re-align your business with the current environment.
1. Redefine your expectations
The industries most heavily impacted by the pandemic are tourism and travel, restaurants and bars, and live entertainment. On the opposite end, we have the ones that thrived: local shops and grocery stores, e-commerce services, and at-home fitness solutions. Likewise, financial services remained steady, partially due to low interest rates and a skyrocketing demand for mortgages.
It’s crucial to align your goals to how the pandemic impacted your particular industry; for those most negatively affected, it’s important to recognize that getting back to how things were before will be difficult, will take time, and in some cases, may be impossible.
If your industry has managed to weather the storm and your company remains on solid footing, we hope that if you haven’t already started to evolve your digital marketing presence, you are making it a high priority moving forward.
2. Know your customer
It goes without saying, but 2020 had a significant impact on people and their mental health. And with all of the restrictions and limitations, customer behaviors changed and evolved, influencing new trends. In some industries, the changes may be more dramatic and, in others, less so, depending on the market.
To keep up with the latest marketing trends in your industry, you must make it a priority to monitor and analyze consumer data consistently and use this information to detect new buying patterns. To achieve this, you can rely on Google Trends. It’s not only a helpful tool, but best of all, it’s free.
Pro Tip
To keep up with the latest marketing trends in your industry, you must make it a priority to monitor and analyze consumer data consistently and use this information to detect new buying patterns.
3. Optimize today, optimize tomorrow, optimize every day
With a constantly evolving landscape, from our current house-bound personal lives to the marketing industry as a whole, only one thing remains constant, and that is that everything changes. The most important thing to always keep in mind is how are the choices you make today helping or hurting your long-term goals. This applies to your company’s long-term goals as well. Small changes, improvements, optimizations each day will contribute greatly to making significant progress in the future. As digital marketers, we know that campaign optimization is never-ending and should be a constant priority, especially now.
Keep an eye out every day and try to maintain your cost per lead and impressions, even if the conversion volume might vary. Most importantly, what you should be focusing on is driving high-quality leads. If doing this daily doesn’t seem feasible for your company, or if you feel like your digital marketing campaigns have hit a roadblock, you can leave it to us to look after your PPC campaigns.
4. Reporting, reporting, reporting
Whether you’re looking to demonstrate how performance has evolved in past weeks for upper management or just trying to keep a pulse on how things are developing for yourself, create reports. Get insights on what’s performing well, what’s been dragging, and get to the root of any problems.
Having all the data in front of you will give a better perspective into what you should be doing and what needs to change in your digital strategy.
5. Conduct frequent competitor research
Last but certainly not least, after keeping an eye on trends, reports, and your campaign optimizations, don’t forget about your competitors throughout this process. Analyzing your competition will help you gain valuable insights.
For example, you can determine whether specific campaigns have experienced a higher cost-per-lead based on someone else bidding on the same keywords. Or you can identify hidden opportunities to bid more elsewhere. If you’re seeing good results while your competitors have pulled back, it means that there’s some market left there that could work in your favor.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these five tips will help you evolve your digital strategy in 2021. It’s crucial not to cut corners when crafting an effective marketing plan, so don’t forget to start this process with a complete audit of your marketing channels, tactics, and performance over the last year.
It’s the best way to gain complete visibility into your achievements and shortcomings so that you can implement the necessary solutions to meet your business objectives. If you need help conducting a comprehensive audit and devising a strategy that works, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Our digital marketing services are at your disposal.
