Warning Signs That You Need To Invest More Into Your Online Marketing

There are plenty of business owners and executives who are a step away from their marketing team, and can’t understand the costs that come with a powerful and well-structured campaign- especially in digital marketing. With the scope of research and tactical efforts now required, the tightening of purse strings can mean less visibility/ customers/ sales/ money- so your money ‘saved’ on marketing has now cost you even more than before.

1) The Competition Is Leaving Your Behind

This can be a scary one. All of a sudden, your business is not at the top of Google’s search engine results page. Before you know it, it’s not even on the first page. If you can see your SEO rankings drop, then your competition have been working hard at their online presence, and you’re being weaned out. They could be investing in PPC advertising, and implementing a new keyword targeting strategy. They could even be targeting your brand name, so that their business appears when your brand is searched. There could be any number of reasons, but they’ll serve as a wake-up call to anyone sceptical of the power of digital marketing. If you feel that you’re competition are a nose ahead, start making room in the budget to find SEO consulting services and quality content marketing.

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2) You Don’t Have A Plan

This is great for that one-way solo trip across Europe, but not for marketing. Your marketing plan is integral to your business, so if you don’t use one, or you’re slow to update or implement your strategies, then you need to revisit your overall marketing efforts with some new vigour. Breathe new life into your strategies, and create a dedicated plan to take you through the coming weeks or months, with firm goals and outlines for the marketing team to aim for. This is also fantastic for mapping progress, and gaining a clear understanding of how powerful marketing can be.

3) Your Marketing Emails Go Straight to ‘Junk’

Poor quality email marketing can be worse than no email marketing! If the audience on your email list are receiving a standard monthly newsletter by email, with dry sales-ey catch phrases, or monotonous company information of zero interest, then they’re going to regret ever connecting to your brand. A/B testing is a fantastic way to get to know your audience, by split testing to see which version of similar emails gathers a better response, and this information can shape future email marketing templates. This is a great opportunity to get to know your customer, and what interests them. Spend time creating engaging, well-planned email marketing strategies, and your audience will respond.

4) You Don’t Have Time For A Company Blog

Right now, almost every company has (or should have) a blog, which they update regularly, and every updated piece of new and exciting content serves as a big flag for Google, saying “Hi, we’re over here! Working hard on our website!”. Google recognises these websites as more current and with better maintenance, so is far more likely to offer them to the online browser. Blogging is also a great place to give your audience a place to connect further with your brand, industry, or company outlook, so you’ll experience more traffic to your website as well as a more loyal and invested customer base. Your content strategy should include your blog, which should be updated as frequently as your resources can allow. Aim for useful, funny, or thought-provoking content, with lengthier content being extremely well-received by the search engines, as it shows more thorough creation and will mean readers spend even longer on your website, helping your overall SEO.

Also Read : 6 Best Tips to Make Your Content Go Viral!

5) Your Current Results Are Dismal

If you’re resigned to your marketing results, rather than enthused by them, then you definitely need to invest more. However, this doesn’t necessarily need to mean more money. An internal marketing team can get expensive pretty quickly, and some businesses don’t have the revenue to add more marketers to the squad- a marketer which could end up costing you more than they bring in. Invest some time to examining your options; digital marketing agencies have proven experience with a visible track record, and can call on multiple facets to deliver you a prime result. Videography, web design, content, SEO and Adwords are all hugely powerful tools when in the right hands.

6) You Can’t Actually See (Or Understand) Your Current Results

A keen digital marketer will be able to produce any number of statistics and insights into your company, and your customer, through the fantastic tools buried in digital marketing. If you just presume everything is running to plan at a glance, then you really have no clue about what’s going on under the surface. By investing in the right strategies and software, you can view comprehensive reports and plan your next tactical manoeuvre with ease.

What Is Everyone Else Doing?

If you’re trying to find a balance for your businesses digital marketing, it’s good to know what your competitors are doing. You can find their most powerful seo strategies and implement them, or learn from their mistakes- either way, your marketing efforts can benefit. Here are the five places that businesses are driving their marketing resources to in 2016, so make sure that you have sufficient strategies in place around these to ensure a powerful result.

• Marketing Automation: With software expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2019, now is definitely the time to look into marketing automation- the 34% increase in sales is tempting, and is the average increase for automation users. This varies from email marketing and lead nurturing, to cross-channel campaign management, centralised customer intelligence, and channel integration.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing uses engaging storytelling techniques to trigger a response or action from the reader, and more than half of all marketers will increase their content marketing budget by the end of this year. Content marketing builds trust and familiarity with your brand, which is why across Australia, businesses are allocating 25% of their total budget to content marketing, and seeing the results that prove how valuable it can be.
• Big Data: This is for the well-versed digital marketer, who can use this to access large data sets of information from the internet, which can be analysed to monitor patterns and trends. In fact, the amount of organisations who implement data-focussed projects has risen by 125%, with even more marketing departments planning on a heavy budget increase for the ability to use such critical information.
• Conversion Rate Optimisation: Commonly referred to as CRO, conversion rate optimisation is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to your website, who will then convert into a customer (or follow another action which you’ve designated). With careful planning, and monitored testing of the behaviour of your online user, you can develop a system to encourage conversion from your audience.
• Mobile Marketing: 2016 will continue the tide of smartphones, with expected user numbers to hit two billion people- which should tell you just how brilliant this could be for your business. Nearly 70% of companies have already integrated mobile marketing into their strategy, and the mobile experience is becoming more and more critical to your business.

Also Read : 7 Tips to Make Your Email Marketing More Mobile-Friendly

If you notice any of the warning signs in your marketing efforts, or you are struggling to familiarise yourself with the continuing technology available, contact our team of digital marketers and SEO experts. Here at Dilate, our Perth-owned marketing and SEO agency offer comprehensive strategies for making your web presence powerful and engaging. Talk to us about how we can help with our SEO consulting services, to take your business to the next level.