08 Jul How Can a Digital Marketing Strategy Help You?

If you want your business to succeed online and stay ahead of your competitors, you need to have a digital marketing strategy in place. Without a strategy, your business won’t be found by your current customers online, and you’ll struggle to bring in new customers looking for your products or services. The world of digital marketing can be tough, but a smart strategy can make all the difference. A digital marketing strategy goes far beyond just having a website — It makes use of data analytics, digital marketing resources and industry trends. A successful digital marketing strategy will help you see a positive ROI in regards to website visitors, conversion rates and overall sales.

To have an effective digital marketing strategy in place, you’ll need to know what your audience is looking for, understand analytic data, and know how to add event tracking to your website.

Know What Your Audience Is Looking For

Knowing your audience doesn’t necessarily come from knowing them personally. You need to know your audience in terms of data. Collecting data on your target audience will inform you of what marketing decisions need to be made, instead of relying on feelings or what you think is right. Audience data gives factual support for developing a smart digital marketing strategy.

The first step to gathering target audience data is to know what they are looking for online, and this starts by gathering information on your audience demographics, interests, search queries, social media activity, technology usage, website interactions and more. Then, you can also gather data on how visitors to your website interact with it. Are they visiting the pages or interacting with the content that you want them to?

One way to improve your website marketing strategy is through keyword research, which is an important element of SEO. Discovering the keywords your target audience uses to find your content or type of content online can help you optimize the current content on your website by strategically incorporating these keywords. This process will increase overall web traffic and increase traffic from your target audience. Tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner can be a great asset to finding the right keywords to reach your audience. These keywords can be used for improving your on-page SEO strategy, online advertising strategy and social media strategy. Of course, it’s important to remember that keyword research is an ongoing process as part of your full digital marketing strategy.

Understanding Analytic Data

COVID-19 has affected business both at their physical locations and online. It has also impacted online user behaviors, including search queries and search engine results pages. Because of this, formulating or updating your digital marketing strategy is more crucial now than ever to ensure your website, content and business information is reaching your customers and target audience online.

This is where the importance of using analytic data to better understand your audience comes into full view. Data from Google Analytics about your website and ads is extremely insightful for gathering every category of data you could need to make informed decisions about your website and digital marketing. Social media analytics can also improve your data collection and insights. 

These analytics reports can help you specifically uncover what types of content your audience is or isn’t engaging with when it comes to your website, ads and social media. You will also gain insight into specific audience user behaviors, such as what time of day they access your website, their locations by area/region, the type of devices they used to access your website (mobile, desktop, etc.) and more. All of this data can shed new light on your digital marketing strategy, both as to what is performing well and what needs to be improved.

In digital marketing, you can’t rely on hunches, feelings or what you “think” about your audience and your business. While these certainly can be helpful at times for influencing some decisions, the hard data always shows the reality. This is why knowing how to collect and properly analyze your online performance data is vital to the success of your digital marketing strategy.

Adding Event Tracking to Your Site

Event tracking gives you more options for tracking and measuring user interactions on your website and can be added through your Google Analytics/Google Ads account. As previously mentioned, tracking how users interact with every aspect of your website and online ads will provide an enormous resource of data to use when developing an effective digital marketing strategy. Event tracking works by monitoring specific user behaviors on a website or ad, triggering a record of an on-site conversion when the tracked action is completed. 

Examples of what event tracking can be applied to include:

• Downloads
• Filling out a form
• Button clicks
• Social sharing
• Adding to a shopping cart
• Logins

When you set up a custom event goal in Google Analytics and add the assigned code to your website, you can also track this data in your Google Ads. This will better inform you on the success of your current ad spending and how to adjust your budget accordingly. 

If you are setting up your event tracking on your own, there are a number of custom event tracking templates available online. Once you’ve filled out the required fields for your event tracking, you will receive a code that can be used in the events to be tracked, whether on your website or your Google Ads. You may want a web developer to help you embed this tracking code to ensure it’s done properly.

Making full use of event tracking gives you the full picture of how your website content and ads are performing online. Without it, your digital marketing strategy is more like wandering the internet blindfolded — sure, you could luck out and successfully find your way around, but that’s quite unlikely to happen. Instead, your business needs to rely on a roadmap to chart a course to success through conversion rates and sales.

Digital Marketing Strategy Experts

You don’t have to be an expert in digital marketing to have a smart digital marketing strategy! Our digital marketing pros at Virtual Stacks Systems UK have the skills and experience helping businesses in a wide range of industries develop effective digital marketing strategies that grow audiences, improve web traffic and increase conversions. From SEO services to PPC advertising and more, we’ll help you cover every base of your online presence. Contact us today to discuss your digital marketing needs!