2021 Digital Marketing To Do List

It’s a new year and the world around us changes evermore rapidly when it comes to keeping up with marketing trends and technology for your business.

We break down the top items you’ll need to focus on right now to improve your top line revenue this year.

1. Goals – Have a Purpose

This is the #1 area where most businesses fail in their marketing efforts.  It’s like driving your car with no destination in mind.  It’s sounds silly, but a majority of businesses are not planning properly and setting goals, then tracking their progress towards the goals.

I’m not just talking about top line revenue goals like, “We need to gross $3 million this year.”  Yes, that’s a goal and it’s a great start, but how are you going to get there?  Especially if you only did $2 million in 2016?

So where can you improve?

Can we set specific goals to grow the business?

Improve marketing and lead generation?  Expand into a new business line?  Target an additional industry with our service offerings?

Invest in Facebook Ads or Adwords campaigns for targeted marketing audiences?

2.  Tracking and Return on Investment (ROI)

What is a lead worth to your business?  What is the life time value of your customers?

You learned to set your goals above.  Now let’s run programs to meet those goals and track which pieces of the programs are getting the best results, for a profit.
If you can see through analytics that spending $10 on a pay per click ad with Facebook generated $200 in business for you, how much would you continue to spend on that Facebook ad?  The answer is “All of it until you are sold out!”  Because it’s working, you can see it in the tracking, so scale it up.  All digital marketing has the ability to be tracked down to the goal you want to achieve.

We all have those moments when we fell for the salesman/woman and bought the ad we maybe shouldn’t have.  Maybe it was $500, or $1000 or $5000.  Only to think later, “Did I get any increase in business from that ad.”  The sad thing is most likely NO.  So let’s stop wasting money on things we can’t track for ROI.

Old school ad formats are dying for a reason.  They can’t be tracked and linked to your goals (above).  Newspaper = dead.  Radio = no results (people can’t take action).  Billboard = your ego (wanting the see your business name when you drive down the street).

Which nets you the most leads or sales?  Paid Search/Adwords? Facebook posts?  A Facebook ad?  Google searches (SEO)?  Instagram posts?

Do you even include a trackable link in your posts or ads?

Setting up the tracking takes some knowledge and experience.  So you can google search how to do it and learn over the next few months how to set up your ROI metrics, or higher a pro to do it right and get things tracking within a week.

DYI with Google Analytics and this Campaign URL builder tool.

3.  Mobile first!

Google and all your customers now think and act on mobile first.  The majority of your customers are on mobile devices all day versus desktops.  Google knows this and split their index into mobile and desktop search results.  They are putting priority on mobile first.  If your website is not mobile friendly, you are going to plummet in search results on mobile phones in 2017.  Get a mobile responsive WordPress website designed.

Is your website mobile friendly?  Test it with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool

Next Steps

These three tips sound simple but there is one HUGE problem.  Your time!

Use our free and simple website SEO analysis tool to check your site for any problems related to search marketing.

It might be best to shop around to some agencies who know what they are doing.  Most can do this for less than the price of an entry level marketing hire and net you 10 times the results.   Just make sure they are focused on results for your specific goals.

You want to hold everyone accountable to meet your marketing plan.  Remember the agency needs to show ROI too!   It takes some time to get up and running.  There is a lot of up front work to just set the systems in place before they start generating sales.  Know the investment is worth it and give it time to work.

Contact us and we’ll analyze your business to give you suggestions