Digital Marketing Checklist: What You Should Expect in 2018

Posted by clever ativity on May 2nd, 2018

You may have the wrong conception that there won’t be enough changes in 2018 to warrant re-evaluating and changing your digital marketing plan. There are something much more than just the fundamental that is going to change this year which will affect you even if you’ve just update your marketing plan to accommodate the latest industry tactics – The changes we are talking about is a cultural shift in communication.

With the advancement and growth of mobile phone technology, smartphones are now primary way through which majority of internet users search and view websites and advertising online. This has already been confirmed by Google as they announced that more than half of their search engine traffic in 2017 originated from mobile devices. Here is something to think about; if 2017 was the year websites were demanded to be mobile-friendly then expect that 2018 is the year those who applied those changes will leave behind those who didn’t. Without a doubt, the rate of mobile usage will maintain its exponential rise in 2018 across search engines, social networks and website analytics reports.

The simple fact is preparing for changes is necessary if you want to get the most out of your advertising budgets and marketing efforts. Some of the changes to expect this year is the growth of mobile web traffic. You need to create a digital marketing plan that involves the tactics below in order to leverage on the changes we are expecting in 2016.

CREATE A FOUNDATION FOR A SOLID DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Here are what you need to do

Identify and Track Goals

  • Select a suitable key performance indicator to track and monitor your digital success once you’ve set your marketing or sales target
  • Find out which KPIs you must measure depending on your goals
  • Examine your current KPIs in your analytics platform to find out which one has more chances of success and the one that has no chance at all.
  • Ensure that your KPIs can be measured
  • Ensure that you keep track of your KPIs on your site and existing analytics platforms.
  • Ensure that your KPIs are relevant to mobile

Be Serious About Persona Development

  • Well, you need to get more serious about persona development this year to take your digital marketing to next level. It is actually very helpful for content development and targeting, here are what you need to do;
  • Collect information and data about your existing customers from your websites analytics, social media profiles, database or from other resources online so that you can determine how to target similar persons.
  • Talk to your sales department to know more about your customer demographics. This way, you can gather offline data. You can bribe your customers with discounts in exchange for their valuable survey data.
  • Identify ways you can utilize to reach your ideal customers
  • Identify areas where your customers are searching for solutions
  • Find out customer preferences and interests and serve unique and personalized contents to your targets.

USE THE RIGHT CHANNELS TO ENGAGE AND PERSUADE

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Create contents that are informative to address informational search queries
  • Reply to your customer’s demographics’ question with informative data
  • Pay more attention to what your targets are actually searching for.
  • Make use of schema mark-up on your rich snippets and contents
  • You can as well use schema to boost your local search visibility
  • Track and enhance the performance of your site
  • Increase your page loading speed
  • Optimize images in your site
  • Ensure you minify Javascript and HTML where it is needed
  • Optimize your site for mobile users
  • Find out how mobile users are accessing your websites
  • Optimize your site for conversion

Email Marketing

  • Ensure you are using mobile-friendly templates
  • Use implicit and explicit information to personalize your email
  • Carry out automation of your emails so that it can better qualify leads through lead nurturing campaigns
  • Keep track of lead engagements with your emails so that you can determine the success of content offerings, channel and messaging.

Online Advertising

  • Use contents to generate leads and drive awareness if you are a B2B advertiser.
  • If you are an e-commerce advertiser, use Promoted posts on Facebook and LinkedIn, Use Dynamic search ads on Google Adwords, shopping campaigns, dynamic remarking on the Google Display Network and Facebook to widen your tactics.
  • Make use of demographic targeting if is available
  • Determine the weakness of your mobile traffic conversion and make a plan to reduce those weaknesses.
  • Make a budget for your social media advertising
  • Show your ads to those who are familiar with your brand

TRACK, MEASURE AND EVALUATE

Gathering accurate data is very crucial in proving “return on investment”. After which you can begin the continual evaluation of your strategy in order to make sure your digital marketing efforts are effective.

Get Your Analytics in Order

  • Ensure there is analytic tracking code in every page in your website
  • Try and eliminate self-referral in analytics tracking which may be stripping off your referral sources
  • Make sure you enable the “advertiser’s features” on Google analytics to get gender, location, age, and in-market audience search interest.
  • Utilize attribution modeling in order to get a complete picture of what is driving conversions.
  • Set targets for every campaigns

Marketing Automation

  • Use marketing automation to get intelligence and drive customer’s action if your goal is lead generation
  • Use the services of marketing automation platform like Marketo or Hubspot
  • Develop more triggers to monitor your engagement
  • Monitor the performance of your campaign
  • Find out relationships between actions and outcomes

Like it? Share it!


clever ativity

About the Author

clever ativity
Joined: February 16th, 2018
Articles Posted: 48

More by this author