Like any part of your business, digital marketing is an investment of both time and money. As an advisor and business owner, you always want to know how your marketing is performing so you can be on track with your goals. Otherwise, you risk being inefficient and wasting precious resources.
Before we dig into whether or not your digital marketing strategy is working, we must discuss what’s at the center of all your digital marketing — your website! This is where first impressions are made and conversions happen so it’s incredibly important that your advisor website be in tip-top shape before looking into the specifics of your digital marketing strategy.
Having an effective website means creating a site that is easy to navigate and read with clear guidance. It should be easy to see the next steps consumers need to take to move further down your sales funnel. You should also be creating a site that is optimized for mobile devices to improve the user experience. Before beginning, if you’re unsure that your current site meets any of these requirements, contact us now and let us help!
When you review your firm’s marketing, there’s a lot of questions you may ask. Where should you spend your next marketing dollar? What will the ROI be by spending that extra money? When it comes to setting the initial goals for your digital marketing it’s most important to ask yourself, is this measurable? Unless you’re focusing on things that can give you actual numerical data and analytics, it will be difficult to know what’s actually working and what changes you should make.
If you’re unsure what exactly to measure, here’s 6 things that can help you maximize your efforts!
1. Your Organic Keyword Rankings
In the time you’ve read this sentence 40,000 people are typing queries and questions into Google. Are they landing on your site? You’ll be able to answer this by taking a look at your Google Search Console. Like your overall site traffic, you want to see your organic search numbers increase steadily from month-to-month. If you’re not seeing this increase, then you should consider taking a look at how you can optimize your content and site further for search engines. SEO is very important for improving your digital presence and can be the key to gaining more sales through your site. Some ways to improve your SEO include meta descriptions, building out links, using local keywords and blogging.
2. Google Analytics
Website traffic is a better indication of success than Google rankings because it includes all sources of traffic and segmentation of data. There are a ton of different metrics you can pull from Google Analytics and many of them are very helpful in improving your marketing goals.
To us, the one most important metric to check would be your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visit your website and then navigate away from it after only viewing one page.While your bounce rate likely won’t change much from month to month, this is one metric you should keep an eye on. Yes- even over site visits. Why? Because getting visitors to your site doesn’t mean much unless they stick around to learn more about your services and engage with your business. Many sites have a bounce rate of 45 to 50%. For most sites, anything under 40 percent is considered a win. A few quick ways to improve your bounce rate would be making sure your site is mobile friendly, avoiding excess pop-ups and consistently updating your blog.
3. Actions
Calls-to-action are a key part of your website design and are crucial to helping a potential customer take the next step. Therefore, any action a user can take on your site adds value to your digital marketing efforts. The CTAs will differ for each site, but some examples include newsletter signups, white paper or case study downloads, event signups and video views.
4. Unsubscribes
Now that we’ve covered the importance of actions on your website, we can touch on email marketing. If you have a newsletter, it’s important that you take a look at these metrics as well. It can be disheartening to see users unsubscribe, but its best to move on. Users who have unsubscribed aren’t interested in your services, so you should get over those clients and focus on the ones who are interacting with your messages.
At the end of the day, you’re only interested in people who actually want to open and read your newsletters, not those who accidentally subscribed or no longer need to see them. However, seeing a drastic amount of unsubscribes should prompt you to take a second look at your newsletters. You may need to do a better job of segmenting your email lists or send them less frequently.
5. Social Media
Your firm’s presence on social media should do three things:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate more leads
- Improve customer engagement
68% of American adults are active on Facebook. So if you’re not engaging on these platforms, you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity to get in front of potential clients. When you share links to pieces of blog content on your social media channels, you are working to drive more traffic back to your site. One way to see how many visits your site is receiving from social media channels is to take a look at your social referrals on Google Analytics. If you’re not getting the referrals you want from social, you may need to take another look at your strategy.
6. Test & Refine
Digital marketing is a beautiful thing. Unlike posting a billboard on the side of the road or sending snail mail, you’re able to constantly refine your digital marketing strategies as trends and preferences change. There’s nothing wrong with making small, frequent changes to your strategy if you see things aren’t working. Make schedules and checklists to make sure you’re stats are going in the direction you want and you’ll always be ahead of your goals!
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