How can SMEs improve their digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a world that is ever-changing, and your digital marketing tactics and strategy need to keep up with the times.

How can SMEs improve their digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a world that is ever-changing, and your digital marketing tactics and strategy need to keep up with the times. It’s important that your business stays up to date with new developments to make sure that you are always one step ahead of your competition and not left by the wayside.

Only about 22 percent of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates, and digital marketing is one sure-fire way to improve this. We recently surveyed 259 CMOs, marketing directors, marketing execs and marketing officers about how PR fits into the marketing mix. Results showed that 97 percent of them believe PR is valuable and they mostly value PR for reputation management, lead generation, brand building and SEO. All of which can be built into your digital marketing strategy, but how?

Focus: don’t try to do
everything

It’s important to choose the channels that really work for you and make sure that you focus your efforts on those. It’s worth doing an audit of how your customers are engaging with you and comparing where most of your customer interactions are happening – is it your website and blog pages or your social media and email marketing?

Once you’ve identified your top channels for customer engagement, you can develop a specific digital marketing strategy for each channel. If you try and focus on every single channel, you run the risk of stretching yourself too thin and not giving each channel the TLC it needs.

PR and SEO work in
tandem

Surprisingly, only 20 percent of marketers feel that PR is valuable for SEO. This shows that the industry has a long way to go to genuinely understanding how vital the link between the two is. 

When it comes to PR and SEO, one drives the other so it’s important to consolidate your PR and SEO strategies. Every time you get a piece of coverage on an online site which links back to your website, it sends some valuable link juice along with it, boosting your SEO at the same time.

However, it’s important to remember that improving your digital marketing performance is not something that happens overnight – especially when it comes to SEO. This is a long-term game, so don’t expect to see dramatic improvements immediately. You’ve got to stick to it to make it work!

Plan ahead

Even if you can’t invest in SEO fully at the moment, set your website up for future SEO success by doing good keyword research now. You need to understand what keywords your customers are searching for. What do you think they’re typing into Google when looking for a service/solution/product like yours?

Keywords and the sales funnel are definitely linked, so make sure you have done a keyword audit for all stages of your sales funnel. Then, start to tailor your website with a variety of content relevant for the different stages of the sales funnel and the associated keywords. The key to good SEO is to make sure that you’re not just producing content for the sake of it, but that it is relevant and helpful, and better than other content out their ranking for the same keywords.

Give every piece of
content a clear purpose

If you don’t know what that purpose is before you produce it, then don’t waste your time – really focus on the content. This goes for content on your website, any link building you do as part improving your SEO, answering FAQs or content you produce to help you rank for a key term.

Digital marketing
shouldn’t be an afterthought

Digital marketing should be a key part of every SME’s yearly strategy and definitely not an afterthought. Every time you launch a new product or service or want to revamp your current ones, make sure that your marketing strategy is at the forefront of conversation.

The first thing is to nail your messaging. Then, carry that across all of your channels and think about the best way of getting that message across. For example, on mobile, how can you optimise this experience and push your messaging? Is the best tactic to launch an app so you can send push notifications? Or would it work better to create a microsite to focus all of your campaign activity? These questions need to be asked at the beginning stages of strategy planning, and not at the end.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heather Baker
Heather Baker
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