Digital marketing is an ever-changing, ever-evolving ballgame — from marketing tech tools to ads and SEO, and how we impact behaviours in specific audience segments. It’s time once again to refresh your practices and strategies to stay on top of trends emerging in the next few months. Digital marketing and human experience (HX) agency GO Digital recommends these digital marketing hacks guaranteed to help your 2023 campaigns run smoother and make a lasting impression on clients and target audiences.
1. Audit, audit, audit
Audits. Marketers might be sick of this word by now, but we can’t deny that a great marketing strategy is shaped by research and a whole lot of information. To get these data and, in turn, make the most of these data, businesses need to engage in audits. Here are some auditing processes in digital marketing that you might not be doing just yet.
Site audit
Any digital marketing strategy that involves website management must include a site audit. There are many online visibility platforms and content marketing software that can do the job for you, such as Semrush. A site audit basically reveals pain points in your website that might be affecting loading times, search engine discoverability, and overall optimum performance.
Content audit
With a website comes content; and if you audited the website that serves as your content’s home base, you should definitely audit the content that inhabits your virtual space. Do this regularly; think of it as housekeeping. Content audits will allow you to figure out what has been working organically and what you can improve on. It’s also a great way to keep track of older content that you can potentially reuse, repurpose, trim down, update, or spruce up.
Backlink audit
You know what they say: The devil’s in the details. Digital marketers know all too well that error-laden backlinks may actually be the bane of any online marketing campaign. The key is to nip the problem in the bud. Keep up with the state of your backlinks with regular backlink audits; GO Digital suggests a monthly audit to keep your website in tip-top shape. Fix lost and broken links on time, and make your authoritative backlinks work twice as hard with a few content tweaks.
2. Optimise your Google My Business strategy
You have a Google My Business (GMB) account and listing — great. What now? You’ll have to optimise the information and content you have on there, too. Improving your GMB listing will do wonders for your business’ overall SEO health. Boost searchability and brand trust. Here are a few digital marketing hacks specific to GMB and how you use it.
Verify your business
Makeaudiences and Google trust your brand more. Verify your GMB listing to add to your business’ legitimacy online. Once you’ve entered all the information a GMB listing requires, Google will ask you to verify them via email, phone, or post. Go through that process and you’ve already ticked a major optimisation hack.
Add more relevant details to your profile
Digital marketers are no strangers to how Google crawls information on the Internet to determine which content deserves more visibility than others. For GMB, you’ll have to expound on your business’ proximity, popularity, and relevancy. The more relevant information you share via your GMB profile, the more Google will have to work with in terms of matching your business with your targeted audience’s potential searches.
Pay attention to GMB interactions
Improve your GMB ranking by paying close attention to how you interact with clients and interested parties. Set up a comprehensive FAQs section that’s SEO optimised; never miss the opportunity to reply to follow-up queries! Gather reviews from satisfied customers because Google’s algorithm heavily relies on ratings and reviews to decide your searchability and ranking. Make sure to respond to these reviews as well — be sure to thank the people who took the time to post reviews. Post and post regularly — events, photos, videos, promotions, whatever is current and relevant.
Utilise performance insights
Let analytics work for you. With all this going on, you can bet that Google tracks your performance and other metrics. Make sense of all that data, analyse it, and build a refreshed GMB strategy around it. That’s what all that data is for after all. Use it!
3. Ready your content for visual & voice search
An emerging digital marketing trend is the rise of visual search and voice search. This impacts your SEO strategy because the way people will search for specific things online will also change. Written keywords will vastly differ from keywords uttered conversationally via voice search. And visual search? Aside from online image matching, there’s the case of alt tags or text, which most websites lack. That said, a digital marketing hack you’d be wise to stay on top of as early as now is to optimise your content for visual and voice search. Make sure this is part of your strategy audit!.
4. Engage in an affiliate program
This digital marketing hack is especially beneficial to brands looking to rapidly expand their client base while continuously rewarding loyal clients. Affiliate programs done right, whether in-house or in partnership with other brands or agencies, will always result in a brand boom that delivers solid results. Hype for brands is critical within certain seasons and industries. For example, fashion and beauty brands always amp up affiliate digital marketing efforts during Black Friday season. Agencies like GO Digital hold expertise in these types of campaigns, and if your business is considering widening its reach with a robust affiliate program, you can learn more here.
5. Invest in data collection & analytics
In digital marketing, data is power. Data-driven marketing will always turn out to be more efficient because they are guided by information that already tells a brand how to reach the right people. Within the sphere of data collection and analytics, turn your sights to zero-party data. If your business can develop ways of gathering data straight from the source, then that means you’ll have access to relevant and reliable data. Of course, gathering data is just as important as reading the data and knowing how to use it to your businesses’ advantage. Investing in updated data collection and analytics software will help any brand personalise ads and brand messaging based on a certain audience segment.
The biggest digital marketing hack your brand can invest in for 2023 and beyond, though, is to partner with a digital marketing agency like GO Digital, which can do everything for you and extend expertise in fast-changing digital marketing approaches. Talk to a digital marketing expert today.
