Author Archives: Brette Rowley

Digital marketing often seems like a challenge in itself. It’s all anyone is talking about but when you try a new strategy it’s tough to see results. It’s as if you’re missing out on a huge opportunity if you don’t explore the world of digital marketing, but you can only invest so much without getting a return.

The good news is that you’re not alone.

We’ve narrowed down the top challenges that small businesses face when it comes to digital marketing. Even better, we have the keys to overcoming them!

Persuading Company Leadership to Invest in Digital

Change can be difficult. When you’ve been successful using the same marketing strategies over the course of the business, it’s tough to convince leadership within your company to take the plunge and try something new. This is especially true if they’ve had a bad experience with digital marketing in the past!

When approaching company leaders about a new strategy, it’s important to lead with the bottom line. What results are you expecting to see from the campaign? How will you measure them? Speak in terms that they are interested and invested in. Revenue not reach. Sales not followers.

If all else fails, take a look at your competitors. Highlight the ways that they are beating you on digital platforms and share your plan to narrow the gap.

Insufficient Infrastructure

One of the key reasons that many digital strategies fail is that they don’t have the proper infrastructure to support the campaigns. Before launching your digital marketing initiatives, make sure that you have the technology, partners, and tools in place to manage the campaigns from creation to measurement.

In some cases, this requires new software tools to manage email lists, automate responses, and capture information. For others, this is a broader-scale look at their technology infrastructure and evaluating everything from hosting to data storage.

Your website is the centerpiece of your digital marketing strategy, so ensure that it’s functioning at a high level with full service hosting and maintenance.

Consistency

Digital marketing places a high value on CONTENT. Social media, blogging, webinars, podcasts… it can be exhausting! Many small businesses start with great intentions, but the content creation falls off as soon as things get busy. In order to avoid that lack of consistency, it’s crucial to plan ahead.

Start by creating a content plan for the next 30 days. Then, identify who will be responsible for creating content. It’s beneficial to have a single person dedicated to content creation so that the voice is similar across all platforms.

Finally, don’t feel obligated to create content from scratch for every channel. Can you repurpose your blog posts into social media captions? Do you have white paper content that can be transformed into a webinar or podcast? Chances are that you have plenty of content available – the key is to share it with your audience!

Proving Value

While digital marketing platforms offer an abundance of analytics, it can sometimes be difficult to tie those metrics back to true business success. The key is to start with extremely clear goals for what you want to achieve. For example, if you are running an ad campaign on Facebook, the metrics that Facebook shares will be things like link clicks, impressions, and reach. So, to set goals for the campaign, it’s important to understand how many link clicks you need to convert the number of sales that you’re looking for.

From there, stay consistent with your measurements. Set aside a time each week or month to evaluate the performance and tweak to optimize success.

Lack of Clarity

If there’s one thing that you take away from this blog post: don’t try to do everything! The digital marketing strategies and options that are available and trendy can be overwhelming, so avoid the temptation to try everything that you hear about. It’s much more effective to do a few things really well than to get burned out on trying each new thing that comes on the market.

If you’re struggling with how to choose a path forward, let your clients be your guide. What channels to they spend time on? What is important to them? What type of content are they interested in?

Focusing on your ideal client and connecting with them online is the key to success in this crazy world of digital marketing.

As of March 20th, Spring has officially sprung! While, depending on where you are, it may take some time for the warmer temperatures to reach you, the arrival of Spring is the perfect reminder to take a fresh look at your business. The typical Spring cleaning tasks of tidying the office and thoroughly cleaning your space are still important but make sure not to neglect your digital assets as well!

As we move towards a more digital world with remote workers, online storage, and outsourced data management, we run the risk of ignoring the “mess” that we can’t physically see. Ever been looking for file that you’re SURE you put in the right folder but it’s no longer there? Wanted to back up your website but weren’t sure where to start?

Spring clean your business’ digital assets with these 5 tips:

Site + Data Backup

Start by backing up all of your information. This way, if you make an error during your organization, you have a full backup to rely on. Depending on where your site and data are stored, you may have automated backups already captured, so contact your hosting provider to ensure that you don’t lose any valuable information.

Softsys Hosting clients who have invested in managed hosting services enjoy free daily backups and 24/7 monitoring to make sure that their data is always available when they need it.

File Storage

This is the perfect time to evaluate your file storage solutions. If your business is like many others’, you might have several different solutions for your file management – client files are stored in one place, internal documents in another, and contracts in yet another service. Take the time to consider streamlining your storage solutions or investing in your own infrastructure to manage future growth.

Once you determine WHERE your files will be stored, create a plan for how they will be organized and who needs access to what. Document this system in an easily-accessed file so that everyone in your organization can understand and follow the plan. Include a naming convention for files so that they are easily searched and located.

Email Organization

Feel like your inbox has gotten out of control? Stop putting off the problem and get your inbox back in line by dedicating a couple hours to organize and simplify your communication. Start by determining a filing system. You probably created one when you first started your account but have gotten away from using it because it no longer fits your needs or you just became overwhelmed. Evaluate the folders you have in your inbox, archive those you don’t use anymore, and create folders for needs that have arisen in the meantime.

Once you have a system in place, the goal becomes Inbox Zero. You read that right, ZERO emails hanging out in your inbox. Studies have shown that eliminating email clutter leads to increased efficiency and productivity and your inbox is the place to start. File away until you’ve addressed everything in your inbox, giving you a clean slate.

Finally, unsubscribe to newsletters and emails that you don’t find value in. This will help keep your inbox clutter-free and allow you to focus on what’s most important.

Update Site + Social Media

Sometimes digital outlets like websites and social media accounts are created and then forgotten. Sound familiar? Take the time during your Spring cleaning to make the necessary updates to your online storefront. Check the addresses, branding, and messaging on all of your accounts to make sure they are correct and consistent.

This is also a great time to add new products or services that you provide or update any team member changes.

Digitize Processes

Now that your digital environment is organized and decluttered, consider what offline processes can be digitized. Do your team members enter information into your CRM system manually or is there a system that syncs it with your intake forms. Is each follow up email written one at a time or do you have an automated sequence that sends it immediately?

Plan for future growth by digitizing processes that are currently slowing you down.

In this digital world we live in, there is no shortage of data. We’re surrounded by it every day. The value of data, however, lies in its application. How you use that data to make decisions that improve your business.

When it comes to Google Analytics, the amount of data can be overwhelming. Logging into your GA dashboard, you are immediately greeted with metrics, graphs, and statistics comparing performance across a particular date range.

These 5 metrics will help turn that maze of metrics into a clear picture that provides valuable feedback on your website’s performance:

1. Users: The first and most basic metric to monitor – how many people are visiting your website? This statistic is less relevant on a day by day basis and more important over time. You want to make sure that your site traffic is growing, so we like to look at this number on a month over month basis. This will help you in a few ways. First of all, you’ll notice any cycles in your web traffic. For example, do you see a spike in certain months/days? Work to understand why and consider offering a promotion to capitalize on that increased traffic. On the other hand, identifying slower months will help you allocate your advertising budget and try to fill in those times with lower numbers by increasing your ROAS (return on ad spend).
2. Acquisition: In other words, where are your site visitors coming from? Do they come to your site directly? Click through from another website? Find you via social media channels? Or organic search? Understanding and monitoring how potential customers or subscribers find your site will help you take advantage of those channels and use them to the fullest.
3. Bounce Rate: Take the guesswork out of determining if your site content is resonating with your audience. The Bounce Rate measures what percentage of users click through to another page on your site versus hitting a single page and leaving. While the optimum rate varies by industry, typically somewhere between 41%-55% is considered average. Anything below that would be excellent! If you find your bounce rate to be higher than you’d like, consider two things: your website acquisition and content. For example, if you are driving traffic to your site via an ad that promises answers to a certain question, but it’s not evident in the top half of the page, users are likely to give up and click away. Ensure that there is not a disconnect by evaluating your content and comparing it to the path users take to your website.
4. Session Duration: Another great metric to track engagement is the average duration a user remains on your site. How long are they engaging with your content? Obviously, the longer someone stays on your site, the better (though not always – for an e-commerce project much better metric would be conversions and goals reached). This is especially important to track when you make changes to your website structure or content.
5. Behavior Flow: Taking it one step further from session duration, the behavior flow chart depicts exactly how users are interacting with each page of the website. Essentially, this is a trail of breadcrumbs that maps the track users take from page to page. From this, you can determine the most engaging pages and where to place your most important content for maximum exposure. On the other hand, you’ll also be able to measure which pages are most likely to result in the user leaving the site altogether.