It’s New Year’s resolution time. This year, why not skip the boring resolutions that you’ll forget about before January is up. Let’s focus on your business instead and make some resolutions that you’re likely to keep (and will make you money to boot). Here are 5 digital marketing New Year’s resolutions every business should be making.
Make 2018 your year to build a competition-dominating digital marketing strategy!
Resolution #1 – Learn how to use Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are one of the most underpriced and effective ways to build awareness and get attention for your brand. Facebook has made it incredibly easy to target your audience in a very sophisticated and super-precise way (perfect if you’ve built a good customer persona). Ads are also delivered in a way that is very unobtrusive and very tailored to viewer preferences, making their potential click-through rates extremely high.
The Facebook team doesn’t rest on its laurels either. They are constantly improving the Facebook advertising platform, simultaneously listening to its advertising customers and core users.
You can’t afford not to learn about Facebook Ads and put them to use in your digital marketing strategy.
Resolution #2 – Build a presence on Instagram
No, Instagram isn’t just for teenagers. It isn’t just for marketing to millenials either (though it is critical if your target audience is millenials). Instead, Instagram is THE fastest growing and most popular social medial platform today. It is growing at a faster rate than Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. It is getting much more sophisticated advertising and analytics features for business accounts, and with deep integration with Facebook and access to Facebook’s crazy-effective audience targeting, it can only get better.
One of your digital marketing New Year’s resolutions should be to build a presence for your brand on Instagram.
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Resolution #3 – Make more video
The results are in. People prefer consuming content through video. Everyone. Including your audience.
Video is quickly becoming the preferred and expected medium for content. Youtube remains the second largest search engine behind Google. Facebook has also set its sights on video, giving an exposure boost to Facebook native videos and betting heavily on Facebook Watch, a user-selectable, channel-based video competitor to Youtube.
To have a viable content marketing strategy in 2018, you need to be focusing on video. Don’t be a perfectionist either. As the saying goes, perfection is the enemy of execution. Nowhere is this more true than with video. If you wait until you can get perfectly polished videos edited before you publish, you will either go broke in production or end up producing much too little content.
Instead, look for cheap, easy ways to create video content. Try Apple Clips if you have an iphone (this is one of the easiest ways to create video on the go including captioning), or use the built-in video narrative function in Powerpoint 2016 if you create instructional videos. Animoto, which gives you easy web-based drag-and-drop video creation capabilities, is also fantastic if you’re creating brand-building videos. The key is to just do it.
Make one of your digital marketing New Year’s resolutions to make more video.
Resolution #4 – Make use of analytics
No digital marketing strategy is complete without analytics. Unfortunately it is often missing.
It’s easy to understand why. Analytics doesn’t fall squarely within any of the traditional digital marketing disciplines. Your web designer usually isn’t going to recommend or install it for you. Neither is your graphic designer, SEO expert, Adwords manager, social media manager, or your copywriter.
Analytics is critical though.
Without analytics, you simply will never know how many people you attract to your digital marketing funnel, where they come from, or what they do when they get there. You will never know what attention or traffic-generating tactics are working and what aren’t, or which pages on your website are working and which need work. WIthout analytics, everything is guesswork.
If you haven’t at least implemented Google Analytics on your website, resolve to do so in 2018. If you have it installed, great! Learn how to use it well to guide your digital marketing strategy. We will be publishing some helpful analytics how-tos in early 2018 to help you with using analytics for your business.
Resolution #5 – Optimize your website
A well optimized website is like a well-organized physical storefront. People who visit will be much more likely to buy from you.
Unfortunately, many businesses don’t have very well optimized websites. Instead of giving their visitors a pleasant experience that makes them want to line up in the checkout line, they drive them away. Sometimes this is because of technical problems like long load times or features that don’t work. Other times it is the design and unintuitive user experience or uninspiring copy. Still other times it might be problems that make the website virtually invisible in search results.
Whatever it is, many businesses have sub-par websites that are the digital equivalent of walking into a store that is dirty, badly organized, and filled with grumpy salespeople. With a website like this, money spent on other aspects of digital marketing, like advertising, content writing, or social media publishing, can literally be completely wasted.
How’s your website performing for you? If you’re not sure, consider getting an independent website audit. We will be launching our independent website audit service in the first quarter of 2018. Stay tuned for more information about how we can help you make sure your website is helping your business put its best foot forward!
That’s it for recommended digital marketing New Year’s resolutions. How about you?
What digital marketing New Year’s resolutions will you be making? Did we miss anything you think is important? What would you like us to help you accomplish in 2018? Let us know in the comments or come on down to our Facebook Page and drop us a note. We’d love to hear from you!
Here’s to lots of success in 2018.
Happy New Year!
Eric & Laura, The Communication Hackers.
Eric Hsu
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