Top 10 Digital Marketing To-Do’s for 2021 — Part One

Keeping ahead of your competition and remaining relevant in today’s ever-fluctuating digital marketing landscape requires a surprisingly methodical, albeit somewhat flexible approach. For those of you who thrill at the idea of checking off items on a to-do list, today is your day and this is your blog. Below, we’ve rounded up our top 10 recommendations for experiencing data-driven, digital marketing nirvana in 2021. So, sharpen your pencils and get ready to check-off your own digital marketing to-do list.

1. Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy

First things first, you need a rock-solid digital marketing strategy. After all, how will you know when you’ve arrived if you haven’t made a plan to go somewhere? Luckily, your digital marketing strategy does not need to compete with War and Peace for length and detail. A good digital marketing strategy is short, simple and answers these questions:

• What are the overall company goals for this year? (Big picture)
• List your marketing goals, how you will measure the success/failure of each one, and how they relate to company goals listed in question #1.
• List the tech and channels needed to achieve your marketing goals.
• Compare your current marketing technology stack against the tech needs in #3, and list items to purchase.
•  Allocate potential budget spends in percentages to determine do-ability. For example, if you plan to invest 25% of your digital marketing spend across four channels, the martech purchases and content expenditures for each channel will need to fit within that budget.

Once you begin implementing your digital marketing strategy, make sure you leave room to make adjustments according to what your data tells you is working and what isn’t.

2. Get Familiar With Your Customer Experience

When was the last time you shopped your own site as a customer? If you had to think before you answered that question, the answer is too long. Top performing marketers regularly put themselves in their customers shoes to ensure their customers’ experiences (CX) are quick, easy and friction-free. To ensure your customers are finding the information they want and accomplishing the tasks they came to your site to do, make it a habit to have everyone on your team perform basic customer tasks and record any hiccups they found, as well as opportunities to fine-tune processes. Pay special attention to load and response times as these two issues can make or break your marketing efforts. In general, you want your mobile, desktop and tablet versions of your site to load in under 5 seconds and you want response times for information requests, whether via email, text or phone to be near instantaneous.

3. Get Personal

Regardless of the channels you use to send campaigns, make sure the content going out is personal and personally meaningful. A good content personalization tool will mine all the first-party data within your current martech stack and allow you to automate the delivery of personalized campaigns across multiple channels. In the event you are missing certain data attributes that you would like to use to personalize campaigns, you should consider purchasing high-quality third-party data from folks like ZoomInfo. If you need inspiration, check out these statistics from Forbes:

• 72% of customers say they only engage with personalized messaging
• 80% of companies report seeing an uplift since implementing personalization
• Personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%
• Personalization can increase marketing spend efficiency by up to 30%

4. Produce Quality Content

Did you know that 95 percent of B2B buyers say they view content as a trustworthy marker when evaluating a business? In addition, 71 percent of B2B buyers engage with a company’s blog throughout their buyer’s journey. What does this mean for you? It means you need to invest in high-quality content that your customer base will find engaging, helpful, and ideally shareable. So, what do you need in order to consistently produce the kind of content that resonates with your target audience? The average business employs a team of one to three content marketers on their team. These teams are typically comprised of writers, editors and graphic artists, who know how to make content interesting, engaging and visually compelling. If you are worried about the costs of perpetually producing valuable content, you’re just in time for our next to-do!

5. Recycle Content

Producing a variety of high-quality content pieces does not have to break the bank. You simply need to be smart about the pieces you are investing in. For example, if you hire a content marketing agency to produce a couple of research-driven, long-form items for you (i.e., eBooks, white papers, etc.), then you should be able to get at least a month’s worth of mileage from that content by repurposing it for various formats, from infographics, messages and social posts that highlight stats, to a series of blogs that break the main concepts down into quick reads. Here again, a good content automation tool will help eliminate the burden of recycling content by dynamically pulling relevant data and content for campaigns from sources across your organization.

Tune In Next Week

Be sure to check out the final five digital marketing to-dos’ in Part Two of our blog series: Top 10 Digital Marketing To-Do’s for 2021.