Top 10 Digital Marketing To-Do’s for 2021 — Part Two
In Part One of Top 10 Digital Marketing To-Do’s for 2021, we covered the importance of planning your digital marketing strategy, enhancing your customer experience (CX), increasing campaign personalization, and investing in quality content that can be repurposed across a variety of mediums. In today’s blog, we’ll help you put the finishing touches on your digital marketing to-do list with our final five items that deserve your time, attention and budget in 2021.
6. Use an Omni-Channel Approach
If you’ve been relying on email as your primary point of contact for customers and prospects, you are likely missing a ton of opportunities to engage with them on channels they prefer over email – like messaging apps, text, social, etc. Adding more channels to your mix is also highly effective for reviving dead accounts. Keeping your communication options open is a great way to “diversify your portfolio” of approaches to reach your audience, which is always a good idea.
Cross-, Multi- or Omni-Channel?
There is a difference between a cross- or multi-channel approach and the preferred omni-channel approach. The main difference is in connection. Lots of companies use multiple channels to communicate with customers, but their campaigns are not integrated across those channels. In an omni-channel approach, all channels are integrated and campaigns are coordinated across all channels to provide users with a seamless experience. To make the leap from cross-channel champion to omni-channel superhero, you’ll need to integrate all the tools in your stack and plan campaigns that cater to each customer’s preferred channel.
7. Cover Your Social Bases
Here’s an eye-opening statistic: according to Sherpa Marketing, more people follow brands on social media than celebrities. It’s no wonder that 73 percent of marketers report that social media marketing has proven effective for their business. Naturally, your company should be visible via LinkedIn, but it’s just as important to open business accounts for your company on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. SproutSocial, an app that makes it easy to manage content across social media sites, conducted a survey of how B2B’s are using social media and found that:
- 89% use LinkedIn
- 88% use Facebook
- 83% use Twitter
- 55% use YouTube
- 39% use Pinterest
- 26% use Instagram
Having a presence across most of the top social sites helps you maintain brand awareness amongst current customers and is ideal for attracting new customers, too. In addition, all of the aforementioned sites also make it fairly easy for businesses to track key performance indicators (KPIs), such as: clicks, leads, conversions, organic reach, paid reach, impressions, engagement and followers, so you can see how well your business is doing within its social circles. To ensure you master the art of being social with your business, keep in mind the preferred content formats of each site. It’s also imperative that you abide by our #4 To-Do from Part One of this blog: produce quality content.
8. Invest in Video
Did you know that 59 percent of executives say they would rather watch a video than read content? Not surprisingly, Hubspot reported a similar finding that 72 percent of customers would rather learn about a product or service via video. If you haven’t added video to your current content catalog, now is the time. Best of all, you need not worry about having a massive budget to accommodate video, there are loads of companies out there that produce a variety of short animated, whiteboard, motion-graphic, live action, etc. videos for budgets ranging from $500 to $10K+. Most of these companies also offer packages that include music, professional voice overs and scripting for each video you purchase. To put things in perspective a typical one-minute explainer video will likely cost around $3500 to $5,500. The good news is, regardless of what you invest, 87 percent of marketers report that video gives them a positive ROI.
9. Shore Up Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those tasks that is never complete because there is always, always, always room for improvement. Mike Khorev, a Technical SEO agency maintains there are only 4 steps B2Bs must take in optimizing their sites for search, and they are:
- Perform keyword research on a regular basis. You need to know what your customers are typing in the search bar when they come looking for your products and services.
- Use the keywords from your research to create content.
- Optimize your site’s customer experience (CX). You want visitors to come to your site and have a good experience. This requires the site to be well-designed and easy to navigate and the content to be engaging, helpful and informative.
- Promote your content and seek high quality backlinks. Khorev advises B2Bs to, “remember that the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity.”
10. Automate Everything
Managing marketing across multiple channels, much less your entire enterprise can be a complex and time-consuming endeavor. The only real way to make it manageable is to automate as many campaigns, tasks and processes as you can. Thankfully, there are a ton of reasonably priced apps on the market that are designed to help you automate all kinds of things. Here are a few things we recommend automating:
Marketing Campaign Personalization