If you’re a business owner or marketing professional who has already dipped a toe into the complex, challenging world of digital marketing, congratulations! You’re beyond so many entrepreneurs who haven’t yet invested the time.
But what’s next? Taking the steps to implement a digital marketing plan, no matter the size of the campaign, is only the beginning. You may be wondering if everything is operating as effectively as possible. It’s a smart question.
The answer is digital marketing optimization. What does digital marketing optimization mean? It refers to a process of making small but strategic changes to a marketing strategy to improve the results.
Digital marketing optimization is best begun at the beginning of a campaign or strategy. When you start with the end goal in mind, you’ll set yourself up for success to do even better in the future. You can only work with what you know in the present moment, but you can also always keep learning.
After all, optimization isn’t about being perfect. It’s about getting the best results you can at the time and seeing the next step to market your brand.
What are the benefits of digital marketing optimization?
If you’ve seen even a small amount of success in your business, you’re probably not the type of person who rests on their laurels. By embarking on a digital marketing optimization journey next, you can realize these benefits:
- Maximize efficiency: When it comes to both your financial budget and the time you and your team spend in a day, you want to do the most with the least. When you optimize your marketing plan, you can be assured that the campaigns and tools are working as efficiently as possible.
- Know when to change course: It’s hard to get off the train once it starts rolling down the track, but sometimes less is more. Digital marketing optimization, especially when you use data collection to support the decisions, can save more than time and money. It can save big, big headaches.
- Stay current on new tech: If you wonder how artificial intelligence can be integrated into your marketing strategy, you’re not alone. The only way you can fully understand a new digital marketing solution like AI is through the process of optimization.
- More likely to reach your goals: When you make a habit of integrating small changes, you’ll be even more likely to achieve your business goals. You may even exceed them!
Hopefully, this is enough motivation to include a digital marketing optimization section at the end of your next campaign. You may also want to complete this process for each channel or platform you use.
Digital marketing optimization driven by data
Many business owners operate by their gut — they just like how a path, product, or policy feels. This can work, but not when it comes to digital marketing optimization. You need to collect and analyze data to support improvements.
Here are the four steps to optimize your marketing strategy with data.
1. Collect data
Start with the marketing goals you’ve set for your online campaign. Pick a few key performance indicators, known as KPIs, that directly connect with that goal.
For example, you may want to optimize your website, and your goal is to increase traffic. You can use Google Analytics, a free tool that helps you track site visits and prospect behavior. This will give you an idea of how people interact with your website, and you’ll only get this understanding by looking at the data.
2. Analyze
Data collection won’t do much if you don’t also carve out the time necessary for data analysis. For example, let’s say you send a survey to the people on your email list. That’s a great way to collect data — but you can’t improve until you crunch the numbers.
Compare the data you receive with the goal you set for yourself at the beginning of your marketing campaign. Notice where you’ve exceeded your expectations and where you could improve. Along with the KPIs you’ve picked, always calculate your ROI, or return on investment, for your work. You can compare this baseline with future campaigns.
3. Strategize
Now that you’ve identified the areas that could use a little improvement, thanks to data collection and analysis, it’s time to consider what small steps you can take to improve. Notice the word small. It’s unlikely you need to tear up your plan and start over. Instead, build on what you learn.
For example, let’s say you haven’t reached a goal to convert a certain percentage of leads into customers. You may want to refine your strategy for your marketing funnel. Look at your strategies as experiments for learning and improving.
4. Implement
The final step in digital marketing optimization is implementing your new strategy. Consider taking this in phases. For example, you may have discovered through this work that you need new subject line strategies for your email newsletters. You can try what’s known as A/B testing. That is, you can test two messages at once with different audiences to see which one performs better based on your data. It’s one way to optimize with confidence.
Optimization by channel
The four-step process of digital marketing optimization can work with any channel, campaign, or strategy you’ve implemented. However, it may look different within each part of your comprehensive plan. The work you’ll do to refine your website isn’t the same as what you’ll need to think about for your social media optimization.
Here are some ways to optimize the most common digital marketing channels.
Email marketing
Email marketing has one of the best ROIs of any channel, and you’ll see the most success when you launch your campaigns through a marketing platform like Constant Contact. Personal email service providers, like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, don’t have a backend you can use to track the effectiveness of emails. Since you know you must be able to collect data to optimize, make sure you are using a system that offers email reporting.
You can create strategies to reward your engaged subscribers with loyalty programs, advanced notice of new product launches, or special coupons. You may also look critically at your sending schedule and try a new tactic. Perhaps it’s a matter of improving the call-to-action wording on your click-through buttons. Use the data to point you in the right direction.
Social media marketing
Meta Business Suite gives you a powerful look behind the scenes of your Facebook and Instagram accounts. For the best social media optimization, you’ll want to keep an eye on all the data they provide to you.
Social media marketing can feel overwhelming, but that’s exactly why it’s smart to set aside time in a campaign’s life cycle to optimize your efforts. If your paid ads or organic content isn’t hitting the mark, you may want to rethink your target audience or medium. It’s possible the people you’re looking to connect with are all hanging out on a different platform.
SEO
SEO, short for search engine optimization, can take a while to be effective, so take a long-term approach when figuring out how to best optimize your content. If you’ve done the best keyword research and followed the best practices for earned media, you may need a little patience to see results.
Still, there are always ways to optimize SEO content. Have you publicized your blogs to the full extent possible? Take a look at the back end of your website: Can you include more keywords in the alternative text of images? Maybe your blogs do not offer enough value. A survey of your current customers can help determine what is most click-worthy.
SMS
SMS marketing, also known as text marketing, is commonly overlooked as an effective digital marketing strategy. To increase your subscribers, consider refining your incentive package for signing up. To reduce the number of unsubscribe requests, try reaching out to current customers with a quick survey to see what they appreciate the most. Gathering additional data can often clarify the next step in the optimization process.
Marketing optimization for B2C
B2C businesses should look at one word when they begin to optimize their marketing strategies: personalization. The more targeted your efforts are to the specific preferences and pain points of your customers, the more likely you’ll get the results you seek.
One way to go about this is through email personalization. To achieve this, you’ll want to take a look at the backend of your email list. Are your lists segmented effectively so that people are only receiving emails based on their buying preferences and habits? The more refined your lists, the better.
As you optimize B2C strategies, think about relevance to the customer. For example, it’s possible to automate an email listing the specific items in an abandoned cart. Your customer will know this email is sent especially to them, which may be enough for them to reconsider — and complete the sale.
Marketing optimization for B2B
If your focus is B2B, you have a different list of challenges with digital marketing optimization. While personalization is also important for you, you may wish to get creative in other ways to stand out in your industry.
One way to do this is through B2B partner programs. Based on the data you’ve collected and analyzed, are there gaps that can be filled with a complementary business partner with an overlapping target audience? Brainstorm ways to create joint referral or co-marketing programs to improve the performance of both companies.
Using AI and automation to optimize
Since one of the benefits of digital marketing optimization is staying abreast of current technology and trends, you may be wondering about AI and automation. Both are exciting tools that, when used correctly, can take your strategy up a notch.
AI is great for researching ideas, but AI-generated content isn’t perfect yet. You can use AI to build a list of interesting blog topics, but you may still want to get a human to do the writing. Google can identify AI-written content, making your SEO efforts backfire.
Automation, too, is also worth considering. There are a lot of great marketing automation tools that make it faster and easier to implement a marketing strategy. You decide a strategy first. Then you can set up workflows that send emails automatically. It’s like having another person on your marketing team!
Ready to optimize? Follow these next steps
Digital marketing optimization is a four-step process that can be done for any channel you’ve focused on for a campaign or strategy. With optimization, you can learn from the effort you’ve already made and determine the best ways to continue — or pivot completely.
If you’ve just begun to optimize, start by taking an inventory of your marketing campaigns. Break up each one by channel: your website, social media marketing, SEO-focused content, SMS marketing, and all others. Then, set aside time to begin the four-step process for each. Collect the data associated with your goals and analyze the results. Strategize ways to improve and implement your ideas.
With marketing, as with all business, you never need to stop learning or improving!
Next up, download our Digital Marketing Quickstarter to get the ball rolling.
