5 Signs That You Need To Refresh Your Digital Marketing Strategy In 2017

When it comes to digital marketing, having an effective strategy in place is a necessity since it can have a direct impact on your sales and brand awareness. Even if you do have a strategy in place, is it really providing you with the results you want? With 2017 just around the corner, here are 5 signs that it might be time to refresh your digital marketing strategy.

1. Lack of personalisation

Personalisation, particularly in your written content, is one of the biggest trends that can help you make a large impact in 2017. With so much competition in the market, this is one way through which businesses can differentiate themselves and stand out as thought leaders speaking directly to their audience. Using first names in email campaigns and taking a personal approach can also increase engagement.

Having a personal approach to face your audience isn’t necessarily difficult either – choose someone from your company to front your social profiles. Where possible, use a real person with their job title, your branding, and a photo of themselves, as this will generate higher levels of engagement.

2. You’re stuck on one thing

Adapting to utilise various different areas of digital marketing is a skill set that a business must possess, or outsource to experts who are able to fully manage this. You might have a great website, but if you’re not implementing a digital marketing strategy then you are not making the most of it. Social media has changed the way businesses interact with their target audience and provides different channels of communication. Facebook Live and YouTube offer live streaming options and have 360 videos as well. These create live engagement and also focus on raising interest in the products, events and offerings of a business. Along with this, SEO, content marketing and great design all contribute to driving visitors to your website, increasing brand awareness and ultimately increasing sales.

3. Confusing your visitors

With digital marketing, the key is keeping it simple with your website design. Clean, easy to use websites show greater engagement than text-heavy and busy ones. Visitors unable to navigate easily around your site will simply leave, and you will be left with a high bounce rate. Nowadays, in ecommerce especially, a simple one-click-to-buy model is the norm. This doesn’t just relate to online shopping though; consider this in your website design and keep menus easy to navigate, make it easy to click to find contact information, and promote the most important things in a clear way to encourage your audience into action.

4. Design Inflexibility

One of the worst ways through which a business limits their exposure is having an outdated website. Over the past few years the use of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones has increased significantly. With new hardware like the Apple Watch enabling access to the internet as well, it is important to ensure that your users can access your website in a user friendly design regardless of the device they are using. If you’re not incorporating mobile-friendly design within your website, your bounce rate will increase and you will lose out on potential customers.

5. Forgetting to Use SEO

This is one of the oldest rules of digital marketing, yet it is still the one that is often the most overlooked since it can sound intimidating. Proper integration of SEO in your digital marketing strategy, across your website, and all written content, is necessary to ensure that your business is reaching its target audience. Moreover, this is one aspect that constantly needs to be refreshed regularly to point towards the keywords you are targeting. Popular search engines like Google change their SEO criterion from time to time so it is necessary to ensure that your SEO usage is relevant and updated.

To discuss your digital marketing needs going into the New Year, give Iconic a call today on 0207 100 0726.