It’s easy to think of marketing strategy as a known entity. I’ve made the mistake myself. We learn best practices and follow them religiously. The problem with this strategy is that your audience is constantly evolving — and the methods you use to reach them must do the same. We must constantly work to improve our digital marketing strategy.
Here at TPM, we’ve been working in partnership with Paypal, Magento, and HiConversion on their Mobile Optimization Initiative for a while now. Working on this project has reminded me just how important experimentation can be. Our business isn’t static. Neither is our audience — or our competition. Experimentation is a critical step and one that we need to take to continually improve our digital marketing strategy.
How Do I Improve My Digital Marketing Strategy?
Continuous evolution is key to a successful digital marketing strategy. And experimentation is one of the best ways to determine in which direction a strategy should evolve. But what does marketing experimentation really look like? There are four key ways you can change your approach to marketing, and experimenting with any (or all) of these will put you on the right path to improving your marketing strategy:
- Add something. Is there an element that your current tactics don’t include that you should try?
- Subtract something. Are you wasting effort on developing content that isn’t serving your goals?
- Refine something. Would minor tweaks address changes in your audience — or your response rate — since you implemented your current strategy?
- Measure everything. Are you measuring the results of changes as you make them, or just changing for the sake of change?
We’ve used all these tactics as part of the Mobile Optimization Initiative — and we’re using them to keep our marketing game on point, too.
Add Something
The world is always changing — that holds true for most fields. New techniques, technologies, and tactics appear, and regardless of past performance, it’s important to adopt the ones that can give you a critical edge.
The Mobile Optimization Initiative
One MOI experiment had vendors add a new floating checkout button to pages where the original checkout buttons didn’t appear on the screen.
The results among vendors were mixed, but the experiment helped uncover a surprising trend: merchants with only a single existing checkout button tended to outperform those with more than one (valuable knowledge for merchants looking to improve conversions).
Digital Marketing Strategy
Adding new tactics can be a simple and straightforward way to improve digital marketing strategy. The marketing world is ever-changing, and new techniques can keep you ahead of the curve. Try these:
- Leveraging local SEO. Differentiate by honing in on a niche in a specific geography.
- Focusing on snippets. Write blog posts that ask and answer popular questions to position your content at the top of Google search results.
Subtract Something
It’s not uncommon to fall into the trap of continuing a strategy past its prime. You implemented a strategy, it worked for a while — but that doesn’t mean it will work forever. Keep examining your marketing tactics for practices that should be trimmed back (or eliminated entirely).
The Mobile Optimization Initiative
Several MOI experiments looked at removing something from the checkout process to encourage conversions:
- Coupon collapse: While some shoppers live to redeem coupon codes, this experiment hypothesized that the extra field was pulling focus from the all-important checkout button
- Simplified cart headers: Removing items not directly related to purchase or continued shopping from the cart header gave most merchants a significant revenue lift.
Digital Marketing Strategy
Are your strategies still reliant on ideas or audiences that no longer apply? Improve your digital marketing strategy by ending outdated efforts:
- Newsletters: Some audiences still appreciate a regular update, but for many markets, newsletters are a straight shot to the spam folder.
- Channels: Are you still marketing to channels where your audience isn’t? Check your engagements and focus efforts accordingly.
- Personas: Your audience isn’t static. Make sure your marketing is focused on the people who are actually buying from you.
Refine Something
Even strategies that still deliver results can benefit from a renewal from time to time. Don’t assume that the fact that something isn’t broken means it can’t be improved upon. Complacency is your enemy when it comes to staying competitive.
The Mobile Optimization Initiative
MOI experiments aren’t all about drastic changes to the online shopping experience. Some had merchants make minor tweaks to streamline the checkout process.
- The auto cart update trial saw huge revenue gains for vendors who removed the need for shoppers to manually update their carts. It was a small change, but obviously, an important one.
- Another minor change that yielded noticeable results was the credit card auto-detect experiment, which eliminated the need for shoppers to select what type of credit card they were using.
Digital Marketing Strategy
An easy way to improve digital marketing strategy is to keep core elements fresh. Regularly update things like:
- Messaging: As your industry landscape, competition, and trends change, so should your messaging.
- Homepage: Your website homepage is effectively your online storefront. Make sure to regularly update art, product descriptions, testimonials, etc., based on recent interactions with customers and prospects.
- Blog posts: You can get new value out of old content by revisiting old blog posts to update them with new links, CTAs, and content based on the latest trends.
Measure Everything
This is the most important step in this entire post. Experimentation must be scientific to be effective. If you’re adding to, subtracting from, or refining your strategies without paying attention to the results of those changes, there’s a good chance your efforts will be in vain.
Whether you measure web traffic, social media engagements, clicks, sales, or referrals, you must do it both before you make a change (any change) as well as after. Without careful measurement, you risk throwing out perfectly adequate tactics for strategies that don’t suit your particular niche or audience.
Do you need expert help to improve your digital marketing strategy? Total Product Marketing specializes in helping cloud and technology companies differentiate and position themselves as the solution their audience needs. Contact us today to discuss what we can do for you.
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