Inbound marketingdelivers 54% more leads thantraditional outboundmarketing.

Of all marketershave found a customer through Facebook in 2013.

Of all marketershave found a customer though LinkedIn

Videos on landingpages increase conversions by86%

At 89%,customertestimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing.

B2B companiesthat blog gain 67% more leads than those that don’t.

Globally, mobile By 2017, there willbe 8.6bn mobile ready devices inuse and global data traffic will have increased 13 fold.

The UK downloadedapproximately 275m apps in February2013 alone.

penetrationat 93%

stands

Organic searchtraffic produces35% higher conversion rates than traffic driven by equivalent paid search traffic.

75% of searchusers are not clicking past the first page of search results.

20% of searches onGoogle are related to location and 56% of mobile phone users use their browser for local searches.

*S.E.O is the acronym for search engine optimisation

Once you have an understanding of your current situation and haveused that information to inform SMART objectives you can begin planning your strategy. At this point you should identify:

• New target markets your business could benefit from reaching

• Areas were you can improve your existing strategy e.g.working to improve landing pages with higher than average bounce rates.

• The relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you need tomonitor in order to understand any progress you make

Search & Social

Identifying areas where your existing marketingstrategy and content can be improved AND identifying new target markets to engage with are two distinct strands of any good digital marketing strategy.

Awareness

Interest

Trust

Streamlining your conversion funnel byimproving your content and strategy can take effect quickly where as engaging new audiences can take more time and effort.

Action

Complete

These two strategies are most effective whenthey are implemented together. “Successful Conversion”

TIME

CO

NV

ER

SIO

N R

AT

E Increasing the effectiveness of the conversion funnel by improving any existing marketing strategy and content.

Fastest growth occurs when these two improvements coincide

Increasing traffic to the website by engaging new target markets

If you think of your initial strategy as a skeleton, developing yourtactics is where you start adding flesh on to those bones. Your strategy tells you generally how you’re going to achieve your objectives, your tactics tells you exactly how.

At this point you should be focusing on content:

••••

What content you will produce and when: plan and scheduleWhen you will broadcast content: time of day, weekends etc. Where you will share content: social and mobile platforms How you will tailor content to suit different audiences

It is here that your initial situation analysis and broad strategyplanning will begin to pay off.

Planning your actions is the point when you decide who will beresponsible for which aspect of your strategy and when they will beimplemented.You should outline the systems, processes and tools you will usethroughout the duration of your marketing.

Identify your internal capabilities andstrategy and tactics and if necessary with relevant external agencies.

capacity for handling yourset up working relationships

Keeping control is essential for keeping your digital marketingstrategy streamlined and efficient, ensuring it generates the highestreturn on investment.

It is important to decide when and how reports will be generated andassign responsibility for doing so to avoid gaps in data collection.

Processes and tools you will use to collect data should also bespecified to make data sets reliably comparable.

Different measurement tools can differ in their results, to handlecollect data from several different analytics tools and take an average.

this

Things you should include in your performance reporting:

• Consistently and constantly measure all the KPIs relevant toyour objectives. That means taking data snapshots at regular intervals to allow data comparisons as well as tracking over time.Regularly run user testing on your website and content to ensure it is providing the best user experience possible. Monitor your conversion rates (these should be tied to your objectives) and make sure this is linked to dates, allowing you to map cause and effect. This will inform your conversion rate optimisation (CRO) efforts.

•

•

One of the best tools available to help keep control of your digitalmarketing strategy is Google Analytics.

This is a completely free resource that only requires the simpleaddition of a tracking code to your website in order to enable data collection.

This platform offers real time tracking, constant tracking and asrecommended, enables data comparison over time.

The amount of data available in Google Analytics is vast so it’s worthtaking the time to ensure you set up your campaign properly. You can find some useful tips, advice and links on how to use GoogleAnalytics right here on our blog.

The Met Office needed a way to monitor vast amounts of online datain order to demonstrate ROI which they measure in terms of reach,revenue and reputation.

Gathering analytics and data enabled the Met Office to transform itscontent marketing strategy through data driven insight, allowing them to create digital personas and better understand their audience behaviour and content preferences

With this insight, the Met Office can invest in marketing resourcesand provide relevant content that is better aligned with customer interests, and can syndicate the content to other authority newswires and syndication partners to attract more relevant traffic to the Met Office website.

We provide “data doses” for our retainer clients and when requestedcan deliver bespoke digital marketing strategy audits, tailored to providing the relevant analytics our clients’ need based on their chosen objectives.

In one case, by providing this tailored digital marketing strategy auditand identifying key actions points, our client was able to increasetraffic to their site by 60% in a single year.