The purpose of the ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective Digital Strategy’ is to offer a different perspective on the traditional marketing mindset.
These key points are:
- Take Responsibility
- Think Win Win – Set your Goals
- Plan to Attract
- Think First to Understand Then to be Understood – Convert
- Always Close the Deal – Transform Leads into Customers
- Delight – Leave a sweet taste in the mouth
- Continuous Improvement
1. Take Responsibility
Take responsibility for your actions, your project, and your goals.
Are they in line with your company’s expectations and industry regulations (Google Quality Guidelines/ Natural Link building)? Ownership of our actions encourage us to take initiative by realising that our actions will be responsible for the success and effectiveness, or lack of, in our work or service.
Technical Example: Link Building
Irresponsible – focusing heavily on commercial anchor text or paying for links, site wide links or highly irrelevant links from off topic content or homepage/sidebar links.
Responsible – Quality content guest posts, high quality content link bait, video link bait etc.
2. Think Win Win – Set your Goals
Starting a client relationship with a strong drive to mutually benefit each other builds the most profitable foundation for success. Seeing it from your client or customers point of view with respect and value for their business and money or needs; whilst at the same time being aware of, and respecting, our own time, effort and remuneration, focuses us into fostering the right mind-set which is pivotal to success. Focusing on what the client wants to achieve or what the end user is searching for and how you can best support their need first, will make our efforts more productive.
Technical Example: Content Win – Link Win
You want a link and the search user wants answers to their questions. Focusing on making the biggest impact to the searcher that goes above what they are asking for increases the likelihood of them sharing your content or creating links to it.
3. Plan to Attract
Prioritise, plan and execute. Evaluate and re-evaluate your efforts and achievements to consistently move forward towards your goals. We don’t just want any traffic, or any user we want the right traffic; the right user is more likely to be engaged, interested and likely to convert. Build the right content for the right keywords, focus this content to gain visibility to the right customers that will ideally convert multiple times or recommend and share your services/products.
4. Think first to understand then to be understood and convert.
This is true in two ways 1. Understand the customer’s need and then provide required information 2. Understand/ gain customer data and then provide the product, sign up or next steps.
Understanding the customer allows us to seek to fulfil a need and then provide a service rather than pushing a service or product on an irrelevant customer.
5. Always Closing – Transform Leads into Customers
Remember your calls to action, make the purchase or sign up process easy to find and easy to use. Remove all hurdles or tangent opportunities.
Technical Example: You have either spent money on Paid Search to drive targeted traffic to your website, or time on your content and SEO which has resulted in a visitor. Ensuring a clear business focus or route into your main site which has strong calls to action is essential.
- Always have your call to actions above the fold
- For long content, include a follow up call to action
- Make the Call to Action stand out using contrasting colours – you want to be able to “spot it a mile off” so avoid using your brand colours.
6. Delight – Leave a sweet taste in the mouth and allow the relationship to continue and fulfil another cycle.
Digital marketing should be about building remarkable content which will turn any converted customer into a brand enthusiast (so long as the product /service lives up to the standard set), leaving you open to upsell in the future and foster the environment for shares, engagement, delight and positive brand awareness.
7. Continuous Improvement
Seeking continuous improvement leads to user testing, funnel improvements, stronger calls to action, greater content, engaging social campaigns, accumulative SEO and ultimately, a highly converting paid search campaigns.
7 Usability Tests:
- Brand Test or First Impressions (5 Secs).
- SEO / PPC Landing Page Test.
- Internal Search Test.
- Google Quality Test – 23 questions relating to Panda.
- Competitor Test.
- Funnel Test – Check out / Sign Up / Registration.
- First impression Test of Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc.
