5 Good Habits of Digital Marketers

Good habits of digital marketers? What are they then?

I’ll come clean straight away on this post – I was reading a blog post one of my predecessors had written about 18 months ago entitled 5 Bad Habits of Digital Marketers and my first thought was – why the negative slant?

My own professional and personal take on things is far more positive. I am a realist and totally understand that things may not always go to plan. But there’s always a positive direction in my thinking and doing. Hence, why I decided to write about the 5 GOOD habits of digital marketers.

And when I thought to positively counter the original post, I actually wondered why would I list just 5 good habits of digital marketers, but here they are…

1. Always Measuring Digital Campaigns

One issue with the original blog post was about “forgetting to measure”, failing to take stock and evaluate, for a number of reasons ranging from the pace of work to fear of failure.

Well, every digital marketing campaign is under some sort of pressure, from better results to time-lines, so it’s a fact of life in the fast-paced digital world that time goes whizzing by and expectations are high for some campaigns. But that’s no excuse to “forget to measure”.

It’s a given that you should be measuring your campaigns. You cannot run an effective campaign without measurement so just do it!

The sheer amounts of data are a lot to handle at times but good digital marketers filter through all the big data and only present the important stuff to clients. More signal, less noise, to use an analogy.

The numerous tools these days, from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Ads (Formerly Google AdWords – Ed) to Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush, all have dashboards showing historical data, some more than others. So rely heavily on the tools that capture ALL data and just be aware of the ones that only show the last 90 days worth. Any digital marketer worth their salt knows which ones they are. Feel free to ask us for our professional opinion.

Download that data, label it clearly, have a good system and that will be the basis of your campaign measurement.

2. Being Cool About Data Capture

Customers, whether they’re businesses or consumers, are usually happy to divulge some data in return for information or free services. It’s acceptable these days to give some information away for free, just like we do in the Clever Marketing blog. We’re happy to give you tips and insights in the world of digital marketing, graphic design and web development, for nothing in return other than a smile on your face that we’ve helped you out. Better still is an acknowledgement or a social share and we’re always delighted when you share our blog posts and content on Twitter or over on our Facebook.

(Ultimately, we’d really love you to be a customer of ours, whether you take us on for a print job, a website redesign or an SEO/PPC campaign, but let’s just get to know each other first)

However, if you want one of our free website audits, they will take a member of our digital marketing team at least half a day to complete; that’s 4 hours out of a skilled professional’s day, so it’s not much to ask for an email address to send your report to and to take a name with which to address the person who requested the website audit.

There are times when it would be useful for us to know, in return for our knowledge, which sector you’re in, how many staff you have etc. But some recipients of your email campaign, for instance, might baulk at divulging their turnover. That’s cool, we understand.

So, go easy on the data capture. The best, most experienced digital marketing agencies know where to draw the line – what to ask, when to ask it and how often. That’s a skill that comes with experience.

3. Knowing Content is Still King

I’ve been a digital marketer for over 20 years now, being involved in SEO since 1998 and PPC since 2002. In all that time, the one thing that has always been at the heart of every website I’ve been involved in is good, solid content. Content is King, as the adage goes.

There have been some interesting situations in that journey, such as traditional marketing managers saying that some of the content on their website was just “waffle” and that it either needed to go or be completely hacked down. Only when I pointed out that the content was both technically excellent and the top-performing article on the site by a country mile, did the person in question decide not to lose a quarter or more of their traffic overnight in a hasty hack.

Or how about the content curation for one client that involved a suite of articles around one fairly short-term topic that saw them dominate the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for that term for a number of months and, for a few days, saw their traffic spike something like fifteen-fold!

Or what about the client who built a brand new website and canned nearly four years of blog posts! We’re talking about not just a loss of traffic and losing a wealth of long-tail search terms but also the investment in time, effort and cost into those valuable pieces of writing.

So, good digital marketers understand that content is king still and they have a good habit of integrating content into digital strategies, both in-house and for their customers. Content marketing can deliver a massive boost to your website and get you better results. so being serious about your current is something we will always advise you on the benefits of.

4. Selling the Sizzle Not the Steak

A traditional old sales and marketing adage you may have heard is “sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

In a nutshell, sell the benefits of the product not just the product itself. Even if the product is great and has the latest spec, top stats and all the bells & whistles, what is it that differentiates the product or service from everyone else’s? What are the benefits, and does it provide a solution to a particular problem?

We recently discussed this particular subject with a client who sells some very sophisticated equipment. We aren’t experts in their field so we don’t fully understand all the technical specifications of their product, but we asked what the practical applications were and they were happy to provide us with some real world examples.

This exact approach is a good habit of a digital marketer – all the technical specs are fine but if you can provide a solution to an existing problem then you will resonate with potential customers.

Selling the sizzle and not just the steak is where the best digital marketing agency will excel – they will mine out the benefits of your product or service and, with clever marketing, create digital marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience.

5. Knowing that Specialisation is for Insects

Of course, your digital marketing agency should specialise in digital marketing, that should be a given. But it’s important that your agency has a truly holistic understanding of all the interconnected aspects of the digital and the marketing world that will help you shine to your clients.

At Clever Marketing in north-east Hampshire, we create a lot of graphic design. That often ends up in print which can be everything from business cards, to flyers and brochures, pitch books and full-on publications such as technical manuals, year end reports. There are trade and exhibition stands, you name it, we print it.

These designs can very easily cross over to your digital assets too, we’ll re-brand and refresh your website design, revitalise your e-commerce site and then drive qualified traffic to it through digital marketing – that is, through organic SEO (That’s Search Engine Optimisation), Pay Per Click and social media too.

We are a full spectrum design and digital agency and we know how virtually everything interacts. So that’s the bonus you get from a Digital Marketing Agency that also understands print, web design and web development too.

Those are the Good Habits of Digital Marketers


Clever Marketing - Digital Marketing Agency in Hampshire, Surrey and Berkshire. At Clever Marketing we eat, sleep and breathe digital marketing so for us, it’s in our blood, it’s a daily routine and a perpetual habit. And there are many more good habits we could divulge but we’re already out of time…

If you’d like to work with our Hampshire digital marketing agency then please do pick up the phone and call 01276 402 381 or complete our contact form and we’ll be happy to be an extension of your business.

Paul Mackenzie Ross
Digital Marketing Manager
Clever Marketing
Digital Agency
Berkshire, Hampshire, and Surrey.
SEO, PPC, social, web development…

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