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 results to timelines, 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 never an 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 AdWords 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.

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 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 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 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 nearly 20 years, 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.

4. Selling the Sizzle Not the Steak

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

What this means is that even if the product is great and has the latest spec, top stats and all the bells and whistles, what differentiates the product or service from everyone else’s is that it brings certain benefits, it provides a solution to a particular problem.

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

And this is the approach that 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.

So, this is where a good digital marketing agency will excel – they will mine out the benefits of your product or service and, with clever marketing, sell your sizzle and not just the steak.

5. Knowing that Specialisation is for Insects

Of course, your digital marketing agency will specialise in digital marketing. But it’s your agency having an understanding of all aspects of the digital and the marketing world that will help you shine as their client.

At Clever Marketing, Surrey, we do graphic design. That ends up in print. It can be everything from business cards, to flyers and brochures, pitch books and full-on publications, 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 rebrand 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, 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 too.

Those are the Good Habits of Digital Marketers

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 this Surrey marketing agency then please do pick up the phone and call 020 3146 4341 or email info@cleverm.co.uk and we’ll be happy to be an extension of your business.

Paul Mackenzie Ross
Digital Marketing Manager

Blogs are an essential element of the digital marketing mix as each post drives traffic to your website. It’s relatively easy to set a blog up and build a following but it takes time to ensure it receives regular traffic.

Successful blogs deliver quality content on a regular basis, which means they’re crawled more often by Google with the opportunity to generate potential leads higher. We take a look at what you can do to maximise your visibility and drive more traffic to your blog.

Write useful content your target audience will share

Your target audience can make a huge difference to the popularity of your posts. So do consider what kind of content is relevant to them and how you can make your posts more shareable. Evergreen content like “how to” guides, tips or education based posts are often popular choices although they’re not for everyone.

Content should be a key part of any digital marketing strategy. Having an editorial plan in place will result in greater consistency, whether posts are focused on a specific theme, topic or style for example. Google Analytics is, of course, essential to finding out where your visitors are from, their demographic profile and what kind of content is most popular among other things.

Make your content SEO friendly

There are a number of ways you can ensure your blog is SEO friendly starting with how it’s structured, what headings you use and which signal words are included. You should always optimise the length of your posts so they’re over 300 words and make sure you link to previous content where relevant.

Your featured keyword, which will help people find you, should appear in your post heading, title, URL, content and meta description. Consider what terms and phrases your target audience might type into Google when looking for the information they require. This will help you identify the best keywords to use. Research can also be conducted using tools like the Adwords Keyword Planner.

Reference your own content regularly

Readers appreciate blog posts with useful links so you should reference relevant content where appropriate, whether it’s a post of your own or someone else’s.  Links to relevant content are well received if they’re in context and provide value. They should never link to top-level web pages and any anchor text must be natural.

It might be worth creating a list of internal content for the purpose of blogging. If you haven’t already catalogued your own site’s content, consider an SEO audit or a website audit where a crawl will identify all your assets.

Let us know if you need a full website crawl, we can offer this as a standalone service or as part of a free website audit including performance, security, SEO and mobile-friendliness

Use social media to share posts and boost traffic

Leveraging your most effective social media channels is a fundamental way to boost traffic to your blog. Curating others’ content is great for encouraging people to share your content and interact. As well as the major social networking sites, consider social community sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit or Pinterest as well. You will need to add value to these sites to get the return but the same applies to any social network. You get out what you put in.

Find influencers and join the conversation

Do you know who your influencers are? If not, you can easily create a Twitter list for example with the most relevant so you can start to build relationships. Joining relevant communities and Twitter chats is a great way to find new topics for discussion too. You should also research which hashtags are most appropriate to your industry. Including relevant @mentions in social media posts will also help increase your reach and visibility.

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about how you can drive traffic to your blog. For further information, contact our Digital Marketing Manager, Paul Mackenzie Ross, at Woking’s Design Agency Clever Marketing on 020 3146 4341.

With the economy finally on the upturn, businesses are getting busier and confidence is increasing. For many that means the ‘to-do’ list is getting longer and, despite the extra daylight around, there still aren’t enough hours in the day.

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