Without a doubt, the main thing you should be thinking about when looking at your digital strategy is the typical journey of a user/potential customer as they browse your website.
We see this journey as being made up of several components that link together to create an overarching digital strategy.
Discovery
The first thing to think about is: how are potential customers going to find my website? It would be a worthwhile exercise to sit down with a piece of paper and brainstorm how you tend to find things online. Ask your friends and family too.
It may be that, as a home improvements company, you know a lot of potential customers will see photos on social media and become inspired by them. Alternatively, you may be in the business services sector and know that your customers will tend to search for businesses in your area.
Most of the time, the way that users will discover your website will be through a mix of several channels and our digital marketing services are about creating and implementing a strategy for that.
First Impression
Great, so you’ve worked out how customers will find you and you’ve found the holy grail and started to bring people to your website… Surely that’s it? Job done? Unfortunately not. You’ll need to think about the first impression that you’re giving off when a user lands on your website as this will be the make or break factor that determines whether you’ll waste a lot of website traffic, or retain it.
One of the key metrics that we look at in the digital marketing world is called ‘bounce rate’. This is the rate at which people land on your website and leave within a very short space of time – i.e. they weren’t satisfied with what they saw.
A successful re-design to us is about ensuring that the website looks good and is trusted by users, this usually leads to a dramatic decrease in bounce rate.
Education
The next stage is generally to educate the user about what your company offers, how it will improve their life and why they should choose you out of all the other companies offering similar services. We do this by planning what kind of things we would expect to see on a website in your niche.
For example, if you were selling sofas online, we’d usually expect to see some nice, high-resolution images of the products, pricing information and details about the fabrics available and different configurations. We’d also expect the site to be securely loaded (so the padlock symbol appears in the browser) and to work quickly. Reviews and other endorsements would also help us to trust the brand.
Content comes into play here as well and can be used to cover any objections that the potential customer might have and to give them ideas as to what kinds of products will work best for them.
Using the sofa example again, we might create content around the subject of types of sofa that work well in minimalist rooms. Within that we’d talk about how our XYZ sofa creates a focal point.
To give another spin on it, in our industry (digital marketing), a lot of people tell us that it’s filled with smoke and mirrors and they ask what exactly goes into a marketing campaign monthly… That’s why we create articles such as this, to help educate our readers.
Conversion
Conversions are most easily described as the number of times that users complete a goal on your website. This may be to pick up the phone and call you, to join an email marketing list or to buy products online.
One of the big things we analyse at Imaginaire Digital is something called conversion rate and that’s simply the percentage of website visitors that go on to complete the primary goal that we set with clients. Most of the time this is either enquiries (via both phone and lead generation forms) or transactions on an ecommerce website.
Increasing the conversion rate of a website is firstly about making sure that all of the cogs in the digital marketing process are aligning properly – are we setting a good first impression? Are we doing a good job of educating the user? Are we building trust?
Once we’re sure that all those cogs are working properly, it’s just about clearing the path for the user and making it easy for them to convert. Whether that’s by showing the phone number prominently and literally telling them to call, or by simplifying the checkout process of an ecommerce website.
Conversion rate optimisation is often one of the ways that we can have the quickest impact for a new client with an existing website that gets traffic and it’s a satisfying part of digital marketing for us as it’s delivering a tangible business result to the client.
Remarketing
By the definition of the big advertising players such as Google and Facebook, remarketing is about building an audience from people that have visited your website and then showing them an advert after they leave to bring them back to the site. A great idea and one that helps recycle lost traffic.
We also look at remarketing as being about getting in touch with existing customers/previous leads to bring them back into your pipeline.
Having a good remarketing strategy can ensure that you’re maximising your website traffic and giving yourself every possible chance of winning sales from it.
The remarketing phase also helps create a loop to bring customers back to your website so that we can repeat the process of setting a good impression, educating them and converting them.
All in all, giving some thought to each stage can have a huge impact on your business and put you ahead of the 80% of companies that just don’t bother with it. We like to see the phases of digital marketing as a road map and use it to build an effective strategy for our clients.
Your luck is in as well, we’re offering a free digital marketing consultation at the moment, during which we will go through each of these stages to build a bespoke digital strategy for your business. All we ask is that, if you’d like help implementing it, you’ll give us some thought!
To book your free digital marketing strategy meeting, call us on 0115 971 8908 or use our contact form and we will be happy to arrange it.
