by Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencer Adam Woods

Top Ten Digital Marketing Tips

No messing around, let’s dive straight in…

1. Go TO your audience — Digital marketing relies on understanding your audience and knowing where they hangout. Waiting idly for your audience to come to you won’t work… get out there! Go to where your audience is, then listen and engage.
2. Immerse yourself in UX — Every business should be obsessed with user experience; carefully tracing a customer journey is crucial to reducing friction and converting as many people as possible.
3. Conversion is everything — Make sure all of your digital efforts are set up in such a way that conversion can be tracked. Digital marketing is not about vanity metrics… it IS about results.
4. Test, Monitor, Refine — So by now you understand the customer journey and you’re measuring conversion. Now is the time to test different parts of your digital UX. But be agile… do it quickly and refine as you go. Customers won’t wait.
5. Your website is your palace — This year I’ve been drilling into my team one thing: we don’t advertise our events, we advertise our websites. We don’t expect customers to purchase off the strength of a single ad — instead we send them to an online source so they can make an informed decision about whether to buy. Be respectful of that and give your website the attention it deserves.
6. Onboarding is crucial — All your acquisition tactics and channels are for nothing if your customers don’t know how to get the best from your product. Walk them through it… and don’t assume a thing.
7. Utility is the key to successful content marketing — Content marketing is a long term, trust-building strategy but merely pumping out stories and crossing your fingers isn’t going to work. To build lasting trust your content needs to be useful in some way. Ask yourself what your audience needs and work back from there.
8. Influencers are not who you think they are — Traditionally in B2B we turned to associations or industry bodies for our major partnerships but in the digital age real influencers are just normal individuals with a passion and a following. There are several great online tools to use to find the influencers in your industry — my favourite is BuzzSumo.
9. ROI is as much a measurement of you as it is your channel — The channel is irrelevant if your content isn’t right. Your messages need to be clear, relevant and compelling regardless of how or where it is delivered. Which brings me oh-so-nicely to my final point…
10. Marketing fundamentals still apply — We can call it digital but at its heart it’s just marketing; it’s taking a product, adding a persuasive message and then effectively and efficiently distributing that message. Digital channels are excellent for targeting and tracking and, when done well, offer a return on investment far superior to traditional marketing — but if your product hasn’t found a market or you can’t craft a message then it’s all for nothing.