13 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost Traffic, Revenue, and Profit in Q1

Hey there! Thanks for reading my post! By this point you have made it through 2015 and are actively implementing your Q1 strategy for your company. Regardless of the type of company or website you have you need a great strategy in place so you can achieve the goals you are setting for 2016. If you an established company you are likely looking to grow sales and revenue 20-30% over the previous year. This is usually a decent way to look at revenue goal setting however it may not be realistic depending on how big you already are, how competitive you vertical is, and if you have the budget allocated to marketing in more areas than the previous year. I always recommending looking back over the previous year, month by month, to see what strategies were successful and which were not. You can look to expand what worked and attempt to make work what didn't by revamping the strategy in that area. For instance, if you ran a banner placement on a high traffic website that had related traffic, but didn't get your return on the ad spend, you can look to redesign the banner, try a more aggressive offer, and change up the landing page the traffic is dropping to. If you didn't do well with a set of keyword phrases in Google Adwords you thought would work better, you can re-write the ads and make the landing page the traffic is dropping to more effective or more targeted to the keyword phrase. If your affiliate program didn't meet your expectations you can re-vamp all of your ad creative, text links, recruit new affiliates, and send better/more frequent messaging. These are some ways that a marketing channel can be made more effective for the new year. At my agency Experience Advertising, we are committed to making increase revenue and profitability a reality for our clients, so we are already looking at what worked and what didn't so a better, more effective strategy can be utilized. In this post, I thought I would put together some surefire strategies (that I have discovered personally over my 17 year digital marketing career) for you to utilize so you can make absolutely sure you have a big January and Q1! Note: these suggestions are in no real order of importance. They are ALL extremely important and areas of your online marketing that should be looked at and possibly revamped. Whether you do it all inhouse, with any agency, or a combination, all of these areas should be analyzed and a better strategy put forth. Some of these channels may not be applicable to what you are doing, so feel free to ignore what isn't relevant and focus on what is.

1. SEO - SEO is still extremely important to getting your free traffic, but seems to become less important over time as the search engines squeeze as much revenue as possible from their searchers. You could always be revising some of your SEO optimization on the site, adding content, adding new pages, posts, articles, how-to's, expand F.A.Q.s, stuff like that to enhance and expand your current content. If you want to get more organic traffic in the new year, you need have some fresh content going up on the site is the new year, because it can take time for new pages of content to start ranking. Another good idea is to create some videos for YouTube that focus on topics that your target audience would get value out of. Adding new pages of content to your site as well as adding more videos to your Youtube channel can only help you get additional rankings in the search results. Make sure you focus on topics related to things people want to do in the new year or things they might be interested in to increase the likelihood that your content will get traffic. Never scrimp on your content, if you are going to create some new posts for the site or videos, make sure they are thorough pieces that are well-optimized with the keyword phrases you are going after. If you are going to do it, do it well so the new pages actually do something for you. Take a look at your Google Analytics reports and see what keyword phrases and content brought you traffic last year and try to piggyback on that by beefing up those pages or adding pages for keyword phrases you didn't get much traffic for but would like to. It's never a bad idea to take a look at your SEO optimization and make some improvements. Make sure your site is connected to Google Webmaster tools so you can get their feedback on the site's SEO.
2. Email Marketing Strategy - take a look at how effective your emails were the past year, i.e. open rates, click through rates, conversion rates, and see what can be improved. Most email platforms have A/B testing on subject lines which can help figuring out what opens best. Did you personalize subject lines in the last year? You can see if it improved open rates. Are your emails mobile optimized? In this day and age they absolutely should be, so that's an area you can address with some mobile optimized templates to improve click-throughs in the coming year. How about promotions and incentives? How aggressive were your promotions to your databases? See what worked and what didn't so you don't make the same mistakes this year. You would be shocked how many companies don't look to make improvements in their email channel. Also, are you actively collecting emails on your website traffic with pop-up email boxes? Add a pop-up box with a nice discount can double your conversion rate. Then when you email that list it increases conversion rate even more.
3. Paid Search - the end of the years is a great time to take a look at the entire year of paid search results and see what worked well, what didn't, and what could be re-optimized for the new year. You can edit the ad copy for the new year and try some new year promotions in the ads to motivate actions. You can see what keyword phrases performed well and make sure they are boosted up where they should be come January. You can see if there are any additional phrases that are similar to the ones that converted well, or brought in sales with a positive ROI, that can be added to the account. Google has done a great job with their keyword suggestion tool, so you can build out new campaigns with targeted ad copy quickly and easily in the account. You can then import those campaigns over to you Bing Ads account so they are running there as well. Now is a good time to get on the phone with your Adwords rep. and see if they have any valuable suggestions, or make your agency get on a conference call with Google and yourself to see what their suggestions are, so you can evaluation what to authorize. Every year Google and Bing come up with new features that most advertisers are clueless about, so you can definitely get some good ideas from speaking to Google and Bing. Bing reps are fairly clueless so don't expect much there in the way of strategies besides insisting you go "broad match," but Bing just revamped their shopping campaigns so if you have a product catalog it needs to be running in Bing ads. Recently, Google Adwords rolled out per call campaigns that run on mobile phones and don't even visit your website. This is great for service-type businesses where you can tell them all of that on the phone and sell them. Whenever you direct people to your website you risk losing in that impulse moment, so you can try Google per call campaigns with or without the option to visitor your site. 
4. Shopping Engines - the end of the year is a great time to see about revamping your feeds on the shopping engines like Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, Nextag, Shopping.com, and a couple others. Are your product titles well optimized? What about your product descriptions. A lot of companies doesn't put enough effort or optimization into their product descriptions. Not only does it help with SEO but it can help get your shopping feeds more traffic from the shopping engines. What about the bid amounts? Are they aggressive enough? Did you over-bid last year? You can make sure that doesn't happen again if that was the case last year. There are tools that can keep you a penny lower in price than your competition, like Wiser. Make sure to check out tools that can help optimize shopping engine performance since it's a more cost-effective channel typically than phrase-based paid search advertising, like RetailTower, so it needs to be optimized and maximized really well.
5. Amazon - Amazon has changed things around recently. They got rid of product ads and keyword ads, so basically you one have 1 option of selling on Amazon, which is to sell through Amazon. So make sure to give Amazon a call and make sure you are selling through them in the best possible way. They're pretty decent about helping merchants over figuring out how to sell on their platform. It most definitely should be utilized as well as possible since they have a huge audience and consumers searching for products more and more over time.
6. Retargeting - what's your retargeting strategy? Meaning how effectively are you advertising to your website visitors after they leave your website? How well is it working? Which retargeting channels are producing ROI and which aren't? Are you running promotions in your retargeting ads? How well are those promos working and could they be changed up? Your retargeting ads could always be revamped and improved to increase click-through-rate and conversion rate. There are many different ways to retarget your website visitors so you need to make sure you look at what was tried over the past year and see how well it performed. Did you know you can retarget your email lists? What about running retargeting ads to your customers to sell them complimentary products to what they purchased. That can perform really well. Have you tried "lookalike audiences" on Facebook and Twitter, you could give that shot, although I recommending maximizing your retargeting campaigns to your website visitors and previous customers before testing lookalike audiences. So your entire retargeting strategy needs to be re-optimized so it works better this time around and is more pervasive than it was last year.
7. Website Conversion Rate - this should probably be up at the top of the list. It's a fact...how well your website converts traffic literally dictates how all of your online marketing campaigns will perform, so it needs to be a constant focus of your marketing department or the agency you use to manage your marketing. If you use an agency for your marketing and they don't do anything to attempt to improve the effectiveness of your website, you need an agency that works to improve conversion rate (like mine). That being said, there are many ways you can spruce up or "tweak" your current website going into the new year to make sure it capitalizes better on the traffic you are going to receive during that time period. You should reference my conversion rate tips but in general these areas could be improved on the site: the usability of the site, A/B testing on the site's page elements, are customer reviews visible enough, are trust/security logos emphasized well enough, are you capturing data on as many visitors as possible (i.e. sweepstakes, pop-ups, coupons, giveaways), do you have a customer referral program up and running, is your mobile site optimized for user experienced as much as it could be. I could go on but those are some of the questions you need be asking in order to boost conversion rate on the site.
8. Affiliates/Referral Partners - what's the current state of your affiliate program and customer referral program? Consider having someone in marketing reaching out to all of your current affiliates and see how they are doing, i.e. personally touching base. Ask your affiliates if there's anything you can do for them to facilitate them in the new year. Or insist that your affiliate agency does that for you. Nothing ensures the future success of your affiliate program like reaching out to every affiliate personally and checking in with them. How about surveying your affiliates? That's a great idea because often times you will hear all of their suggestions and grievances that need to be address to make your affiliate program a better one. What is your affiliate recruiting strategy? If you don't have a solid strategy in place to recruit new affiliates, you should look to implement a great plan to prospect new affiliates into your program. A surefire way of increasing your website's traffic over what it was the previous year is to bring in some new affiliate partners.
9. Customer Referral Program - Take a look at your customer referral program and how broadly you are "pushing it" across everything you do, i.e. on the site, in your auto-responder emails, through email blasts to your databases, on your thank you page, in your call center on the phones, on Facebook with boosts, on Twitter with ads, and anywhere else you could possibly be emphasizing your customer referral program. The more places you can promote your customer referral program the more uptake it will get over time. I often hear companies making the judgement that their referral program "isn't doing much" and "not meeting our expectations." It's partly because it's the type of thing that needs to become part of the very fabric of your company in order to get the most uptake as possible. Companies that really get it, will promote it here, there, and everywhere, even through TV commercials. You can even advertise the fact that you have a referral program on Facebook to your audience and to new customers because not all referral programs require the referrer to be a customer. Check out FriendBuy.com for an affordable, feature-rich affiliate widget for you website.
10. Sweepstakes, Contests, and Giveaways - ask the question, "How many sweepstakes did we run this year?" Ouch. The answer probably isn't going to be too impressive. In my opinion, I haven't seen a company yet that runs enough sweepstakes or contests to build their audiences and increase engagement. And you may think you have a good social media strategy but if you aren’t running frequent sweepstakes and contests, you don't have a social media strategy! Because nothing increasing email opt-ins, page likes, Facebook sharing, and tweets like a sweepstakes or contest. People LOVE entering sweepstakes and contests to win stuff.
11. Social Media Strategy - this is the channel that is evolving faster than any other, so you have stay on top of what social media strategies should work for your company and make sure you are leveraging them to the fullest. Do you have a New Year's Sweepstakes planned? That's a great idea to kick the year off with excitement! How are you advertising on Facebook? What about Twitter? Are you running ad campaigns on Instagram and Pinterest yet? Well you should be, or whoever handles your ad campaigns should be. One of the most effective ways to get social sharing going on is to post what are known as "teaser headlines" on Facebook. These are posts that link to your website where a viral video (usually) is hosted on the page. You just find a video on Youtube in your niche that has a lot of views and post it to your site. Then when you share the page url to Facebook you tease the title with something like "This kittens friendship with a dog will have you in tears." You've seen them. These types of teaser headlines get shared like nothing else, so it's a good way to get more company page likes for the future without having to spend anything on Facebook advertising, although I do recommend advertising on Facebook in certain ways.
12. B-to-B Sales - companies selling to other companies is most definitely the hottest thing in e-commerce. If you products or services lend themselves to it, look to see what businesses you could sell your products to. A lot of the upside in e-commerce is in the Business to Business vertical. Part of the reason is because companies make larger purchases that consumers, so you can spend more in advertising to acquire the account than what you are accustomed to with B to C. Orders from companies also have better retention than the B to C channel, so they order more over time. So again you can spend more to acquire the customer that what you are used to.
13. Partnership Marketing - This is one of my favorites! Bringing in partnerships with other companies is a great way to boost revenue. Look at them as another type of affiliate or referrer that can produce sales for you. If you can reciprocate by generating sales for them as well, that's even better because you can land the deal easier if you can reciprocate with traffic. You can have someone in your marketing department in charge of reaching out to other companies to see if they might be interested in partnering up. These types of partnership can really produce, i.e. when I was at my last corporate position running the marketing, I brought in a partnership that produced 150 sales per month on a steady consistent basis. So you can see that if you had several of those it can really add up and pad the bottom line big time because they have a fixed acquisition cost you can set in your comfort zone. Each year you can look to add 100 more of these types of partnerships, and if you keep the previous ones active you can ensure you will have a seriously growing channel with the partnership marketing strategy.

Whew! What a heck of a list! Looks like you have your work cut out for you. Or you can bring on a digital marketing agency to help out (like Experience Advertising). Unless you have a large Marketing Department, you will likely need additional resources to implement and manage all of these startegies, but it's definitely possible. Goals were meant to be smashed, so let's do this!

Thanks for taking a look and let me know if you would like to discuss working with my agency on one or numerous strategies to improve your traffic, sales, and profits in 2016! I would love to help you completely obliterate your goals in 2016.

Thank you,
Evan Weber, CEO
Experience Advertising, Inc.
954-662-8010 - mobile
[email protected]
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