Your Marketing Qs — Answered!

Soup Agency is giving the rundown on the most common marketing queries in May.

Here are all of the top questions we’ve had this month from clients and staff alongside some recent updates.

In the ever-evolving world of SEO, what are the latest strategies and tactics yielding the best results?

With search engines like Google continually updating their algorithms and changing user behaviour, businesses must evolve with it. As such, we have seen a constant evolution of SEO strategies to stay above the curve. The good news is that we have the latest tips and tricks for aligning your content to be picked up by search engines. Here are our top tips:?

1. User intent Optimisation: Instead of putting all your focus into integrating keywords, look more holistically at user intent to understand what people are looking for and how you can provide content that brings value to their queries.?
2. Mobile-First Indexing: Optimising your content for mobiles should be a top priority as the rise of mobile phone usage increases. This will give users a seamless experience between devices and create a positive experience for them on your site.?
3. Structured Data Markup: Reviewing your content and implementing a structured data markup will give search engines more context about how to read your site. This can improve your chances of appearing in the top search results.?
4. High-Quality Content: Quality content is king when it comes to SEO best practices. If your content is relevant, unique, engaging and resonates with your target audience it is going to be valued by search engines. This is because search engines like Google want to always provide their users with the best content and search results, to make their platform easy and relevant to use. By extension, if your content is high-quality, you are more likely to be rewarded on these platforms.?
5. Backlink Building: Another way to ensure your content is rated highly on search engines is through having authoritative websites mentioning yours, known as backlinks. By focusing on earning natural, relevant backlinks through guest blogging or creating sharable content you can improve your SEO rating.?
6. Regular Updates: Doing regular quality checks of your website’s content and making sure that it is updated and relevant to your ideal customer is going to also help you stay relevant.?

By following these strategies, you can stay ahead of the curve and keep your content optimised for SEO.?

What are the key factors to consider when developing a successful digital marketing strategy for e-commerce businesses?

When you are just starting in the digital marketing sphere, it can be easy to overlook key elements when building your digital marketing strategy, particularly as an e-commerce business. Here are the several key factors that you need to consider to make your digital strategy the most effective it can be:?

1. Define your Target Audience: Without a defined target audience, you are grasping at air and ultimately will not bring in the results you want. Make personas for your target audience and think about how they would like to be marketed.?
2. Multi-Channel Approach: Using multiple digital marketing channels and creating a connected story throughout all your channels such as social media, email marketing, content marketing and SEO will position your brand and reach potential customers.?
3. User Experience: Making sure your website is optimised for users will provide a seamless and enjoyable experience across all user touchpoints. This includes optimising your website, app and social media platforms to be device-friendly, intuitive navigation and have fast loading times.?
4. Content Strategy: Ensuring your content is aligned and relevant across all channels will address the needs and interests of your target audience. This can be done by creating high-quality product descriptions, blog posts, videos or other content formats such as reels to attract and engage customers.?

what should new businesses be aware of when building a digital marketing strategy?

If you are a new business thinking about entering into the digital marketing sphere you must consider several factors. Without clear objectives and goals in place, you are blindly entering into the marketing without clear metrics to measure; this will lead to results that aren't measurable and waste valuable time and data collection. That is why when setting up a campaign it is important to define specific, measurable goals such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads or increasing sales.?

Secondly, you should have a defined target audience. This will help your advertising spend be put to better use and give you more control over how your marketing messages are distributed; giving you insights into what marketing messages and channels best resonate with your target audience. Another step you can take it by researching your competitors to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and current strategies, thinking about how you could improve on their approach and differentiate your brand.?

The last considerations you should consider are consistent branding, budget allocation and how you will track performance. Consistent branding is important as it will help build trust and recognition among your target audience. This extends into keeping your socials the same as the brand name, making you easy to find. How you spend your budget and track performance is an ongoing process that should be evaluated throughout your campaign. Revisit these continually as you enter into the digital marketing sphere and begin testing new strategies.??

What are the most effective strategies for building and nurturing an engaged email subscriber list in today’s digital marketing landscape?

It can become easy to get drowned out in the noise of email marketing so to build and nurture an engaged email subscriber base, we suggest these strategies:?

1. Offer Incentives: People are more likely to click through on your email or subscribe to your email list if they are offered discounts, freebies or exclusive content for signing up.
2. Optimise Opt-in Forms: Adding opt-in forms on your website, blog or social media profiles by keeping the form fields minimal and the copy persuasive can bring a lot of benefits to encouraging subscribers.?
3. Segmentation and Personalisation: Segmenting your email list based on demographics, interests or behaviour will help you create a more personalised experience for your subscribers. This will increase engagement rates, drive conversions and minimise unsubscribing.?
4. A/B Testing: Conducting regular testing by experimenting with different email formats, subject lines or call-to-actions will help you better understand your target audience.?
5. Interactive content: Another way to increase engagement is through interactive content such as polls, quizzes, surveys, or games for promotional wins. This will increase engagement and encourage users to share.?

How should businesses approach A/B testing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to refine their digital marketing efforts and enhance website performance?

When looking to incorporate A/B testing into your marketing efforts it is important to take a rigorous approach to refining and identifying key metrics. First, determine which metrics are most important for you to measure success, this can look at click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated per user. It can also be helpful to develop a hypothesis about different elements on your website or marketing campaign that could be optimised for improved performance. This could be design elements, messaging, call to action or navigation.?

Once that is established, you can look into conducting testing. Make sure to always have a control group (A) and a variation group (B) to accurately understand the impact of changes. Once the tests have been running for an appropriate period, you can gather data on the performance of each test variation and analyse which result performed better. Based on these results, you can implement changes to improve the performance of your website or campaign, using data-driven insights as your guide to what changes to make.?

To take this testing further, you can consider how A/B testing can be applied across the rest of your channels. For example, did a certain time perform better? Has short or long-form copy resonated with your target audience and what type of people were receptive to it? Consider these optimisations across channels to improve your overall performance and ROI.