12 Ways To Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts Now

No matter how marketing, communications, and advertising changes over the years, we’re all looking to get more traffic to our website in hopes that more online visitors will equal more sales for our business, i.e. improving our conversion rate.

As a top digital marketing agency in Dallas, we know the key is finding quality, targeted traffic that will stick around the site and eventually convert into a sale.

How can you get that quality, targeted web traffic?

There are several steps you can take to evaluate and optimize your website for lead generation, getting the results you’re looking for as soon as possible.

First, take a look at where your current traffic – especially the traffic that converts – is coming from.

Here are a few areas you’ll likely be evaluating:

Email marketing

Email marketing has some of the highest return on investment (ROI) a business can ask for.

• How is yours shaping up? How many emails are you sending out each month? How are you organizing your email lists? Is the content within the newsletter appropriate for the buyer’s journey?
• We help companies grow and organize email lists to start achieving digital marketing goals.
• We can also help benchmark open rates, click rates, and overall engagement performance.

Social media

Whether you’re on one social media platform or all of them, make sure all of your profiles are complete, professional, and properly branded.

• Are you posting regularly on each platform?
• Is the content catered to the audiences on those particular platforms?
• Is the content original or shared from someone else?

Southwest Airlines, based out of Dallas, utilized social media (particularly Twitter) to connect with their customers in a very public way. In fact, their business model revolves around social media (including listening to customers), and they have been known to reward customers with gift cards or free tickets when they interact with them online.

We didn’t mean to let you down today, Joe. Feel free to DM us if we can be of further assistance. ^MK

— Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) November 20, 2017

Live chat

• Live chat continues to be a great way to convert leads into sales.
• How is your live chat doing?
• Are potential customers dropping off at similar points in the chat conversation?
• How long are potential customers waiting before they are prompted by the chat?
• What about the response wait time?

Odin Leather Goods, made in Coppell, Texas, linked their website with Facebook messenger so users can hold a continuous conversation within a familiar platform (Facebook), which can also alert them on their phone. Odin also catches potential leads with a pop-up form to push visitors to sign up for their newsletter.

Blog posts

Blogs remain to be perfect gateways to a website before closing the deal.

• How often are you publishing blog posts?
• Are the blog posts covering appropriate, targeted content?
• Does each blog post have several calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout that direct customers through the website?

A bookstore bar in Dallas, The Wild Detectives, is focused on creating a book community and their blog reflects that by making it all about the books their staff members read, featuring detailed reviews and book covers.

Search Engine Optimization

Getting your website ranked on the first page of Google and other popular search engines is key to getting traffic. Using targeted keywords can help you rank high for specific Google searches, now we’re really talking.

• When was the last time you audited your keyword list?
• How does your meta content look on the search engine results page (SERP)?
• Do you have a Google My Business account? Tip: this is critical to dominate your local Dallas / Fort Worth competitors
• Does your most important content have pillar pages?

This might be a good time to evaluate your local SEO efforts – are you ranking for Dallas keywords related to your business? Are you well-known in the Dallas, Fort Worth, and surrounding areas? Are you ranking for your services or products?

Are there any areas listed above that you skipped over because you’re not present there at all? Are you on social media? Did you stop doing email marketing? If so, these are areas you’ll have to revisit. If you have the resources to be present in all of these areas, you need to be!

Need help with this type of evaluation? Let us audit your lead generation performance for free!

The entire process should be seamless, so if a user is clicking on a particular ad, the landing page they come to should match the ad they clicked in every way possible. Pay special attention to your headline, forms, CTAs, and your overall message (make everything very targeted and consistent).

CTAs

CTAs may be small, but they are powerful when done right! Perform an audit of your CTAs and make sure you’re using actionable words (make sure they’re legible, too), consider text and button colors, create a sense of urgency, and place CTAs above-the-fold, if possible.

Thank you pages

A thank you page is often very underutilized and can be a goldmine for businesses, so it’s important to make sure you’ve got yours right. You can use your thank you page to ask for referrals, ask for social media shares, offer a coupon or a discount, or link to the most popular content on your site.

Define your goal

If you’re not already, it’s time to start thinking with the end in mind. For your business, what is considered a conversion? It may not always mean a sale.

Instead, it could be signing up for the email newsletter, or downloading a free eBook. When you keep the end result in mind, you can optimize your website for lead generation by better targeting all of the steps customers will take to get there.

Dallas-based company, Game Stop, knows their customer inside and out, and their website proves it by putting the games (and the deals on games) right on the homepage, and organizing their website by gaming system. Aside from selling and trading products, they point visitors to their free rewards program, which is a good way to get return customers.

Use the Buyer’s Journey to your advantage

The key is to meet a buyer wherever they are within the buyer’s journey. Here’s some key elements of each step of the journey, and the type of content that should be available to the user at each stage.

Have you ever considered using a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) like HubSpot?

If using a CRM is something you’ve considered before, we couldn’t recommend it more. Having a CRM database opens up so many marketing opportunities that can really drive more leads. With this information, you’ll be able to determine if your customers are coming from Dallas, Fort Worth, Irving, wherever your customers are.

In most cases, a company could utilize a CRM to:

• Create and deploy landing pages
• Chat, Helpdesk, Knowledge base
• Marketing automation
• Marketing optimization
• Maximize up-selling and cross-selling
• Increase customer revenues
• Improve customer service

If you’re looking to implement a CRM, we can help. Atomic Design and Consulting is a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner in Dallas.

Awareness

At this point, the buyer is trying to pinpoint their problem and find a fitting solution. Their search terms will be more general, and the content they’re looking for likely covers possible answers to their problem(s). The content here should be how-to articles or step-by-step demonstration videos.

Consideration

Once the buyer has pinpointed their problem and is aware of possible solutions, they are going to start researching their options. Details about the product/service are what customers are looking for, along with trustworthy, educational content.

Dallas-based Tenet Health has an entire section of their website dedicated to the ways they give back to our community. This emotional and caring connection could serve as the tipping point for potential patients, or potential volunteers. They also have action-packed CTAs!

Decision

During the final stage, they are going to be looking at prices, deals, free trials, etc. before they make a purchase or a conversion. Comparison charts, coupons, and/or ways to schedule a call are all great ways to capture the customer here.