Used to be a website is what kept you ahead of your competitors. Then it was a newly designed website. Now, are you wondering what is next?
Mobile phones and other new devices are pushing digital change faster, taking more of the time and attention of your customers. You need to be where your customers are now and where more of them are headed.
Accessing the new digital environment where customers are spending more time researching, following and learning is where smart business owners want to be.
But, how to get there?
It Is No Longer Just The Website
Having a website has gone from the center of a digital strategy to the equivalent of a Yellow Book ad in the 1980s. Basic stuff, but not the centerpiece marketing strategy.
Using a website to attract and convert prospects is a new paradigm. No longer is the site a ‘brochure’ that people find on their own or an online validation of the value of your business.
Now it is an optimized ‘conversion machine’ designed to initiate and record customer interactions including phone calls, emails and contact forms.
Getting prospects to your site is now more important than the site itself.
Attracting Converting Prospects Requires Multiple Fronts
While today’s digital landscape may seem fractured and difficult to wrap a strategy around trust that it isn’t.
Feeding that feeling are small shops and larger agencies providing a single-channel solution in competition with other single-channel solutions. It’s sales.
Instead, imagine that all those fractured solutions are really the same … conversions. It’s either a source of scale to provide conversionsthem, or niche targeted to your core audience to find new customers.
Either way, it’s simply getting your business in front of your prospects when they are looking for what you offer.
Once You Have Them Convert Them
Now comes the key to solving the digital landscape for your business: Analytics.
You need to track conversions — a click to call, a click to e-mail, reading a page, clicking a link, filling out a form. No matter the conversion, track it.
Once you can track success you and walk it back to the source. What works best to get you phone calls? Display ads? SEO? Facebook? Paid Search? LinkedIn? Instagram? Dex? TV? Radio? What converts best and how much does a conversion cost?
These are all basic data points your business should be tracking on a monthly basis and optimizing over time in order to leverage today’s digital landscape.
If you aren’t employing this strategy at all you likely aren’t feeling it … yet. Failing to establish a digital marketing strategy is what threatens to have your business left behind.