As an Orange County marketing company, we’ve seen various marketing strategies on the web. Some come up with crazy things like clickbait and flash sales to lure people in, some maintain numerous social media profiles to be visible everywhere, and some even just pay exorbitant fees to be advertised.

Now, while we know how tough digital marketing can be, we really don’t think you need to go through all of those hoops. As long as you’re being persistent with your strategy and doing things that have been proven to work, then you can only go up from there.

If you want to have a successful digital marketing strategy, here are five surefire ways of doing so. 

Have Clear Budgets, Objectives, and Schedules

It’s important to establish the whats, hows, and whens of your business. You need to know how much you’re willing to invest, what you hope to accomplish, and when you want to implement your marketing strategy so you can track its progress and effectiveness.

When it comes to budgeting, you should make sure you’re not spending too much of your money. Every little penny counts—you can’t just blow everything off on marketing fees and hope for the best! A digital marketing agency in Orange County highly recommends 5-10% of your estimated revenue—don’t worry; if done correctly, you’ll be earning twice or thrice your budget by the end of the run.

You also need to plan out your strategy, including what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. It’s like building a checklist and doing things one by one instead of winging it. This way, you can monitor your progress and figure out the next logical step in your strategy.

Prioritize Your Website

You may have already heard about the importance of social media in your digital marketing strategy, but did you know that you shouldn’t be focusing on it too much? Your business website should be your number one priority as it is the most important thing to have in your arsenal—it’s something you own entirely, and nothing can take that away from you.

Social media platforms, on the other hand, are owned by big names and companies that can change the rules in an instant. If Mark Zuckerberg, for example, decided to charge $10 extra for every ad you post or decided that only American companies can be boosted, then there’s not much you can really do about it. Additionally, social media platforms come and go—imagine spending lots of time, effort, and money marketing your business on Twitter only to have the website in shambles after Elon Musk purchased it.

Invest in your website first and foremost before moving on to social media. They’re just there to help boost your visibility, and you should always include a link to your website on your social media profiles.

Analyze Customer Behavior

Understanding customer behavior is crucial to understanding your website traffic. Are people finding you through Google or social media profiles? Are most of your traffic from loyal customers or prospective ones? What keywords did they plug into their search engines to find you? How long do they stay on your website?

If you know what conditions most of your customers were in when they found you, then you can capitalize on that. If you find that most customers found you on Yelp, then you can optimize your Yelp profile better. If a keyword is more popular than the others, then you can start uploading more content that’s relevant to that keyword. If they didn’t stay very long, try to understand why—was the page loading too slow, perhaps?

Thankfully, there are plenty of helpful tools like Google Search Console and Plezi One to help you out.

Optimize Your Pages

You should keep your audience scrolling and clicking through your website for as long as possible. Never let them reach a dead-end—always lead them to another page or provide calls to action.

For example, if you’re an online bakery and one of your most popular pages is about your moist chocolate cake, then you should either direct their attention to other chocolate pastries you offer or let them order a moist chocolate cake at the end of that page.

You can also optimize your content to get your audience’s contact information.

For example, say that you have a highly informative article about Google AdWords in Orange County. In the end, you can offer a video or webinar you can send them via email. Now, you’ll have access to their email, and you can start sending promotional material straight to their inbox (with permission, of course)! 

And speaking of promotional material…

Upload Premium Content

Videos and webinars aren’t the only things you can offer for premium content. The sky’s the limit!

If your products are particularly pricy and your customers aren’t sure if they should invest, you can offer free trials or samples so they can test things out for themselves. You can even include freebies as part of a package—why not include a small sample of something they didn’t order to see if it’s something they’d like to order for next time?

You can also get creative! For example, if you own a boba store, you can have downloadable wallpapers with cute boba characters, coloring pages, stickers, icons, and more!

You don’t have to go all out—just offer things you think would be convenient for your audience and make them happy to be on your website.

Conclusion

Building an online presence is tough, but it’s not impossible or complicated. All you need are set objectives, a good eye for analytics, and a drive for customer satisfaction.