EOFY – How To Use Your Budget Wisely

The end of the Financial Year (EOFY) is nearly upon us again. A time that we’re all prepared for, yet it somehow always seems to catch us off guard. So, have you managed to spend your allocated digital budget? If you still have money to spend read on for our top suggestions for website optimizations in 2018.

1. Update your marketing EOFY strategy 

Firstly, you should ask yourself if you’ve hit you and your clients’ targets – such as ROI, CPC or leads generated. If you haven’t, it’s time to look at your overall digital marketing strategy. The digital world is always in flux. Your customers from last year may not be the same as they are today. Having a digital marketing strategy that is as agile as the market you are in helps you be more prepared and realign accordingly.

Some starter tasks for a strategy review:

• Review internal/client goals and objectives – have these been hit yet? Can you shift or increase your budget to make some last minute gains on goals and objectives?
• Measure completion of your quantitative goals by way of percentage and compare them to the previous year.
• Review and revise your goals for the upcoming period.
• Compare the effectiveness of each of your marketing channels against your goals.

Collating your data over the last year and creating solid, comprehensive reports depicting visitors, conversion rates and percentage increases means taking a numbers-driven approach. The great thing about data and metrics to measure your success is that number speak the truth. They can easily be compared with your targets, monthly averages, with the past six months and the upcoming six months. Keeping an eye on your data will teach you new lessons about marketing, your target audience and the effectiveness of your branding and approach.

2. Create a content calendar for the next financial year

Content is a critical component of any successful marketing strategy. When properly implemented, a content marketing strategy can drive traffic, brand awareness and position you as an expert in your field. Any good content strategy will include details such as blog and social posts, detailed articles, reviews or even just basic news sharing from trusted sources within your industry. Your website SEO performance will also be turbocharged fresh content. It pays to plan ahead and have this content ready to go!
EOFY is a great time to prepare future content for new or existing content calendars. This will allow you to hit the first quarter of the new financial year running, not stopping to prepare content as you go. 

Remember to consider the following when preparing content calendars for clients or your business:

• Keywords – keywords are the essential starting place. Pick your keywords in advance, and write based on them.
• Brand guidelines – consider the brand guidelines and make sure your content stays on topic and on tone.
• Audience – always consider the audience and tailor your content for them
• Data & Research – use previous content performance to refine what content works well for your business.
• Mix it up – avoid favoring one single topic too much. Play to your strengths by all means, but make sure you provide a compelling and diverse content offering. You might find having rotating topics or genres helps you achieve this.
• Context – when you can, remember to throw in spontaneous posts that weren’t pre-planned. These work most effectively when timed inline with real-time events.

3. Speed things up

Did you know that Google is getting harsher on websites that aren’t quick and mobile optimised? Particularly if you’re in certain verticals such as news or sports sites, Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP have become a must have. So if your site is taking longer than a few seconds to load, then chances are Google will be ranking you lower you for having a slower site. What’s more, for every additional second your site takes to load, you lose approximately 7% of your leads! That’s crazy. If you’re interested to see how your site stacks up, you can check out your site speed now using Google Speed Insights 

Bear in mind that Google Speed Insights will tell you if your page is running slow and give you suggestions for what you need to optimise and improve, but only for that particular page. If you input your homepage URL, the stats will only represent your homepage performance. Therefore, it is vital that you repeat this process for all of your key and most visited pages.

4. Build new landing pages 

Landing pages are a great way to generate qualified leads using the targeted content. From studies and results, marketers have been able to attain leads at much higher rates by directing them to landing pages instead of default pages such as the homepage. This makes quite a lot of sense as you’re free to put whatever content you like on as many landing pages as you like. If you have budget remaining this EOFY, now might be a great time to generate some new landing pages with targeted content for both quick and ongoing conversions.

Landing pages are a great way to boost traffic for:

• Specific promotions or sales
• Seasonal and evergreen products
• Important information or news
• Launch deals

Be sure to have keywords in mind for every landing page you put together. Test out your landing pages and edit or update the under-performing ones constantly.

5. Check your page titles

You might be asking yourself what correct page titles you should use on your website? Well, businesses generally have their title as their business name. This is great if your business name happens to also be your primary target keyword. In reality, this is rarely the case. The best search title usually contains the city or a suburb you’re targeting, followed by the service you offer and ending with your business name. For example: Melbourne Business Statistics and Insights | Your Awesome Business Name

Look to optimise your titles to include your target keyword for that particular page. Perhaps you could even incorporate a slogan that includes that keyword for added effect.

6. Back up your data

As simple as it sounds, it’s easy to forget. Securing your business doesn’t end with the nightly lock-up. It extends to making sure you’re covered with the appropriate insurance and backing up your data. This means having copies of all your important data from your accounts to your customer’s information. You never know what will happen tomorrow, it important to have a safeguard. You can use EOFY as a reminder to do a full audit and complete back up of all your data.

Bringing it all together

EOFY can be a stressful time, but it is also an opportunity and serves as a great reminder to get some simple housekeeping done. If none of this makes sense to you, or you’re struggling with time, get in touch with us and we will be more than happy to help.