Digital Strategy

A successful digital campaign can be defined as one which meets or exceeds your goals for the online campaign. As all digital campaigns should tie into higher level business goals, success with a digital campaign also means success (or improvement) towards your business goals. As success is driven by your goals, its important that these are clearly stated at the outset of the campaign. Having a firm understanding of your goals will ensure your tracking and optimising for the right results.

Digital marketing tools are the things that will help you execute your digital marketing strategy. These include, but are not limited to, email, SEO, AdWords, social media, and more. There are countless digital marketing tools online, but not all of them will be useful or suitable for your business or specific campaigns. Having an understanding of which marketing tools you will use should be discussed when planning your campaign. 

Digital campaign management involves looking after a whole digital campaign. This includes developing a strategy, implementing actions and monitoring progress during and after the campaign.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of encouraging people to take action when they visit your website. CRO works by optimising your website to convert visitors on various pages including the homepage, pricing page, blogs and landing pages. There are various CRO strategies that can be used to help improve conversions. These include text-based CTAs, lead flow pop-ups, A/B testing,  optimizing high performing blogs, and more. In short, CRO works by optimizing your site to get your customers and potential customers to take the actions you want them to take.

Conversion rate optimistion is all about the bottom line. The more conversions you get (be that leads or sales), the more money your business makes. Increasing profitability through your website requires constant review and optimisation; which is exactly what CRO aims to achieve.

The goal of an IA audit is to analyse what information is currently on your website, what information should be added to your website and how the information should be structured to improve user experience. The aim is to have users land on a page on your site and be able to navigate through the site intuitively. A user should always be able to understand where they are on your site and how their current location relates to the information they are viewing. As IA audits include in-depth keyword research, you will often find additional pages that are required to help navigate the user journey.

In short, yes. By improving the way your visitors can navigate through your site and by providing the information they need in an intuitive way, it will improve user experience, leading to higher conversions.

Persona profiling involves the creation of a fictional character that identifies and represents a customer type. As well as taking into account gender, age, socio-economic and location demographics, persona profiles also look at identifying behaviours and attitudes of the target market, allowing for more effective marketing.

Businesses use personas because it is very important to understand who will be using their product or service offering. Once a persona is identified, a user journey specific to that persona can be mapped out. The best marketing channels to use can also be reviewed as you will have a deeper understanding of how and when your target persona is likely to connect or engage with the business. The use of personas should cause marketing spend to become more effective.

User experience (UX) encompasses all aspects of a user’s interaction with a company’s website, and is really interested in the way a website visitor perceives and responds to the product or service offering during or after the online visit. While UX does include having visually appealing websites, more important to UX is functionality. The website must be easy to navigate with all functions working and at a fast speed, as well as just looking good.

User experience is incredibly important. Exceptional user experience can assist in encouraging visitors to take a certain journey, building loyalty and trust, providing positive and meaningful interactions with your brand, as well as increasing conversions that ultimately boost your bottom line.

Digital marketing today is highly relevant to almost all businesses and organisations. Our world is increasingly digitised and technologically smart. For those that are new to digital marketing, the phrase encompasses all types of marketing that occur on a digital platform. Some of the more popular digital marketing activities include:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), including Google Ads
• Social media marketing
• Content creation
• Email marketing
• Influencer marketing

Getting started with digital marketing requires a strategy that connects your business goals, buyer personas, analytics and budget.

Start by understanding why you want to do digital marketing – what high level business goal are you trying to assist? In many cases, this will be to increase sales or generate leads. But you may also have a goal to increase brand awareness, for example.

With the goal in mind, you must now define who your buyer personas are. It’s best to define your personas by behaviours and attitudes as well as demographic data (age, gender, social grade).

Flowing from your personas will be information on how to best connect with your target audience. This should be used alongside current website data to determine which channels will be the most suitable for your business.

Examples of digital marketing include SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Advertising, Landing Page creation, conversion rate optimisation and more. Looking for some more inspiration? Here are some case studies that prove you can achieve the goals and ROI’s you’re looking for – click here

A digital marketing strategy is a plan of actions created to help achieve company goals. These actions take place on carefully selected online marketing channels and can be free or paid. The strategy should incorporate digital marketing actions that support your higher business goals.

The digital marketing strategies created at Arcadian Digital take into account annual goals, as well as shorter-term quarterly goals. The quarterly goals ensure we’re monitoring progress towards the high-level business goals.

It can be difficult to determine what form of digital marketing to do and where you should focus your efforts and budget.

Unfortunately, many agencies prescribe the same type of marketing to every client. At Arcadian Digital, we understand that every business is different and therefore requires a bespoke digital marketing strategy.

The best way to find the most effective strategy for your business is to look at:

• Your customer base
• Your business structure
• Your business goals.

Using data from previous campaigns can also help decipher what types of digital marketing converts and what works for your business. Once you have digital marketing in place, it’s important to monitor and measure the results and be flexible to change. This allows you to find the most effective digital marketing mix for optimum ROI.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation which refers to techniques to rank a website higher within search engine results. This can be done through keyword research, optimising site pages and link building. While the meaning of SEO has stayed the same for many years, the processes that we use often change rapidly, due to changes in search engine algorithms, amongst other factors.

SEO can involve many steps and requires continual effort in order to achieve any visible results. To begin SEO for a website, you should begin with an audit of how the website is currently performing, then build a comprehensive strategy that prioritises different optimisation actions and fits in with your digital marketing plan.

SEO is the process of increasing the number of organic website visitors by getting the site to appear higher on organic results returned by a search engine. SEM (or search engine marketing) is considered internet marketing that increases a site’s visibility through both organic search engine results and paid advertising placements. In short, SEM includes SEO tactics but also other marketing tactics such as paid advertising.

SEO is always worth investing in. Because SEO can take time before it’s effects are visible, it is worth beginning SEO sooner rather than later. SEO strategies should also be continuous as there are constant changes to the way users search and the way search engines rank websites (eg. their algorithms). If your business is looking for higher visibility and a way to reach relevant traffic, it is worth spending time and effort on your SEO strategy. From small businesses to large organisations, SEO can help drive huge ROI at a very minimal cost.

SEO strategies involve a number of different activities that can aid in SEO work. These activities include keyword research and discovery, site audits, keyword planning, website modifications and content creation. Most SEO companies claim that it takes 4 to 6 months before any results are seen, however it’s important to remember that finding the right SEO activities and strategy for your business can speed up the process and yield greater results.

There are a number of factors that can affect how much time, effort and money SEO will cost you. These include whether any work has already been completed, how much time is available to work on the SEO campaign, how competitive the industry is and what goals you have for your site. Depending on these factors, your SEO dollar and time budget will differ.

To get your products displayed on Google Shopping, you will first need to create a Google Merchant Center account. Then you will need to organise and optimise your products and product data so that it can be uploaded to your account. You will also need to link your Adwords account before being able to create a Google Shopping campaign. To get your ads shown, place bids on your shopping campaigns and build your ads!

Setting up an account with Google Merchant Center is free, however, the only way to display your ads is through pay per click advertising (PPC). This means that it is a paid service to display your ads. It is worth keeping in mind that there are many marketing strategies and tactics that can be used to lower the cost and maximize the efficiency of your PPC ads.

Google Shopping is a Google service that allows consumers to search for, compare and shop for retail products across different stores. When browsing on Google Shopping, results are shown to customers as tile images and also display other information such as the price, brand, and retailer.

There is no minimum bid or minimum cost for Google Shopping ads, therefore you can spend as much as you want depending on how much visibility you’re looking for. Some products will naturally have more competition too which means you may need to spend more to be visible. Compared to other marketing channels though, Google Shopping has a relatively low cost if managed well. As with all forms of marketing, you should keep a keen eye on your ROI from media spend in Google Shopping. For many eCommerce stores, Google Shopping can become their most positive ROI form of marketing which means you may start reducing spend in other areas of marketing to put more investment into Google Shopping.

Google Shopping campaigns don’t use keywords to determine ad relevancy, therefore you should make product titles, descriptions and images as descriptive as possible but also appealing to potential buyers who are viewing your ads. Google will use search and click data to determine whether advertisements are relevant to search queries.

Yes! As of 2019, Google Shopping ads are able to appear on YouTube feeds and search results. For example, if you’re searching for product reviews on Youtube, Google Shopping ads for relevant products may appear.

Google Ads is Google’s advertising system. It works by asking advertisers to bid on keywords relevant to their ads in order to appear in the ad search results. Advertisement appearance positions are determined by ad ranks, not just bids. Ad rank is essentially the maximum bid for a keyword multiplied by your ad quality score. Quality scores are determined by how relevant and useful your ad is to users. This means that your ad copy, keywords, URL and landing page all need to be relevant and provide a good user experience. By doing this, Google ensures that relevant and useful ads are being shown first.

It is free to create a Google Ads account, however, Google requires bids on keywords and will charge an amount for every click that the ad gets (hence the name cost per click or CPC).  Therefore it does cost money to use the Google Ads service.

The cost of Google Ads for a business can depend on many factors. It depends on how much budget you are willing to spend on bidding for relevant keywords, how competitive these keywords are (highly competitive keywords cost more) and also how well you manage your campaigns. With good campaign management, it quickly becomes apparent that the Google Ads platform is a more level playing field than most realise! With constant optimizations and management, your ads will be more effective and your budget will be spent more wisely.

Google Ads is the platform that allows you to advertise on Google search engine. So if you’re looking to create ads on Google, make sure you establish business goals, know your target audience and perform keyword research before beginning your campaign. From there, you will need to create a Google AdWords account (and link this to your Google Analytics account for tracking purposes), set a budget, and create your pre-planned campaign(s) including ad copy, keywords and bidding structure.

Google Display ads show on the Google Display Network. The Google Display Network is a collection of partner websites that show ads. For example, whilst your target audience is browsing a news website, they may see a Google Display ad on the side of the article. Ads are shown on different websites based on different targeting methods. These include related keywords and topics, a choice of specific websites or pages or a choice of specific audiences based on interest, demographics and whether they have visited your site before. While Google Search Ads utilise ad copy in search results, Google Display Ads utilise imagery.

Remarketing is used to connect with people who have previously interacted with your website. Remarketing with Google Ads can be done through the Google Display Network with standard remarketing, dynamic remarketing, remarketing lists for search ads, video remarketing and customer list remarketing. All of these types of remarketing serve different purposes and can benefit different businesses in different ways. Remarketing can be incredibly cost-effective and is especially useful for businesses who have a long sales cycle.

Remarketing lists for ads allows you to customise ads for previous visitors and tailor bids and ads to these visitors when they’re searching on Google or on partner sites (part of the Display Network). Remarketing lists are created by adding a snippet of code, called a remarketing tag, to every page on your site. This code tells Google Ads to add every site visitor to your remarketing list. Therefore, visitors cookies associated with their browsers are then added to your remarketing list. You can also create remarketing lists for specific pages by adding the code to specific pages only.

A landing page is a standalone web page created for a single ad or marketing campaign. It’s called a landing page because a visitor will click on a link or an ad, and land on the page. Landing pages are created for specific purposes – usually to increase conversions (sales or leads) by taking the customer on a very specific and intended journey through the page.

Landing pages are typically very simple and have only one button or form. This is because they are designed to achieve one goal. Webpages, on the other hand, are designed to encourage exploration. Because a landing page is a single focus page, it often brings back higher conversion rates and can lower the cost of acquiring leads.

A landing page can include anything from a headline, a description of the product or service being offered, supporting media such as an image or video, customer testimonials or security badges as a form of supporting proof and a method of capturing customer information. The key when developing a landing page is to have a clear goal in mind for what the landing page needs to achieve. This will then determine what is included on the page.

Landing pages and SEO serve different purposes, however, you can tailor your SEO plan to incorporate for landing pages as well. Landing pages that are optimized will help search engines better understand the purpose of your page and help your site rank higher. This, in turn, will help visitors find your page easily, improving their experience and bringing in more conversions. Additionally, well-optimized campaigns can assist in improving ad quality if you are undertaking a PPC campaign as well. Thus, using landing pages can enhance and aid other marketing efforts including SEO and paid marketing.

Websites are a tool that can be used to tell a story, explain products or services and relate to your customers – basically an online salesperson. In today’s digital world, every business should have a website. A landing page is a part of your website with the main aim of creating a conversion. Whilst it is possible to have a landing page without a website, both should be used as they both are important, especially if you want to gain long term customers and continual growth. If you are dealing with time-sensitive material such as a big campaign that deserves its own site, consider using a mini or microsite paired with landing pages to avoid unnecessary effort yet still yield great results.

An effective email marketing campaign strategy is an extension of a digital marketing strategy. In order to create your email marketing strategy, you need to have a good understanding of who your customers are, what your business goals are, and how you wish to use email marketing to affect your goals. Understanding your sales funnel is also important – as well as understanding which stage of the funnel your email campaigns are targeting. 

Some considerations for your email strategy will include who to send the emails to, how to segment your emails for more personalised messaging, what content appeals to the segment and how regularly they would want to hear from you. You might also want to consider how you can use your email marketing to support other promotions such as new products, VIP specials and more.

Recent research shows that email marketing is alive and well, and is much more important than most perceive it to be. It is considered the most effective marketing channel – with some marketers believing it to be more powerful than social media and SEO. On top of that, email marketing is the easiest way to build relationships with new, old or prospective customers.

Email marketing can be used for a range of things including building loyalty, growing awareness of new products/services, expanding awareness of your brand to subscribers’ networks, re-engaging abandoned carts and staying top-of-mind.

There are many different types of EDMs and email marketing that can be implemented. Two main types that are highly beneficial are newsletters and abandoned cart emails.

Newsletters are informational emails that are used to show stories or articles that may interest your audience and keep them up to date with your business, products and services. These types of emails generally perform well when presented in a visually appealing way with images and icons that can attract the reader without sending a lengthy email. 

An abandoned cart email is a message that follows up with customers who don’t complete a purchase on your site. Data shows that over 75% of people abandon their carts online. However, some of this population can be salvaged through an abandoned cart email. Remind your customer of the product that they have left behind and convince them to go through with the purchase, as well as offering them other product ideas that might entice them to purchase even if they are no longer interested in the initial add to cart. 

When looking for an email marketing software, you will need to consider the types of emails you intend to send, how many recipients you have as well as the number and experience level of administrators. There are a number of different email marketing software available but it’s important to select one that is cost effective but also meets the needs of your emails and suits the editors (or administrators) who will be using it. If you’re unsure which is best for you, we welcome you to have a chat to us. We’ve used a number of different software programs so can provide some insights into the pros and cons of these based on your business needs.

There are three main ways to create an email template. Some email software platforms have basic templates that are available for their customers to utilise for free. These are the most basic of templates and don’t allow for much customisation or creativity in the design. A step up from there is purchasing an email template design and having a developer or marketer sufficient with HTML to customise the design with colours, buttons, imagery sizes, fonts and more. The final way to create a template is a full custom design. In this instance, you have full control over what elements are on the template, the design, fonts, colours and more. The process for a full custom design involves as initial discussion on what you want the email to include, a mock up of the email followed by a full design (reviewed on both desktop and mobile). Once approved, the design is then built by a developer, usually to be responsive and in most cases, to include modules that can be added or deleted; allowing for freedom of content in the future.

Similar to Google AdWords, paid social media advertising is an advertising platform run through social platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn that offers users a pay-per-click (PPC) payment model. This essentially means that an advertiser only pays for an ad when a user engages (clicks) it. When utilised correctly, paid social media advertising can be a highly cost effective way of targeting niche target markets.

Yes, there is a cost associated with advertising on social media. Social media platforms use a pay-per-click (PPC) payment model, meaning that you only pay when an interested user click on your ad. There’s no set amount that you have to pay – this is determined by your budget. The number of clicks you receive will be directly attributed to your budget and bids. Optimising your social media advertising campaigns for a targeted audience, bid strategies and locations are just a few ways you can lower the costs the advertising will cost you while still achieving the same conversions.

The social media networks that are best for advertising are different for every business. You should consider who your target audience is, how they use social media and how they like to engage with businesses. This will help you select which (if any) social media networks you should advertise on. Many social media networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest offer social media advertising.

Most social media networks offer advertising. These include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Selecting which network(s) to advertise in will depend on your target market.