Welcome to the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Portal
We're here to help all businesses get the most from the fantastic opportunities available from digital marketing.
The Smart Insights expert commentators share best practices amongst our community on the digital marketing techniques that matter, that's digital strategy, web analytics, conversion optimisation, social media, search engine, affiliate and email marketing.
For each topic we give step-by-step guides to improve your online results which we hope give clarity for marketing managers or business owners and a refresher for digital marketers. We also offer weekly alerts for all giving our insights on the latest developments that matter.
I find when reviewing online marketing strategies in student assignments or real-world live assignments that the different aspects of strategy often aren’t well integrated.
Although online marketing strategies are usually well structured into the SOSTAC® structure featured in our online marketing strategy template, the sections aren’t often well related. It’s not clear how each strategy is supporting a goal or the analysis on which its based.
A simple method of showing the integration and providing a one pager summary of the digital strategy summary is to use a table set out as below with separate columns for SMARTER goals (see end of page), substantation (based on the situation analysis) and strategies. This can also include the KPIs for success.
A method of summarising digital marketing strategy. Source: Internet marketing: strategy,implementation and practice, p233, table 4.7 Editor: Dave Chaffey. Typo removed in final published edition!
Many marketers are using or have tried Google AdWords, the auction style advertising platform that allows you to advertise on Google sponsored search and content networks, commonly known as pay per click (PPC).
This guide shares my experience of actively using Adwords as a small business owner who manages their own campaigns. I’ll run through the steps to review Adwords to improve traffic quantity and quality to give more conversions. In the second part I’ll go into more detail on the optimisation.
I have been using AdWords for a while and overtime I have gone through many phases of continuous tweaking and re-structuring to improve conversions and I am always looking at ways to make it a cost effective marketing tool. Whether you are starting new or have been using it for a while, it is important to understand some key areas within your account to improve the performance and gain return on money spent on campaigns. I will run through some of the areas related to account structure and Ad Creative in this post.
Back to basics – how is Adwords structured?
As you’ll know, Adwords setup involves you writing your ads and choosing relevant keywords (words or phrases) that someone may type into Google which will then trigger your Ads.
The top ads will appear to potential customers under the heading sponsored links on the right or above the Google natural search results. As well as showing up on Google search, there are options within AdWords to allow your ads to appear in the content network, a diverse network of millions of websites where the ad is shown next to content relevant to your target audience.
Before I get into the steps, here’s a reminder of the basics of an AdWords account;
- Your Account is divided into separate Campaigns
- Campaigns are divided into Ad Groups
- Ad Groups are comprised of Keywords
- Keywords trigger your ad when a user searches for them on Google or on the content/partner sites
- The ad text is called Creative and all Keywords within an Ad Group must run on the same Creative
- You can run multiple Creatives per Ad Group
Adwords help has an excellent diagram of account structure if you’re new to managing Adwords.
Step 1 – Research the Keywords used by Your Target Audience
I always stress this at the start of any Digital Campaign, keywords are the foundation of your campaign. If potential customers are searching for your products or services, they will find you more quickly if you have selected the right keywords.
It is important to think like your customers. How might your customers search for your product or service? Some of the best keywords tend to be 2-3 words long. There are many keyword research tools to help you with this process providing suggestions for new keywords based on real search data. Some of the tools I find useful are;
Your keywords should be organised by common themes or products. Think about and list all the keywords you want to use and then group similar keywords together. The next stage is to organise them into your account in a structured way.
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Whether it’s upgrading hosting, improving your URL structure or simplifying information architecture upgrades to your web presence are inevitable for every company.
As more companies reach the limits of their current web investments, many are worried that significant change will impact their organic listings and SEO performance. I’ve even seen a company maintaining two websites, frightened that merging would reduce their organic rankings, even though it was near impossible for users to find anything.
Whether you are an in-house marketer or an agency specialist, in my experience if you are able to plan ahead and factor in SEO migration tactics to your project you will find a smooth transition. Often the very fact you engage with the search engines can provide improved rankings on the other side.
In this article I look at 5 tactics to help you in the event of a large scale migration or upgrade.
- Benchmark your current performance
- Befriend your search engine
- Cherish your most valuable links
- Limit the impact
- Manage the bounce.
Step 1 – Benchmark your current performance
Sounds obvious but do you know exactly how visible your site is currently? To effectively establish your current position and to be able to understand the impact of site changes, there are two areas to focus on; web referral levels and SEO inclusion.
Timing:
- Pre launch – during the planning phase of a major upgrade or migration.
Purpose:
- Review the historic website traffic patterns to understand the future impact of change
- Monitor historic organic search referral levels to understand search inclusion and consider running a simple SEO health check.
What to check for?
- Look at the trends of views, visits and top landing pages considering seasonal and promotional variations
- Review the number of search referrals to your site and take a measure of your current percentage
- Run crawl tests to understand how accessible your site is to search engines and how many pages are currently indexed
- Note down any crawl barriers that currently exist i.e. 404’s, redirection failing, server performance issues
- Take stock of your external links section by section
- Review your robot.txt files and be aware of what you may have hidden (or forgotten about).
In the days of Heraclitus, mobile messages involved horses. But his wise words about the constancy of change apply so well to mobile email.
Mobile long meant a senior executive armed with a BlackBerry that turned HTML email into something suited to a modern art exhibition.
Email designers scratched their heads and hoped the problem would go away. Email marketers took solace in the fact that most audiences were BlackBerry-free. Then along came the iPhone and mobile email has never been the same.
Keeping your head in the sand is no longer an option: mobile email is one of the four trends driving email marketing change. This post explores the challenges and solutions for the forward-thinking marketer.
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An introduction to on-page optimisation for SEO
Many of the posts or articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that you find on the web today will talk about emerging trends or the latest tools to manage this or analyze that, it can become too easy to lose sight of the core building blocks that help shape a successful online business.
Working closely with Dr. Dave Chaffey, we have created the first of many ‘back to basics’ guides that we hope will help companies who lack outside or internal expertise review their own digital marketing effectiveness – a DIY approach.
You can download the on-page SEO template at the end of this post.
We hope that anyone who writes or reviews copy who isn’t an SEO expert will find the guidelines and examples useful.
What is on-page optimisation?
On-page optimization is an essential tool in your natural search-marketing toolbox. Each page of your website is an asset you can use to help your business rank higher in the search engines. On-page optimisation often involves applying a simple set of guidelines to ensure every page on your website is working hard for you. Though quite a simple process, some areas are often overlooked or forgotten due to the million other things we have to remember / do.
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