SMEs with limited time and budget should follow these simple strategies to get results in 2017
Your website is the face of your company’s digital marketing strategy, yet one of the most common critiques today is that websites are too complicated. Sometimes it’s a case of gamification taken too far or overuse of the popular, but visually intense parallax format – a busy website, overdesigned or poorly formatted is simply difficult to use. What’s more, creating such a site, and maintaining an equally deep marketing presence on social media or via email, is time-consuming and may not pay off.
A critique that we encounter far less often in the digital marketing world, is that a website is overly simple, but that doesn’t mean such sites don’t exist. Rather, the overly simple website tends to be described differently: they choose unattractive fonts, lack visual interest, or don’t implement their content effectively.
Look at these manufacturer sites; proposed on the premise that they would make important information easy to find, they fall quickly into the trap of the overly simple. Rather than appearing straightforward, however, they seem to lack aesthetic consideration and could have been built by someone with little coding knowledge. Today, such sites are often accompanied by too little social media use and marketing moves that lack professional polish.
Neither the excessively simple nor the too complicated website has an advantage in a world where a vast number of beautifully designed, elegant, and organised sites exist, but in the world of digital marketing, it’s easy to build up an overly simplistic digital presence. You just need to emphasise using your time wisely to create worthwhile content. High-value content is more important than a lot of low-end content.
Ready to change your company’s digital marketing style and add a little flair? Build your presence while staying streamlined by implementing these three digital marketing strategies. Combined, simple, and straightforward strategies make for success.
1. Use a Simple, effective page design template
Website templates are the perfect tools for helping inexperienced designers create professional, straightforward sites. Most often, the least appealing sites are those that lack an evident template or that have failed to add the little touches that take a plain template from boring to bright.
If you’re not sure where to begin when building your website, consider a platform like SimpleSite. As the name suggests, SimpleSite is an easy to use web design platform, offering limited design templates and a small set of construction tools, allowing users to set the number of columns for content, select the font, and customize the header image. With SimpleSite, you can also add e-commerce features with ease; these tend to be among the more difficult site segments to create, but SimpleSite virtually does it for you. Need some extra information? Check out this page for a review of SimpleSite website building features.
Another option for building simple websites is WordPress. As you probably know, WordPress is a well-known site building platform, but it takes a little more expertise to use than SimpleSite. On WordPress, you have access to a great number of free and paid templates and hundreds of site widgets that can enhance your site’s functionality – you can create photo galleries, build in social media links, add a blogroll, and much more. WordPress is used by many successful bloggers and is highly flexible in terms of what it can support.
Though templates are used for thousands of sites – and unarguably create a lot of very similar pages – a great template filled with high-value content is still an indispensable tool. Don’t skip the template just because it might make your page look like other sites.
2. Choose your channel focus
Another common mistake that companies make when trying to develop their digital marketing presence is failing to assess the many social media channels available. Instead, many companies opt to spread themselves thin, expending all their energy on keeping up with their long list of social media accounts. This isn’t a good strategy and tends to stem from a philosophy that lacks a clear sense of market. When you know your market, you don’t need to divide your attention. This radar or Bullseye framework is a great way to review your channels to gain focus.
Instead of trying to reach everyone across all networks, choose one social media channel to be your main focus. This allows you to invest modestly for greater returns and produce higher quality content for your audience. Just make sure you do your research first – find out what sites your clients prefer and target those venues. Most social media sites break down strongly along demographic lines, so it’s just a matter of figuring out where your company fits.
Once you’ve chosen a primary digital channel, make sure you learn how to automate your posts. If you’re using Twitter as your main channel, for example, programs like Hootsuite allow you to set up a calendar of posts in advance. Enter your content, set a schedule, and it will automatically post at the appropriate times. This is one of the most important steps when it comes to streamlining your digital marketing efforts.
3. Drive contacts through a focuson opt-in
Email marketing may be one of the oldest digital formats, but users still rely heavily on emails for product and promotion information. Unfortunately, many also ignore these important messages because they feel they’re receiving too many of them. This makes the majority of email marketing wasteful for both companies and their clients.
Instead of sending out emails every time something changes on your site, or several times during the course of a promotion, slow down your pace and target your audience more effectively by allowing them to opt in to a stable schedule of emails. This may tie your hands to some degree when it comes to scheduling promotions, but if you’ve promised your audience they’ll only get one email per week and you start making endless exceptions, you’re more likely to land in their junk pile.
Simple Not Simplistic
At the end of the day, the best digital marketing strategy is one that’s simple and straightforward, but that focuses on the right details – it isn’t simplistic. A simplistic strategy underestimates your audience and doesn’t serve your company’s full potential, but a clear and simple one makes the most of your time and money. Do right by your company and by your clients by offering your best and keeping your digital marketing simple and smart.
Thanks to Larry Alton for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Larry is an independent business consultant specializing in social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/straightforward-digital-marketing-3-simple-strategies-work/
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