Social media, Inbound marketing and its partner-in-arms; content marketing are here to stay. They are mainstay techniques open to the busy marketeer.
But just like ‘digital marketing’ firmly embedded itself in the modern marketing mix, Webbiquity found that in 2015, 71% of companies planned to increase their digital marketing budgets this year, it’s easy to forget just how much of a force digital is for marketers.
It’s also easy to forget what a pivotal role websites play in digital marketing efforts, especially for B2B businesses. After all, your website is supposed to act as the focal point of your online presence. Wherever your content exists, whatever the format, and no matter how it’s distributed, it should always lead your prospects back to a website that demonstrates a clear value proposition (and propels them further through the Inbound sales funnel).
With this in mind, we’ve taken the time to pull together our two top tips for improving your website’s performance so you can get more bang for your digital marketing buck.
Pay Close Attention To Algorithm Changes
Success in business has never been an exact science – it’s difficult. It’s an ongoing process that requires continuous efforts to get ahead, and stay ahead. When it comes to today’s digitally driven world, this applies especially to marketers.
See, with the advent of social media tools and Inbound marketing platforms, the potential consequences of burying your head in the sand have become that much more significant. Google’s 2015 Mobilegeddon algorithm update was a great example of this.
For those of you that don’t know, search engine algorithms are what determine your ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages) and essentially what provide the framework for effective SEO practices. Considering how important your search rank for specific terms is for attracting relevant traffic to your site, you need to keep on top of each and every one of Google’s algorithm changes and see how it could affect you. Failure to do this could see you miss out on valuable website visitors that could have otherwise been converted into eventual customers.
In short, search engine algorithm updates can cost you money.
So, with Google soon set to roll out an update to their Penguin algorithm, what can you do to stack the odds in your favour?
Well, given Penguin 4.0 will focus heavily on link quality, we suggest you make the management of your link profile a top priority. You need to take a good look at the number of links you have on our site and the number of unique domains. By doing this, you’ll get an idea of your on-site link quality. While you can do this manually, Link Detox and Moz’s Open Site Explorer are tools you can use to get started with your self-assessment.
What these tools do is help you identify any of the ‘toxic links’ that the Penguin update is likely to penalise you for. These links include any that link to sites that have malware warnings or link to a large number of external sites. Once you’ve found these, you need to start removing them manually. You can do this by contacting linked site owners and asking them to remove the links.
If you cannot get a response from any of the third parties linking to your site, you can contact Google directly and request that they ‘disavow’ these links before the algorithm update.
With links and general SEO best practice out of the way, let’s talk about your content. As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, content is the vehicle you use to demonstrate your value propositions, marketing messages, and generally propel visitors through the sales process.
You can find out how to give your content a boost here, but in this blog we want to focus on something a little more specific: dynamic content.
Dynamic content, also known as ‘adaptive or smart’ content, is HTML content on your website, landing pages, forms or emails that changes depending on the person viewing it. For marketers looking provide a personalised experience, it offers a goldmine of potential.
So how does it work?
With dynamic content, you set a certain criteria (such as a industry, job title, department or even their ‘lead score’). Based on this criteria and the information you already have about a visitor, you’ll be able to control the content this visitor sees when visiting specific pages, ensuring it is aligned with what they’re likely to be interested in.
This is particularly powerful for businesses that need to tweak their messaging and value proposition in slightly different ways to resonate with a varied consumer base.
The most common, simple example of this is the personalised greeting we’re all accustomed to receiving in emails. What happens here is that your name is retrieved from stored data and inserted into the email automatically, personalise your experience (albeit very slightly).
This of course does little justice to the actual potential of dynamic content: it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dynamic content also plays a huge part in optimising landing pages and forms so that you can experience more success with lead conversion.
But what about it’s impact on your website?
Well, that is also good news. Personalising your website experience with dynamic content falls in line with exactly what online consumers have been calling for since 2013. In fact, according to a 2013 study by Janrain and Harris Interactive, 74 of online consumers reported being frustrated with websites when content (such as offers, ads and promotions) had nothing to do with their interests. The same hold true today too, especially for B2B websites performance.
Let’s face it, the B2B world is different.
Your customers are professionals: they know what they want, and it often keeps them up at night. By using dynamic content to your advantage, you can make sure you retain the interest of these individuals, using messaging that cuts through and clearly demonstrates how your offering solves their specific problems.
Say hello to leads.
Making the Grade
Digital marketing is one of those things that has grown exponentially in popularity in the past decade. As a result, we’ve experienced the inevitable: the rise of almost countless self-proclaimed ‘experts’. The problem with this though, is that it makes it difficult for businesses like yours to get a truly useful, actionable overview of how well your digital marketing efforts are working and whether your website makes the grade.
We’ve found a way around this problem though. Having used digital marketing to fuel an average turnover growth of 20.1%* for our clients in 2015, we’re happy to offer a free, comprehensive 17-page audit of your digital marketing efforts.
If you’re interested, you can grab a copy of your personalised report by clicking the button below.
{{cta(‘045ae862-7560-4aef-91ac-5ed0c35c4c7d’)}}
*Source: CreditSafe & Official Companies House Data.