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It is all too easy to fall into the trap of the digital marketing comfort zone, but this can be a path into complacency, under-performance and ultimately decline.

When marketing campaigns consistently perform year after year and momentum is positive, you may be fooled into thinking that everything is working to near-peak levels with no need to stretch the boundaries or challenge this “everything is going great” sentiment.

If this sounds familiar it is likely (unless you are the only active player in your industry) that results will begin to stagnate and regress, and there is a need to consider a more robust digital strategy.

The solution is being actively aware of new and changing opportunities including technology, industry, audience and associated items, and taking action on them.

Action-taking is key as this fuels a culture of exploration, testing, and refinement required to be an industry leader and maintain closer to peak marketing performance for a longer duration.

In this post, I share five of the most useful marketing approaches to enrich your own strategic plans and increase your robustness to changing external competition.

1. Proximity Marketing & Beacons

The technology for proximity marketing is nothing new, in fact, it has been available since 2013.

What has changed though is the readiness of technology such as Google Beacons for effective marketing use and practical application within more common marketing approaches.

What Are Proximity Beacons?

Beacons are a form of technology that can transmit signals over a certain (generally small) radius.

This means that devices such as mobile phones and GPS can receive marketing messages tied to their geo-location and be pinpoint targeted with relevant messaging.

How Can They Be Used for Marketing?

Proximity marketing and Beacons specifically are being widely used for everything from table service within restaurants through to sending SMS messages with discounts to existing customers when they pass by a store.

Based on a recent article from a colleague of mine “Google Beacons: Is proximity marketing ready to take off in 2020?,” the main benefits for marketing include:

• Location targeting of people/potential new and repeat business.
• Mapping of marketing success and closing the online/offline marketing attribution.
• In-store messaging and promotional offers for hyper-local messaging.
• Guiding people through entire shopping centers, stadiums, airports, and cities.
• Gamification.
• Cross-selling during the buying process (for example in-store related product offers).
• Loyalty.
• Much more.

2. Conversational Commerce & Chatbots

Conversational commerce is a bigger opportunity than simply chatbots alone.

However, for the purposes of this post, chatbots are the suggested technology-based action to explore for diversifying and strengthening your strategic plans for 2020.

When Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014, no small part of the strategic thinking was based on the fact that people spend more time in messaging apps than they do on social media.

Chatbots can integrate your business within external platforms (such as Facebook) allowing you to reach your audience on the messaging apps they prefer.

As chatbot integration can include your website, social media channels, and external messaging apps you can fill the gaps within your business coverage and provide an ‘always available’ face to your organization.

When skewed towards conversational commerce you are able to provide controlled and consistent expertise, shorten the distance from awareness to purchase and facilitate offline access to information that users demand online and instantly.

What Are the Marketing Benefits of Chatbots?

The benefits will vary massively based on your objectives, application and successful implementation of them for marketing but commonly expected gains would include:

Improved Customer Service​s & Support

Helping existing and prospective customers understand the product/service which is best suited to their bespoke needs and budget.

The ability to quickly providing answers to questions and filtering more complicated inquiries for your Customer Service/Support Team.

​Financial Savings Versus Traditional Staffing

Implementing a chatbot is considerably cheaper than hiring employees to perform tasks that can be automated and handled by a bot/computer.

This form of removing and reducing manual and repeated activity from companies can support increased efficiencies, time and cost savings for investment elsewhere. Chatbots can also work on smaller budgets.

Proactive Customer Engagement​ and Increased Nurturing Through the Buying and Servicing Funnels

The ability to initiate a conversation with your customers based on know behavior and activity triggers.

One practical example might be communication as part of any ordering and delivery process.

Generating Valuable Insights & Obtaining a More Thorough Understanding of Your Customers

Data is marketing fuel and a performance enhancer. By using the additional knowledge obtained from chatbot use, you can refine and maximize your marketing tactics.

As an example of this in action, the new forms of user engagement and data can be recombined with other existing data sources to:

• Improve products/services.
• Fill information gaps on the site.
• Fix newly discovered barriers to conversion.

​24/7 Customer Support​

As discussed earlier, chatbots are ‘always on’ and can handle concurrent user interactions at the same time.

This means that there is a reduced loss of potential business from people so there‘s no waiting in telephone queues for information, or dropping out of the purchase funnel before getting the brand effectively in front of them.

3. Voice Search Optimization (VSO)

In this case organic inclusion of ​VSO as a core part of your non-paid digital marketing investment.

The statistical justification for voice search optimization is widespread:

• Per comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.
• Gartner predicts that 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020.
• A Google study found that 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers say that their devices are used as part of their daily routines
• NPR’s Smart Audio Report revealed that 55% of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine going back to the days before they had a smart speaker
• eMarketer reported that 35.8% of millennials use voice-enabled digital assistants at least once a month

The big change in VSO is that there are clearly defined tactics to target and implement to improve results.

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Tactics for Voice Search Optimization

Like most areas of organic search engine optimization, there are many ways to implement VSO.

Targeted optimization can be undertaken with a mobile and voice-first approach.​

Broader tactics in this area can include question and answer targeting of activity to reach the longer tail and solution-led queries growth tied to voice.

Other tactics can include:

• Creating fresh content (for closely matched voice intent targeting).
• Reworking existing pages with technical ‘format’ updates (schema.org, for example) so that information can be clearly identified, matched, and presented for use in voice search results.

Here are some more granular actions for VSO gains:

Local Intent

“Near me”, “close by”, and “local” intent opportunities are ready for driving forward spanning most, if not all, industries.

Organic search demand on these query topics is growing rapidly and has been for some time.

This can be linked to mobile growth, voice growth and related search engine preference for mobile-first result delivery and local intent filter for many results.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are a core tactic for voice and these are a primary source for voice results.

Schema updates such as Organization​, Open graph​, Q&A, Article and more, can provide opportunities to increase results.

Content updates (tables, lists, images, short paragraphs, simple language) and content types ​can also help target Featured Snippets.

Local Search

Location optimization cannot be overstated for VSO. Action examples to consider include:

• Location terms identification, seeding and content building.
• Bing Places and Google My  Business listings, reviews, posts/maximizing.
• Company and broader business citations.
• Local links and mentions​.
• Third-party reviews​.

Technical SEO

Ongoing focus on technical SEO and related updates (website health/audit score, speed (mobile/desktop), etc.) is also essential.

4. Integrating User-Led Design

User experience has changed dramatically over the years and evolved from often one-off, holistic and project-based services with limited commercial or data-driven justification to business-critical design changes and ongoing data-driven updates that directly impact ROI.

From a recent article of a Performance UX colleague of mine, it was confirmed that the factors most important for 2020 design fueled strategy include:

Designing to Ease User Concerns & Reinforce Trust

From fake reviews through to favicons and increased site information displayed in mobile SERPs, designing for trust is becoming a standard requirement for making the most out of every person landing on your website (and getting them there in the first place).

Rethinking & Revising Information Architecture & Navigation

When you combine website data, iterative testing, and refinement with a data-led design you will be amazed at the impact that can be achieved as part of conversion rate optimization.

Often design can be omitted from traditional SEO and CRO conversations when it comes to site architecture and navigation and that has to change for optimum performance

Creating Differentiation Through Experience

Regardless of the scale of your business and size of your immediate online competition, you can create a better user experience, increase repeat custom, and satisfy your users more

5. Increasing the Practical Value from Your Data

Most companies are gathering more data than ever before and investing in added data expertise, wider data tracking, collection, plus related items.

There is still a gulf however in the volume of data companies are exposed to compared to the value derived from it.

The inconsistent use of data and ineffective processes in place for systematically generating value from data are part of this.

There are many data-fueled marketing niches (for example personalization of marketing through data) that require increased marketing focus and time to get right.

There are also lots of practical data recombination and workflow activities that can be implemented now for quick wins.

Examples of this are:

• SEO keyword and topic targeting triggered by unfeasible return on advertising spend (ROAS) Google Ads keywords data.
• Content gap identification from search query high volume/zero-click data from Google Search Console.
• Product/service gap exploration led by Google Analytics site search.
• Content change analysis from automated competitor analysis to fill product/content/service gaps.

Summary

These are five of my current strategic “must-haves” which will help expand, diversify and strengthen many marketing approaches for 202 and beyond.

The common thread through this article comes back to:

• Taking action.
• Using all of the new and changing data more effectively to challenge the status quo.
• The need to always be testing/refining and experimenting with new technologies and marketing opportunities.

Times have indeed changed. It seemed like only yesterday when businesses were entirely dependent on traditional marketing avenues to get the word out about their products and services.

Now experts are saying that digital ad spending worldwide is expected to account for half of the predicted global ad spending across all media by 2020. While that doesn’t mean that traditional marketing is dead, it surely signals that digital marketing has come a long way and is poised to become the most potent form of marketing in the world today.

The beauty of digital marketing is that it boasts a wide variety of strategies that are applicable to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Digital marketing works for companies with a global reach as well as for local businesses. If you’re running one or a few of the latter, here are some ways digital marketing can help your local business grow.

Cost-Effectiveness

One of the most common issues facing small, local businesses related to their marketing is budget, which is often limited at best. With traditional marketing channels like TV and print charging an arm and a leg for advertising, local businesses tend to have a hard time competing with bigger companies for ad space — and the attention of consumers.

However, with the cost-effectiveness of digital marketing platforms like social media, your local business should be able to reach the same number of people at a fraction of the cost. That means the products or services of your local business still get marketed to people, and you won’t need to spend a lot of money to do it.

Targeted Customers

Reaching the right people is essential to any marketing campaign. Digital marketing tactics allow you to target specific people who are interested in your local company and the products or services that you offer.

SEO, for example, allows local companies to optimize for location-specific keywords for their specific type of business so that when users type them in a search engine, it will readily serve up the information they need. And if your business is at or near the top of that list, users will likely click on it, and you will have reached your target customers, all because you optimized your website for local SEO.

You also get to set your target audience whenever you create a PPC or pay-per-click ad or a Facebook ad. You can use age, gender, hobbies, occupation and other attributes to describe your target audience. You can be as specific as you like when you’re targeting customers through such digital marketing platforms.

Digital marketing strategies also allow you to create buyer personas, which are essentially made-up people who possess the attributes of your ideal customer. With these buyer personas, you can target the most likely people who will be interested in your products or services.

With the narrower focus provided by digital marketing strategies, your local business should be able to use its marketing budget more efficiently and effectively.

Highly Measurable Results

If there’s one thing about digital marketing that will definitely help you as you grow your local business, it’s the measurability of all its results. You need to know if your marketing campaign is working or not, and tracking everything is so much easier when it’s digital.

Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing has no room for guesswork. Every tactic used in every campaign is measurable, thanks to digital marketing analytics.

With the data that Google Analytics and other similar tools provide, you get to see if a particular approach is effective or if it needs some tweaking. You can also use the things you learn and apply them to future campaigns to ensure better success rates.

The capability to track and measure results in real-time also enables you to make adjustments to the way you use your marketing budget. If analytics say a particular tactic isn’t working, you can simply redirect your resources to the ones that actually work, allowing you to reduce unnecessary expenses at the same time. That way, you can concentrate on strategies that will more likely help your local business grow.

The Mobile Advantage

The number of mobile users has long outnumbered those of desktop users, and the difference will only grow more significant over time. For your local business to grow, you need to reach the mobile population who tend to search for things they want to try in a specific location and do their buying exclusively on their mobile devices.

If you make your website mobile-friendly, you will have a digital marketing tool capable of reaching billions of mobile users at your disposal. Remember, sites that aren’t mobile-friendly don’t display well and are harder to navigate on smartphones and tablets. Mobile users have no qualms about dropping your website if they find navigating it on their devices bothersome and time-consuming.

These are just some of the ways digital marketing can help your local business on the road to earning more leads, conversions and revenue. Results may not be instant, but digital marketing, when done right, can take your local business where you want it to be over time.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

With ecommerce sales surpassing $4 trillion this year, staying ahead of emerging technology and trends is essential to staying competitive online.

As technology advances, so do consumer expectations for the buying experience. Shoppers have an overwhelming amount of information at their fingertips.

Brands need to understand and implement the strategies that will allow them to stand out and connect with their target customers.

In this article we’ll reveal some of these key strategies:

1) Revolutionizing the customer experience with artificial intelligence

Digital technology has been expanding at a rapid pace. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront, boasting impressive tracking and analytics capabilities which help marketers make smarter decisions, drive more revenue, and increase customer acquisition.

Advances in machine learning (ML) have been equally important to marketers and advertisers alike.

With the ability to quickly and efficiently analyze a near infinite number of datapoints, marketers are more and more often turning to machine learning to better understand the impact that different touchpoints of individual shoppers and even entire audience segments have on the buyer’s journey.

Another impressive and still-growing technological breakthrough has been in augmented reality (AR). This technology combines digital information with a physical environment in real time. In the world of digital marketing, recent advances in AR have opened the door to completely unique, customized shopping experiences for consumers.

Whether it’s enabling shoppers to view furniture in their homes or allowing them to try on clothes in a “virtual dressing room”, AR is yet another opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Automation is another game changing technology for marketers, allowing them to efficiently optimize their time by automating tasks that used to require manual effort.

Marketers can trigger personalized emails when customers make a purchase, abandon a cart, interact with the brand on social media and more, all through automation. These personalized emails can lower customer acquisition costs by 50%, boost revenue by 15%, and increase spend efficiency by 30%.

2) Video marketing strategies to increase engagement

93% of marketers have landed a new client from a video on social media. So how should marketers, who are likely to feel slightly intimidated by video production, be approaching video creation?

First, it’s important to understand that a full-fledged production crew is a thing of the past. In 2020, entering the video marketing space can be as simple as creating short, informal videos to showcase your brand’s products. These videos can then be used on YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, and most other channels you’re advertising or marketing on.

Advertisers wanting to take advantage of YouTube’s capabilities can do so via video display ads, YouTube TrueView video and discovery ads, or TrueView for Google Shopping ads. All of these ad formats allow marketers to promote engaging, story-driven content to their customers in an unobtrusive way, promoting brand awareness and building trust.

For marketers looking to increase conversions, TrueView for Google Shopping ads overlay YouTube videos with featured products from the already successful Google Shopping format. With one click, customers are directed to the products in the video and can purchase them without any in-between steps, significantly reducing friction.

And for those advertising on social media or Amazon, both channels have plenty of additional opportunities to leverage video, whether it’s in-stream video ads on Facebook, or Enhanced Brand Content videos on Amazon product detail pages.

Even your own website and email marketing database offer plentiful opportunities to take advantage of video to enhance your user experience, answer frequently asked questions, offer product tutorials, and so much more.

3) The rise of multi-touch attribution

We live in a digitally dominated world. Consumers are constantly bombarded with brands and products on their social media channels, Google searches, webpages, TV screens, podcasts, phone apps, etc.

For marketers paying to advertise on these different mediums, it’s important to understand what touchpoint(s) actually lead to a conversion.

That’s easier said than done.

While most attribution models can identify the first time a customer saw or interacted with your brand, this doesn’t tell you what happened next.

Did the customer research competitors and decide on your brand? Or did they completely forget about you until their next touchpoint? How can you accurately understand and optimize your sales funnel if you don’t know what path your consumers are taking?

Marketers using last-touch attribution assume that the last touchpoint is the only impactful one that leads to the conversion. And while it may play a big part, this assumption disregards the efforts of a multichannel, cross-device strategy.

If your team is putting in the time and effort to align your advertising and marketing across email, social media, paid search, organic search, and Amazon to create one consistent, unified experience, don’t lose your momentum by immediately dumping your budget in what you see at the top or bottom of the funnel.

Instead, adopt a multi-touch attribution model to take into consideration every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions about how much to invest in advertising formats at each stage of your buyer’s journey.

4) Keeping consumer trust amidst privacy concerns

Transparency and honesty are the keys to keeping consumer trust. 76.3% of consumers feel moderately or significantly concerned about their data when they interact with brands. If consumers don’t trust you, your audience becomes unreachable.

Whether or not your brand is affected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), you should be working to ensure you are compliant to these consumer privacy regulations. With many other states proposing similar requirements, more widespread adoption is inevitable.

If your brand relies on consumer data to personalize ad copy, ad placements, email copy, and more, prioritize your customers’ comfort. Make it clear when you’re collecting their data and why.

Demonstrate how collecting their data will benefit them and their relationship with your brand.

5) Reduce friction with social proof

When considering multiple products, shoppers want to know that the product they choose will live up to their expectations. Who better to trust than past customers? If your product has zero reviews, getting just five reviews can increase shoppers’ purchase likelihood by 270%.

The first step to reducing friction is adding FAQ’s, pictures of your products, sizing charts, product tutorials, etc. to your website.

These will give your shoppers a 360-view of what they’re purchasing. These not only add credibility to your brand and product, but show that you care about your shopper and want to provide them with as much information as possible throughout their buyer’s journey.

The second step to reducing friction is displaying user-generated content. This includes reviews, ratings, testimonials, and live sales notifications.

Shoppers want to hear about the product from other customers. Showcasing the success of your product or brand will convince shoppers you are the right choice for them.

This concept is known as “social proof”, and the more often you’re able to include it on your website, landing pages, in emails, in your checkout process, or anywhere else you’re interacting with consumers, the more likely you are to build trust and close the sale.

Source: www.clickz.com

The growth of the digital marketing industry has consistently been 12% to 14%, and that number is only increasing.

But that doesn’t mean you should simply throw money at it. You need to be careful and have a system to manage it properly.

In this article, I’ll walk you through my proven method for accurately forecasting your digital marketing growth over time and choosing the marketing channels best for your brand.

Forecasting Your Marketing Growth

Before we dive in, I want to note that this method applies to any business model.

Though there are other, more specific methods suited to individual channels, the one I’m about to present lends itself well to general business owners and marketers as they make the critical decision of which marketing channels to invest in.

The end goal is to be able to compare different traffic channel sources against each other and select the one that will yield the best return for your business.

Here’s what we’ll look at: sources of traffic, target audience, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, number of transactions, value per transaction, cost per transaction and return on ad spend.

When you put these together, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about how to allocate your resources throughout your digital strategy.

Why is that important? Because if you aren’t investing in the channels most likely to yield a profit, you’re leaving money on the table.

This is especially relevant for smaller businesses, which tend to only invest in a few digital channels, according to a study of 300 marketers done by my company in 2019. In this case, it’s critical that they’re choosing the channels that will work best for their businesses.

Let’s take a deeper look at the process.

1. Determine a source.

Your first job is to identify the traffic source you want to evaluate. Keep in mind you’ll be repeating this process on each source you plan to use.

For example, you could choose a source like Facebook or LinkedIn, paid search on Google Ads, or email marketing.

2. Build your model.

After you’ve chosen a source, you need to determine how many conversions can be attributed to that source.

To do that, we build a model that looks like this:

Audience size (the number of people you’re targeting) × click-through rate (the number of people clicking on your search result, ad, email, social post, etc.) × conversion rate (the number of people taking the desired action on your site) = number of conversions

Let’s say your audience size of this channel is 150,000, while your click-through rate is 10%, and your conversion rate is 5%.

Using the model above, your total conversions would be 750.

3. Forecast the value of the source.

Now that we have an accurate idea of the number of conversions our source is bringing in, we’ll want to determine what the future value of that source may be.

How do we do that? We run another equation, of course:

Number of conversions × conversion value to the business (generally the lifetime value of the customer) = value

Now, you’re probably wondering how to determine the conversion value. Don’t worry; I have you covered there, too, but it will require a little more math.

To find the conversion value, you’ll need to look at how much revenue each lead is generating.

So, if you see $5,000 in revenue from every five leads, your revenue per lead would be $1,000.

If we plug that into our formula, this is what we’ll get: 750 × $1,000 = $750,000.

That means your forecasted value for this source is $750,000.

4. Determine the ROAS.

Your return on ad spend (ROAS) tells you how much you’re earning versus how much you’re spending on an ad.

Finding it, of course, requires another formula:

Total revenue earned × amount spent = ROAS

If you spent $2,000 on ads and earned $6,000, your ROAS would be $3,000.

Determining this will help you understand how well your investment is paying off, and, ultimately, if this is a source worth pursuing.

5. Compare your sources.

Now, you want to go back to the beginning and repeat this process on each of your marketing sources.

Run all the equations, and collect all your information in a centrally located document.

You should begin to see some clear winners here that produce the highest conversion value and, most importantly, the highest ROAS.

6. Start to scale.

Good news: The math is over (for now).

At this point, you’ve run the numbers and should have an informed grasp on which channel source is producing the highest returns.

This is the advertising method you want to focus on and invest the most in going forward. The others you will want to refine so you can get better models in place before scaling.

7. Diversify your sources.

Here’s the thing: You don’t want to allocate all your funds to your top player.

After all, digital marketing changes all the time, and to make sure you’re prepared for any unforeseen disruptions, you’ll want to diversify your strategy and the channels you use.

I recommend investing in four to six channels and never allocating more than 30% of your budget into one.

Keep the majority going toward your top channel, but back it up by investing those profits in supporting channels.

8. Always be optimizing.

Quite simply, you should always be optimizing. Doing so will allow you to continue to increase your ROAS and bring your costs down.

What should you optimize? Everything.

Test new ads, landing pages, conversion funnels and everything in between. If you find something that works better than what you’re currently using, chances are that will translate to more efficiency and profitability.

Conclusion 

Simply put, this method results in growth.

It’s a by-the-numbers approach to marketing, and it works. Run it on all your existing sources, and continue to run it every few months to ensure you’re still on the right track.

Source: www.forbes.com

Pivoting from the world of software engineering to where I am now, running a digital marketing agency, was quite a transition. But after being in this industry for more than 12 years now, I still remember something a mentor told me that has affected how I approach business to this day.

It was a story about how when they first built the Waldorf Astoria New York hotel back in the 1930s, the leaders didn’t put a sign up to garner buzz and foot traffic and then take it down when it didn’t immediately reach the icon status it eventually achieved. Instead, they invested time in creating something with staying power, a place that redefined luxury and took everything people knew about hotels to the next level.

This story has stayed with me, and it’s been a helpful reminder that consistency will always bring better results than jumping on the newest fad. It’s about committing to something, seeing it through and having a long-term approach. Here are some ways you can leverage this advice for your own business.

Recognize That It’s Great To Be First, But Better To Be Lasting

Seasoned journalists know that while being first is part of the job, above that is getting the story right. As the Reuters Handbook of Journalism states, “Accuracy … always takes precedence over speed.”

The same is true in digital marketing. While it’s easier to garner attention when you make a big announcement or launch a new initiative, the real staying power comes from what goes on behind the scenes — namely hard work, consistency and a proper strategy.

Take SEO, for example: Sure, you can experiment with black hat methods that attempt to trick search engines into considering a site more valuable or reputable than it actually is. But not only is this dishonest; it’s also likely to get you penalized by search engines. Cultivating strong SEO takes time, but it’s worth it to see your brand rise through the ranks for the right reasons.

Don’t Jump On Every Bandwagon

Video content, TikTok, artificial intelligence. Between rapidly evolving technology and ever-changing search engine algorithms, the digital marketing space doesn’t stay stagnant for long. But that doesn’t mean you should invest time and energy into every new fad that crops up.

Throwing your resources toward each new trend isn’t only risky, but it also can lead your team to burnout. It’s great to try new things, but don’t forget about your brand’s core mission and values along the way. And if a new development looks like it might have some staying power and isn’t too costly to try out, go for it.

Focus On Long-Term Goals

I know it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day tasks when you’re running a digital marketing program or even an entire company. But taking the time to revisit your long-term goals prevents you from getting bogged down in daily to-dos — and it keeps you focused and rooted in your mission.

What are your business goals one year out? Five years out? What can you do today, next month and next quarter to make those things happen? This type of thinking gives you perspective and helps you plan better for the future.

At least quarterly, get with your marketing team to discuss how you’re tracking toward those goals, so you can recalibrate as needed and leverage your resources as efficiently as possible.

Don’t Abandon Projects That Aren’t An Immediate Success

While a set-it-and-forget-it model may be tempting when it comes to running campaigns, it’s been my experience that consistent testing is how you’ll get the most bang for your buck — and the highest return on investment.

Testing certain aspects of a campaign helps illuminate what is and isn’t resonating with your audience. With that in mind, it’s also worth noting that just because something didn’t bring you the best click-through rate or a ton of leads this month doesn’t mean it won’t pan out in the future.

Stick to it. Keep iterating and testing, and you’ll be surprised at the returns you get from being patient. If you’re still not seeing the results you want after a few months of testing, then it may be time to scrap that campaign and start over.

Invest In Being Evergreen

While timeliness can help an ad or campaign resonate (for example, during the holidays or a new season), often the content and initiatives that stand the test of time are evergreen. When publishing a video, blog article, offsite content or something in between, creating things that are relevant, educational and actionable can bring you positive results months and years down the line — far more than one-off trend pieces will.

Not only that, but evergreen content allows you to work smarter versus harder by giving you a lasting foundation you can continue to build on. One great example of this is content pillar pages. These are one-stop-shop articles on your site that cover a broad topic in your industry and then link to other, more niche articles under that same umbrella. This builds your credibility and helps your site be viewed as an authority by search engines.

Get Your Clients On Board

These days, people want results right now. But in many aspects of digital marketing, it simply doesn’t work that way. Anyone who says otherwise is peddling a pipe dream.

Sure, we can find quick wins when working with new clients through things like setting up proper tracking or creating paid search campaigns. But it’s crucial to help clients understand that digital marketing isn’t a one-and-done process — real lasting results come after months (and years) of dedicated, hands-on work.

You want your digital marketing program to be around for the long haul — not just a flash in the pan. It’s all about keeping your mission in mind, thinking about the big picture and building up strong, consistent processes that set you up for big wins and even bigger returns.

Source: www.forbes.com