As we’re rolling towards the mid of 2020, here are a few questions you might be asking yourself:
Am I using the right digital marketing strategies this year? 
Which online marketing trends should I be focusing on in 2020?
Which areas of digital marketing should I be investing on?

If you aren’t asking these questions yet, it’s time that you do. Here’s why. Considering how competitive the marketing landscape has become and how frequently consumer behaviours change, you should put your money on marketing strategies that will deliver value.

No room for guesses

In the age of innovation, you can no longer expect the same digital marketing tactics of yesteryears to work and hope that educated guesses will help you succeed.
In order to thrive and survive, you must keep your eyes on the changing trends and how the world of digital marketing is evolving. 

Related Article– 5 Steps to Make Sure Your Digital Marketing strategy is Results Driven

For example, according to a survey by Marketo, customer lifetime value will displace lead generation to become the top metric for measuring the success of marketing campaigns in 2025. This means, forward thinking companies will switch gears to make customer relationships a priority.
So, if you want to stay competitive and make your mark in the long-term, you have to think beyond lead generation. You have to think about customer loyalty and how to get people to come back to your product/service again and again.

 That said, let’s look at 10 digital marketing strategies that deserve your attention in 2020.  

1. Use influencers

Influencer marketing has been around for a while. With consumers putting a huge emphasis on trust and expertise over celeb factors and marketing bling, the trend has shifted in the favour of micro-influencers such as bloggers and YouTubers.
These influencers are experts in their niche and are looked upon as trustworthy by their followers. Apart from trust, relevance is another significant benefit of using an influencer for running a campaign. Because most influencers work within a chosen niche such as technology, beauty, fashion, food, etc., it’s easier to engage someone who appeals to your target audience. This ensures that there’s no disconnect between your brand and messaging.

2. Build community

For the past few years, it’s been getting harder to rack up organic reach on social media. But the pay-to-play model is not for everyone. Not all businesses have the money to run paid social media ad campaigns.
This is where building social media communities can come in handy. These communities bring together people to interact with each other on some shared interests. For instance, if you’re a sports tee brand, creating a community around fitness and outdoor activities can help you engage with your target audience on a one-on-one level.
The key is to remain responsive and active in your community and encourage the flow of dialogue between community members. In order to achieve success with communities, there should be a community manager to closely monitor activities, resolve issues, and answer queries. 

Related Article– 5 Growth Hacks To Build Relevant Social Media Followers

3. Create podcast

Podcasts have been popular for a while now. But if you’ve just been using podcasts as an avenue to publish your content and connect with your audience, it’s no longer enough. You must include programmatic audio in your marketing mix. This will allow you to place ads automatically in the audio content.

4. Focus more on videos

Video has become marketers’ favourite over the last few years. 87% of marketers use video as a part of their digital marketing strategy, while 54% consumers want to see more videos from the brands they support. Clearly, video’s popularity as a marketing tool shows no signs of slowing down.
Therefore, it’s time to put more focus on video content. YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram remain three top platforms for video advertising, where you’ll have the maximum scope to gain your customers’ attention. For this, you must create compelling video stories and promote them in a non-intrusive manner, giving viewers the option to opt-in and be in control of their online viewing experience.

5. Explore new social media platforms

Of course, you’re posting content on your social media pages already. But what can you do differently this year?
A great way to reap even more benefits from social media marketing is to expand your reach on channels apart from those you use on a regular basis. Depending on where your audience is likely to flock more, choose a different channel this year and build your presence on it. This means if you use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for your business, try leveraging Snapchat or Pinterest along with your usual channels.  

6. Mobile-friendly emails

More emails are read on mobile than ever. So why not make use of the device’s popularity to push your brand’s email campaigns to the inbox of your customers. Today, if your email marketing isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re losing out on a ton of opportunities. 
Although there’s no cut-and-dried design template that one must follow across all platforms or devices, you can achieve a single design that works well on different screens by paying attention to best practice techniques and implementing clean and minimalistic design that emphasizes on user experience. Don’t stuff your emails with too much information, keep the CTAs easily visible, and maintain the content hierarchy.
Remember, the success of your email marketing campaigns stands on your content, so make sure that the message you’re sending across through emails is well-crafted and nothing less than compelling.

Related Article– 7 Steps List Building Formula | Email Marketing List

7. Focus on augmented reality and virtual reality

Brands have already been experimenting with AR/VR technology to offer an immersive experience to users. This year, AR/VR will receive an even bigger push with its forecasted market size hitting close to USD 571.42 billion.
From AR filters on social media platforms to AR/VR based apps, there are many ways to implement this technology in your strategy. Provide a near-real feel of your products through AR/VR or give users a virtual tour of your products — these technologies allow you to engage customers more immersively.  

8. Create content for all platforms

You might be creating a ton of content by now. But in 2020, it’s time to scrutinize which content formats you’re using, where you’re publishing them, and how to take your content marketing initiatives to the next level.
For instance, if you’ve been mainly focusing on creating blogs for your company website, don’t limit yourself to text content only. Include infographics, videos, podcasts as well as animated gifs and other rich media content to enhance the appeal and engagement factor of your content. You should mix different formats and topics to make sure your content stands out from your competitors.

9. Understand the position zero and aim for that

“What is Position Zero (P0)? Position Zero (P0) refers to the first Google search result that appears above organic SEO listings. Also known as a featured snippet, P0 aims to directly answer searchers’ questions, without needing to click the search result link.”

Related Article– Proven SEO Strategy for All Kind of Businesses

Now that you know what position zero is, let’s understand how to get there.

• Focus on creating content around queries such as what, why, when, where, who, and how 
• Pay attention to your headlines and include query-based words in them
• Create how-to content or the type of content that offers instructions
• Prefer a listed format of content 
• Create content around frequently asked questions in your industry

10. Create content for all the levels of your funnel

If your content isn’t doing its job of keeping users hooked on to your website despite ranking highly on search engine results, your focus on the funnel might be out of balance. This means, you might be spending hours on top-of-the-funnel content but failing to give as much time or focus to the middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel content.

Related Article– 11 Step Content Creation Strategy To Convert Your Contacts To Contracts

If that’s the case, you must spread your content creation efforts across all levels of your funnel. So instead of creating just top-of-the-funnel content, dedicate time into creating more in-depth content that will help generate conversions. The world of digital marketing changes at a rapid pace. In order to be effective, your digital marketing strategies need to be flexible and adaptable with the changes. Implementing these 10 strategies will enable you to give your business the desired visibility and boost on SERPs.
Put these strategies into practice, measure how they are performing, make necessary tweaks, and monitor progress — done well, this can be your formula for digital marketing success in 2020.
Also, Read

• Facebook Ads Strategies that drive 5X Percent Results
• 8 Steps to Develop a Google Ads Strategy for Any Business

Facebook is always regarded as the undisputed leader in social networking and it continues to be. It is a solid platform where marketers can interact and engage with billions of users in an effective manner. In this blog we will explore and research on the Facebook Ads strategies that drive 5X Percent Results.

Facebook has devised proven strategies for brands to create their brand presence and help in brand positioning. This blog will enlighten you on the new trends in Facebook advertising and the various ways and means to influence the purchase funnel by boosting the PPC results. We, at Digitechniks ensure that the strategies are validated and shared with the target audience for better results.

Related Article– 4 Step Formula To Establish Your Business As A Brand

Let me just ask you a question! What do you understand by Facebook Ad strategies? Facebook Ad strategies help in lead generation and conversion of existing prospective leads to a customer. Some marketers fail to understand that you need a plan to execute your goals and it is Imperative for you to understand the below crucial strategies that help in boosting your Facebook campaign results.

Facebook Ads Strategies that drive 5X Percent Results

Strategies that can help in maximum reach in terms of Audience

• Setting up a Conversion Funnel 
• Create effective personas focusing on realistic buyers
• Focus on the conversion tracking pixel
• Use Audience Segmentation as a tool to make interesting offers
• Run a free campaign and give away some benefits

Strategies that can promote effective lead generation

• Integrate Ad words and Facebook Ads – Ideal Combo for better results 
• Align the Facebook Ads with content marketing strategies 
• Accelerate the eCommerce domain by setting up multiple product ads
• Combine Facebook mobile Ads and Instagram ads
• Focus on the Carousel Ads and Dynamic Facebook Ads to increase your reach on the target audience.
• Identify new leads through a Lookalike audience

Strategies that help in conversions and profit maximization

• Create a new marketing list based on the generated leads
• Devise an Upsell campaign to boost profits
• Revamp the remarketing strategies

Setting up a conversion funnel

The purpose of the Facebook conversion funnel is to capture the interest of the audience and nurture them until it gets converted to a sale. Appealing Facebook Ads will be effective to transition the interest of the audience towards a purchase.  Facebook conversion funnel focuses on brand awareness and product pitch. It can also aggregate the common interests and preferences of the users who know about a certain product and may buy it after few considerations. Some target audiences will buy the product based on recommendations from others. So nurturing and sustaining the interests through Facebook Ads is the important objective for setting up the conversion funnel.
It is very important to focus on the larger target audience and create successful ad campaigns by grouping people based on different stages of conversion as below
The stages of the conversion funnel are

• Attract customers by creating awareness and design appealing Facebook Ads to overcome the objections through effective content and useful blogs.
• Plan strategies for conversion by rolling out an irresistible offer like a free trial offer and by creating effective lead ads so that the target audience cannot resist the offering and decide to take the next step. You can also roll out contests using Facebook Ads.
• Close the sale through lead nurturing campaigns by providing attractive discounts and limited-time offers to stimulate the sale.
• Focus on Customer Delight by designing effective strategies by giving incentives for referrals, repeat purchases and up-selling campaigns.

Using a conversion funnel it is easier to cater to the needs of several Facebook audiences and promote cross channel marketing strategies for effective brand positioning

Creating effective personas for realistic buyers

It is of prime importance to understand the traits of ideal customers before developing the value proposition of Facebook campaigns. We need to classify the audience based on their interests, demographics, pain points and purchase behavior trend. Creating effective personas will be effective if we imagine the customer as real and evolving and that is when you can connect with them through your offers and engaging content. The personas must help the buyers in recognizing themselves so that audience connect is successful.

Related Article– 6 Steps Customer Acquisition Formula

Example of creating effective personas
What you meant to say:  DM business owner
What your Facebook Ads headline should be: “How to use digital marketing as a tool for increasing your business conversion”?
Once we get hands on in identifying the realistic buyers through effective analysis, creating personas is like a cake walk. This also helps in the choice of the right target audience and clears the air of confusion as to whom to target, when to target and what to offer using Facebook Ad strategies.

Focus on Conversion tracking Pixel

In the world of flashy content and shiny ad textures, conversion tracking is not so interesting a feature for many advertisers. How will you identify whether you are on the right track in your Facebook campaign?
Here we go! First install the Facebook Pixel on your website. Let me guide you as how you can do it

• Go to the Pixels page in Facebook Ads Manager and click on Actions.
• Click on View code

Each and every Facebook Ad account is assigned with a Single pixel code. All you need to do is to copy the code and paste it between the <head> tags of all the webpage or the template of the website. Aliter option is to place the pixel using the Google Tag manager. You can customize by adding specific tracking codes in order to track particular lead conversions and purchases. By installing Facebook pixels you can track the results of your ad campaigns in terms of right conversions and crunching numbers. You can also create retargeting ads by mapping it with new custom audience features

Using Audience segmentation

Audience segmentation is the aggregate of personas of effective buyers and setting up a conversion funnel. It is an ideal tool for remarketing focusing on a different set of audience by focusing on website visitors. It helps in improving the brand awareness and also analyse the behaviour of the audience.
 Wondering about your Audience segmentation?  We caught your interest and it can easily explained as below

Related Article– 6 Simple social media hacks to convert contacts to contracts

If you understand the above segmentation, you will also notice that the segmentation of audience is based on personas of the various buyers aligned with the different stages of the conversion funnel. It is also evident that every stage of the funnel will call for a different advertising approach and targeting strategies like offers, contests etc.

For example,

Bon prix – leading fashion retailer used a mix of different ad types and different tools for Facebook targeting Ads and reached a 5% increase in sales.

Run Free Campaigns as an incentive

We need to attract and connect with the target audience by giving valuable offers as giveaways and contests. Most of the audience enjoys the Facebook giveaways as it has a higher degree of engagement with the product and in turn influences the audience to close the sale or get the product with a discount as a flash sale Ad campaign.
Your focus need not be always on sales while running a free campaign or contests; you can design campaigns to promote brand awareness and as a pathway to generate new leads. You can also have contests like “Smile contest” or “Slogan contest” etc.

Important tip:
Please select the reach campaign objective while audience targeting so that your campaign reaches the majority of the audience

 Integrate Ad words and Facebook Ads

 Hope you got an effective insight about your Facebook strategy and it is time to focus on the results of your Ad campaigns. It is very important to combine various campaigns and generate multimodal leads through Ad words with an engaging content. The first step is to promote brand awareness based on client’s interests using effective Facebook ads. The next step is to create a remarketing list of search ads using the website information in Ad words. It is possible to set an Ad words campaign for previous visitors who used a specific keyword to search. Your Facebook Ads and Ad words will show up first if the keyword is ranked in Google and win the auction.

Related Article– 5 Growth Hacks To Build Relevant Social Media Followers

Align Facebook Ads with Content Marketing

The objective for creating Facebook Ads is to transition the leads to sale. The ROI of the campaign is extremely banked up on the lead generation and reaching out to the correct target audience. The warm leads are prospective leads and cold leads are audiences who are still in doubt. If you want to transform the cold leads to hot leads then you need to blend content marketing into Facebook Ad strategy. You can easily do it by sharing engaging content to the audience and start your transition process. You can also ask your network to like or share the content to reach the majority of the target audience. It is ideal to design a single Facebook post with multiple ad campaigns so that the audience responses will be reflecting as a single ad

Related Article– 11 Step Content Creation Strategy To Convert Your Contacts To Contracts

Combine Facebook mobile Ads with Instagram ads

 We know that mobile is the new boom to reach a larger audience in Facebook Ad campaigns. It depends on the ad objective and also ensures that the landing page is also optimized for mobile. It is true that mobile Facebook ads lead to effective results from Consumer brands to B2B across different industries.
Let us take the classic example of Udemy. Did you observe that Udemy uses both Instagram ads and mobile newsfeed ads?
 It will be more advantageous if you place different ads at the desktop and mobile news feeds while setting up Facebook Ad campaigns. Mobile ads have smaller fonts in display headlines to highlight the main ad text of the Ad copy. Desktop news feed ads have headlines with descriptions with links as it is the key capture of the ad

Accelerate eCommerce by setting up multiple product ads

It is easier to highlight multiple products in a single Facebook Ad. The key advantages of this feature are that you can give more options to your target customers. The cost of promotion is the same even though you showcase multiple ads and the target customer gets visibility on the different benefits of a single product. The major results of this strategy is increased CTR, reduced CPC resulting in highest audience engagement and drastic improvement in cost per acquisition.

Focus on Carousel Ads and Dynamic Ads

It is a proven fact that Carousel Ads are gaining more momentum than the static posts in the Facebook Ad campaigns. Even storytelling becomes easier using the carousel ads with engaging content and images. Carousel Ads works best if you want to help your audience to choose a product and explain the key features step by step. 
Dynamic Ads are the best options for E commerce sites as they generate the highest ROI and they can focus on customized ad campaigns for the audience in dilemma. The combination of Facebook multi product ads with the custom audience will fetch you a carousel of different products and it can be easily browsed on the website.

Identify new leads using the Lookalike Audience strategy

To convert the target cold audience, Facebook advertising campaigns focus on targeting the Lookalike audience strategy. The cold leads will have a similar profile as the current target audience and there is any fair chance that they might get interested in your offers. All you have to do is to target people who are like your customers or converters by creating Facebook custom audiences of past converters and set up lookalike audiences based on the same.

Creating new marketing Lists with Lead Ads

 Lead ads are useful tools as they allow us to fill the contact details without logging out of Facebook.  This reduces the friction points between conversion and prospect by exchanging email addresses or any other engagement that is critical. The first step is to create a Customer audience based on blog readers for 30 days and also to include web visitors. The next setup is to generate a lead ads campaign and collect their emails leading them to the conversion funnel. Lead Ads are more prominent in mobile and the success of the lead ads is dependent on engaging content leading to more downloads and in turn maximum lead generation.

Devise Up selling strategy for generating profits

 Research reveals that the revenue of the Facebook Ad campaigns is generated by repeat customers and they are 5X valuable to the company. Upsell strategy can be used to target people based on past purchases and listing the relevant items for them. It also helps in getting track of lost audience with strategies like discount offers and limited period benefits. Up-selling Facebook strategy works best for B2C products predominantly. We can get lucky in B2B business if we have referrals along with email marketing.

Revamp the remarketing strategies

Facebook Ad strategies must focus on retargeting the visitors of the landing page as they know your brand, having a specific product preference. In such cases it is very easy to create a landing page with customized offers for those targeted audiences. If you segment your audience in granular fashion then remarketing revamp is easy as you can use specific landing page offers in an exclusive manner.
Remarketing strategies help us to keep our target audience satisfied as they experience memorable customer experience. This can lead to repurchase and up selling opportunities and also referrals through word of mouth. The revamping will also help in brand positioning leading to profit maximization and increase in the number of audience. Revamping remarketing strategies will work like cutting the butter using a hot knife.

Related Article– The Relevance of PPC to Your Marketing Strategy

The objectives and proven tips of Facebook Ad strategies is discussed in detail in this blog with the prime focus on generating effective campaigns to generate leads, increase target audience and finally to get profit.
Try out these Facebook Ad strategies that drive 5 X percent results and let us know how it has worked out for you.
Also, Read

• 8 Steps to Develop a Google Ads Strategy for Any Business
• Proven SEO Strategy for All Kind of Businesses

“Is my digital marketing strategy working?”
“Am I doing it right?”
“Why am I not seeing the results I want?”
“How can i fix my digital marketing strategy?”

If you find yourself asking these questions, don’t worry — you’re not alone. You are among the people who do not have a proper digital marketing strategy in place for your business.
In this article, you are going to learn to fix the problems in your digital marketing strategy.
According to the Managing Digital marketing research report, nearly half (45%) of companies don’t yet have a planned digital marketing strategy.
However, if you do have a digital marketing strategy and yet find that it’s not giving the results you expect, here are some questions you should think about:

• Have you established the right goals?
• Are you looking at the right metrics?
• Do you have the right tools to evaluate the results of your campaigns?
• Are you struggling to make sense of all the data you’re gathering?

Information overload is a real struggle

Too much information is overwhelming. With too much data at our fingertips, monitoring and measuring success can be tedious and time-consuming. This is why it’s important to know what to focus on and what to leave out.
With a ton of metrics to be tracked on a daily basis, it’s a tough job to navigate the right metrics to know whether your digital marketing efforts are actually helping you fulfill your business goals.

A recent LinkedIn report shows that 50% of digital marketers in India rely on inaccurate metrics.
So if you want to ensure that your digital marketing strategy is working to fetch you the results you’re looking for, let us walk you through five steps that will help you achieve that.

1. Plan

Failing in planning means failing in getting results.
The first step to making your digital marketing process more results-driven is to be sure you have clear goals. If you’ve already established your goals, take the time to evaluate those goals.
Begin with collecting as much information as you can about your business and industry as. This will include:

• The trends that impact your business, such as seasonal slumps or peaks in sales so you can tweak your marketing campaigns accordingly.  
• The past achievements and failures of your business, such as marketing campaigns that were successful and the ones that weren’t.
• Market research to see what your competitors are doing, what’s working and what’s not.

Also, it’s important to narrow down your goals to make sure you’re hitting the nail on its head.
For example, instead of a vague goal like “make more sales”, go for something more specific, such as “increase sales of X product/service by X% by the 2nd quarter”.
Such clear-cut goals help to make your marketing campaigns more focused and easier for you to identify the actions that will get you the result.

Related Article– 8 Step approach of a Successful Digital Marketer

2. Implement

It’s another very important step to drive results.
Many people plan but only few implement.
You have to figure out how you can implement the digital marketing strategy that you have planned in the first step.
Create all the processes with action points, Fix the calendar and complete the tasks one by one.
A good way to start is by identifying your target audience and creating your customer profile. The objective here is to know exactly who you’re going to market to.

For example, if you’re targeting new moms to buy baby products from your online store, your social media activities and online ad campaign need to be designed around that demographic.
Because you have pinpointed exactly who you are marketing to and which product you are trying to sell, your digital marketing strategy is much more actionable and likely to produce results.

Related Article– 8 Steps to Develop a Google Ads Strategy for Any Business

3. Track

Now, it comes to making sure that your goals are relevant and measurable. How to do that? Focus on metrics like revenue per lead by source or an estimated sales value of each new lead.
For instance, if you know which of your leads are most likely to convert and where they are coming from, you can continue to invest in those channels. Likewise, this will help you stop wasting your time and money on channels that won’t be the most profitable for you.
Carrying on with your marketing campaigns without knowing if they are actually working and what needs to be done to improve them can be a huge drain on your budget.
For a truly result-driven digital marketing strategy, you must track the progress of your campaigns and recognize specific ways to measure success. For example, if you’re running a social media ad campaign, the metrics you need to focus on are:

• The “impressions” your posts are generating
• How engaging they are
• Click rate or how many people are interacting with your post
• Traffic or how many people are visiting your website

Related Article– 6 Simple social media hacks to convert contacts to contracts

You need to pay attention to each and every aspect of your digital marketing campaigns to understand how truly successful they are and which are the areas that need to be tweaked. Failing to do that, you may risk running an ineffective campaign for too long, and wasting your money as a result.
Here are some tools that will help you at this stage:
Digital marketing analytics – This helps you monitor and track critical aspects like the search engine rankings and social media performance of your business.
Testing tools – These enable you to test the different versions of a marketing message or a feature on your website. For example, testing the headlines of your email campaigns or different versions of sign-up forms will let you determine which option will get you higher conversions.
Event-based tools – These will allow you to look at the actions that visitors perform on your website or mobile app.
Visual behaviour tools – These tools let you track which areas of your website are more engaging to visitors and where they are spending more time. For example, when you gain insights like which are the most heavily clicked areas on your website, you can place your call-to-action buttons there for maximum impact.

4. Interpret

After you have collected data and gained insights into your campaign’s performance, you’ll be better positioned to determine where to allocate your budget for increased ROI.
There can be many ways to interpret what you discovered in the earlier steps.
For one, you must put more time, effort, and resources into channels that generate higher quality leads and offer maximum potential for conversions.
If you don’t seem to be getting results from a particular channel, it means your product/service is probably not for the users and demographic of that channel. This will require you to take another look at your audience profile or try another more suitable channel. 
Evaluating the insights will also help you understand whether you need to readjust your goals. Maybe you’re setting up objectives that are too ambitious for your business at the moment and that’s why your marketing efforts are falling short of expectations. Or perhaps, you’re meeting your goals too easily and need more challenging goals to see better end results. 
Armed with this information, you’ll need to tweak, rinse, and repeat your digital marketing strategy until you see the outcomes you’re looking for. 

5. Optimize

Based on Interpretation you’ll have to optimize the required platforms and campaigns.
After understanding which activity is giving you better results, you’ll have to focus more or less on the respective activity.

For example, if you have many pages ranking on the 2nd page of google for commercial keywords, you can optimize your webpages in such a manner that they come to the 1st page of google. This optimization will give you instant results.

Related Article– Step by Step Guide To Develop a Search Engine Strategy for Your Business 

For a digital marketing strategy to be successful and effective, it needs to be result-driven. If you’re not driving profits through your online campaigns, it’s time to put your strategy under the scanner.  
It might seem like an overwhelming process with a whole bunch of metrics to be tracked, but knowing which of them apply to your business and monitoring them using appropriate tools can make all the difference. 
We’re hoping this guide will ease some of that confusion and help you create a digital marketing strategy that actually works for your business.
Our coach Mr. Sharan Kulkarni is on the mission to help people make a result-driven digital marketing strategy for their business.

Do you want to crack the code on how you can use SEO to grow your business and get more leads and sales?

You may have heard the SEO success stories of other people and now you want the same for your business. That’s great, but here’s a reminder — SEO is not an option. You simply cannot ignore SEO if you want to survive and succeed in today’s business landscape.

But where do you begin? Which SEO strategies would work for your business?
Before diving straight into the application of SEO techniques, it’s important to find answers to these questions and put a plan into place. That’s where the need for a solid SEO strategy comes in. 

Without a strategy, not only will you feel lost but also lose time, money, and opportunities. You won’t see the results you’re looking for and it may even damage your website’s reputation and presence online.

What types of unethical tactics should you avoid? How to prevent your site from getting penalized by Google?
A proper SEO strategy will help you navigate the tricky waters of search engine rankings while helping you steer clear of any shady practices that may put your brand at risk.

So, if you’re looking to make SEO work for your business in 2020, we have you covered. But before we get into the step-by-step process to create an SEO strategy, let’s quickly take a glance at what SEO actually is.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the way to drive high-quality traffic to your website and simultaneously boost your brand’s presence, reach, and lead generation through organic (or non-paid) search engine results.
Simply put, SEO is all about making changes to the web pages on your site in a way that they are understood and preferred by search engines better than those of your competitors. This puts your website among the top positions on search engine result pages (SERP) for a particular query, so you have a better chance of being seen by your target audience.

1. Understanding whether you need SEO

As we mentioned before, SEO is a must-have for businesses these days. But if you still wish to assess your need for SEO, as yourself the following questions?

• Are you witnessing less conversions? 
• Are you struggling to compete in your market?
• Do you want to reach more customers? 
• Do you want to get more good-quality leads?
• Are your customers spending more time online?

If the answers to these questions are “yes”, then your business needs SEO and you need to have a strategy to make it work. 

2. Finalizing goals

In this step, you need to identify the goals you’re looking to fulfill through SEO. For your SEO outcomes to benefit your business, make sure that these goals are aligned to your business objectives.

For example, if you want to increase your sales, then it makes sense to adopt SEO strategies that are focused on converting your site visitors into paying customers. Plus, through tactics like retargeting, you can attract existing customers and encourage them to become repeat buyers.
Similarly, if your aim is to create a buzz around your business and increase customer awareness, your SEO strategy should focus on brand building and promotion. 

3. Spying on your competitors

Clueless as to where to begin? Simple, keep a watch on your competitors. In this context, “spying” means knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your closest competitors in business. This will help you gain new ideas and learn from their mistakes. So when you know what your competitors are up to, you’ll be better positioned to plan out your next move.
Wondering how to do that? Check out this list of tools that allow you to collect a host of information on your competition.

Related Article– 12 Affordable Digital Marketing Tools To Spy On Your Competitors (Like A Boss)

4. Doing keyword research

Are you still guessing the keywords your customers might be using while searching for your products/ services? Or, are you still entering random keywords into a tool and hoping for good results? 
These are impractical and often blind-sided ways to go about SEO keywords research. So, when you do it this way, you end up optimizing content around phrases that will probably give you mediocre results at best. In other words, it can be a hit or miss.
Now is the time to put the guessing game to rest. One of the most effective tactics is to find the exact keywords that your competitors already rank for. This cuts down your time for research and gives you those keywords that have good potential. You can choose from a bunch of different tools to find keywords that your competitors are using — SEMrush is one of them.

5. Choosing different keyword types for different goals

Not all keywords are meant fulfil the same purpose. For example, transactional keywords and informational keywords are used to target buyers in different stages of customer lifecycle.
While transactional keywords (contain words like “buy”, “sale”, “rent” etc.) are typically meant for ready-to-buy customers, informational keywords (include “where”, “when”, “how”, etc.) are used by customers in the awareness phase when they are still searching for information prior to making purchase decisions.
Along with the purpose, the way these keywords can help you rank on SERPs is also different. Transactional keywords are suited for landing pages, category pages, and service pages of the websites. Informational keywords, on the other hand, perform best when used in blogs and articles.
In one of our previous articles, we discussed the differences between these two categories of keywords in depth. You can check it out here.

6. Estimating the efforts and time required

SEO can be time-consuming and the returns are rarely immediate. Therefore, it’s essential to set realistic expectations at the outset.
The amount of time and effort you’re willing to put into your SEO campaigns will depend on factors like your business goals, budget, type of customers, competitors, etc. For example, if you’re planning to rank highly for a large number of keywords against many competitors, you’ll have to spend more time than someone who is looking to rank locally.
It’s true that the more time you invest, the better payoff you can expect. But, whether or not you should invest a certain number of hours into your SEO efforts is something you have to figure out after understanding your business needs and the role SEO plays in it.

7. Doing on-page and off-page SEO

Your SEO efforts should be a concerted mix of on-page and off-page SEO. For the uninitiated, on-page SEO takes place within the site, while off-page SEO happens outside the site.
For instance, on-page SEO refers to elements within your website that you can optimize such as the content and the underlying code. Off-page SEO refers to activities performed to boost your site’s credibility, reputation, and authority through inbound links and social signals.
Both on-page SEO and off-page SEO are important when it comes to driving valuable traffic to your website. You just need to understand the way both work and how to implement them in your strategy for maximum benefit.

8. Implementing advanced SEO

Have you noticed how some search results appear in a box-like format at the top right side of the SERPs? Well, this is known as a Knowledge Graph.
Rich snippets are another form of structured information that appears in the space between the URL and description in the SERPs.
Google’s Knowledge Graph and structured snippets both play critical roles in entity-based search and are particularly helpful for e-commerce businesses.
These advanced SEO elements allow website owners to add more details about their website and its content, which makes their websites better understood by search engines. This is done by including a piece of code in a specific format that’s understandable to search engines, which read the code and create rich snippets.
When done well, this extra step can take your SEO outcome from ordinary to outstanding.

9. Using search console to improve the ranking of every webpage

This is perhaps one of the best yet an understated SEO trick in the book. Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools) is one of the most powerful SEO tools at your disposal.
It’s a free service by Google that enables you to manage your website’s search functionality. Not only does it help you to optimize your search engine rankings, but it also helps you identify and fix errors that could weigh down your website’s rank in the SERPs.
There’s a host of other benefits of using a search console, but one this thing is certain — it’s a vital tool that can make a world of difference in your SEO results.

Related Article– The Definitive SEO Guide to Growing Small and Medium Businesses 

With these proven strategies in place, you’ll be on your way to take your company’s SEO to the next level. 
But here’s something you need to remember. As with everything else in digital marketing, building an SEO strategy is not the end of the road. You need to keep monitoring, measuring, and tweaking your SEO efforts to experience the advantages that SEO offers.
If you’re planning to employ SEO to grow your business or looking to improve the outcomes of your existing campaigns, start from the drawing board. While it might look like a step back, taking your time to strategize your SEO efforts could pay dividends far into the future.
Related Article– Step by Step Guide To Develop a Search Engine Strategy for Your Business

Do you want to use Google  like a growth machine?
Do you know that Google Ads are more effective when used with proper strategy?
Are you using Google Ads in a way that gives you the best bang for your buck?
Or, you are simply picking a bunch of keywords and creating your Google Ads around them.
If yes, then it’s a recipe for failure.
Why?

Because while Google Ads certainly work and they can give you nearly-immediate results, running a few ads and hoping to reap massive success from them can lead to disappointments.
For one, this ad-hoc approach won’t give you the results you desire.
You’ll end up wasting time and money on campaigns that probably won’t drive conversions.
And, even if they do, you might not be able to identify which campaigns are showing results and which aren’t.
For instance, you won’t know for sure if a lead or sale you’ve received has been driven by your Google ads or not.  

The key to success lies in the right strategy

Most of the business owners fail to succeed because of the wrong strategy when they don’t know the right steps to get results from Google Ads.
While the promise of driving low-cost, highly-targeted, and high conversion campaigns on the world’s most popular search engine sounds lucrative, you won’t get these benefits unless you have a strategy in place.
Like any successful marketing campaign, it all starts with planning. If you’re just getting started with Google Ads, this may seem a bit challenging.
In this article, we’ll walk you through Eight steps to plan out a Google Ads strategy for success.  

1. Pick a goal for your campaign

The purpose of this step is pretty straightforward. To pinpoint why you’re creating a particular campaign. This is to ensure your campaign fulfills a specific goal for your business.
Google can make some automatic suggestions for what goals you can choose for your campaign.
It could be getting more leads, more sales, driving more traffic to your website, increasing your brand awareness, and so on.

Related Article– Supercharge Your Leads from Google Ads With These Simple Steps

After you select a specific goal for your campaign, you have the option to tweak it further with features and settings.
While you can add or remove a goal at any point of time, remember that goals also serve as a benchmark for gauging the success of your campaign, so setting up goals is always a great way to start.

2. Finalize the campaign type to achieve the goal

After you set up the campaign goals, it’s time to select the type of campaign you’d like to run in order to fulfill those goals.
Your choice of the campaign will determine where your target customers will see your ads. Also, the settings and options available to you will vary accordingly.
Here are the types of campaigns you can choose from:
Search: These are text ads that help you attract customers who are interested in your product or service.
Display: You can run these ads across the web using images and banners.
Shopping: These are specifically purchase-oriented ads where buying/selling is involved.
Video: These ads use videos to reach and engage viewers on YouTube and elsewhere on the web.
App: These ads are focused on driving app installs across Google’s networks.

3. Identify your target audience

This step involves finding your target audience.
Keywords are at the heart of Google Ads and because these words are used by your target audience while searching for a product/service, it’s critical to determine the right audience.

• Use information such as demographics — age, gender, location and spending habits — to interests and preferences to define exactly who you want to reach. 
• Use insights from your existing customer data to refine your audience profile further. 
• Identify which stage of the buyer journey they are at for a particular campaign e.g. first-time buyers, existing subscribers, etc.

Google Ads is set up to assist you in selecting the most appropriate ad format and positioning for your audience and your goals. So if you find the process a little daunting, you can let AdWords make some basic decisions for you. 

4. Create the keywords list

Selecting the right keywords can make or break your Google Ads campaign.
Some tips to do it right:

• Rather than using general keywords related to your business, decide on 10-20 possible search queries that closely match your campaign. 
• Just like in SEO, long-tail keywords help fare better than generic ones. 
• The more specific your keywords, the better e.g. ‘women’s sports t-shirts Bangalore’. These types of keywords will improve the targeting of your ads, reducing their chances of being shown to searchers who are unlikely to convert.
• All keywords come with an estimated value; the more popular they are, the lesser chances you have of getting seen on the first page, plus, the more you’ll pay per click. Therefore, focus on lesser-used keywords for better positioning and ROI – Keyword Planner can help with this.

5. Develop your campaign assets

Assets are the elements needed to create ads while running a campaign. These can be banners or images (display ads), video (for video ads), text and landing pages (for search ads), and so on.
Make sure you use appealing texts, headlines and descriptions, eye-catching visuals, and impactful audio to attract and engage your audience.
Your assets should align with the specific goals of your campaigns as well as those of your business.

6. Setting up the conversion tracking

Can you monitor and analyze the actions that visitors take when they land on your website, such as filling out the contact form, subscribing to your email list, or downloading a resource?
Without being able to tie every conversion to your campaigns, it’s difficult for you to track what’s working and what’s not.
This is why it’s imperative that you measure and attribute the conversions to your campaigns. That’s where AdWords conversion tracking comes in.
Setting up conversion tracking is simple and the process begins when you define a conversion goal for your Google Ads campaign.
After you’ve specified your desired conversion action, such as a sale, opt-in or call, you’re on your way to track data. Here’s how you can start tracking conversions:

• Select a conversion source
• Create a conversion action
• Personalize the tracking options as per your goals
• Install the conversion tracking code

7. Create a campaign

Depending on your campaign goals and type, now it’s time to create a messaging for your campaign that’s relevant, engaging, and convincing.
Remember, while creativity can be alluring, what’s more important is to deliver your message in a simple and hard-hitting way that persuades your target audience to take your desired action. After all, the end goal is always a conversion.
To this end, your campaign should not just have eye-grabbing content, but also a strong call-to-action that will guide people to take the next step.

8. Optimize the campaign

Creating a successful Google Ads campaign doesn’t stop with clicking on “run”. After the ad is live, you need to monitor it at least once a week to track progress and make the required tweaks here and there.
Here are some basic metrics you should track:
Impressions – the number of people who saw your ad
Clicks – the number of people who clicked on your ad
Click-through rate – the number of people who were led to your website through the ad 
If your ad isn’t performing as it should, you’ll need to optimize it, which means making changes that will drive the desired results. So, if your ad has few impressions, try working with different keywords. If your ad suffers from less clicks, maybe you should reconsider your targeting. Poor click-through? Revisit your copy or messaging. Not getting enough conversions? Improve your landing page.

Related Article– 4 Proven Ways To Reduce Google Ads CPC

Finally, remember that like any other plan, it’s important to be patient and follow-through from time to time to ensure your Google Ads strategy is working at its best.
Hopefully, you’ll find this guide helpful whether your Google Ads efforts weren’t as fruitful as you’d have liked in the past or you’ve just dipped your toes in the world of Google Ads.
Either way, there’s a whole world of benefits you can unlock for your business if you learn to do it right. We have designed a free webinar to guide all business owners while making their search engine strategies.

Related Article– Step by Step Guide To Develop a Search Engine Strategy for Your Business