Improving
digital strategy
performance

Learn digital strategy in five steps

Step five - improvements

Understanding how to correctly use each digital channel to communicate value to online users is a fundamental step in running a digital strategy.

Using multiple channels at the same time to ensure you are present at each touchpoint of a customer’s journey helps improve the first fundamental step even further.

A truly comprehensive digital strategy, however, will go one step beyond just using each digital channel at the same time.

A fully integrated approach involves using each channel to improve the performance of all the other channels. It’s a form of synergy where you use key learnings and data of each channel to improve the performance of seemingly unrelated channels within your strategy.

A truly comprehensive strategy

Leveraging other channels to improve overall strategy performance

By themselves, each channel can perform strongly and deliver effective results. When you integrate each channel together the combined performance impact on the overall strategy will be greater than if each channel was simply used in isolation.

This strategic approach is explained fully in each relevant channel section (e.g., improving SEO strategy) but a few general examples:

Facebook ads can help improve SEO by providing initial promotion of new website content which hasn’t yet been picked up and ranked within Google search results. Highly relevant traffic (from Facebook ads) can be used as an initial audience to provide Google with user experience signals (e.g. bounce rate, time spent on page etc) to assess the quality of the content.

Google ads can help improve Facebook ads as you can use Search ads to drive a large amount of high quality traffic (based on strong commercial/purchase-intent keywords) to a specific page. Lookalike audiences can then be created on Facebook using the characteristics of these highly-valuable Google users.

eDM’s can help improve Google ads by acting as the basis for creating similar audiences. These audiences are based on the characteristics of users on an email list (such as their search behaviour). Google will seek to match email list users to Google profiles (i.e. based on a Gmail address) and will then look at their recent search behaviour to form an online profile. Google Ads can then use this data to seek out other users who closely match original customer profiles (i.e. browsing history).

Improving a low conversion rate:

Some people find their content and ads are performing well (i.e. they are receiving a large amount of relevant traffic to their website) however they aren’t seeing many conversions (purchases, signups etc). In this case, the content and ads have done their job, but the issue now lies with the quality of the landing page and value proposition(s).

A conversion rate refers to the number of visitors a website receives divided by the total number of conversions. This rate provides insight into how well a website is working to convert visitors into potential customers.

A typical conversion rate is between 2 – 3% but some websites see rates of around 10%. If a website has a low conversion rate, this needs to be addressed first before trying to bring additional visitors to the site (i.e. creating new content and ads).

Conversion Rate Optimisation:

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of improving a website to help boost the overall conversion rate. Friction refers to certain pain-points which may cause users to avoid a certain desired action.

Perhaps a signup form has too many fields to fill in and users can’t be bothered. A landing page may have too much information and users become overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next. There may be too many calls-to-action on one page such as ‘contact us’, ‘sign up now’, ‘get in touch’ – users don’t want to choose the wrong option, so they leave altogether. The website may be too slow to load or a user’s first impression is being greeted with multiple popups.

Caution

Switching costs online (i.e. viewing another website) are very low so users will simply click back to the search results if your website provides a bad user experience.

Methods of CRO can include:

Additional research (are you actually giving customers what they want?)
Improving the professionalism and visual appeal of the website (to improve trust)
Improving the call-to-action (from ‘learn more’ to ‘grow your sales now’)
Reduce the amount of time and effort required to signup (e.g. too many fields in a form)
Having one clear offer, not a mix of services
Focus on further communicating the value and benefit on what you’re offering
Using reviews/testimonials to help build trust and reduce the risk of purchasing/signing up
Split test different landing pages (using Google optimise). You can change images, colours, CTA’s, copy, form length etc.

This concludes step five of learning digital strategy (improving strategy performance). In the next section (SEO), we’ll cover how keyword research guides the content creation process and how you can use SEO strategies to attract free traffic from Google.