Digital Marketing Results: Tried and Tested Methods to Maximise ROI for SMEs

With this in mind, in this blog we’ll take a look at: 

• The proven marketing strategies that will help you deliver results and drive profits 
• The KPIs you need to measure 
• How to track your digital marketing efforts

Let’s dive in.

4 top digital marketing strategies to deliver results and drive profits

You want strategies that deliver both quick wins (to generate instant sales revenue) and long-term growth (larger, more sustained sales pipelines). To help you do this, we’ve listed our top digital marketing strategies right here:

Strategy One: Go Local 

If your business relies on local customers or you have a number of business locations, local marketing is a highly effective strategy that will deliver a high ROI for your business. Actually, research from Hubspot shows that 97% of people learn more about local companies online than through any other medium.

The bottom line is, local marketing allows digital marketers to target a highly specific audience and prevents wasted budget on customers who either don’t live in your area or who are never going to buy from you. 

Here are our top strategies for local marketing: 

• Local Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - this involves optimising your website for local terms and keywords. You’ll also need to look at setting up and optimising your Google My Business page, create local content and list your site on relevant local directory sites. 
• Create local paid ads - one of the best things about paid search advertising either through Google or social media marketing channels is you can create a highly targeted and specific audience. This means you can only target customers in a certain area and you can add location terms to your ads too. 
• Local landing pages - if you’re running local campaigns either through paid ads or SEO, leading visitors to a relevant landing page that they can relate to is important for driving conversions and getting the most from your marketing spend. 

Strategy two: Focus on organic strategies 

SEO and social media marketing are both great ways to gain awareness of your business and drive traffic to your website and - aside from the initial investment you’ll need to make in terms of time and resources - they won’t cost you anything. 

SEO helps you to drive organic traffic to your website and, unlike paid ads, you don’t have to pay for every visit. Plus, once your site is ranking highly in the search results, you’ll just need to maintain your website and make sure it’s continuing to drive traffic and convert visitors. In fact, 53% of website traffic comes from organic search results so it really is worth investing.

SEO will continue to drive results for your business over the long term whereas, as soon as you stop spending on paid ads, the results stop. 

In addition, social media channels such as LinkedIn and Facebook allow you to post organically, share your content and brand personality and build a following online, all without spending a penny! This can really help to build trust with your target audience.

Strategy three: Make it personal 

A surge in buyers across all industries buying online means there is an increased demand from consumers for more personalised journeys, and the B2B buyer is no different.

To put this into perspective, a McKinsey report revealed that 76% of consumers said that receiving personalised communications was a key factor in their decision to make a purchase. It’s these personalised experiences that can help you to drive repeat business and build customer loyalty… And essentially increase your chances of being seen by the right people in the right places. 

But how do you do this?

• Utilise first party data - first party data is great for learning more about your customers and being able to tailor content to their preferences and provide a more personalised customer journey. 
• Remarketing - the B2B buying journey can be complex and involve a number of touchpoints so remarketing is perfect for keeping your brand top of mind and you can show them dynamic creatives based on their interests.

Strategy four: Provide value

A key part of building relationships with customers is providing value. Content marketing is a key digital marketing strategy for giving your customers value and can be used for three different purposes:

1. Help your audience to solve their problems 
2. Provide the information they won’t find anywhere else 
3. Build trust in your brand and showcase your expertise 

Side note: Content marketing is a long term investment and it can take a few months to start seeing the results but once you do, you’ll continue seeing results for months and years to come. One last quick thing. Aside from offering value to your potential customers, it’s also one of Google’s most important ranking factors so it’s essential if you want to be found by the right people at the right time. 

KPIs to measure for digital marketing channels

The KPIs you measure in relation to your digital marketing strategy will depend on your overall business goals and what you’re looking to achieve through the channels.

However, there are common KPIs to consider across the sales funnel to understand which digital marketing channels are performing and delivering results for your business. 

Let’s look at the five stages of the sales funnel in more detail…

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Reach (Awareness Building)

When you’re looking to build awareness of your brand online and drive traffic to your website through activities such as SEO or PPC, here are some of the best KPIs to track. 

• Impressions - this is the number of times your content is displayed to online users, whether or not they click it. 
• Pages per visit - the number of web pages a user visits during their session and indicates that visitors are engaged and looking for further information.
• SEO Rankings - the positions your site ranks in search results shows you how visible your content will be when your potential customers search for relevant terms. 
• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) - the cost of 1,000 impressions of a web page. This helps you understand how many users see your content and helps you to decide where to invest your budget for maximum visibility. 
• Bounce rate - shows you how many visitors leave your site without performing an action. High bounce rates mean you’re not driving the right traffic or engaging visitors enough. 

How to track KPIs and digital marketing results

So how do you track these KPIs and understand how you’re building awareness of your brand online? 

These are the top tools you need in your digital marketing toolkit:

• Ahrefs - this is a great tool for tracking your SEO rankings, where your website is ranking and the keywords it’s ranking for. You can also use it to see what your competitors are up to and see if there are any improvements you can make to your strategy. 
• Google Analytics - this will allow you to have a look at the numbers of people visiting your site, where they’re going and the pages they’re looking at. You can understand which of your channels are the most effective and which of your web pages are performing well.

Act (Decision making) 

When buyers are still weighing up their options, they will be viewing your content and ads and comparing them to other options. So, how do you measure the success of your activities in the decision making stage of the customer journey? 

• Clicks - this shows that visitors are engaging with your websites and are looking to trigger the next step in their journey. 
• Engagement rate - usually found on social media channels, this metric shows how involved your visitors are with your content. It can be measured by looking at comments, likes or shares on posts or pieces of content. 
• CPC (Cost per click) - this is the amount of money you pay in PPC to drive a click and make sure you’re targeting the right customers. 

How to track KPIs and digital marketing results

• Google Ads - this platform is where you run your PPC campaigns from and you’ll be able to track CPC and how many people are clicking on your ads through to your website. 
• Hootsuite - not only allows you to schedule posts across all of your channels and it will also show you the analytics and the number of people who are liking, commenting on and sharing your posts. 

Convert (Purchase)

Whether they’re purchasing online or offline, these marketing activities give you the chance to convert website visitors into paying customers. You can track conversions through the following metrics:

• Conversion rate - this is the number of people who complete a desired action compared to the total number of website visitors. A high conversion rate means you are targeting the right people and providing a good experience. 
• Cost per conversion - this is the total cost of a digital marketing activity in relation to the conversions it drives. Low cost means your activities are offering a good ROI.

Engage (Advocacy)

It costs less to gain repeat business from existing customers than it does to drive new customers so engaging existing customers is essential. But what should you be measuring?

• Referrals - referrals from existing customers helps to build trust with your customers and compels others to convert.

Wrap up

As you grow your business, you’re going to want to invest in digital marketing to make sure you’re seen by potential customers online but you want to know you’re getting the best results from your spend. This is essential for any business but even more so when budgets are tight. 

Following these tried and tested digital marketing strategies, and using the right tools to do so, will help you to develop and track a successful digital marketing strategy.

The result? Healthy, long-term sales pipelines.

If you’d like to find out more about digital marketing that can get results for your business, please get in touch on hello@logica-digital.co.uk.

Or, jump straight in and request a free digital marketing audit.

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