We work with folks everyday who have been tasked with improving the effectiveness of their brand's eCommerce strategy. And many start at a logical place, the website.
This is the foundation of your digital platform, no question about it. But if you build it alone, they will not come. Your digital strategy must go beyond the destination, and include effective tactics to reach and engage your audience across owned, earned and paid channels.
The strategy defines the approach, but the execution is just as critical. This is why we've partnered with Listrak, the only digital marketing automation platform distinctly designed for online and omnichannel retailers. Listrak provides powerful tools to orchestrate cross-channel experiences, manage the entire shopper journey, deliver true 1:1 personalization, and better understand trends that fuel significant growth.
Frequent Questions
In this wide-world of digital marketing, the opportunities and tactics can vary greatly. But even though this is true, the questions that our clients need answered have great similarity.
How do I get qualified traffic to my website?
Qualified is the operative word here. The wrong traffic inflates bounce rates, decreases conversion rates, wastes budget, and perhaps even most importantly, muddies the data that influences our decision-making. So we need the right traffic. We pair data intelligence and consumer insight to better define the audience and their online behaviors. Not just who they are, but how they use each channel and the emotional connection at each stage of their journey.
The traffic is there, but WHY AREN'T CUSTOMERS CONVERTING?
Let's think about this with the help of an all-to-common example. A customer searches Google for killer deals on a new television, and Google kindly provides results from relevant sources. While one brand sends this traffic to their homepage, another brand has created a unique landing page for this specific audience and for this specific offer. We don't even need to see the data to know who will come out on top here. See, the benefit of a better defined audience is that it allows us to craft messaging and experiences at each touchpoint that fuel engagement and drive action. From there, we constantly test different messaging and creative to identify statistically relevant winners. We call this Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), and if you're a commerce business you should be doing this in perpetuity.
How can I track the effectivEness of my organic search (SEO) efforts?
All aspects of your digital platform impact your search visibility. The keywords you use to get in front of the audience matter. The site architecture including urls, page titles and overall categorization of content matters. The landing page design and messaging matter. Your approach to social media impacts search factors as well. And it too matters. While there are many moving parts associated with your organic search strategy, the most important thing to understand is that organic search is no longer just about search engines and their robots. It's also about humans, and ensuring they can find what they seek as painlessly as possible. Organic search must influence your site design and development approach, and should be addressed during the site planning stage, not post-launch, and must be monitored and managed ongoing.
HOW MUCH MONEY SHOULD I SPEND ON PAID ADVERTISING?
First, let's get the house in order. Paying to drive traffic to your website if we haven't first optimized the experience for organic visibility, engagement and conversion is a waste of your budget and energy from our perspective. But now that we've said that, in the paid world budget is obviously king. If the paid search keywords that make the most sense have high competition or if the potential audience on Facebook is massive, this will obviously drive the budget up. But there are other opportunities, such as geo-targeting, Google Shopping, retargeting or interest and behavioral microtargeting, which allow us to effectively manage budget within a defined locale or target market. More bang for your buck, so to speak. We work with our clients to define the paid opportunity for the brand, including competitive research, keyword recommendations, targeting and bidding parameters, ad creative and messaging, and landing page assets, and the expected return on investment.
Let's Collaborate On Something Great!
If you'd like to explore digital marketing strategies that will improve reach, fuel engagement and drive action, take a moment to provide some additional detail below. A member of our team will be in touch shortly.