10 ways to supercharge your digital marketing right now

It isn’t easy to make your business stand out online, and digital marketing can be cloaked in mysterious acronyms and hard to use platforms. Even if you don’t have a huge marketing budget, there are some simple tactics you can use to improve your online presence and sell your products and services effectively online.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Brainstorm a list of keywords. Think of the top 20 – 50 keywords or phrases that best describe your business and review your website content against the list.

2. Create new content such as blogs, white papers or articles based on and closely themed around the topics missing from your current website and publish them over time. You'll have an instant content strategy and these posts will help build your visibility on Google, driving traffic for relevant keyword searches to your business.

3. Create an editorial calendar and use it as a plan for your social media posts. Get all your company events, industry conferences or exhibitions, speaking opportunities, client or partner events, marketing campaigns and notable product launches into an online diary, so you can plan social media posts before, during and after them and make the most of important moments for your business.

4. Head to Google Trends to see what is happening in your market. Google Trends can show you what the world is searching for and identify new or rising opportunities in your sector and locality. You can compare the popularity of brands over time and see what people are interested in right now.

5. Review the marketing tactics of your top 5 competitors. Never be afraid to take inspiration from the opposition. They have the same challenges as you and operate in a similar space. Think about whether there are companies competing with you, who are not exactly the same. You might be trying to gain a share of searches on Google with companies who only compete with you for one aspect of your business. Take the best of what competitors are doing and learn from their mistakes.

6. Follow your clients, partners, customers and competitors across your social media platforms. An easy way to gain followers is by following other relevant social media accounts. It also makes sense to understand what your competitors are doing and engage with what your partners and customers are interested in on social media. Social media should be a conversation and can be a customer service or research tool, as well as a place to sell and communicate.

7. Assess your best social media posts from the last month by reach and engagement (likes, retweets, shares etc) and work out what made the best posts resonate with your audience. Once you identify those patterns, then do more of those types of post to improve your social media over time.

8. Find the top 50 complaints, problems, questions or pain points for your customers and solve or address them using content. If you write about what your customers are struggling with and solve their issues, then you will attract more people with the same issues via search in the future. You'll be showing your company's expertise to a very relevant audience online.

9. Survey your customers - ask them what they want from you in the next year and what you are doing right and wrong now. A quick online survey using something like Survey Monkey, or on social can help you keep customers happy and develop relevant products and services.

10. Think about which actionable metrics are important to your business and create dashboards for them in Google Analytics, and on your ad platforms. Data is useless, if when it changes significantly, you don’t know what to do about that change. Pin down the essential online metrics for success, measure them and react accordingly.

Put a few of these strategies into action for your business and you will start to build your online community, boost sales and use data more effectively to get closer to your customers and understand them.

Barney Durrant is Managing Director of Bluebell Digital, a marketing consultancy helping clients to create effective and engaging online campaigns.

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