2014 Essentials
Your 2014 Web Marketing Plan
As web and mobile marketing continue to evolve, so do your opportunities for reaching more of your ideal customers and building your business.
Here’s what you should focus on in 2014.
Your mobile website.
By 2014 most of the traffic to your website will come from a mobile device, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker.
Other studies have shown that mobile users are more likely to buy if your site is mobile optimized, and more likely to leave immediately if it’s not.
If you don’t get a mobile website up this year you are literally just handing off your customers to your competition.
No matter how much money you throw at SEO (search engine optimisation,) no matter how much time you spend on social media marketing like Facebook and Twitter, no matter how many resources you dedicate to blogging and online video, if your site isn’t mobile compatible you will lose business.
Improve your SEO, especially for the locals.
No matter how popular Facebook gets, or how much traffic Pinterest generates, people still turn to Google (and to a lesser degree, Bing,) to find stuff.
If you generate a good portion of your business locally, you really need to step up your local SEO in 2014.
Visit GetListed.org and make sure that your company is listed in all the local databases that power the web. You can “claim” your listing, and thus take control of it.
Once you have control of your listing you can update your information, post photos and videos, and take other steps that will increase your visibility for local search (which puts you in front of even more mobile users…see above section.
And whatever your take on Google+ may be, most search experts agree that Google+ Local (formerly Google Places), can help business’s local search visibility. In short, go visit Google+ Local and make sure your business is listed there.
Rethink your social media marketing.
Maybe 2014 isn’t the year for adding another social media platform to your marketing mix. Maybe it’s the year for dropping one.
What if you quietly dropped your Twitter account, or stopped making videos?
Or, if you’ve been investing all your time into Facebook, with nothing to show for it, maybe it’s time to rethink your priorities.
If you can drop one or more platforms without losing business, maybe you can reinvest that time into forming deeper relationships with the customers that matter more on the platforms they spend the most time on.
Build your email list.
Nothing is sexier than a big opt-in list. :)
You will always get the best ROI from your email list, so focus the rest of your marketing on getting people to sign up for it.
Here are a few tips for building your email list:
- Appreciate that most people don’t want to sign up for “yet another email newsletter,” so use “email bait” to persuade them. It could be a white paper download, entry to a raffle, or discounts in your store.
- Make the calls to action for your email signup more obvious, and place them in multiple spots on your webpages.
- Use social media and offer free webinars as ways of building your list.
- Create landing (aka squeeze) pages that focus on converting visitors into subscribers.
- Deliver amazing content, since every email newsletter is an invitation to unsubscribe from your list.
Takeaways
By following a few simple steps, 2014 is going to be a banner year for growing your business.
Start by attracting more qualified traffic to your website by improving your local and organic search visibility. Then, refocus your attention on the social media platforms that are actually delivering leads and traffic.
Finally, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly in preparation for the 2014 mobile tipping point, and use that mobile-friendly site to turn more visitors into email subscribers.
If you need help with developing or executing your own web marketing plan please contact us.