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What does it take to build and scale an effective digital marketing strategy? Here are three ways to delight and convert more customers online.

Good digital marketing doesn’t just involve investing in digital platforms like Facebook or Google. No matter the level of investment, or what other competitors are doing, you need to fully comprehend the spend’s value to the business, and how success will be measured, before you ‘splash the cash’.

To do this, you need to identify your success metrics – if you’re not defining success then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Let’s say you’ve got a food delivery business and your goal is to have 300 people who visit your site each month download your app. That’s a great start. You now have a defined action and a target figure. You can set benchmarks and begin digging to find out what the top-converting path is for that specific action. From there, you can begin testing how to get people onboard and move them along that path to engaging with your services.

Common success metrics include:

  • online sales

  • app downloads

  • phone calls resulting from specific campaigns

  • cost per lead or cost per response

  • harvesting of contact details for your database

  • social media engagement

The metric you choose will depend on the type of business you run and your current business strategy.

Then it’s time to up the ante. Here are my three tips to taking your digital marketing to the next level.

1. Include multiple levels of offer

Imagine you’re an insurance broker. Some of your site visitors will want a full quote, so for them you’ll need a detailed online application form to capture their data (and ask their permission to use it in your marketing) then provide them with automated feedback.

Others will simply be browsing for general costs for different services. For them you’ll need to provide a lighter, quicker experience capturing a few vital pieces of information to deliver a rough estimate.

Then there are those who don’t know what they want. For them you might need a live chat, or a clear call to action asking them to leave an email or phone number for a call back.

Your digital experience should service all types of customers.

Retailers who do this well offer pages containing multiple products that you can mouse-over for a larger image or click for a brief overview in the form of a pop-up. They include a different button to navigate to the specific product’s page containing deep, detailed information and reviews. Those who do it best, and for high-value items, have a pop-up offering live chat about the specific product or service being viewed.

2. Pilot your low-level marketing investments

If you’re implementing a marketing campaign that involves display ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads or re-targeting, don’t go all out and spend your entire budget in one hit. Get a feel for each type of campaign by piloting and testing them one at a time.

Find out what works for your industry or market, develop an understanding of cost per engagement or cost per response, then run the most successful campaign on a larger scale once it’s proven.

A customer who sees the same targeted messaging on email and in an ad is 22 per cent more likely to purchase from you. So once you launch your campaign, make sure you personalise content in email, SMS, on social and in served ads.

3. Never stop testing

Just having a website isn’t good enough. The only way to continuously increase traffic and, in turn, conversions, is to test and refine. Once you have some volume coming through, you need to be rigorously testing your offers, landing pages, home page, checkout system or what is relevant to your site.

How do you do this? There are many solutions to enable A/B testing, and even the most simple allow you to enter two different URLs, send 50% of your traffic to each, and find out which is most successful against a certain measure.

You can also invest in paid solutions to test more specific functions, like colour and placement of buttons, number of sections in forms, and more.

Finally, don’t underestimate the value of engaging an agency to conduct testing for you. Getting online conversion right is one of the most important factors for the health of a small to medium business, so don’t be afraid to reach out to an expert for help.

Your digital marketing strategy plays a key role in generating more leads for your business but it's only one part of the puzzle. Make sure you are making the most of every opportunity, download our free ebook ‘5 quick ways to clean up your sales and marketing pipeline’ today.