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SEO Checklist 2023 to boost your search ranking

SEO Tips

SEO services are known as a hack for web owners.

MarketingGuru is a full-service digital marketing agency in Thailand that notably specializes in SEO services across regional and global companies.

We serve digital marketing services to clients from different industries and business experiences with measurable results. Over 50+ Clients are happy to contract with us because of the 200% of ROI.

However, organic keywords are not always key! From our expertise in SEO services, we will discuss Other crucial elements to be a top-search in Google ranking below.

  1. Improve website usability 

First of all, website architecture matters for either customers or Google easily navigate. Whereas, it is a first impression that influences visitors to stay on your site instead of clicking the red x button of a window without action. Unorganized themes and layouts evenly decrease their trust and credibility. 

Web owners may use Google Analytics and Google Console to track users’ behavior and what information they are looking for to drive digital marketing effectiveness. Also, you can keep your site accessibility and availability :

  • Make it crawlable to get detected by robots
  • Visual sitemaps to plan your page
  • Consistency, simplicity and accurate

  1. Check site speed 

Presently, Responsiveness is a big concern to be one of the ranking factors by Google and repeat business. Customers are prone to feel confused and frustrated and abandon your site if they are not able to see and connect with content quickly. Don’t make them wade through a slow experience! Keep Testing your site speed and check if it works well with any different devices, locations and operating systems.

Here are some tips to speed up your site

  • Use external CSS/JavaScript and code
  • Optimized graphics and video size 
  • Apply browser caching
  • Minimize an iframes

  1. Find your competitors

Our Digital Marketing agency helps clients to outstanding competitors by utilizing SEO services. These tools will bring analysis of competitors’ offerings, marketing strategies and target markets. Additionally, medium-tail or long-tail keywords entail support pages and compare what needs to be improved. Also, researching new ideas like relevant keywords in the same category. Though, be unique as a way of attracting potential customers.

  1. Assess your content, always

Content evaluation is of considerable importance whilst marketing algorithm updates are ever-changing. Content creators and Digital Marketing agencies need to follow and implement search rater’s guidelines. This assessment ensures that content resonates with your audience and provides solutions for customers’ pain points. Determine your content: Does it trustworthy and provide value to visitors from search engines viewpoints? Does it feed high-quality and up-to-date information?

Poor content can cause serious damage to your audience’s experiences besides bad design or slow page loading. Lots of advertisements or spammy links from other sites are not a bright idea either. As is known, SEO services facilitate users to find keywords that are relevant to your title and target. You can get the most out of those words to attract more traffic and engagement for free with When organic keywords optimization.

Common elements to create top-quality content:

  • Know keyword intent to increase conversion rate
  • Help the reader to navigate easier to find what they are headed
  • Verify what types of pages you want to display
  • Understand Google algorithms and make them brief, guided and accurate

Apart from content quality, meta-description quality should not be ignored.

  1. Link buildings

Regarding SEO services, off-page SEO is another of the most powerful search engines. specifically, it brings a huge traffic boost to your website directly. Considering, the core of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Your ranking depends on quality of the content rather than quantity. Although linking is contemporarily and competitive use the right tool such as LinkAssistant to source leads and search for potential links. Furthermore, utilisation of white hat techniques avoid the risk of penalty. Besides, natural links will fuel brand awareness.

301 and 302 redirects, for instance, have just deemed no harm to SEO because they can elevate PageRank and traffic efficiently. Especially, in the right place – visual content displayed on Facebook and Pinterest. Next, specify “Canonical URL “ to clog duplicate content and Google from index one of them.

  1. Create a robot.txt File

  1. Fix technical SEO issues

Keep in mind that having SEO issues without knowing it is a complete waste of money. We understand that nobody wants to lash out at the Digital Marketing budget due to labeled crawl equity in Google. As well as company ROI and marketing goals are blocked.

Perpetually check and update your site links that may indirectly cause a budget issue. Broken links, long redirect chains and redirect issues cease a crawler from visiting your website as they imply your content is low quality. Such links damage bounce rate, company reputation and relationship with Google. Again, Users may concerned about whether your company is reliable or not.

  1. Track and measure SEO KPIs

Finally, Key Performance Indicators for SEO are a basis for any marketing companies and agencies. It gauges their progress to make better decisions on campaigns. Moreover, remarkable outgrowth helps to maintain customer retention and perceived value.

Google Analytics and Google console even more improve ability and provide insight from CTR (click-through rate), conversion on your landing page and customer engagement. Which is difficult to measure. Use analysis on keyword performance to have a deeper understanding of marketing projects.

  • Traffic
  • Backlinks
  • Conversions

MarketingGuru digital marketing agency is ready to professionally enhance your web ranking to be a top search in Thailand!

We provide free consulting for full-stop marketing services in Thailand, Contact us today!

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How To Go About Creating an Email Marketing Strategy

Marketing

The most important element of an email marketing strategy is the relationship between you and your audience. Do they trust you? Do they know who you are? 

According to Statista, roughly 281 billion emails are sent every single day. This number is predicted to grow to 347 billion emails daily by 2023.

There is no doubt that email marketing is still playing a huge role as part of digital marketing strategies. This is why today we will be writing about how to create an email marketing strategy.

Even former President Obama was using email marketing which led to his success in the 2012 Presidential election.

An opt-in page for Obama’s email marketing strategy

So, to help you win more customers the way President Obama won the election, we will be looking at some email marketing strategies. Then, you will be able to find ones to incorporate into your business.

1. Personalization

Personalization tactics are key to increasing your customer experience. One of the best email strategy, or any digital marketing strategy these days, are the use of personalization. Research has found that an average of 71% of consumers express frustration when their shopping experience is not personalized.

One example is adding your recipient’s name in the email. For example, instead of “Dear valued customer,” use “Dear Steven,”. 

Another way to personalize your emails is by recommending your products to the customer based on their purchase history. This will help you cater products to your audience.

This kind of strategy can be implemented using email marketing tools such as MailChimp.

2. Subscriber Segmentation

Market segmentation is a huge part of all marketing planning. Subscriber segmentation is the same. The more you know your customer and the more you are able to cater to them, the better your chances of delivering better customer experiences by incorporating the right content to them. By segmenting different kinds of customers, you can deliver an email marketing strategy that will best suit them. Here are a few ways you can segment your audiences:

  • Industry – Let’s say you are a retailer and your target customer is a business that sells computer hardware. Your email campaigns will receive a much higher engagement rate if you send them emails recommending computer hardware compared to sending the same email to a business that sells books.
  • Company size – By segmenting with company size or annual revenue, you can market certain levels of B2B product or service depending on the business’ capacity. 
  • Sales cycle – Buyers who are in their earlier stages will likely be less receptive to an aggressive sales pitch or product demos. However, they will likely appreciate information on industry research. In contrast to buyers deeper in the cycle, they are likely to respond better to free trial offers or product webinars. 

3. Mobile-Friendly Emails

Emails opened on mobile devices account for 46% of all email opens and the number is growing. This is exactly why your emails should be mobile friendly as it will tremendously add value to customers in your email marketing strategy.

Half of all promotional emails sent to customers are still desktop-oriented. Therefore, you will be further ahead from your competitors just by implementing responsive design in your email marketing strategy.

It had also been found that 55% of smartphone users make at least 1 purchase after receiving a mobile promotional email.

However, while simply sending emails alone can be effective, you can increase the effectiveness even more by optimizing your emails. Here are some ways you can optimize your emails for better conversions as part of your email marketing strategy:

  • Implementing responsive email design – most email service providers already provide you with the solution as part of their features.
  • Keep subject line and pre-headers short and simple – Subject lines can make or break your email open rate. Don’t let your emails go to waste by implementing an attractive subject line. You can look at ones in your own email box for some examples of a good subject line.
  • Include a Call-To-Action (CTA) – Make sure that CTAs in your emails are noticeable whether they are viewing the emails on desktops, mobiles, or tablet devices. Make your CTA big and bold.

Tip: 41% of marketers say that email is the most effective method in sending offers to mobile consumers during holiday shopping seasons.

4. Automate Email Campaigns

Email marketing automation should be set up when possible.

These are trigger-based emails that are automatically sent out to users who signed up after showing certain user behaviors. One of the most common trigger emails are ‘welcome’ emails, ‘thank you’ emails and ‘transactional’ emails.

According to Campaign Monitor, automated emails generate up to 320% more revenue compared to non-automated ones.

The reason why automated emails perform so well in an email marketing strategy is because of the context. It is the middle ground between transactional emails and direct marketing emails.

For example, let’s say you visit an eCommerce store. You’ve added some items to the cart but started to grow some doubts and decided not to complete the purchase.

With email marketing automation, you will receive an email for the product you were shopping for just an hour later. Your interest in the item will likely grow because of it. Imagine if there were a link back to your shopping cart and a free shipping code or a 10% discount code for the order? You’re likely to go back to complete the purchase.

This is why trigger emails are so powerful. Setting it up does not have to be expensive or complex either. You can simply start with any one of the auto-responders out there today.

Conclusion

Having an email marketing strategy will provide you with a better way to connect with customers and grow your ROI. Keep in mind that if all your emails are about selling your product, it is less likely to sell unless your audience trusts you enough to deliberately sign up and be on your mailing list for the sake of receiving promotions.

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The Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends in 2020 You MUST Know to Stay Competitive

Digital Trends

The digital marketing landscape is one that is ever changing and constantly evolving. As the new decade starts, digital marketers must learn how to adapt and stay ahead of the curve in order to thrive in the competitive digital marketing landscape. We enter this new decade a smartphone obsessed society, with people spending an average of over 3 hours a day on their smartphones. This reliance on smartphone brings about opportunities and new ways digital marketers can explore to better reach their customers. In this article, we will discuss the quintessential trends for digital marketers to understand to succeed in the upcoming year.

1. Voice Search

“Alexa, where can I find the nearest Thai restaurant?”. Questions like these will become more common with people demanding more convenience from their smart devices. These voice enabled devices act as an assistant to help people in searching for products online.

Voice technology has already been a significant force in the search engine domain. Google announced in 2016 that 20% of the searches it has received have voice intent. This figure has grown to a predicted staggering 50% of searches in 2020.  Furthermore, it is predicted that by 2022, 40% of a surveyed population by Capgemini would prefer using a voice assistant as opposed to manual search.

There are actionable steps that us digital marketers can take to capitalize on the trend of voice assistants. Digital marketers can shift their focus of targeting shorter keywords to targeting long-tail keywords instead. This is important for targeting users of voice search because of the way they are likely to search for the things. For instance, users will search with full sentences when speaking. Like: “Can I find out what’s the best digital marketing agency in my area?” instead of typing “Best Digital Marketing Agency near me”. This would change up the game for digital marketers as they have to now look at more long tail keywords to target.

Additionally, there are companies like Jetson.ai that help businesses craft and transform their online marketplace into a fully voice search integrated one. Allowing consumers to buy from your site using only their voice. Below is a video of Jetson in action.

With these statistics showing the move of consumers to voice search and purchasing, capitalizing on voice technology with these tools and tips is paramount to a digital marketer’s success in 2020.

2. Diversifying Marketing on Social Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. These are the most renowned social media platforms that come to mind when people talk about social media marketing. However, what they fail to notice is the trend of companies seeking to do their marketing on other platforms and increasing their engagement by doing so.

Take for example: TikTok. TikTok is a social short-form mobile video platform where users can share their self-produced entertainment content. TikTok is a rising star in social media marketing, with an impressive download volume of 614 million in a single year, outmuscling established competitors like Instagram. TikTok’s growth can also be seen in its sudden growth in ad spending, growing 75 times from May 2019 to November 2019 in the span of only half a year.

Pinterest is also another emerging platform for companies to marketing their products, especially for companies that have females as their target demographic. Presently, Pinterest have a monthly active user base of over 300 million users, with 70% of these users being female. Pinterest is great for digital marketers to share their visual content, ideas and style inspiration.

In 2020, with these emerging alternative social media platforms, it is important for you as a digital marketer to keep up with the trends and appropriately use the different varieties of social media platform to effectively capture your target audience’s attention. Choose wisely and market smartly!

3. Personalized Marketing

Let’s face it, if you’re an online retailing site, you would be more than glad to have 15% of your visitors converting into customers. But the fact of the matter is that it is highly likely that you’re only going to see about 1 – 5% of your site’s traffic convert into customers. This most likely has got nothing to do with your marketing efforts being low quality or that your products are uninteresting.

The likely reason for why your visitors leave your site is probably because the messages they see on your website don’t resonate with them. To curb this issue and possibly boost conversions, you would have to make use of personalized marketing tools to ensure that your visitors needs are satisfied.

One very good example of a company that does personalization well are companies like Asos, End Clothing and Amazon. These companies make it a point to track your buying patterns and show things that you are likely to buy based on your cached buying and product viewing history. Additionally, they notify customers through e-mail on deals that they think are of interest to them. 

To make the best of this trend as a digital marketer, tools such as OptinMonster and Barilliance could help your company to create personalized exit intent pop-ups and even personalized floating headers to promote relevant deals and sales to customers that are deemed interested. By tapping on this trend of personalized marketing, you could bring your digital marketing game to the next level as well as see your conversion rates soar. With companies seeing a sales increase of over 50% after utilizing such personalized marketing tools.

Personalized marketing is the future and will become commonplace in the future of e-commerce and digital marketing. Mark our words.

4. Augmented Reality Content

The future of ecommerce is in augmented reality. Shoppers want to be able to experience and feel what an object looks like in their space or on them without even having to leave the house. The amount of convenience this could bring to them as well as enhance their shopping experience is insurmountable. 

AR being an upcoming trend is also backed by consumers’ sentiments as surveys have shown that 70% of consumers believing that AR could bring them benefits and 67% of media planners wanting AR in their digital marketing campaigns.

Presently, we are seeing furniture companies like IKEA implementing AR successfully into their online stores. Customers can use the AR function to see how a piece of furniture would look like in their living space! This helps to bring more trust and satisfaction in the consumer shopping experience. The level of immersion brought by AR can help to create a shopping experience that is hard for competitors not using it to replicate, helping your business appeal better to potential customers.

5. Automated Advertising Campaigns Optimization

AI and machine-learning are powerful tools that we as digital marketers should make full use of. There are algorithms designed to help ease our digital marketing journey by optimizing our online advertising campaign.

There are software out there like SmartyAds and SalesForce Marketing Cloud, that are able to help you with your online advertising. Automating tasks and processes such as the keyword bidding process to even helping with personalizing your emails to each client.

By acquiring the service of such software, you’ll free up valuable time as a digital marketer to do tasks that robots and algorithms can’t perform. Automation is the way to go in terms of making your digital marketing campaigns more effective in the future.

Still Can’t Figure Out How To Strategize in 2020?

Fret not! Our gurus at MarketingGuru are here to help your company with campaigns and digital marketing strategies. We have a team of creative and trendy gurus who are consistently in the know with regards to marketing trends. To find out more about our services you can head over to our site! As a full service digital marketing agency we are experts in not just SEO, but also in Social Media and Pay Per Click marketing as well.

You can get a FREE SEO AUDIT from our expert gurus by dropping in an email to us. We wish you all the very best in your 2020 marketing endeavours!

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12 Holiday Marketing Trends You Should Know as a Marketer

Digital Trends

Tis’ the season to be selling! The holiday season is here again and companies are looking for opportunities to market their products to consumers who are more willing to spend because of the festive mood. 

To prepare you for the festive season, our gurus at MarketingGuru will be sharing with you 12 Christmas Marketing Trends and Campaigns that you need to know to greatly boost your holiday season business

1. 80% of Shoppers Stated Internet as the Greatest Influence for Purchase

Digital Marketing Influence for Consumer Purchase

Based on a survey conducted by WordStream, it was found that 8 in 10 shoppers in the holiday season cited the internet as their greatest influence for making a purchase.

If anything, this statistic proves how pivotal the use of online marketing is for the festive season. If you own a business, it is of paramount importance to optimize your website to gain exposure to the aforementioned 8 in 10 customers.

Find out more about how you can optimize your website to capture their attention from this article or get a FREE SEO audit courtesy of the gurus at MarketingGuru (Yes, we are playing Santa Claus right now!).

2. The Usage of Facebook/Instagram Stories for Holiday Marketing

Instagram Stories Usage for Holiday Marketing

Another important trend that should be remembered by marketers for holiday season marketing is the use of Facebook or Instagram stories as a tool for marketing their products.

Facebook’s 2019 Holiday Marketing Guide, highlighted how window shopping for products has seen  a shift to shopping through stories. Based on Facebook’s survey on consumers, 69% of people surveyed expressed that stories are a favorable way of helping them become familiar with new brands or services and 62% become more interested in brands or products after seeing them in stories. With these statistics, it has become very evident that the importance of marketing through Facebook or Instagram stories is high and that if your brand hasn’t already started utilizing these means of marketing, you’re missing out.

In case you’ve missed it, we have an article that helps guide you if you’re unaware of the potential mistakes that you may make when using Facebook for advertising. Hopefully this helps as you venture into Facebook and Instagram stories marketing.

3. Effectiveness of Email Marketing

Email Marketing Effectiveness for Holiday Season

As old-school as the notion of using emails to get to your customer may sound, the figures have shown that email marketing is still king during the holiday sales period. Klayvio’s research has shown that 27% of holiday spending during promotions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes as a result of email marketing. This is also further backed by how email has seen a higher conversion rate as opposed to organic searches and social media marketing. This just goes to show that as a smart marketer, you MUST capitalize on email marketing now to capture more of your audience. Time to start sending out these promotional emails to your customers!

4. Mobile: The go-to consumer purchase channel

Picture for Mobile Platform being the preferred holiday season channel

The smart phone is a very convenient way for consumers to access and shop on the internet. The World Advertising and Research Centre (WARC) has predicted that 72% of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025. Hence, it is no surprise that mobile shopping dominates the holiday season as the preferred consumer purchase channel for online shopping.

Mobile purchases accounted for 54.3% of all visits to retail stores for Cyber Monday in 2018 and this amounted to $2.2 billion in sales. 66% of consumers also used their mobile devices to make purchase decisions during the holiday season.

What this means for marketers is that they must be able to ensure that their websites are mobile device friendly. This could be achieved by ensuring that your website has a responsive web design, which allows your website to fit a variety of screens of different sizes. It is important to invest in making your website mobile friendly, not just for the holiday seasons, as Google’s mobile-first index allows websites with a mobile version to be shown first. By making your site mobile friendly would help to optimize it for Google’s search engine.

5. Mobile Page Load Speed KILLS Conversion

Google Pagespeed

Statistics have shown that during the holiday season, a slow mobile page load speed could cause a drop of up to 20% conversion for every second of delay. Losing sales of such volume due to an unoptimized mobile site is costly to businesses looking to thrive in the holiday season. As such, marketers cannot just solely focus on promotions and forget about the basics of site performance!

Google Pagespeed Analytics Opportunities for SEO
Google PageSpeed Insights’ Analysis

One tip we could give for marketers looking to optimize their website for the holiday season is to run their domain URL through Google’s PageSpeed insights. This allows for them to receive a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 from Google of their website’s performance. An analysis of the causes and opportunities for increasing load speed of the mobile page will also be given when the website’s URL is tested. This should help in solving load speed issues and help to reduce such unnecessary losses.

6. Cyber Monday II: The Hidden Gem

Cyber Monday 2: Sales Opportunity Online Marketing

If you somehow have not prepared your business for Christmas season, fret not because there is a great opportunity that can still be tapped on for increased online sales. Introducing, Cyber Week II, the week where consumers flock online to treat themselves after the tens to hundreds of gift cards they received as Christmas gifts.

Cyber Week II starts on Christmas Day, with Cyber Monday being the Monday that follows it. During the 2017 holiday season, it was discovered that in the week after Christmas, consumers have an Average Order Value increase of 28% from Christmas week and the weeks before that.

With this, we hope that you are able to use this information to sustain and planning out your marketing campaigns for the holiday season, making it stretch past Christmas or if you have missed out on it, take advantage of the post holiday period!

7. The Impact of Personalization

Picture of Personalized Letter

In an Evergage report on personalization, 70% of surveyed marketers have said that personalization has a “strong” or “very strong” impact on their company advancing customer relationships. This trend is especially important in the holiday season when there will be a barrage of email or mobile marketing deals coming from different companies

To stand out from this barrage of holiday deals bombarded at consumers, marketers need to know how to personalize. An example of this could be to use the information on your customer’s browsing history on your site to send them appropriate deals regarding the products they have been looking for. This helps to capture their attention as your company provides them with what they need conveniently, making you stand out from the pack.

8. Retarget Your Customers

Customer Retargeting Online Marketing

Retargeting of customers is to target your customers who might have products from your site on your cart or browsed your website for a significant amount of time only to have bounced in the end. It is especially important to retarget your customers during the holiday seasons as certain products that may be of interest to these customers may be on sales during the holiday period.

SoftwareAdvice’s statistics on retargeting has shown that customers are 70% more likely to convert when retargeted with display ads. This statistic is further backed by how click-through rates of retargeted ads are 10x higher than the click-through rate of the initial display ad.

With so many customers being more receptive and impulsive to buying products during the holiday season, retargeting them would be appropriate, especially since there is a chance that the products they were interested in previously may be on sales.

9. Guide Your Consumers

Consumer Guide Online Marketing

Research from SearchEngineLand has shown that consumers want direction when shopping for gifts in the holiday season. Shoppers were 1.98 times more likely to be browsing a gift guide to find compelling ideas for gifts to their loved ones. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as it is a very common scenario to be out of ideas for gifting!

Marketers should come up with content like gift catalogues or ideas for their business’s products in the holiday season in order to give guidance and direction for these lost consumers, in turn creating higher conversion for their companies.

10. Secret Santa!

secret santa picture for online holiday marketing article
Secret Santa surprises. Christmas celebration in the office

Christmas season means a whole lot of Secret Santa and Gift Exchanges from consumers, be it within their family or the companies they work at. Usually these events have a specified budget such that the participants would know how much they would have to spend minimally.

What this means for marketers is that when optimizing your companies website to prepare for Christmas sales, you should focus on using meta tags, descriptions and alternate image texts that involve price points. Content like Secret Santa gift ideas and catalogues could also be created in order to drive higher traffic to your website during the period. This is affirmed by SearchEngineLand’s keyword research on Secret Santa during the holiday period, which shows that multiple of the top searched queries involved a price point.

11. Free over Fast

free shipping vector for online holiday marketing article
free shipping boy. vector illustration

While there may be an urgency for getting gifts in this holiday season, consumers still have a preference for free shipping over fast shipping during this period. In a survey by Etsy conducted for consumers for 6 major countries (China, France, Germany, Japan, UK and USA), at least 52% of the surveyed from each of these countries have expressed that they’d prefer free over fast shipping. This is further backed by how Comscore found that about 80% of the transactions made on desktop during the holiday season, included free shipping.

The implication of this for marketers in the holiday season is that they have to be able to set a threshold price for free shipping that is reasonable enough for consumers to want to spend that amount and for their company to not be losing money from providing the free shipping. Free shipping seems to be a qualifying factor for consumers to consider shopping from a company nowadays during the holiday season.

12. Local Search Presence

google my business banner for holiday online marketing article

Having your business listed in the Google local listing directory by using Google My Business is critical in the holiday period. Statistics have shown that 50% of users on mobile platforms have visited a store within one day of doing the local search during the holiday period.

Marketers must know to take advantage of this statistic by optimizing their websites such that shoppers looking for a local store via Google can easily find their website. This in turn will help in boosting the website’s SEO performance as well as increase traffic from people around the shops area.

Conclusion

And on the 12th day of Christmas, MarketingGuru gave to you, 12 top trends that you should know as a marketer. Now that you are equipped with this information, go out there and get those customers for your company this festive season!

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B2B-Roadmap_square_logo

The B2B Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap To Maximize ROI

Digital Marketing Tricks

Understanding Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital transformation has overtaken the world in the past five years, changing the way we think, learn, inform, and buy. This change not only affects B2C businesses but it is making waves for those in B2B as well. Today’s wildly successful B2B brands have welcomed digital transformation into their marketing strategies and can be seen reaping the benefits. A stellar example comes in the form of HupSpot’s LinkedIn sonspored ads campaign that were meant to attract small to medium sized businesses. The results showed 400% more leads within their target audience. Other big B2B brands such as Shopify, Upwork and Dropbox are also leveraging the power of digital marketing to enhance their lead generation tactics.

Source: LinkedIn

While B2B marketing has always been challenging, today’s landscape gives birth to a whole new set of fast paced challenges that many B2B brands are struggling to catch up with. Technology has allowed B2B buyers to have unlimited access to information through multiple mobile devices at any time. This changes the buyer journey and opening up new channels of communication.

Navigating through this ever changing landscape can be a challenge – even for the best of brands. That is why we have compiled the ultimate roadmap to build a B2B digital marketing strategy that is fit to succeed in the modern B2B landscape. This B2B Digital Marketing Strategy roadmap that will maximize ROI and lead your B2B brand to maximise ROI.

If you would like to find out more on how to build a digital marketing strategy, head over to one of our article on digital marketing strategy.

Understanding Digital Marketing Strategies

The modern B2B buyer is much like a B2C consumer as their buying decisions are largely motivated by customer experience rather than the price. This requires B2B brands to take an experiential approach that leads the target audience through a digital journey to lifelong loyalty.

Despite these similarities, there are still some key differences. Read our the key differences between B2B and B2C Digital Marketing article to find out more.

The Roadmap Process Explained

Our B2B marketing strategy roadmap targets the five essential components of a successful digital marketing campaign. This includes website, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and online advertisements. Read on to find out the importance of each one.

1.  A High Performance Website

Your website is much like a first impression for potential clients, making it the most valuable marketing asset. According to research, 80% of people examine websites in order to check out new service providers. These numbers are bound to rise as more millennials and Gen-Z buyers enter the market.

MarketingGuru’s Website

An effective website needs to have the right design, informative and relevant content that captures attention. Here are some main points to keep in mind while optimizing a website for lead generation and sales:

  • Ensure Fast Response Times: Eternally loading websites can be a huge turnoff. According to surveys, 40% users leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
  • Security Comes First: Unsecured sites are a big red flag for users and research suggests that 85% customers are averse to browsing an unsecured site. Avoid this by purchasing as SSL certificate for your website.
  • Make It Mobile Friendly:  In a world where 70% of all online traffic comes from mobile, a smooth mobile experience speaks for itself. Furthermore, 50% B2B queries originate from smartphones as buyers are more likely to choose vendors who have a mobile-friendly website experience.
  • Give Actionable Information: Your website is more than a long winded introduction to your services. It is a 24 hour sales opportunity which require actionable information like clear CTAs, contact forms, past projects, testimonials and affiliations to guide the buyer in the right direction.
  • Professional Design: Poor design and navigation capabilities repel buyers. Websites need to be pleasing to look at and easy to navigate. 
  • Get Your Message Across: 46% buyers abandon a website because it is not clear what the company does. Sometimes your message can get lost in the web design. Provide relevant content that highlights your core services so buyers don’t feel confused.

2.  SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a growing field of interest that can generate leads and sales by really pushing your content and website forward. If you are unfamilar about SEO, head on to digest our 9 point simple SEO guide first. There are two primary components of SEO:

On-Site SEO helps search engines find your website through keyword phrases to produce relevant search results. These ensure that if B2B buyers are looking for your type of services, search engines can redirect them to your website or content.

Offsite SEO provides backlinks to your website in the form of outside engagement or guest appearances on other websites. Backlinks can increase your credibility and establish authority in the field while bringing in networking opportunities.

By networking, getting featured on other websites and generating more traffic, you can establish yourself as a credible source to get higher rankings on search engine results. SEO can be integrated into your content strategy to bring more visitors and put your company in the limelight.

3.  Content Marketing

Content marketing is a multi-dimensional area which consists of blogs, press releases, videos, social media content, articles, ebooks and much more. B2B buyers are increasingly relying on digital content to make their buying decisions easier. 75% B2B buyers think that content has a direct impact on their buying decisions.

Here are some content marketing areas that businesses are focusing on to get the best results.

  • Blog Posts: Blogs are a fantastic way to get your message across while providing helpful information and establishing your expertise. Buyers can gain insight on your work as they read relevant blogs that empathize with their problems and identify how to solve them. Blogs which connect to the buyers’ struggles and present it in an engaging manner are highly popular among B2B buyers.
  • Social Media Posts: Social media is an effective way to not only get customers but build an audience. Building an audience ensures that there are people who follow you for the content and remain loyal to keep coming back for you.
  • Infographics: Most people appreciate visual imagery as it can condense complicated information into an attractive visual. Infographics are the ideal way to present information and capture attention
  • E-books: E-books are also a content marketing strategy that is surprisingly effective when they include actionable information such as checklists, guides and tips that impart wisdom.

4.  Online Ads

Online ads may be the first thing that puts your company in the direct line of sight. Online ads can be in the form of text, imagery or videos displayed on frequently visited platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and other websites. These online ads have now become highly sophisticated to allow for targeted advertising that reaches the most relevant customers. Apart from contextual advertising, online ads target consumers even when they are distracted so they can recall your company without ever clicking or focusing on the actual ad.

Google advertising is a popular form of online advertising. The benefits of Google pay-per-click advertising should not be underestimated.

5.  Social Media Marketing

Social media has emerged as the ultimate tool for B2B marketing that can help in lead generation, branding, establishing authority and building an audience. Social media allows you to deliver a constant stream of targeted content that keeps your company relevant and entertains a loyal audience.

Here are some common types of social media posts that are most popular for businesses:

  • Blogs
  • Digital Seminars (webinars) or events
  • Attractive statistics and facts
  • Industry related news
  • Informative one minute videos

While a multi-channel approach is usually preferred, picking your social media platforms wisely can help you build a strategy for your type of business. All social media channels may not suit your brand but LinkedIn is a must for all B2B services. In fact, 80% of B2B leads originate from LinkedIn. So if you are a B2B business, having an active presence on LinkedIn is essential.

A Final Note

The digital world is an opportunity to start anew and target an even larger audience than ever before. As the world moves towards digital, sticking with the old approaches means risking your B2B business. Embrace the digital wave with a marketing strategy of your own through effective SEO, PPC and social media marketing that can take your B2B business to the next level.

Digital marketing strategies are all about innovation, so don’t be afraid to step out of the comfort zone and enhance the B2B buyer’s experience to maximize ROI and gain loyal customers. Use digital platforms to market your B2B agendas, learn from businesses and create new communication channels to help your business achieve greater heights.

Are you trying to build a B2B digital marketing strategy that works? MarketingGuru provide SEO, PPC and social media marketing services that can give your B2B business the desired competitive edge. Speak to one of our gurus today!

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How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Business?

Digital Marketing Tricks

Let’s face it. In today technological advanced world, every business has at least a website and some form of social media presence. What is more important is having an effective strategy to integrate all your digital assets.

What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Whenever digital marketing is mentioned, SEO or PPC advertising are often among the first few jargon that comes to mind. For those who are not aware, they are acronyms for Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising. However, many seldom mention and discus about establishing a digital marketing strategy.

“The series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business.”

Digital Marketing Strategy
HubSpot Blog

 

According to HubSpot, digital marketing strategy “the series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business”.

That’s a huge bunch of words. In short, it is simply how you are going to achieve your objectives by leveraging on your digital assets such as your website or social media accounts.

Why Your Business Needs A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Having mentioned that most business owns a website and a couple of social media accounts means that your competitors are also able to level the playing field. Hence, the only way to stay competitive is to have an effective digital marketing strategy to achieve your objectives.

Some may argue that there are other forms of marketing and digital marketing is just one of them. That may be true, but digital advertising spending is set to overtake traditional in the United States. This underscore the importance of not only having a credible brand image but also the strategy.

The trend in many small and mid-market companies is to outsource various areas of web development, marketing and graphic design to agencies. This fact makes it more important to understand your own strategy. A digital marketing strategy not only convey a unified message to your audience but also helps to establish a reliable brand image.

How To Develop Your Own Digital Marketing Strategy?

For those not in the marketing industry, it may seem like an uphill battle to craft a digital marketing strategy. Don’t let the word ‘strategy’ scare you off. The steps outline in this article can be applied for both large and small companies.

Step 1: Identify your objective and goals

This step should be obvious since nailing down your objectives and goals will help you determine how your digital marketing objective contribute to your overall business objectives. For example, if the business objective is to increase revenue by 50%, your digital marketing goal would possibly be to increase leads from your website by at least 50%. By having a quantitative goal, it helps to determine the best tactics to be successful.

Step 2: Analyze your past campaigns

Chances are that your business has done a digital campaign previously. By identifying the past mistakes and results, it can provide useful insights and help focus the marketing resources.  Based on the insights, you may need to revisit step 1 and change your goal.

For instance, after analyzing your leads from your digital assets, you discover that most came from Facebook. Hence, you may want to focus on a KPI regarding Facebook such as increasing Facebook followers by 30%.

Step 3: Identify your target audience persona

Every business will not be profitable without their customers. Hence, it is of utmost importance for a business to know their key customer groups and their profile. This includes identifying their demographic and psychographics attributes. A simple way to build your audience persona is to take a look at your Google Analytics’ Audience Reports and identify the key characteristics such as age, sex, career, etc.

Step 4: Identify your means

At this junction, it is important to identify three aspect: budget, digital channels and your team. It is important to determine if you have the required budget need to achieve your goals. This could be done by using historical data of your past campaigns to create a forecast of the results. Most importantly, you should also allocate your budget to each channel you intend to use.

This is also the best time to do an audit of your digital channels. You may want to focus more on a certain channel or even explore new channels you haven’t explored in the past. You may also want to evaluate if A/B testing should be implemented for certain channels. If KPI has not been set for each individual channel, it may also be a good time to do so.

The last aspect is your own team. You should assess and evaluate if your team possess the capacity and expertise to execute your digital marketing initiative. This is also the time to determine if you should hire more team members or to outsource certain elements to an agency.

Step 5: Develop, execute and review the plan

After all the research and evaluation, it is time to put everything into the plan. Certain elements may have to be achieved first before others can begin, just like your website has to be completed before beginning SEO and thereafter, social media marketing. This may require a certain degree of expertise and coordination and should be best left to a professional agency if your team is small or does not possess the required capabilities.

Don’t be surprised if your plan is not executed successfully because not all assumptions will be correct. The key in this step is to regularly review the performance and tweak the necessary elements as needed. At regular intervals, ideally on an annual basis, scrutinize the performance and do a complete review. If necessary, don’t be afraid to go back to Step 1 and repeat the process.

A Final Note

Digital marketing may seem easy. After all, most millennials are already savvy with social media and you probably use Google as the starting point when looking for products. However, crafting a digital strategy and reviewing it regularly may not be that easy since most marketers also have other tasks. This is when consulting a full-service agency really helps. You may even consider outsourcing your marketing department and focus on your strengths to develop your business. If your business has not started or is in the process of developing your digital marketing strategy, contact MarketingGuru to find out how we can help you today.

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4 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing Tricks

Gone are the days when being found online is a good-to-have. Today, your business existence lies on being found online. This makes digital marketing a crucial tool in any marketer’s toolbox and being able to understand the difference between B2C and B2B digital marketing is essential for an effective campaign. Before we begin, let’s find out what is B2C and B2B.

B2C vs B2B

B2C and B2B are simply the two different main types of customer transactions. Often times, many people confuse the ‘C’ in B2C to refer to customers. They are correct in some sense, but technically, they are wrong. B2C and B2B refers to business-to-consumer and business-to-business respectively. Their similarity lies in that both consumers and businesses are customers. In short, B2B end-customers are businesses while B2C end-customers are consumers who are the general public.

Most business are a mix of B2C and B2B so as to maximize their potential revenue. A good example is your local banks. They have products and services that target the general public (B2C) and very likely also have another business division catering to companies by providing slightly different products and services (B2B).

Now that we know what B2C and B2B, we can begin looking at their differences.

1. Audience Buying Process

The audience buying process involves two components: the audience and their respective buying process. We know B2C and B2B audience are different because their end-customers are different. Because of this, the market size for B2C and B2B are different. B2C companies have a larger market size because their market involves everyone (before segmentation). B2C customers also are quicker to decide because they can make the final decision.

B2B transactions on the other end take longer. This is because there may be many layers of hierarchy to seek approval. The marketing executive may have to seek approval from his manager who then need to seek approval from his director. Closing a B2B deal may take many weeks or even months.

2. Campaign Goals

With different audiences and sales cycles, the campaign goals are also definitely different. Hence, it is not logical for both to have the same objectives. For B2C, the goal is to get as much traffic to the website or landing page as possible. This is because consumers tend to make quicker decisions, it is possible for consumers to make a purchase on the first visit to the website. Think about how often you enter an e-commerce website and make a purchase before you leave the website.

With slower sales cycle and longer buying process, the goal of B2B campaigns is to reach the correct and qualified person. If the decision maker is the marketing director, there is no point in targeting the human resource executive who does not need your products. B2B can also be seen as playing the long game because it is not enough to just create awareness to your target audience. The long buying processes require constant efforts to remind the decision makers and that involve re-targeting.

3. Keyword Optimization

Different audiences also mean different keywords are used when searching for products. B2C keywords are also more competitive because of a larger market and also because they are more generic. Whereas, B2B keywords are more niche to their industry and may not be as competitive.

Both B2C and B2B also have their own challenges in keyword research. The challenge for B2C keyword research is in finding keywords that are not too saturated but still have a decent traffic level. B2B challenge is in finding keywords that are technical but not too niche and still informative to all who are involved in the buyer’s journey.

4. Content Strategy

Content is a big topic and content can exist in countless formats. The content strategy here would refer to the approach B2C and B2B uses to attract their audience to their website or landing page. As mentioned, B2C buying process is quick and the objective is to get the most conversions in a short period of time. Hence, the content focus on flashy promotions or to a certain extend click-bait. You may have notice that your favorite retail brand often attracts you using sales promotion. Most of the time, the promoted discount is not applicable on your desired product.

B2C content strategy is less effective for B2B. Due to longer buying process, the content focus is on providing informational and valuable content to the user. This is to assist their buyer journey to help making a decision on choosing their product or service. Since B2B target audience are normally not found at where B2C audience normally hang out, you will seldom see their social Ads on Facebook or Instagram. B2B focus would be on customer case studies or white papers.

A Final Note

B2C and B2B digital marketing strategy are very different and require different approach. B2C may see more immediate results which make B2B seems like more work. However, B2B sales tends to be of higher monetary value and a single deal may be worth the entire B2C revenue of the quarter. There are benefits to both B2C and B2B but what is important is knowing the difference. It may make sense to outsource your marketing needs if you don’t possess the relevant expertise. Whether it is B2C or B2B Digital Marketing, contact MarketingGuru to find out how we can improve your marketing results.

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