As 2019 jolts into life. I wanted to spell out some key areas I think you should focus on as the year gets under way. These six key areas are the essential components of a complete digital marketing plan.

Your website ✅

Website speed – a slow website will disappoint your clients and search engines
Content – Your website needs high-quality content and although copywriters will be good at editing, they don’t have the knowledge to write about your subjects. This needs to come from you as a starting point.
Usablity – Is your website designed to please your customers or do they leave without making contact
Content management – Are you able to update your website efficiently and do you know how to make your pages appealing to search engines and users
Not Secure – have you noticed this in your address bar? Browsers are now making SSL (https) a must-have for customer confidence.

SEO and PPC ✅

SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages. Where are you ranking for the term your customers are using, and do you know what terms they are searching for?
Off-page and on-page optimisation – There are many factors that determine what makes your site findable. Learn how search engines work – it’s not all technical.
Google Ads – Advertising for the terms people are using will get you more traffic and more business, and it’s not as expensive as you might think, but it can be a minefield.
Google My Business – If people search your business by name, Google shows all the information they know about you. Is it up to date and accurate?

Social Media (paid and organic) ✅

Facebook Ads – Paid advertising on social networks provides you with a flexible, affordable way to reach the right people. But it’s full of traps that can be costly if not done right.
Messenger, Instagram and Stories – you can advertise here as well as Facebook
LinkedIn Ads – If you’re selling to other businesses, this could ybe your best option. Like Facebook, it’s highly targetable, but it’s also geared heavily towards B2B.
Organic posts – We don’t advocate that you hire a third party to be social on your behalf, because we think that only you can ‘be yourself’

Videos and Photography ✅

Video – This is an undeniably powerful tool for your business to use and it works on your website, on your social networks, in emails, even at exhibitions and your shop if you have one. You should consider a mix of commercial videos as part of your marketing plan, and social videos as part of your organic social media.
Photography – Pictures grab attention, and words fill in the gaps, but if your pictures don’t make that all-important first impression, you could lose eyeballs. Again, choose a professional for your commercial money shots and consider improving your own skills for those organic social media posts.

Analytics ✅

You can’t improve what you haven’t measured. Web and social analytics are the dashboard to your digital marketing. Google and Facebook particularly, provide an enormous amount of data that you can use to better understand your audience and make smarter marketing choices.

And analytics isn’t just about numbers. Link your analytics to your conversion process to get vital clues as to whether your ads and campaigns are actually making any money.

Email Marketing ✅

GDPR didn’t kill off email marketing, it just made it more targetable. The benefits of building an email list haven’t changed and tools like MailChimp make it easy for you advertise repeatedly to people who have actively chosen to hear what you have to say.

Remember that email outperforms many other marketing strategies including social media. On average, it returns £40 for every pound spent.

That’s all folks!

So that’s our six top tips to get your digital marketing into shape this year. It’s not in any specific order, because each business will have different requirements. And you shouldn’t try to tackle it all at once. Do one thing well and then move on to the next task.

Many of these things you can do yourself. The tools are there for you to use. Some people like to save money and do the work without calling in the experts, but equally, if you’re too busy doing what you do best, then we’re here to help.

You can also join our own dedicated mailing list, where we send out helpful tips and reminders for all the things mentioned above.

Six digital marketing basics you must get right in 2019