Practical issues to consider when reviewing a company’s digital marketing

Look to your site first, or opportunities will go down the plughole

Digital marketing strategies vary wildly from business to business as well they should. Not every website has the same business/ sales goals and they most certainly don’t use the same marketing or technical platforms. To a certain degree, before starting to develop strategies for new clients you never know quite what challenges are going to be "thrown your way"!

However, there are some fundamentals to consider in advance of setting or spending  budget. The website that you want to digitally market should always be assessed or audited to identify if the best use is being made of the additional traffic that digital marketing will invariably drive.

Let me break this down into an analogy that I like to use with my clients: think of your website as a bath, and your potential conversion ‘leakages’ as the plug hole in that path. Your digital marketing will, in essence behave like a tap. When you turn that tap you will begin to flood your website with traffic. However if your website has conversion issues, and that ‘plug’ is out – it doesn’t matter how much you turn the tap, all the traffic you drive will disappear down the plug hole.

So, as a rule of thumb, if your website isn’t meeting industry-average conversion rates of 2.5%, or thereabouts, then address conversion issues on your site in advance of rolling out digital marketing as you are sure to be wasting budget.

On sites where checkout conversion is less of a problem it is usually a good idea to first consider the structure of the site and its pages. Let’s say for example you have a site where the conversion rates are fine, but the site structure means that there are not particularly satisfactory or relevant landing pages. If you are about to launch a paid search campaign, your spend could be driven up as quality scores will be negatively affected if you don’t have relevant enough landing pages in place. In this case, creating landing pages specifically for this task would be recommended- so you should know in advance how easy/ difficult this is likely to be on the site that you are working on.

Similarly, site and page issues such as slow load time will negatively affect both PPC and SEO, therefore it is usually a good idea to try and sort these issues out in advance.

One other area of digital marketing ‘preparation’ that you should ensure that you plan for is that of ‘information scent’. I feel that it is important to cover this off as a basic as this is something that very regularly is missed.

According to scientist Dr Ed Chi from PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre). Information scent ("heavy", but interesting research PDF) scent is:

“Made of cues that people use to decide whether a path is interesting (or relevant). These cues consist (of) images, hyperlinks and … citations related to the information needed (by the searcher)”.

Scent is important across all areas of digital marketing as you need to ensure that if a user clicks through on an online ad that the scent of that ad follows through onto the landing page to reassure them that they are on the correct page- landing page optimisation alone is not enough!
A great example of the impact of scent (or lack of it) was observed by US firm Geico.com. They ran a memorable display campaign featuring a Gekko in their ads.

The usage of the strong Gekko imagery meant that the campaign itself did particularly well in terms of click through, however their actual conversion rate was extremely low.

Although they had created a designated and optimised landing page for the campaign, the landing page contained no ‘scent’ from the ads- no Gekko was to be seen!

As a result, users became confused and unsure if they were on the correct website, and so exited the page without converting.

The importance of ensuring that scent in terms of your landing page imagery and wording is huge. In all your digital marketing ensure that your campaigns are reflected and recognisable on your own landing pages or website.

Digital marketing preparation and covering these basics can assist you in ensuring that your planned campaigns have greater ability and less barriers to achieving you results. I'll look at other considerations in my next posts.