Advanced Website Marketing Tips for 2020

3 Advanced Digital Marketing Tips for 2020

As digital marketing enters its third decade of existence, it continues to evolve. You need to keep ahead of the current trends to be successful in your marketing.

Use Advanced Analytics

Everyone uses Google Analytics because it’s free and ubiquitous. Every marketer worth their salt knows how to use it.

But it’s limited. There are a few problems with the free version of Google Analytics:

• It uses sampled data. Which means that it’s data has a large margin of error, and could be quite wrong at times.

• Is misattributes data. For example, it puts a considerable amount of traffic into the “Direct” channel that isn’t really direct traffic. 

• It doesn’t combine data on a logged out and logged in experience at all. Do you have a software or information product on a different subdomain? Forget being able to track the two.

These problems, and more, are one reason why the market is being flooded with so many analytics tools and companies. 

One analytics software that I like is Woopra. It has a “forever free” plan, just like Google Analytics, but Woopra’s features are much more robust. It can be used not only for website analytics, but for product analytics as well. 

There is no sampling of data, so you get a 100% clear picture of what your users are doing. It’s channel attribution is great. 

And best of all, it puts together all the pieces of the customer journey together so that you can track what customers are doing both on a logged in and logged out experience.

Any advanced analytics tool should be able to tell you the following:

• The devices that a particular customer uses. You should be able to link both the mobile and desktop device to anyone who has created an account with you.

• How many times a user has visited your website, even if they clear their cookies.

• What all of the touchpoints are along the user’s journey.

• How much money each user spends with you.

It’s valuable to know how your customers react to your website and product.

How many touchpoints do they need, on average, before they buy from you? 4, 5, 8, or 13?

Do your remarketing audiences contain pre-existing customers? Removing them could reduce your ad spend significantly.

Can you track purchases to individual users? If so, you could find out that 3 purchases made on separate devices are really the same user.

Data is a goldmine. Investing in advanced analytics is the first step in your prospecting journey.

Do SEO at Scale

Many businesses or companies that invest thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars per month into advertising don’t even bother with SEO. It’s a huge missed opportunity.

Tech company Canva recently achieved a valuation of over $10 billion dollars, and one of it’s primary growth strategies was SEO. 

It’s a go-to strategy for companies in industries as diverse as software, law, and ecommerce. 

What I often explain to potential clients at my SEO company Garit Boothe Digital is that explosive growth is possible through SEO for them too.

Why does search engine optimization work so well?

Although there are costs associated with it, compared to advertising, it’s basically “free” traffic. It’s not uncommon to see websites gain half or more of their customers from organic search.

Traffic from Google accounts for 58% of all referral traffic on the internet. 

Source: The SparkToro Blog

Across the internet, websites get more free traffic from Google search than they do from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo, Bing, Reddit, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Gmail combined. 

I won’t deny that advertising on Google can be powerful. However, as you can see in this image, organic search drives 10 times as many clicks as paid ads. 

If you want to go where the vast majority of traffic is, you need to have an SEO campaign. 

SEO is a complex topic involving technical optimization, creating content, and outreach promotion. It’s way beyond the scope of this article. 

But even if it isn’t a priority for you right now, you can make small optimizations that will set you up for the future. Things like improving your website speed and developing topical relevance can lay the groundwork for a future SEO campaign.

Reduce Friction, Increase Customers

If you want more people to do what you want them to do on your website, then you need to reduce friction.

Reducing friction means making it easy.

Make it easy to:

• Sign up for your email newsletter

• Follow you on social media

• Fill out a lead form

• Create an account

• Add a product to their cart

• Buy from you

Whatever conversion event you set up, make it easy to do.

What this doesn’t look like:

Thank you Salesforce for that ridiculously long lead form

For most people, a white paper or guide isn’t appealing enough to put down a full name, email and phone number. Including that level of information is begging to be harrassed by salespeople. 

The indication that your lead form is too restrictive and/or not enticing enough is your conversion rate.

If you are only getting 1 or 2 percent of landing page visitors to convert, then that means your marketing campaign is terrible.

And that your lead form is probably too long.

Ask yourself this: is what I am offering worth what I am giving?

If 99% of your landing page visitors say no, then it’s time to optimize. 

Another example of reducing friction is reducing callouts. Here is a website that I saw recently: 

Homedepot.com has way too much going on here. 

The callouts include a:

• “Shop Now” button

• “Feedback” bar

• Search bar

• Banner that says “FREE DELIVERY” with a link and arrow

• Back and next arrow to see more images in the image slider

• 18 visible menu links

• A “My Account” button

Scroll below the fold, and you’re bombarded with more CTAs:

I could go on and on about how terrible this website is, but you get the point.

So let’s move on to a website with only one call-out:

Brian Dean’s SEO blog Backlinko has only one CTA on the homepage: to sign up for his email list.

There are only three menu links, and you can’t even click over to his blog without scrolling down to the footer.

Granted, this isn’t a fair comparison. Home Depot has way more website visitors than Backlinko, and their customer base probably has a much wider variety of purposes for visiting the website. So it’s a harder-to-design website.

But the principle still holds. If you can focus on only one callout, your conversions for that callout will go way up.

Another marketing company that I admire is Direction.com. They have a beautiful website design and super-focused callouts. Their SEO is on-point without sacrificing their user or conversion experience. 

A lot of the things that make websites more persuasive are super simple. They involve things like increasing site loading speed, matching the design experience to the user’s device, and giving users what they want.

Are people mostly going to your site to log into their account? Make the “Sign In” button big and super obvious!

Do potential customers want to check the price of your product? Create an awesome pricing page.

Do your readers want to see your content? Include big links to your articles.

The inverse of all of this is true as well. Downsize what isn’t important.

Most websites don’t need a chatbot. It doesn’t matter how fancy chatbots feel. They’re a distraction.

If you don’t have a good phone team, then hide your phone number in the “contact us” page.

Don’t include two side-by-side buttons. Just pick one.

Most conversion rate optimization practices are simple. Like sticking to a diet, it just takes discipline and good habits.

Digital Marketing in the 2020s

Even though we don’t know what new technologies the future will bring, we do know some things. Analytics, search, and good design are here to stay. Use them wisely to grow your business.