Every business knows that digital marketing takes a lot of time and effort before it starts to pay off, but any successful marketer also knows that the digital world cannot be ignored if they are to keep up with the competition. While every successful digital marketer already knows the importance of having great content, an excellent user experience and a consistent social media presence, it is sometimes the simple things that can make or break a marketing strategy. The following digital marketing hacks don’t take much time or effort to implement, but their impact is significant.

1. Great Call to Action

A call to action is the most important element of all of almost any piece of marketing content, whether it’s an email newsletter, landing page or social media post. However, even if it is backed up by an impeccable piece of content, your efforts will never pay off if the call to action itself isn’t compelling or relevant enough for your target audience to want to proceed. Above all, marketers must take into account the short attention spans and limited patience of online audiences. As such, a call to action should always be relevant, specific and never misleading. Keep it short, clickable and, where appropriate, use digits for including prices.

2. Personalized Emails

Although email is the most popular way for businesses and consumers to stay connected, most marketing emails end up being ignored. The primary reason for consumers to ignore marketing emails is a lack of personalization. If your recipient feels your company doesn’t see them as an individual, they’ll hardly be motivated to open it. Email personalization helps show your target audience that you are not out of touch with their needs and desires, but it goes beyond addressing your recipients by name. Take personalization a step further by segmenting your audience, creating customer personas and setting up automated behavioural triggers.

3. Compelling Headlines

In an online world that is full of noise, getting people to read the content you’ve worked so hard on isn’t always easy. However, if your headlines aren’t compelling enough, the content itself won’t build up the audience it deserves. Coming up with a catchy headline can be the most time-consuming part of all, but there are a few simple hacks which can help. For a start, numbers tend to work very well, not least because the online audience loves list-type articles to such an extent that many blogs and other websites are solely dedicated to lists. You’ll also need to keep your headlines original and relevant, avoiding overused clichés and empty promises.

4. Simple Forms

People dread filling in forms, and no one is going to want to spend more than a few moments filling in a form just to receive an email newsletter or subscribe to your website. Simplicity is essential if you don’t want to risk boring your readership, and any sign-up forms should be kept as quick and simple as possible. All you’ll usually need to know is the person’s email address and name, since most other important information can be extracted from the previous interactions they’ve had with your website and business. Consumers are also becoming increasingly concerned about online privacy, so never ask for more information than absolutely necessary.

5. Automated Alerts

Thanks to the extensive data generated through the various forms of digital marketing, it is easy to garner a wealth of useful information without having to probe your audience directly for it. By setting up automated alerts, you can gain important behavioural insights into your target audience to get a far better idea of what they want and expect from you. Any respectable marketing automation software provides an alerts feature, whereby you can automatically receive alerts for tracking the activities of your target audience. For example, you can receive alerts when people share your content on social networks, request further information and much more.

6. Careful Timing

To maximize the potential of your marketing efforts, you’ll need to pay attention to timing, whether you’re sending an email newsletter or posting an update on social media. Unfortunately, there are no set rules in this regard, so a bit of A/B testing will be necessary to find the perfect solution. The perfect timing relies on the habits of your target audience and the industry itself. A few general rules apply, but your mileage may vary. For example, consumers are most likely to respond to lifestyle-related promotions during the evening, while the typical lunchbreak tends to be the period when people are more likely to respond to offers relating to financial services.

7. User-Generated Content

As social the Internet is, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that user-generated content plays an important role in shaping purchase decisions. From online reviews to what people say about your brand on social media and other public forums, you need to accept that you don’t have direct control over your brand’s image. Marketers should capitalize on user-generated content by leveraging it on their own websites. Instead of being afraid of the occasional piece of negative feedback, today’s businesses need to work hard to build up trust through transparency. Allowing customers to leave public reviews on your site is a great way to start.

8. Complete Metadata

Although user experience should be your main priority, the technical aspects of search engine optimization shouldn’t be neglected either. While keyword-based optimization is becoming more meaningless as the search engines evolve, there remain some technical elements of SEO that are still important. Metadata helps to define your content to the search engines, and Google still pays attention to tags such as title, type, description, alt text (for images) and permalinks (permanent URLs). You should always make sure your metadata is complete with content that is relevant to the subject matter and its audience.

Final Words

Above all, a sustainable digital marketing strategy relies on a thorough understanding of the needs and interests of your target audience. The more technical aspects of digital marketing, such as search engine optimization are, for the most part, of secondary importance. By prioritizing user experience, audience segmentation and personalization, you’ll be better equipped to make sure that the right content gets seen by the right people. In turn, your conversion ratio will increase, and this statistic is far more important than the number of people visiting your website alone.