It’s that time of the year again! As we move into the New Year, we often challenge ourselves to reflect on what worked and what did not work the past year. This introspection often leads to changes in the way we think and act in the form of New Year’s Resolutions. As you develop your marketing plan for 2017, think about the past year and what changes you can make in order to bring your brand more success throughout the New Year.
To help you, Premiere Creative has rounded up four resolutions that will help improve your digital marketing efforts for 2017 to increase ROI, drive sales, and strengthen brand awareness.
1). Focus on Mobile Efforts
In case you weren’t already aware, mobile search is drastically overtaking desktop searches as approximately 65% of digital information gets obtained from mobile devices. As a result, your brand needs to have a clear mobile-focused online strategy. In addition, a mobile optimized website is imperative if you want to compete with industry rivals. Now more than ever, website design is about user functionality, especially for mobile visitors. According to CMS Report, about 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. Responsive designs and cross-platform advertising are great solutions to help connect and engage with your mobile audience.
2017 will most certainly be a big year for the mobile experience. As we discussed in a previous post, Google’s big search index divide will be rolling out in January 2017. This new update will cause mobile and desktop results to split into two distinct versions: one will focus to mobile search while the other one will focus on desktop. The mobile index will be updated on a more regularly than desktop, which means that mobile users will receive better results quicker. Make sure that your website and digital strategy are up-to-date in order to get indexed easily.
2). Claim Your Local Listings
The start of a new year is the perfect time to update or claim your local listings! Local listings are important to your digital presence because they allow potential visitors to easily find your business when they search for local products and service. If your business hasn’t already done so, make sure you claim your Google My Business listing, Yelp and other directory listings. If you have already claimed your local listing, take some time to review it in order to make sure that all the information is correct. Clear and accurate information about your business will not only attract local customers, but it will also improve your SEO because you will have consistent information across search engines.
3). Clean Up Your Website
If you want to start the year off with a clean slate, you must first revisit any potential factors that might be holding you back from achieving success. One way is to thoroughly examine your website to make sure everything is up-to-date. This includes examining each page and piece of content for broken links. Broken links prevent Google bots from crawling your website and indexing all of your great content. As you examine your site, be sure to make note of any broken links you might encounter, then set up proper redirects to appropriate pages.
Secondly, you might want to revisit some of old blog posts. Chances are you’ve been constantly updating your website throughout the year with rich-content. Unfortunately, some content is time-sensitive and may no longer be useful. A simple fix to this is to revisit old posts and update and repurpose the information accordingly.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, make sure to examine your website’s speed. Studies show that 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, which is detrimental to attracting new customers. Examine all of your files and make sure you optimize them to reduce your website’s load time.
4). Revitalize Your Content Strategy
The New Year is a perfect time to review and revise your content strategy. Content will continue to remain king in 2017 because it is what attracts visitors to your website and converts them into customers. According to statistics:
- 61% of people say they are more likely to buy from a company that delivers content.
- Business that blog receive 77% more traffic and 97% more links to their website than those that do not blog.
- 81% of marketers plan to increase their use of original written content for 2017.
While it is highly recommended that you have up-to-date content, it is also worth taking time into developing an evergreen content strategy. Some of the content you create will have a short lifespan; many people may find it useless or outdated a few weeks later. Since developing content can drain time and resources, focus on developing content that people will find useful week or even months later.
A Fresh Start
These four resolutions are by no means the only way that you can strengthen your digital presence this year. However, it will definitely help you start the year off strong. If you would like expert guidance in planning out your digital strategy, contact us at Premiere Creative today! Call (973) 346-8100.