If you’ve followed our recent posts, we’ve been talking a lot lately about the 5 steps that encompass all marketing operations. Those steps make up our PATIO framework:
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- Planning & Strategy
- Approach
- Tools & Tactics
- Implementation
- Optimization
PATIO can help you better organize and think about your marketing wholistically, as well as ensure you do things in the right steps. PATIO can also be used broadly for all your marketing, or just within a particular channel. We’ve recently featured content on planning & strategy, approach, tools & tactics, and even implementation. But we haven’t spoken a lot about the last step, optimization, which is often one of the most important, yet forgotten aspects of marketing.
Optimization involves the process of looking at the data and performance from your marketing efforts, and then going back and adjusting what you do in different channels based on that data – all with the intent to continue to boost your results. The data might make you rethink any of the previous four steps as you may indeed need a different plan, a different approach, additional tools, new tactics, or even better implementation. For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the 5 common optimizations that we think more small businesses should make, based within different channels. They are:
Optimization No. 1: Website & Search Engine Optimizations (SEO)
With this one, optimization is part of the SEO acronym so it’s probably one of the more obvious choices. SEO itself can be an involved process and should be done by an agency or someone who understands the core principles. What we’re going to cover here are opportunities that we often see small businesses missing out on.
First, let us explain. When we analyze websites for how well they rank in search, we sometimes see a few patterns. To start, a lot small businesses have pages that rank in Google! Which is great. But many times, it’s not on page 1, but on page 4 or 5 of results. If you think about the data alone that suggest 97 percent of searchers never go past page 1, it’s a big opportunity to get your ranking pages to page 1 for those key, relevant terms people are searching for. Once you get to page 1 of results, you’ll inevitably see traffic increase significantly on those key terms.
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- One thing to do here: As a small business, we think it’s worth investing in a SEO tool such Spyfu or SEM Rush, or Moz that can tell you where your site ranks for any term where you get search impressions.[1] Then, you can take a look at those opportunities that we would call the “low-hanging fruit” – search terms where your page ranks in the top 100 (within the first 10 pages). Once you identify the pages with those opportunities, consider the following steps:
- Reinforce those high-value keywords (the ones people are coming to the page after doing a search) everywhere on the page (page title, URL, headlines, body copy, image alt text, etc.
- Add more topic-model keywords (related keywords) to the page as well.
- Increase the number of cross-links to that page from your own site.
- Similarly, link to the page from your own social media and promote it more to generate more inbound links from other websites (in addition to your social media links).
- One thing to do here: As a small business, we think it’s worth investing in a SEO tool such Spyfu or SEM Rush, or Moz that can tell you where your site ranks for any term where you get search impressions.[1] Then, you can take a look at those opportunities that we would call the “low-hanging fruit” – search terms where your page ranks in the top 100 (within the first 10 pages). Once you identify the pages with those opportunities, consider the following steps:
Doing that should help you boost your ranking and move you closer to page 1. Need additional help? Download our free SEO checklist for copywriters or contact us about doing a SEO audit for your website.
Optimization No. 2: Email Subject Line/Sender Name Optimizations
Like the other marketing channels that we list here, email is definitely one area that you should make sure you’re performing up to standard. Many small businesses send email but then they don’t look to see how that email performs or which ones have performed the best. Like other areas of marketing, if you see a pattern of success with something you’ve done in the past – whether that’s certain topics you cover, a social post that got a lot of engagement, language you’ve used, target audience you’ve connected with – you should try to replicate it. This is especially true for email. One area to focus on is the subject line and sender name of the emails. Basically, the subject line (and any preview text) and the sender name are the two main reasons emails get opened. So, making sure both are compelling are key ways to optimize your email sends.
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- One thing to do here: It depends on your industry, but a standard open-rate benchmark for the average email across all businesses is about 20 percent. If you’re getting below that, or think you aren’t meeting your basic industry standard for open rates, you can try to do a few things:
- With the sender name, try to test sending your company emails from a person (rather than just the name of the company or some different version of that.) We’ve found across many industries, for example, that names generally work. And, in our experience, female names tend to get opened at greater rates than male names. If you insist on keeping a name out of it, it might be worth testing a sender name such as “The Team at [Your Company Name] or something else that’s catchy.
- With the subject line, the biggest mistake companies make is they often go too long with a subject line. (Remember, most emails are actually opened on a mobile phone today so there is limited room for long text.)
- Try something short, punchy or catchy to capture the receivers’ attention
- Use an engaging call to action
- Create some urgency such as a limited-time discount code or announcement of a pending deadline
- Add personalization (such as the recipient’s name) to the subject line. (See more below).
- Use the preview text to further elaborate on, but not restate the subject line.
- One thing to do here: It depends on your industry, but a standard open-rate benchmark for the average email across all businesses is about 20 percent. If you’re getting below that, or think you aren’t meeting your basic industry standard for open rates, you can try to do a few things:
Need more help? Check out our blog post, 5 Little Things That Matter for a Successful Email, or contact us to learn more about our email and marketing automation services.
Optimization No. 3: Social-Media ‘Approach’ Optimizations
Optimize social media you ask? If you’re like many small companies we know whose businesses aren’t solely reliant on Facebook, Instagram, and all its cousins, you might find social to be a bit of a conundrum in general. For example, many small businesses are told over and over they have to “get on the social bandwagon” and have to keep it up regularly. But when they post, there’s still limited engagement (either due to algorithms such as Facebook that limit business reach), or because what they’re posting about isn’t as engaging as they hoped it would be. So how do you optimize in this environment?
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- One thing to do here: One thing we often encourage more small businesses to do is to put a “face” on the posts. What we mean by that is have an employee or perhaps you as the owner of a small business put themselves “out there” more from a brand standpoint. Remember, one thing about social that remains true: People love seeing other people. Regardless if that’s a personal post or a business post. Posting photos of the team, videos of you talking, or at work, or even photos of the work you have done (if it’s a visually compelling image) all help to drive engagement. Keeping testing topics for sure, but certainly include more of the “human element,” and you’ll likely see more engagement and broader awareness.
Optimization No. 4: Marketing Automations and Personalization
Let’s face it: As consumers of any product or service, we all want to feel like we’re getting specialized attention. Or at least, we want to know that a company knows me as an individual or as a business (if it’s B2B). The way you can do that at scale is really investing a bit in what’s known as automation and personalization. A great channel where both are often on display is email, but it can be done with websites, advertising, mobile, and other mediums as well. It’s a big area so let’s just focus on email for the purposes of example.
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- One thing to do here: One way to optimize email in general is to automate your sends, especially for triggered emails (emails that are sent in response to a behavior or action that a user takes). For example, we would recommend setting up:
- An abandoned cart email series (if you have an e-commerce platform) that reminds people to check out if they left something in a cart but didn’t finish the purchase. Typically, a series of at least 1-3 emails is automated based on that behavior.
- A welcome email series for people who register on your website.
- An email journey that’s automated if someone downloads a content asset (with a form) or registers for an event
- One thing to do here: One way to optimize email in general is to automate your sends, especially for triggered emails (emails that are sent in response to a behavior or action that a user takes). For example, we would recommend setting up:
One thing to note here is that, because all the responses are based on an individual’s action, the messaging is automatically more personalized for the recipient. (It’s the reason triggered emails get opened at a much higher rate than other sends.) And then even if there’s no automation involved, you can also certainly personalize the subject line, body of an email, or segment offers to specific individuals to better tailor what you’re sending.
Need additional help? You can learn more about our services in marketing automation and email and we’ll be happy to set you up for success.
Optimization No. 5: Cart/Checkout, Registration Form Optimizations
Whether you are a B2C or B2B business or have an e-commerce or sales-based business, it’s likely your website uses a form of some kind where your customers or potential customer have to put in their information. One issue we often see with many businesses is that they ask for way too much information upfront. Because they are so insistent on collecting data about their audiences, they forget that many people would rather not take the time to fill in a longer form online. Especially since many do this on a phone. The key here, of course, is to optimize your conversion rates, so looking at the number of people who visit versus filling in a form or completing purchase is certainly something you’ll want to continually consider.
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- One thing to do here: If you’re an e-commerce site and focus primarily on the United States, the easiest tip we can recommend is to just get rid of the “Address 2” field on your forms or de-emphasize it, something that e-commerce industry researcher Baymard Institute also recommends. The reason to hide it or de-emphasize it, is that it takes up additional space that doesn’t often get used. And where you do need it, you can simply add a link to add it. Shrinking the form size will make it visually easier and more likely that someone will fill it in. Similarly, if you have a non-e-commerce site such as a B2B site that focuses more on sales leads, keeping your forms short and not asking for the moon in terms of title, industry or other extraneous fields should help more individuals fill in the form so you can get the lead in the door.[2]
That’s just one of the many areas you can optimize with your cart/checkout or registration forms. If you need more help, contact us for a free consultation. We’ve performed e-commerce audits and/or can make sure your site forms are set up in the optimal way.
Conclusion
The reason marketing is so hard these days is that you’re always fighting a constant battle to continue to improve. If you can pick and choose just a few of these optimizations, I think you’ll find they’ll pay off in the long run. We hope this has been helpful. As always, our goal is to help you excel in digital marketing. Feel free to contact us anytime if you need additional support.
[1] You can do it manually – just doing a search by yourself – but it’s a lot more work and takes time.
[2] If you tend to get a lot of poor leads, it may, however pay to ask more questions in order to better qualify audiences. But still don’t go overboard.