Continuously Improve Your Digital Marketing Footprint online
Continuously Improve Your Digital Marketing Footprint online.
Increasing your business’ brand recognition is a key to building customer loyalty and market influence. The application of a unified digital marketing plan improves both your overall market visibility and ROI (return on investment). When managed appropriately, your digital marketing plan is one of the most effective ways to ensure achieving the highest levels of profitability. To optimize your business’ web presence, you must seek to create continuous improvements via client data acquisition, analysis, thorough planning, and targeted solution implementation. In his small business article, Ian Linton beautifully defines continuous improvement as “a form of quality management that focuses on making small incremental improvements to a process.” Linton’s labeling of continuous improvement as a “form of quality management” highlights the fact that paying attention to implementing continuous improvements should be an integral part of your business already! Ask yourself, “What results is my website bringing me now?” Is your digital marketing something that you are actively tracking? More importantly, are you leveraging the data collected from your digital marketing in order to improve your business and to make those crucial incremental changes?
It’s time to take that next step to improving your business. Keep in mind that change alone is not the answer; it’s all about targeted change so that you can achieve ‘Kaizen’ or change for the better. It’s not so much about buying some digital marketing package that presents a formal series of steps that you can follow but rather, it’s about considering your digital marketing portfolio through a new lens. Examine what you are currently doing with your business’ digital marketing and what it is doing for you by collecting data and then making the appropriate incremental changes based on analytics. Then do it again, and again, and again. Base every minute change you keep and every tiny adjustment you decide to make on both the results of your data and their profitability. Brian Klemmer said to base everything on results because they’re “often hard but always fair”. Objectively evaluate what is working for you and what isn’t then eliminate the waste and plant what you need to grow. That’s the method for improving your customers’ journey and becoming more influential within the market. Analyze everything and make small changes over time. As the adage goes, “by the yard it’s hard, but by the inch, it’s a cinch!”
Increased ROI is the ambrosial cup from which every business should strive to drink. According to Linton, continuous improvement really “aims to reduce waste… [and it] can help you to get more from your marketing budget”. For your website, this can occur on a specific page, or it can be site wide, depending on which aspects you are addressing. For social media, it can occur across multiple platforms and social media sites, or it can be more localized. In the end, the decision is up to you. However, digital marketing author Gary Angel maintains that “The more discrete and isolated a change, the easier it is to measure its true impact on the system.” Hence, the need for continual improvement rather than one instantaneous overhaul. Subtlety is the name of the game because businesses aren’t optimized overnight. It takes time and patience to collect enough relevant data to be able to create a plan of action.
I’ve seen the importance of making isolated changes rather than grandiose remodelings play out in other avenues of life as well. I remember when I was training for the International Chinese Martial Arts Championships in Las Vegas back in 2014, I was going to perform three Tai Chi forms. I had been practicing for years, and even though I thought that I knew these forms inside and out, it was the five months before the tournament where my sifu (teacher) worked on fine tuning minuscule details one at a time. At first, the minutia seemed insignificant. He would tell me things like “relax your fingers more here,” “lift your sword five more degrees,” “turn your waist a quarter inch further,” and “take a deeper breath before starting this movement.” Of course, being his student, I listened and applied his refinements one after the other. I couldn’t see it at the time, but eventually, all of those minuscule alterations yielded upwards of a 10% improvement in my skill level! My demonstrations overall were so much improved that I went on to earn gold and two silver medals in the tournament. A bunch of little changes over time can yield significant results. What impact on your business would a 10% improvement in profits bring?
Jim Lenskold, a marketing ROI expert, touts the importance of, “continuously improving marketing performance and profitability by applying deeper insights to maximize the effectiveness of strategic and tactical decisions.” Where do those “insights” come from you ask? He points out that they come from “carefully designed measurements and financial assessments of ROI to ensure that the marketing contribution of profits exceeds the marketing investment while meeting appropriate short- and long-term objectives.” So again, ask yourself, what results is your website earning you now? The power of digital marketing to improve your business’ earnings and customer interaction is exponentially greater when you consistently perform data analysis and make small incremental changes based on that data. That improves the customer Journey and subsequently increases your digital marketing ROI.
It’s important to note that the mantra of continuous improvement is not some idle phrase or nebulous concept. Rather, it is an approach that allows your business to soar rather than sink by making you aware of various key elements that might otherwise have been overlooked or ignored completely. Angel outlines some excellent core ideas for “driving continuous improvement in digital, many of which are rooted in formal continuous improvement methodologies.” Once again, it’s important to stress that this isn’t about some graduate level understanding of theoretical marketing concepts. Rather, it’s all about developing a routine for evaluating your digital footprint one piece at a time. Once you’ve accomplished that, you can begin to consistently improve your business in ways that build consumer confidence and develop long-term customer loyalty through improved brand recognition and increased market influence.
Sources:
http://measuringthedigitalworld.com/2015/11/21/continuous-improvement/
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-continuous-improvement-marketing-22878.html
http://www.i-scoop.eu/five-essential-principles-improve-digital-marketing-roi/
Amaro, F. ROI. (2014). Photograph. Retrieved on October 23, 2016.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/79084674@N04/15938913208/
- Footprint. (2011). Photograph. Retrieved on October 22, 2016.
MacEntee, S. Measuring Tape. (2014). Photograph. Retrieved on October 25, 2016
Tache, S. How? (2008). Photograph. Retrieved on October 24, 2016.
The Digital Way. Money-grow-interest-save-invest. (2016). Photograph. Retrieved
on October 25, 2016. https://pixabay.com/en/money-grow-interest-save-invest-1604921/
Tucker, T. Loyalty. (2010). Photograph. Retrieved on October 23, 2016.
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