No two web marketing campaigns are the same. Show me two sites in the same industry, selling the same products or services and I’ll show you two unique web marketing campaigns. That’s because no two web sites are identical. Or at least they shouldn’t be.
Far too often, though, web marketers try to standardize their web marketing strategies in a way that can easily be sold to every customer that comes along. I can tell you this, if you’re buying a standardized strategy, you’re getting a stale campaign!
Every website brings its own unique challenges that require a fresh approach. And any web marketing campaign that is set in a routine can eventually become stale, too. Even as you’re getting results, you find that there is a point of diminishing returns. If you’re in that stale zone it might be time to shake things up a bit and look for fresh opportunities.
1. Mix Up Your Content
This is one of the easiest ways to liven up your web marketing but also one of the most important. Have you gotten stuck in the text blog post rut? Are you getting bored with what you are writing? Chances are your audience is, too.
There are so many different ways to provide information to your audience. There are video, images (infographics, anyone) and audio. There are GIFs, case studies and cartoons. The possibilities and combinations are nearly endless. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it at Marketing Land and have a tool available to help you put more variety in your content. Don’t be married to just one content format or type.
2. Do something “BIG” on social media
Social media is made for fun and unique campaigns. It’s time to move past scheduled content and engagement. Do something out of the ordinary that will make a splash.
The ALS Association did this quite literally with 2014’s Ice Bucket Challenge. In the event, the ALS Association encouraged people to pour ice cold water over themselves, post a video of it and challenge family and friends to do the same, all in an effort to raise awareness and money for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. To say the effort went viral is an understatement. As a result, the ALS Association raised more than $220 million worldwide to fight the disease.
3. User testing
Sometimes it pays just to watch people work through your site and see how they do. You can learn a wealth of information and find issues you never would have thought to question. What you assume to be self-explanatory may not be to someone who has never been on your site.
User testing can be as simple as finding a some people outside your company (friends, family, acquaintances, etc.) and asking them to perform a few actions on your website. A simple Google search for “User Testing” will also bring up a list of services that can provided user testing for you, some even providing video of people as they try to use your site. At the very least, you may want to try a tool such as Crazy Egg that tracks how users scroll and click through your website.
These tests can give you valuable information on things that you can improve to increase visitor satisfaction and conversions.
4. Give something away
Sometimes the best marketing dollars are spent in giving something big away. Maybe it’s free products/services to veterans or disaster victims. But use that as a way to 1) make some noise on social media and 2) get new long-term customers.
Giveaways can also be contests on social media, particularly on Facebook. This can be a great way to raise brand awareness while also increasing engagement on Facebook. Just be careful about how you do it. Businesses often run Facebook contests in ways that go against Facebook’s guidelines, which can result in the page being removed from Facebook. For instance, you can’t require that followers share the contest on their Timeline to enter the contest. Running contests through a third party app, such as Shortstack, is a good way to ensure you are running contests in accordance with the guidelines.
5. Re-Evaluate
Every once and awhile, it’s important to step back from the routine work of digital marketing and assess your progress using analytics. What’s working? What’s not? Don’t keep doing something just because it worked once upon a time or because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” To paraphrase the iconic Ferris Bueller, marketing moves pretty fast.You need to stop and look at your analtyics and make sure you’re not missing the key to greater traffic, leads and sales. And you want to make sure you aren’t wasting time and efforts on tactics that no longer or never did work.
6. Optimize for New Keywords
Optimizing a site from scratch can be exciting. Ah, the thrill of checking analytics to see if there is a jump in website traffic and then the joy and relief when you finally see it.
You can still get that newly optimized feeling by simply optimizing for new keywords. Think you used them all up already? Probably not. In almost 20 years of doing SEO, and I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve completely run out of keywords to optimize for a client, and in those cases, the clients were in niche industries where searches are limited.
You most likely have thousands upon thousands of keyword optimization opportunities…and a seemingly endless opportunity for bringing in traffic from new sources!
These are just a few ideas. Get your team together to come up with some ideas of your own. When you have a stale marketing campaign you don’t’ have to change everything to freshen it up, sometimes it just takes one significant thing that you can use to breath new life into your efforts.
