Have you made any personal resolutions for 2014? Have you broken them yet?!
What about for your marketing strategy? Here are four suggestions for resolutions for anyone who is responsible for a digital marketing plan.
1. Make web analytics your best friend
We have a lot of clients at Webreality and every single one of them has a website. Many have more than one. I can only think of a handful who spend anything like enough time with their web analytics.
And it's understandable - not everyone has the appetite for regular data bashing.
But you've spent thousands on the website, thousands on the brand, thousands on the advertising...
If there's one single thing you can do in 2014 that will improve your marketing return on investment, it's optimising your use of analytics data.
2. Start split testing
Split testing is a thing of great beauty, and almost anyone with a digital marketing plan can make use of it.
It's the process by which your web pages (or marketing emails) are incrementally improved by testing one version of a particular variable against another for its effectiveness in achieving a specific goal. So, it might be the colour of a "Sign up now" button, or the text on that button, or the layout of the page, or the choice of an image.
Obviously, it goes hand in hand with effective use of analytics: you can't tell which version of a variable is working better unless you study the data.
If you want to improve your digital marketing performance at minimal cost, there's probably no better place to start.
3. Get a grip on your content strategy
We all know that we need one... but very few businesses have one, let alone implement it well.
We've published plenty before about the right things to do. Maybe 2014 is the year to start actually doing them!
4. Make sure you're mobile-friendly
Maybe you're already on top of this one. If so, stop reading now!
If you have a website that hasn't been designed (or re-designed) specifically to work well on tablets and smartphones, you're probably irritating as many as a third of your website users. That's the typical share of mobile web users for many Webreality client websites now.
It's by no means essential for all, but very very few websites have a good reason to ignore mobile users.
The first place to start is... your web analytics! Where you'll be able to see the share of usage attributable to all web browser types. From that data, and especially how it's trending, you'll be able to see how much of your web traffic is mobile. If it's at least 25% and rising, we'd say you need to act. If your site doesn't welcome mobile users, a competitor site surely will.
If you need help with any of these resolutions for 2014, please contact us. Our resolution is to help you this year!