Five digital marketing tips

These five hold across channels and across years, and each one is something you can act on this week.

1. Pick one number and let it decide arguments

Enquiries, trials, signed contracts, revenue. One. Everything else is diagnostic.

The reason to do this is not reporting hygiene. It is that a team without a single number argues about opinions, and a team with one argues about what changes it. The second argument is productive and the first one never ends.

Here is the test of whether you have really picked it. A channel produces a lot of traffic and none of that number. Do you stop the channel.

2. Be specific about who it is for

“Businesses looking to grow” is a description of nobody. A page written for everybody hedges, and hedged writing does not convince the person it was meant for.

Name the job title, the situation and the moment. A head of ecommerce who has found resellers undercutting the advertised price on a marketplace is a real reader. You can write a sentence they recognise, and recognition is what makes someone keep reading.

You lose the people who do not fit. Those were not your customers.

3. Own a channel that cannot be taken away

Search rankings move under you. Social reach gets cut by a platform decision. Ad costs rise as the auction matures.

An email list is yours. So is a documentation site people return to, and a tool they use weekly.

Spend some of every quarter’s budget on the channel nobody else controls, even in the quarters when the rented channels are working.

4. Fix the step just before the money

Everyone works on the top of the funnel because it is visible and easy to buy. The step before the purchase is usually where the loss is largest and the fix is cheapest.

Watch a recording of five people using your checkout or your enquiry form. It takes twenty minutes and it typically finds something embarrassing. A required field nobody can answer. An error message that does not say what is wrong. A button below the fold on a phone.

Fixing that converts traffic you have already paid for.

5. Write down what you will not do

The tactics you refuse, the customers you are wrong for, the channels you will not enter this year.

This is what protects a plan from being eaten by whatever seemed urgent in March. It also makes every later decision faster, because half of them have already been made.

The one under all five

Do fewer things properly. A marketing programme running four channels badly is outperformed by one running two well, and the budget is the same.

Which two depends on where your buyers actually are. Answer that with data, before spending a year on the answer you assumed. That is where we start in growth work.