1. Amadou T. Agne – Vogueboard
According to Hubspot research, salespeople spend as little as one third of their time on selling. The other two thirds is spent on writing emails (21%), entering data (17%), scheduling calls (12%), and internal meetings (12%).One of the greatest opportunities during the current, hopefully short-term, slowdown is to optimize business processes through cloud-based software automation, increase efficiency of sales teams by implementing a CRM system, and training people for new skills like marketing automation or B2B sales automation.
2. Neil Patel – Quick Sprout
Most ecommerce sites focus on driving traffic. And although traffic is important, improving your conversion rate is a great way to generate more sales. So if you want your ecommerce site to grow, don’t just focus on traffic building, also optimize your site for conversions.
3. Jeff Baker – Brafton
Marketing strategies shouldn’t be based on hunches; many people make the mistake of assuming marketing is a purely qualitative “opinion” that anyone can do. Good marketing strategies are always a combination of data and psychology: the data justifies the investment in the strategy and the psychology is based on your customer profiles and personas.
Jeff Baker, CMO and Moz blog contributor.
4. Nick Dimitriou – moosend
To thrive, businesses need the best marketing strategies to meet their KPIs. While marketers have numerous tactics in their marketing toolbox, developing an effective SEO and Link Building strategy is the first step to achieve scalability. As more and more consumers trust and use search engines to find products and services, improving your website rankings through SEO is the best practice to increase your credibility, boost your organic traffic, and meet your sales goals. – Nick Dimitriou, Head of Growth at Moosend
5. Mark Schaefer – B Squared Media
A marketing strategy is meant to identify un-met and underserved customer needs, compel an organization to meet those needs, and then envision a system of promotion, placement, and pricing to deliver the product in a profitable way.
6. Andreea Sauciuc – cognitiveSEO
A good marketing strategy is understanding your audience and the user intent when they perform a search on Google. As an e-commerce business, you should know exactly what your audience wants to give them products and services that fulfill their needs to convert them and push them down the funnel.
It is a long process to rank on Google and find the user intent. It implies research (keyword research on Google, on your website search box, analytics), and then competitors spying to understand what do they offer. Then you’ll continue with content optimization so that SERPs will love your website content, fix any issues and technical errors to make a fast and performant site. No one likes a slow loading website…
Then continue with promotion and what other digital marketing strategies you want.
There’s a saying “Take care of home before impressing the streets” which can translate into analyzing your website before you share content and promote it.
7. Chase Clymer – Honest Ecommerce
A good marketing strategy is a simple marketing strategy. Pick one or two tactics that work and become the best at those in your space
8. Paul Thornton – digital hothouse
There isn’t a marketing strategy that works for all companies. Know your target audience. Once you understand your audience you can then start to create a strategy – where does your audience appear, if online, what websites, platforms and search engines do they frequent and what are their interests? Once you understand this you are able to focus on where to market to them, the messaging involved, and whether that includes the need for any offers or discounts.
9. Phillip Thune – Textbroker
A good online marketing strategy always includes a good content marketing strategy. If you are looking for huge traffic volumes and nice conversions, you need to attract Google and your readers at the same time. Start with your content and persona analysis. Then, write content that provides valuable information to your readers and solves their issues. If outsourcing content creation is an option, Textbroker is the right fit.
10. Alan Carr – Webpop Design
You can easily increase your bottom line by strategically placing customer reviews on your website. Customer reviews are proven to encourage people to buy. If you place real-life reviews on your website around your products or services, you can build trust with your users that can help lower the barrier to them buying from your website.
By providing social proof with customer reviews that are placed at key points throughout the purchase process, you can potentially double the chance of a website visitor converting into a customer. Integrate a service like TrustPilot into your checkout process to completely automate the process.
11. Dr Dave Chaffey – Smart Insights
To compete and grow your business with online marketing it’s essential to have a digital marketing strategy. Yet our research shows that many businesses of different sizes don’t have an integrated strategy to reach and engage audiences in an effective way. Our strategy system ‘RACE: Reach > Act > Convert > Engage’ uses a data-driven approach to grow business based on analytics and dashboards. Ultimately, you will compete based on the quality of your content marketing strategy, blending creative and efficient content distribution.
12. Mike Lieberman – Square 2
Today’s marketing strategy looks nothing like the strategy we used to build even five years ago. Today it includes story development, buyer journey mapping, differentiation, customer advocacy initiatives, tactical orchestration, analytics to measure performance and technology to improve performance.
13. Jason Falls – jasonfalls.com
A good marketing strategy is one that aligns with the overall goals of the business. No one will be happy with your marketing if it doesn’t have at least a trickle-down effect on revenue or sales. That doesn’t mean you can’t use content marketing, influencer marketing, advertising, public relations or even affiliate marketing for awareness or less concrete reasons. Those reasons may well lead to revenue or sales! But you have to develop a marketing strategy that ladders up to dollars or you won’t be in charge of marketing very long.” – Jason Falls, Digital Strategist and author of Winfluence: Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand (Coming in 2021).
14. Michael Melen – SmartSites
Invest in your reputation. Good online reviews on your business will boost returns on all of your marketing efforts, be it SEO, PPC, or otherwise. Develop effective processes to maximize your positive reviews and minimize the negative. If I had to develop a single central marketing strategy, that would be it.
15. Chris Makara – Bulk.ly
A good marketing strategy starts with having the right product fit (or service) that can solve a pain point of the target audience. The design, messaging and experience should all align in order to deliver on solving these pain points. And in order to know if the strategy is working (or not) it must be set up so that you can track your efforts. Without this data it’s hard to know if it is making an impact on your bottom line.
16. Joi Sigurdsson – CrankWheel
Automation has been the name of the game in marketing for many years, but I like to encourage people to think about where in your strategy a human element could help. Can you segment your website visitors automatically to understand which ones are the most valuable, and offer them to chat with a real human, or even offer them an immediate phone call and screen share to explain your offering? For those 1% of most valuable visitors, it can be really worth going above and beyond what most of your competitors are doing. Concretely, you can segment e.g. by seeing if they visit one of your higher-value pages (e.g. pricing or a page on a big-ticket offering) and stay there for a while, or you could have a form that they can fill out which usually ends up with an automated email or email sequence, but gets scored and might offer them to get a callback right now if the score is high enough.
17. Ajay Paghdal – Linkio
Don’t be afraid to link to competitors from your e-commerce website. If you’re just getting your website off the ground and SEO is important to you, think about building your content strategy around being a resource for shoppers. You can see in this e-commerce SEO case study how linking out to your competitors can improve your rankings for more keywords than if you just talked about your own products. Once the traffic is on your site, it’s your job to convince them your shop is the best.
18. Brian Dean – Backlinko
If you’re like most ecommerce sites, SEO is a REALLY important part of your business. The problem is, retail giants like Amazon and Best Buy tend to rank for just about everything. But they have a weakness…
You see, massive ecommerce sites like Amazon rely on Domain Authority to rank. If you look at individual product or category pages, they generally have few (if any links) pointing directly at them. Which means, if you can build links directly to your product pages, you can outrank them. Fortunately, there’s a strategy called The Moving Man Method that’s perfect for ecommerce sites. Basically you a) find products that are no longer sold and b) reach out to people that linked to those products and c) ask them to replace their link with a link to a similar product you sell.
19. David Reimherr – MAGNIFICENT
Marketing is simply putting the right message in front of the right people at the right moment. The key is, your message MUST deliver value to each individual. Gone are the days of broadcasting a ‘special offer’. In today’s fast-paced digital world, content and offers must truly be ‘special’ to each person. Take the time to research and understand your audience. Then, apply analytics to confirm accurate (or at least the most realistic) marketing decisions. It is not about just marketing, it is about marketing smart.
