WE at Red Door know that developing a top notch digital marketing presence requires expertise in numerous areas, including SEO, media, UX, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and social media.
Each of these elements is vitally important to your brand’s digital health, and a weakness in one particular area will cause the whole to suffer. In thinking about the strengths and weaknesses in your brand’s digital presence, here are some questions to ask:
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Is our website optimized to our conversion goals?
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How effective are our key site pages – home page, landing page, lead generation forms – at driving goal conversions?
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What do our users want to do? What do we want them to do? Can we make navigating our site easier for our users?
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Are users finding our site via search? Are we maximizing search effectiveness?
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What are users or customers saying about us? What can do we do to leverage positive brand sentiment, and can we learn from negative sentiment?
Of course, asking these questions is only the first step in maximizing your brand’s digital presence. The next step is answering them and integrating your learnings. There are many tools available to address these different issues. Here are five of the best tools for ensuring that you and your brand are digital marketing masters.
SEMRush
One of the most effective ways to gauge your digital marketing standing is to compare your brand’s performance to that of your competitors. A tool like SEMRush offers a view into how much traffic other brands are driving to their websites, what keywords are – and aren’t – working for them, and where they are spending their marketing dollars. You can even download samples of competitors’ ad copy. Use this plethora of information to size up your brand’s marketing muscle, as well as to recognize potential opportunities to tweak and shift your current digital marketing initiatives.
Visible Intelligence
With social media providing the public as powerful a voice as it’s ever had, it has become crucial for brands to know what their customer base is saying about them. Visible Intelligence and other social listening tools allow you to sift through social media posts, blog entries, articles, and other online content that mention your brand. From here, you can quickly get ahead of any budding customer service or PR issues, identify causes of negative and positive perception, and shape marketing efforts to maintain strong positive brand sentiment.
3M VAS
Making your website easy for visitors to navigate is vital to your brand’s digital health. Use 3M’s Visual Attention Software to assess what users see in the first five seconds upon landing on your site. You want users to spot the most important elements of the page in that initial five second period, and 3M VAS mimics human eye movement pattern to show you where users’ attention is likely to be drawn on the page. Use this information to target unnecessary distractions and inefficiencies in your site’s intended user flow.
Usability Hub
In the same vein, users’ feedback on your brand’s website design is irreplaceable. User testing services, like Usability Hub and UserTesting, allow you to present your webpages to a pool of people in a controlled environment to assess their opinions about them, and even to see how they interact with your site. With Usability Hub, you can show alternative page designs to people to gauge their preferences, ask more in-depth questions about your site, and see what stands out to them in the first five seconds. UserTesting gives you the ability to have people navigate specified portions of your site while their comments and on-sight movements are recorded. User experience testing services let you test your site with the intention of finding strengths and weaknesses in its design.
These tools provide a solid backbone for developing and strengthening your brand’s digital presence. Moving forward, we’ll build upon the analyses these tools offer, and introduce a few best practices in page design and conversion rate optimization.
