The Complete Digital Marketing Checklist

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. In an age where new tools, tricks, and tips are surfacing every day, it is easy to feel overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge you need to succeed in marketing. But you don't need to be overwhelmed or even whelmed. Why? Because we're here to help. We created the Complete Digital Marketing Checklist to help you focus your attention on the most important aspects of marketing while pushing aside all the fluff and distractions. Proficiency in digital marketing begins with understanding the key foundations of the digital world. Our digital marketing checklist will focus on the essential marketing elements for your company website, email, and social media. Master these, and you are on your way to furthering your marketing success.

Make Sure You Have Google Analytics On Your Website

Our digital marketing checklist starts with the most important item in your toolset - data. This is one of the first things we evaluate in our approach to helping companies with their digital marketing. As a Google Analytics Certified Partner, we have seen first-hand the extreme benefits of making sure Google Analytics is up and running on your website. The data captured by Google Analytics helps you better understand how your website and your users are operating. Here are the key benefits of connecting to Google:

• Track users: Understand the search behavior and locale of your website visitors.
• Track your marketing channels: Determine how each marketing channel is performing. Which efforts are attracting and converting the most traffic?
• Filter out internal traffic: Keep corporate traffic from tainting your data. Instead, observe organic reach and marketing traffic.

Focus On Local SEO

When it comes to SEO, it is easy to emphasize content, keywords, and never take our eyes off of our personal website. If you fail to focus on local SEO, however, you are missing key opportunities to connect with customers.

• Google My Business & Bing Places for Business: The first step to local SEO is claiming and optimizing your business page on these two platforms. Too many businesses leave these unclaimed, losing countless touches and business opportunities.
• Yelp, Yellow Pages, and other local listings: Create a profile or business listing on any local search pages to ensure that nearby customers know you are in their neck of the woods.
• Build local content: A look at some recent case studies will show the value of local content. What is local content? Everything from city-specific landing pages to blog posts that focus on your city and not just your product. What local events does your company support? What local issues/businesses/fundraisers do your customers care about? Focus on that and a simple keyword search and you are on your way to creating some SEO-rich local content.

Add Schema To Your Website

Using schema, known as Semantic SEO, is essential to digital marketing. It is also still largely ignored, even by well-known companies. Schema is a structured data markup that helps Google, Bing, and every other search engine read and understand the contents of your website. It is schema that allows Google to pull those nifty little rich snippets into your search engine results. Schema also helps Google pull websites to the forefront using lists or star ratings. Implement schema on your website today. Yesterday. As soon as possible. It is that important.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Having a responsive website could be the difference between increasing sales or losing customers. You can rank number one on Google, but if your site isn't optimized for mobile devices, customers will be gone before the page has fully loaded. Mobile-friendly sites need to do more than just account for various screen sizes. Optimizing your site for mobile also includes these elements:

• Keep site speeds high: Google expects your mobile-friendly page to load in 1 second. Check your site speed, to make sure it is up to par and rendering data fast enough to engage your visitors.
• Don't block CSS, JavaScript, or images: Blocking prevents Google from determining if your website is working properly, which can result in poor rankings.
• Don't use flash: Using flash requires your visitors to have a flash player. That and the fact that it doesn't work on Apple devices should be enough to convince you not to use it.
• Optimize for local: People are using their phones to search the web more and more every day, and the chance is high that they are searching for something local. As a local business, you will want to do everything possible to help those people find you.

Give Your Website A Full SEO Audit

Next on our digital marketing checklist, as we mentioned previously, search ranking depends on so much more than having the right keywords in place. Everything from slow page load to broken links can impact your ranking. Do regular SEO audits on your website to ensure you're keeping up with best SEO practices by an SEO expert or qualified individual.

• Test your site for errors: Check that all your pages, buttons, and backlinks are working properly.
• Optimize title tags / meta descriptions / internal links: Keep title tags to 50-60 characters, and meta descriptions at 155-160 characters. Also, make sure every internal link is sending your visitor to the correct page.
• Make sure your local SEO is on lock: At this point, you are aware that local SEO is extremely important. Do it. Do it now.

Add Elements Of Personalization To Your Website

Website personalization is the practice of serving content to users based on their behaviors and actions when they previously visited your website. Diving deeper into the data from Conversion Rate Optimization, personalization looks closely at clicks, actions, location, and every other element of website behavior that can be tracked to ensure a unique experience for every person who clicks on your website. Users are starting to feel frustrated when websites don't give them the information or experience they are looking for, and 59% of shoppers say they are influenced by personalization. It is definitely time to get personal.

Website testing, otherwise known as Conversion Rate Optimization, is like editing a book. It is important to check every line, period, comma, etc. Unlike book editing, however, website testing shouldn't only happen right before a website goes live. Websites are alive and constantly changing, and therefore need regular testing. Here's what to keep an eye on:

• Test content: Check for errors. How does it appear to the user? Are the fonts correct? Is it up to date?
• Test layouts: Are your layouts mobile friendly? Are they eye-catching?
• Test calls to action: Do they grab the user's attention? Are they driving traffic? Do the buttons work?
• Test headlines / banners: How do they show up on all devices? Are they doing their job?
• Test landing pages: Is all the content where it should be? Links working? Page optimized?

Get Heatmap, Scroll Map, User Videos, And User Tracking Installed On Your Website

When it comes to optimizing your website, having the right tools in place can be invaluable. Using tools like heatmaps and scroll maps to track user data allows you to understand your users and focus your marketing campaigns on the correct audience. Without that data, it is impossible to know how best to attract users, give them the most personalized content experience, and catch their attention with a focused call to action.

Develop An Email Marketing And Marketing Automation Strategy

As part of your off-site marketing strategy, email campaigns are still a top priority. While people may be browsing the web from their phones, they are also still checking email from their phones as well. Developing a marketing strategy and calendar (more on that later) allows you to set up automated emails that target your audience at key times of day and days of the week. Here are some things to focus on in your email marketing:

• Distribute new content through your email: Not everyone is going to come directly to your blog, so bring your blog to them.
• Segment your audiences and distribute content based on those segments: This targeted approach gives your user a more personalized experience with your brand and website.
• Be consistent in sending out content: This is where an editorial calendar comes in handy. Read on.

Develop A Social Media Marketing Strategy

Another aspect of your off-site marketing strategy, social media must be part of your marketing plan. People spend over an hour a day on social media, and 16-24 year olds? 3 hours! Your audience is already there. It is time to meet them where they are at. Here are 5 things to do when it comes to social media marketing:

• Claim your social media profiles: Simple enough. Claim your business, brand, personal page, all of the above.
• Optimize with correct business information: For business pages, make sure all of the information is correct, useful, and helpful to the customer.
• Actively engage your communities: Start sharing content. What do your customers care about? Start engaging them with the things that matter most.
• Respond to reviews: Don't leave reviews hanging. People read them, and they will want to know what you have to say about it. Thank people for great reviews, interact with some of the not-so-great reviews.
• Distribute your content: Did you post a new blog? Share it on social media, along with any other content your customers will want to see.

Build An Editorial Calendar

The all-important editorial calendar. This one little (or big?) piece of marketing genius will help you enormously with your marketing strategy. By creating a calendar and organizing your content and marketing campaigns, you can easily stay on top of deadlines, keep content flowing, and track the effectiveness of each new piece of content or campaign. What are the tenets of a great editorial calendar?

• Keep building content
• Track content efforts and distribution
• Make sure team members know their responsibilities, deadlines.
• Share content!

Have Questions Or Need Help?

We're here to help! If you have any questions or comments about our digital marketing checklist, feel free to contact us and we'll be happy to give answers to any inquiries and get your digital marketing strategy on track! At Marcel Digital, we are all about giving your efforts a comprehensive purpose. Don’t miss out on the impact you could be making.