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14.07.2016 // 10 Small Digital Marketing Strategy Hacks That Move The Needle

10 Small Digital Marketing Strategy Hacks That Move The Needle

When was the last time you evaluated your website from the perspective of a customer?

Have you ever secret-shopped your own eCommerce site? It’s far too often for a company to implement a website, software solution, or new program and never look back. You may get lucky and never have any big issues.

Or, you may find everything from glaring typos to broken graphics and links that go nowhere. Even the most successful programs can afford to be tweaked a bit.

Keep your digital marketing strategy on point by checking in with your systems and assets every quarter to every six months and performing a thorough test.

See if anything can be updated, streamlined, or improved. Often, even small changes can make a really big difference. Below are small digital marketing strategy hacks that will really move the needle for you:

1. Replace One-Time Pieces with Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is a major time and money saver, as you can promote it at any point, rather than having to recreate content for a new campaign every quarter. Remember that, even though you’ve seen it a lot, your customers and prospects probably haven’t. What’s uninspired to you could be exciting to them and make a big difference on your ROI.

If you have seasonal campaigns, do your best to make those evergreen as well so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each year. As an added bonus, maintaining consistent elements across seasonal promotions will build brand recognition with your customers. If your product is one that must be purchased annually, they’ll come to expect your campaigns – and they’ll be ready with their credit cards.

2. Prune Your SEM Spend

Obviously, you implemented your search engine marketing strategy so that you’d be able to attract customers doing searches inside your wheelhouse. But it’s still really common for those programs to get bloated and irrelevant over time. To prune your spend, ask yourself, are those outlier terms really worth the investment?

Usually, it’s better to review the program and get laser-focused on only the keywords that matter most. Prune the rest.

3. Optimize Your Follow-Up Emails

Do you send transactional emails to customers that could benefit from a marketing tie-in? Even an electronic receipt can include a call-to-action asking customers to share their experience with you or enter a positive review you can use for social proof. When you really optimize each and every email you send, you’ll increase engagement and improve marketing without increasing time or money spent.

4. Audit Search Ads and Landing Pages

It’s important to periodically audit search ads and landing pages for consistency in messaging, color scheme, and promotions offered – especially if multiple people work on them or if your internal brand standards have changed. Small mistakes in these areas due to out-of-date landing pages or mismatched ad/landing page pairings could cost you customers or unnecessary ad spend.

Also make sure all links on your landing pages work, and that all the ads you have are still relevant. Eliminate any extraneous ads – there’s no need to have them cluttering your ad account. If you aren’t able to do this yourself, you can hire an intern to do this in-house or outsource to an agency. The money you save will make doing so worthwhile.

5. Continually Optimize Prices

Companies that price once and never think of it again are leaving untold amounts of money on the table. Too many businesses focus on getting leads and customers, but fall off cliff when it comes to pricing. To optimize your pricing, quantify your buyer personas, implement a pricing process, and review it on a regular basis.

6. Create a “Swipe File”

Copywriters are known for keeping great-performing content in a swipe file, which they can then use for inspiration and ideas for future pieces. It’s time that digital marketers did the same. See a beautiful pricing page? Inspired by digital sales copy? Impressed with a color scheme? Snapshot it in Evernote or another program, tag it, and save it for a time when you need some marketing inspiration.

7. Improve Your Pricing Page

Your pricing page is where your customers go as they’re making their purchasing decision, so it pays to do it right. Making your pricing page clean and focusing on elements that matter to the customer can increase your sales dramatically. Why take up half of your pricing page with elements included in all plans? Instead, focus on the upgrades, keep your table small, and offer the right number of tiers. Your customers will thank you.

8. Streamline Your Checkout Page

There are an enormous number of small ways to optimize your checkout page to improve last-minute conversions. If you don’t need a field, don’t ask for it. Save your customers time and aggravation by allowing them to just check-out when they’re trying to buy, instead of forcing them to sign-up for an account. Include testimonials to reduce buyer’s remorse and last-minute mind changes.

Many companies don’t bother with the design of their checkout page, but just implementing these small changes can increase your sales and growth dramatically.

9. Celebrate Your Influential Partners

Companies who have influential partners or strong brand evangelists take celebrating them for granted. By publicly acknowledging these influential people, you encourage them to keep going, as well as invite others into advocacy. A small step of recognition could have major implications for your business’s sales and growth.

10. Implement Customer Retention Strategies

Customer service isn’t often viewed as an element of marketing, but smart companies know the sales funnel isn’t complete until they’ve secured referrals and repeat business. A mere two percent increase in customer retention can lower costs by as much as 10 percent, so don’t forget customer service when you’re discussing digital marketing hacks and improving ROI.

Improvements to your marketing strategy don’t have to require a five-person team and a six-month time schedule. Instead implement these small digital marketing strategy hacks and watch your sales, company growth, and customer satisfaction soar.

08.07.2016 // Three reasons to consider The City of London Investment Trust

A good investment for the long term?

We believe investing over the longer term serves to mitigate some of the short-term risks and volatility inherent in equity markets, and can maximise your potential returns. The City of London Investment Trust aims to unlock value in equities on a medium to long-term basis, and may be of interest to investors looking to gain UK stock market exposure through a broad, conservatively managed portfolio of blue-chip investments.

Looking back over the past 50 years, short term investors may have been unnerved by any number of macroeconomic events: the 73/74 bear market, the winter of discontent, severe unemployment, interest rates hikes to 15%, ‘Black Monday’, ‘Black Wednesday’, The Asian Financial Crisis, the dotcom crash, or the Global Financial Crisis; all potentially leading to performance damaging withdrawals in the process.

City of London

Adjusted for inflation, £100 in cash would be worth £1662 today; with income reinvested, £100 put into gilts would have handed back just under £7k; a broad basket of UK equities would have earned you nearly £27k; and £100 into the City of London would have earned just over £56k. Whatever your investment, you would have achieved the best outcome with a long term approach. However, please consider that past performance should not be used as a guide to future performance.

An investment trust advantage

One of the Trust’s strategic aims is to provide a growing stream of income for its investors by investing in companies that are well financed, offer a strong competitive advantage and demonstrate a history of stable cash-flows and rising dividends.

The investment trust structure helps to achieve this aim: unlike open-ended vehicles which must pay out all of the income they receive from underlying holdings, a UK-domiciled investment trust is permitted to retain up to 15% of its annual income and pay it into a reserve account. It means that during more plentiful years a small percentage of the dividend payments can be put aside, so that during lacklustre years, for example in an economic downturn, the fund manager is able to use the reserve to top-up the dividend it pays investors and smooth the income stream over time.

While not a guide to the future, this has enabled City of London to grow its dividend every year since 1966 – the longest record of any investment trust! Job Curtis has been managing the Trust since 1991.

Low charges

Charges can be a significant drag on performance, a fact sometimes ignored by investors. For example, using a simple mathematical model, a £10,000 investment growing at 6% for 30 years would be worth around £51,000 in a fund charging 0.4%, but only £42,500 in an identical fund charging 1%.

Due to its size and its ability to spread its costs among a large base of investors, City of London’s ongoing charge is the lowest in its sector, at just 0.43% per year. So why consider City of London?

- While not a guide to the future, it has weathered a myriad of economic events and market turmoil through its conservative, blue-chip investments, and may be a good investment for the long term.

- It has the longest growing dividend record of any investment trust, aiming to provide a smooth stream of income to its investors. - It has the lowest ongoing charge of any investment trust in its sector, reducing the drag to potential future performance. Three reasons to consider The City of London Investment Trust