NEWSFLASH…Digital marketing is hard work! It takes time to research, it takes time to provision and it takes time to implement new activity and when everyone is busy, more often than not, digital marketing gets shelved.
But believe it or not there are quick wins you can implement today! Re-heat your leftovers from last night, sit down at your desk because these are 7 ways you can boost your digital marketing in your lunch break.
Monday Lunch Break – Sort Your Facebook Targeting
It’s lunchtime, you’re 7 coffees in and you’ve made it through the dreaded Monday morning. Put that coffee high to good use and start kicking some digital marketing goals with Facebook.
Who are your Facebook ads targeting and why are you targeting them? These two simple questions usually get answered with the following: “we target everyone because that’s what we do here”. Facebook’s targeting functionality is getting better all the time and unless you are leveraging that, you can’t possibly be maximising your ad performance on the platform. We recommend running test campaigns with niche targeting and tailored messaging alongside your regular Facebook activity. This will help you understand which audience group represents the best value to your brand and which messaging works best within individual audience groups.
Tuesday Lunch Break – Get Negative With Your Keywords
While it’s too early in the week to be getting negative it’s time you started getting negative with your AdWords keywords. Chances are you’ve dedicated hours to strategically mapping which keywords you want to show for, you might even have mapped your keyword segmentation based on the user’s purchase journey but how much time have you dedicated to negative keywords?
While your keywords ensure you have the ability to show on the relevant search queries, negative keywords ensure you don’t waste impressions (and budget) showing on terms that aren’t in line with your advertising goals. Consider you sell Ford car parts online you may want to add Holden as a negative keyword to ensure your ads don’t show for irrelevant traffic.
Wednesday Lunch Break – Segment Based On Intent
Hump day…Enough said…We know users who type a brand search into Google have a very different intent than users who stumble across your ad on Instagram or Outbrain right? So in the interest of equality it doesn’t seem fair to compare all channels on a level playing field. By using segments in your Google Analytics you can isolate certain sets of data and understand user journey and behaviour based on intent rather than a blanket approach site-wide.
Segments can be split by sessions or by users. For example you can use a segment to only focus on traffic being driven by Instagram campaigns and better understand what value they represent to your brand. While these users may not convert directly, maybe they are more likely to sign up to a newsletter or watch a video or read a blog. Segments allow you to compare like-for-like rather than apples and oranges.
Thursday Lunch Break – Split Test Your Subjects
This is it…The downward slide into the weekend has begun and you can barely wipe the smile off your face. Lets take that newly found enthusiasm and use it to talk directly to our customers through an email campaign. But how do you know what email subject line works unless you test it? Not only that, how do you know what used to work can’t be done better unless you test it? Testing is at the heart of digital marketing and always trying to improve your existing practices is a great way to ensure you don’t get stale.
You can split test your subject line length, copy, hard sell vs. soft sell, personalisation vs. no personalisation, appearance etc. Then compare the data on different levels from opening and click through rates to unsubscribes and engagement. Not only that but you should be continually testing email days and times to understand what works and what doesn’t. Your online audience is a moving target and unless you’re moving with it you will quickly fall behind.
On a side note, whenever you are testing email subject lines always bear in mind common spam triggers to avoid your next round of testing ending up in the trash. Common terms like ‘free’ or ‘save’ or symbols like $ or % greatly increase your risk of ending up in the junk. Also avoid overcapitalisation, excessive spacing or underscoring to stay on the safe side.
Friday Lunch Break – Add your ad extensions
It’s Friday! While your competitors are kicking back and looking to the weekend you are put your head down and run right past them…it’s the digital marketing equivalent of the tortoise and the hare story. With more and more businesses competing for impression share and traffic on Google (particularly since right hand side ads got the flick), ad extensions have never been more valuable. Essentially Ad Extensions are a user friendly, interactive form of adding more information to your existing ad creative and help ensure your ads stand out from your competitors.
They come in a variety of forms and you’ve no doubt come across them yourself from call and location extensions to sitelink extensions, review extensions and call-outs. Ad extensions are free to add to your campaign and you only pay per click, the same way you do with ads themselves.
Saturday Lunch Break – PageSpeed Test Your Site
You’re working a Saturday…The office is more than likely empty and you’re well and truly in line for employee of the month! And while you might not be able to resolve the issues of a slow site load time in your lunch break you can go a long way to identifying the issues.
Google’s PageSpeed tools are an invaluable free resource, which will score your page load time out of 100 and recommend issues to fix and improve load time and user experience.
Sunday Lunch Break – Review your UTM tagging
It’s Sunday, you don’t want anything too physically or mentally draining to tackle during your lunch break so how about we finish off the week with a review of your UTM tagging. Google Analytics is great but is it telling you all you need to know? Without consistent, easy to understand UTM tagging it becomes much harder to identify which individual creative or campaign is performing delivering the best value for your brand. UTM tags or Urchin Tracking Modules are essentially extra information appended to the end of your URL to show which campaign and ad has driven the engagement.
Consider you have 5 Facebook ads running, without UTM tagging you will only be able to see that the traffic has come from social but you know which ad has sent the traffic through and more importantly which ad is sending through quality traffic. For more information on how to tag your URLs properly check out our ultimate guide on UTM tagging.
If there’s a better way to spend your lunch breaks than we’ve listed in this blog, it’s news to us! Share your lunchtime goals in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you.
Written by our partners at Traffika.