10 Digital Marketing Hacks for 10 Years of HOM

This month, we celebrated 10 years of HOM. While we had the team together, we thought this would be a great time to collate our top 10 digital marketing hacks for content creation, graphic design, SEO, PPC, and social media advertising. We hope these handy tips will support you in optimising your entire digital marketing strategy for success.

 

Ten Marketing Hacks For Content Writing with Tia:                                                                                                                                                                              

1. Discover your niche to create original and valuable content for users.
2. Identify your audience by creating a fictional archetype based on demographic data. Direct your written content at this archetype to better understand your audience’s needs, worries and questions. 
3. Scope out the top-ranking competition to see the kinds of content they’re creating. Never copy, but this is an excellent way to research what works for them and how you could elevate your content. 
4. Perform Keyword Research and incorporate these phrases into your headlines and content to attract more clicks. Software, such as Google Ads, can help with this, or you can complete your own research by extensively exploring content around your niche within the search results. 
5. Create natural internal links to other blog posts or pages you’ve written that are valuable for users to extend their knowledge. 
6. Aim for long-form content that’s a minimum of 500 words to explore the topic thoroughly. But remember, online users typically stay on a webpage for 15 seconds, so if you are thinking of writing a long blog post (2,000 words+), you’ll have to think creatively about ways to engage with your users and grab their attention for longer. 
7. Create a content calendar so you never run out of content ideas and can schedule posts. It’s best practice to research key dates or holidays relevant to your niche. Always jot down ideas that come to mind in a notebook or spreadsheet that can be useful later. 
8. Write in everyday language to grab a larger audience. Ordinary language is straightforward and often more engaging. It’s best if your content naturally reads as if you were helping the audience in person. 
9. Improve readability with online software like Hemingway App to improve SEO and boost online readability. You want your online content to read as clearly and concisely as possible. 
10. Just write! Worry about your content sounding good in the later editing stage. 

 

Ten Marketing Hacks For Graphic Design with Vicki:

1. Less is more! 

It is tempting to squeeze as much information as possible onto an ad/poster/flyer, but it’s much more beneficial to keep it simple! Use short, catchy titles and a good balance of relevant images and key informative text. Also, don’t forget about hierarchy — what do you want the customer to see first, and where do you want their eyes to go next? Using different sizes and styles of text can help achieve this, as well as paying close attention to the overall layout.

2. Utilise lines, dots and simple patterns

It may sound simple, but especially when working with a small space, it can be constructive to use small marks and lines to create slight segregation between areas of information/imagery. Lines can also help to create a sense of ‘flow’ for your viewer whilst making your artwork also look more visually interesting at the same time.

3. Share the people behind the business

Stock imagery/video can be a handy resource. Still, you will get much more engagement in sharing real-life content such as team outings, snippets of advice from team members, personal achievements or even chatty social media stories. Seasonal holidays are also a great way to promote your brand while sharing real-life things such as putting up the Christmas tree, setting up an easter egg hunt or even a pumpkin decorating competition. These are all ways you can share what your team is up to and maybe even encourage your audience to get involved too.

4. Stick to your brand guidelines 

It’s important to have a visual toolbox when promoting your business to help your brand look consistent, professional and easily identifiable. The main features include a clear logo, colour palette, typeface(s), image style and a set language style/tone of voice. It is also a good idea to have a set of pre-made templates you can reuse by simply swapping over the images and text, such as a ‘did you know’ titled image or testimonial backgrounds.

5. Show your target audience what they want to see

When using imagery, make it relatable and reflect what your target audience could achieve from using your business, such as a model (representing your target audience) wearing your product, smiling and laughing. Sharing non-business-related content they may be interested in can also be a big win in gaining interaction.

6. Share success

Graphs, upwards arrows, and clear numerical statistics representing success will always ‘wow’ people over standard text. When sharing testimonials, feature an image/video of the customer and share their name and what they purchased from you to create a complete visual story of the customer’s journey.

7. Schedule, schedule, schedule!

An organised social posting schedule is a great way to plan your content and visualise your layouts (especially for your Instagram grid!) This way, you can also have set topics of information that you share weekly/monthly that your audience looks forward to and general spontaneous stuff. An organised plan can make consistent posting easier by streamlining the process. Pre-made templates and social posting scheduling tools also help with this.

8. Keep up to date with social media platform updates

How we interact on social media is constantly changing, and many platforms are now changing their algorithms to favour video and ‘reels’. It is essential to stay up to date with these changes and adapt our marketing methods to ensure we get seen! Whilst it can be daunting, there are many (free!) resources online that you can utilise to upgrade your skills and content, such as youtube videos and apps.

9. Colours create emotion

Familiarising yourself with colour psychology is also handy for connecting with your audience. Colour psychology refers to the emotions that different colours reflect; for example, red can portray love, passion or energy, whereas blue can represent calmness, trust and loyalty.

10. Imagery, illustrations and icons

Depending on your marketing methods, it’s a good idea to consider the style of imagery you use. Whilst it is vital to stick to your brand guidelines and be consistent with your image style, it can be helpful to utilise icons and illustrations to break up chunks of text and visualise concepts that photos might not be able to.

 

Ten Marketing Hacks For SEO with Andrew:

1. Perform keyword research to ensure your phrases are actually searched for.
2. Optimise <title> tags — be precise and targeted to your target phrase.
3. Check your website is trackable by the search engines and that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any pages you want to be indexed.
4. Create an XML file and also reference this within your robots.txt file and Google Search Console.
5. Take time to write unique, relevant and exciting content.
6. Search & remove any 404 errors; either use a custom 404 page, or 301 redirect deleted pages to an existing relevant page.
7. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to run speed and performance tests, and make changes where required.
8. Create visually attractive pages with a mix of content, images, video, testimonials and FAQ’s.
9. Structure your website; consider future-proofing by using categories, short URLs, and directory structures.
10. Don’t try to over-achieve; without a large marketing budget, you will not rank for a phrase such as ‘insurance’, so be realistic and target phrases within the time & budget you have.

 

Ten Marketing Hacks For Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) with Stewart:

1. Ensure all tracking is in place & accurately reporting before starting. With PPC, it’s vital to know which campaign elements drive leads or generate sales revenue.
2. Leverage first-party customer data where possible. For example, utilising a list of existing customers to create a similar audience of people likely to buy or engage with your brand.
3. Spell-check all ad copy, even when a new ad is created. Google will approve ads with incorrect spellings, and users will quickly lose confidence in a brand even before they see the website.
4. Consider dynamic telephone tracking if your inbound communication entails a large volume of phone calls. This allows you to identify the search terms generating phone calls at a keyword level. 
5. Ensure the landing pages you target load correctly on desktop and mobile. Often, the mobile experience is overlooked. But, it’s essential to consider the user experience once a mobile user clicks on an ad.
6. With e-commerce campaigns & setting initial ROAS targets, try to be conservative initially, and set lower ROAS targets to build up traffic and data before setting more aggressive targets.
7. Monitor search terms to ensure irrelevant and low-intent traffic isn’t getting through to the site & using up ad spend. Add anything irrelevant as negative phrases.
8. Use an appropriate budget for what you are trying to achieve; if daily budgets are too low & you are targeting many elements, the budget can often become stretched and have an overall negative effect.
9. For retail, optimise your product feed. Ensure product titles contain accurate product descriptions, such as colour, material, length, etc.
10. Landing pages must reflect the advert and audience you are targeting. The user needs to immediately find what they are looking for once landing on the page. For example, if targeting ’round blue widgets’, send users to the ’round blue widgets’ page and not to a generic ‘blue widgets’ page.

 

Ten Marketing Hacks For Social Media Advertising with Shaun:

1. High-target Advertising: LinkedIn audiences usually have more demographic information than Facebook. Therefore, targeting on LinkedIn can be incredibly accurate.
2. Follow the 3 key elements of advertising: Audience, Message, and Offer.
3. Always consider segregating your advertising objectives. Is it for lead generation or brand awareness?
4. Adverts on LinkedIn last longer than Facebook Ads, meaning you don’t need to refresh your content as often. 
5. When advertising on TikTok, consider building engagement organically by taking your consumer on a journey before using paid advertising to launch your new offer/product. 
6. E-commerce made easy: Use Instagram Business to tag and sell your products without needing a website by creating a product catalogue from your Facebook page. 
7. Unlike its competitors, sponsored ‘camouflage’ paid ads on Twitter look very similar to regular tweets, making it more likely for users not to dismiss them as ‘just another business trying to sell me something.’
8. Featuring a case study is one of the most effective types of content for generating hot leads! The next in line is video.
9. LinkedIn advertisement is much more expensive. But, if your leads have significant value and longevity, then the cost per acquisition will be worth it.
10. Also known as A/B testing, split testing allows you to separate your audience into two groups. One group sees one variation of your ad, and the other group sees the second variation. Once you have the response from your audience, you’ll be in a better position to choose which ad you think will yield the best results when you run it for real.