7 Effective Online Marketing Habits That Will Boost Your Business in 2012

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“We are all creatures of habit.”

It may be a well-known saying, but do we really understand how true it is? Every part of our lives is influenced by routine, repetition and familiarity in some way, right from choosing what we have for breakfast to making important decisions that will affect our businesses. Of course, some habits are better than others, and forming new habits (or addressing ones we’d rather give up) requires training. It is essential to perform our desired actions, use discipline to repeat them and consistency to keep it up. The more we do this, the more natural it becomes – and a habit is born. Online marketing habits are no different. To make your business presence felt in the digital world, you must be ready and willing to identify positive actions, create a schedule for their execution, dedicate yourself to adhering to the routine and continue to carry it on into the future.

Here’s a guide to the most essential online marketing habits to push yourself into the limelight:

Habit 1: Schedule Campaign Actions

Marketing campaigns don’t just occur at the click of a button. You must be organised and have clear stages of development in order to make the most of your potential. How you plan is, in many ways, is just as important as the execution of your campaign.

Firstly: make scheduling apps and software, such as Google Calendar and MS Outlook, your best friend. Everything should be coordinated on a central diary.

Making time to properly utilise your Google Analytics account should be a top priority. Make time to check it – and analyse the performance of your chosen approach.

In order to enable you to manage time efficiently, you should set up alerts to trigger the performance of your campaigns fall – for example: a reduction in conversions generated from an AdWords campaigns or significant drop in traffic to your website(s). This allows early intervention and avoids wasted time on ineffective strategies.

Email campaigns and press releases should be scheduled at targeted dates, but this should always be done well in advance, to allow you to integrate their launch with other actions.

Habit 2: Track all Activities

Launching materials and actions and not following performance is like setting off a wind-up toy and walking out of the room. It’s a complete waste of energy, and is annoying to anyone else who is left to watch!

Be proactive. For example, when you post a new blog, consider questions such as:
- Did it perform better when I shared it via Facebook/Twitter?
- If social networking positively helped, did one site work better?
- Is that because your connections are superior on one network over the other?
- How could performance be improved?’

Traffic to your website and conversions should always be monitored in relation to your actions, in order to identify the strongest line of attack.

Habit 3: Build Mobile Friendly Sites – they are here to stay!

You only have to look around a train carriage during rush hour to realise the importance of mobile technology.

It is expected that by the end of 2012, tablets and smart phones will account for 16 to 22% of all paid searches. Furthermore, online retailer ASOS has seen a year-on-year increase in activity of 123% from Android phone users.

If your website is not mobile friendly, you are missing out on a huge market. But if you want to target your development even further, it may be good to know that 77% of mobile traffic comes from tablets, such as the iPad.

Habit 4: Focus on Paid Search

Like many of the Internet’s best features, Google is moving towards a paid premium model to improve quality – and, of course, revenues.

For SEOs a troubling development has ensued: Since Google decided to start encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default settings for logged in Google accounts last November, keyword data from logged in Google searcher are no longer available in analytics apps – instead there is a {not provided} status for such searches.

Only Google AdWords traffic on Google has 100% keyword referral visibility at the moment.

In the local marketing scene, Google Places was initially introduced as a free service but with the introduction of AdWords Express, local businesses can now ‘boost’ their local listings above organic local business listings on Google by paying.

Paying for premium services, as well as planning, scheduling and executing your campaigns effectively will help you get the most out of your marketing.

Embrace the paid search marketing mode as it is here to stay – Google under a lot of shareholder/investor pressure to increase revenue and so a lot of their new developments are geared to doing just that. Be sure to measure you return on investment for all your paid search efforts.

Habit 5: Create Locally Targeted Campaigns (PPC, SEO, Social Media)

If the rise of mobile technology is one example of an ever-increasing market opportunity, the importance of being local is another.

According to data from Bing, 53% of searchers have a local focus when looking for businesses, organisations, products and services. Similarly, Google states around a fifth of all searches have local intent. This has huge implications in terms of targeting and placement.

Conversions from searcher on mobile devises tend to be very high as mobile searcher are hardly ever just browsing through the internet. An individual searching for a taxi or a local hotel from their mobile are more likely to call the taxi company or hotel than a desktop user. Research shows that 43% of local searchers contacted a business or visited a business after searching.

Be sure to structure and locally target your email marketing, Pay Per Click, Social Media and Group Buying campaigns. AdWords now has very robust device targeting options that can target specific devices. I would advice the create of campaigns exclusively dedicated to mobile devices if your resources permit. e.g. I have started to create iPad only campaigns with very impressive conversion results. The rule of the game now is test, test, test….especially with mobile devices.

Habit 6: Think like Your Customers

Remember the old adage, “the customer is always right”? Well, it’s as true now as ever – and it means that you need to understand them and think like them in order to best serve their needs.

What are they likely to search for?
What do they like to talk about socially?
What will grab and hold my attention as a customer?
Is the blog post I have written likely to help my clients?

Whatever the answers are, that is what you need to shape your campaigns around.

Usability testing is no longer prohibitively expensive with crowdsourced user testing sites like usertesting.com.

Habit 7: Get Proactive with Your Learning & Actions

In the information age we live in, information overload is a problem we are all starting to wake up to it. We all seem to be bombarded too much information (most of which is ‘junk’ information) – information we really do not need to process from RSS feeds, email newsletters, blogs, TV, radio, etc. Extreme as it may sound; avoid ‘junk information’ the same way you would avoid junk food!
If online marketing is your sole responsibility, learn online marketing in small bits and execute actions in manageable chunks! The worst way to approach your learning and development is to bombard yourself with pointless actions and details.

You probably do not need to read through a 100 page book before you take action – online marketing moves really fast.
Execute what you learn in small chunks as taking a big bang approach on campaigns hardly ever works!
It is important to keep a focus; streamline the information we consume and act upon for our businesses.

Be smart and keep on top of your skills on step at a time. Online marketing moves fast and, if you don’t keep up, you’ll miss out.

Photo credits: Niklas via Flickr