It’s the 100th post on the Early Morning Train Blog! Hurray!
To celebrate I thought I’d do something special – give you my top 100 digital marketing tips. These tips cover all types of digital marketing as well as some general advice. These are 100 things every digital marketer needs to know. These are the first 100 things I would tell anyone with a small business or startup who wants to advertise it better.
It’s not the best advice – it’s the most important advice. For each one, I’ve tried to give a specific example to put it into context.
I hope you find these 100 digital marketing top tips useful! Don’t say I never gave you anything.
1) Always proofread everything. A typo can really undermine your message.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Content Marketing
2) Almost everything should end with a good CTA. Simply telling people what you expect them to do next really helps focus your audience.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
3) Don’t optimise the same thing two days in a row. Ideally, leave it a whole week at least between reviewing stats for ads/emails/whatever. Optimizations need time to take effect, and you need to gather enough data to see how the optimisation is performing.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
4) 1,000 impressions or one full week is enough data to know how well something is performing. Generally speaking, after you’ve run something for this long, you should be able to tell if it’s working or not.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
5) Always use your own past performance as a benchmark. Whether it is your old CPC, CTR or CPA (or Cost Per Result) – focus on improving what you did before. Benchmarks and success stories from other companies are interesting, but should not be used to make decisions about YOUR advertising.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Analytics
6) Double check before you panic. If you’re testing to see if something works (like a page or an ad), make sure you test on multiple devices and internet connections (and locations if possible) before raising the alarm.
Most useful for: Troubleshooting
7) Connect all your Google services. This means Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Business Profile, Google Search Console etc. This will make sharing data between them easy (which can be super helpful). The easiest way to do this is to use one email address to sign up for them all.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Site Owners, Analytics
8) Get automated reports. If you advertise with a company and they can’t set you up automated daily reports to show how well your ads are doing, they are not a good company. They are either lying to you, not the company you are actually dealing with (as in they are paying someone else to place your ads), or they are just bad at their jobs.
Most useful for: Ad Buying
9) Don’t get talked into something you don’t want or understand. Salespeople often have no idea what they are talking about and have just memorised a lot of words to bamboozle you. Make sure you write down questions before you talk to them, and get the answers you wanted before you sign any deals.
Most useful for: Ad Buying
10) Behavioural targeting is more annoying than it is effective. Marketers talk it up because it is automated, so it saves THEM time and money, not you. It’s always worth testing but keep your eye firmly on your ROI (and factor in user trends if you can).
Most useful for: Ad Buying
11) Don’t start using a new marketing channel unless you’re going to keep it up. One blog post won’t make any difference to anything – a blog post a week for the foreseeable future will. This goes double for social media – so many people post a few times then give up because they don’t see immediate results after a few posts. If you’re going to do one of these things – plan to do them on a schedule and for the long-term. This doesn’t mean you can’t quit if something isn’t working, only that you have to give it a chance to work first.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing
12) Post on a consistent schedule. Whatever you are doing – blogging, tweeting, gramming, whatever – work out the best times to do it, then keep doing it at those times. People like getting the thing they were expecting when they expect it.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing
13) If something isn’t working, stop doing it. Maybe LinkedIn just isn’t the right space for your brand. You don’t have to be on every marketing channel to succeed, and you don’t have to do something in the future just because you did it in the past.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing
14) Continually review past performance and work out how to improve. This generally means having some consistent way of measuring results, and working out how to spot trends.
Most useful for: Conversion Rate Optimisation, Analytics
15) Don’t mess with success. When looking for things to improve, leave your best performers (whether it’s a page, video, ad or whatever) alone. Improve the things that could do better, not the ones which are doing best.
Most useful for: Conversion Rate Optimisation
16) Keep records of performance. Write reports, even if it’s just for yourself. Putting stats into some sort of formal order helps you to understand them. You should write recommendations based on these reports, and record them elsewhere too so you remember to do them.
Most useful for: Conversion Rate Optimisation, Analytics, Productivity
17) Use a project management tool like Trello. The more ideas you have in your head for things to do later, the stupider you become. Keeping important to-do lists in your head takes brainpower! Write all your ideas down, and check them off as you do them. Increasing your efficiency is good for your business!
Most useful for: Productivity
18) Focus on your strengths. If you can write a mean email, but can’t get your head around Social media then don’t beat yourself up about it. Do the thing you’re good at, and read guides about the thing you’re not until you are. If that doesn’t work, either seek outside help or just forget about it for now. Doing a few things really well usually works out better than doing lots of things badly.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Productivity
19) If someone sends you a message, reply. Not responding in a timely fashion is just rude, and might make someone dislike you or your company for no real reason.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Social Media Management
20) You are only objective about a new project or company for a week or two. After that, most people can’t see the wood for the trees. If a new person starts work – get them to write down their opinions on everything after a couple of days so you can review and improve.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Site Owners, Productivity
21) Granular targeting is usually best. This means splitting up your advertising into as many subsections as is reasonable. For example, if you are selling bikes and just want to target cyclists, you could still split the targeting by gender and age group. This will help you to see which ads work best for which people. NOTE: Only do this to large audiences – if you split your audience too much then you won’t get enough data from any subsection to make reasonable judgements about them.
Most useful for: Display Advertising, Social Media Advertising, Paid Search
22) Never run just one ad. Have at least three to five variants live at any time.
Most useful for: Display Advertising, Social Media Advertising, Paid Search
23) New isn’t always better. If you are testing some new product or service, always keep in mind what you want to get out of it (e.g. sales), and see how it stacks up against other types of marketing.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing
24) Read digital marketing articles first thing in the morning. If you do it while you’re still just starting your day it’s often easier to absorb.
Most useful for: Productivity
25) Reread your notes a year later. Whether they are instructions/training materials/notes from conferences you should always review them at a much later date. I find that there are often important things I’ve forgotten, as well as things which weren’t important then but can be useful now.
Most useful for: Productivity
26) Most people want marketing to be about things local to them. Mention place names if you can.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Local SEO
27) Track offline marketing too. Use a shortened URL (such as with bit.ly) redirecting to a UTM link to track offline marketing.
Most useful for: Analytics
28) Stats from different systems never line up – especially conversion stats. If you’re tracking conversions on multiple systems (e.g. through Google Ads, your email provider and Facebook analytics) be aware that they will likely not match up their stats, and that they will probably claim lots of conversions that were caused by something else. Choose your single point of truth (i.e. Google Analytics) and use that to monitor everything. Use the other analytics you get as supplementary information.
Most useful for: Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Ad Buying
29) Live up to the promises your marketing makes. If you promise a page that will revolutionise someone’s DJ skills, make the page match the hype. If you let people down, they’ll stop trusting you, and trust is incredibly hard to get back.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing
30) AdSense is a good place to start. The overall average Page RPM for Google AdSense is around $10. When your site is still growing, this is a good level of income to tide you over, especially as after you set AdSense up you don’t need to do anything.
Most useful for: Site Owners
31) Don’t use Pops. This means Pop-ups or Pop-under ads. They are ridiculously annoying, whether you are putting them on your site or using them to advertise.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Ad Buying
32) The best frequency cap for display ads is 3/24. The best frequency cap for any sort of invasive ad is 1/24.
Most useful for: Display Advertising
33) Generally speaking, the more invasive an ad is, the more money it makes and the better performance it gives. So overlays and expandable display ads make more money than simple banner ads. Mid-roll video ads make more than pre-roll ads, which make more than post-roll ads. Ads that autoplay, and which start with the sound on perform extra well. With all these things, however, you are making people hate you. Users of a website will only tolerate so much before they find an alternative. People who like your brand can suddenly switch to hating it if you do too many annoying things. Therefore you should use invasive ads exceedingly sparingly, if at all. People liking your brand is worth so much more than a few clicks in the long run.
Most useful for: Site Owners
34) Most people don’t even see ads anymore. In general, the public has developed a sort of ad blindness. People know where ads are on a page, and intentionally never look there. This means that using ad slots to advertise your email marketing list is a bad idea! It’s the place people are least likely to look!
Most useful for: Site Owners, Email Marketing
35) Email marketing is still king. It performs amazingly well compared to other types of marketing and is much cheaper. Don’t ignore it.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
36) CTOR means virtually the same thing as CTR. The reason it has a different name is that it’s lower hanging fruit – CTOR is for people who have already opened an email, and so are much more likely to click a link than someone who has just seen a random ad.
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Analytics
37) Have a welcome journey planned out for new subscribers to your emails. At the very least direct them to somewhere on your site in an email that confirms they’ve registered.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
38) MailChimp is a great service for email marketing. Especially because it’s free for users with small subscriber lists.
Most useful for: Email Marketing
39) Split test emails wherever possible. More data is always better.
Most useful for: Email Marketing, Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation
40) Building an email marketing list takes time. This means you should start as soon as possible. Ideally, your sign up form should be live at the launch of your site.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Email Marketing
41) An MPU (300×250) is generally the best display ad unit available. It’s generally worth experimenting with others though, as it depends where you are advertising.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Display Advertising
42) Use standard ads. To maximise revenue from ads on your site, use the main three as sizes for desktop (300×250, 300×600, 728×90) and make sure they all appear at least 50% on-screen when the page is loaded. This will improve performance and therefore revenue.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Display Advertising
43) Adding more ad slots to your site won’t necessarily make you more money. Especially if they slow down your site and cost you users. People aren’t going to click on multiple ads from the same page are they?
Most useful for: Site Owners, Display Advertising
44) For mobile sites, experiment to find the best ad setup. The ideal setup of ads on a mobile site isn’t really settled yet, as phone screens come in all different sizes and aspect ratios. The best options at the moment seem to be having an MPU (300×250) load every 3-4 paragraphs (after the screen has been fully scrolled at least twice). However, you should test what works for your site, as it may differ.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Display Advertising, Mobile Marketing
45) Your Homepage and About page are both just ways of funnelling people into the rest of your site. Make sure you have strong CTAs and links on both which go deeper into your site.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Content Marketing
46) All web pages should work on mobile phones. Google indexes pages on a mobile first basis now, so this is doubly important.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Mobile Marketing, SEO
47) Don’t turn your nose up at free advertising, especially when you’re starting out. There are many free advertising sites on the internet. When you’re budget is low but you have time to spend on getting things right, it’s worth trying them out and seeing which ones work best for you.
Most useful for: Site Owners, Display Advertising
48) Get a security certificate for your site. It’s good for SEO and user trust.
Most useful for: Site Owners, SEO
49) Give yourself time to get it right. If you sell a technically complicated type of ad to go on your site, make sure you have testing time baked into the deal. This means they have to get the ad to you in advance of the advertising start date. Agree exactly when they have to get it to you by (via email) and make it clear that if they get it to you after this time, then the ad will likely go live late (even if they get it to you before the advertising start date).
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Productivity
50) Never accept a deal on a Friday if it has to go live immediately from an advertiser you don’t know. It’s a common scammer practice – you set it live on Friday, it runs all weekend without you checking it. Then on Monday, you find out the ad was some sort of malware that has hit all your users.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Productivity
51) Always have a small pack of mints on you at work. This is so you can have one just before a meeting. A burst of sugar will make you smarter and more attentive for a short period and make you seem smarter.
Most useful for: Productivity
52) Always have at least two Admin level users on every service you use. This is in case one email address doesn’t work for any reason. Nothing is more annoying than being locked out of a system you use and having no way back in.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Site Owners, Productivity
53) Always get things in writing (even it’s just an email). It’s no fun to have a he-said-she-said type argument, and they happen all the time when digital marketing is involved.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Productivity
54) Don’t believe the hype. Believe the results. Digital marketers are good at marketing bad results. Always trust the actual results over what someone tells you.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Analytics
55) Always add Google Search Console and Google Analytics to your site. Make sure they are linked (including to your Google Ads account).
Most useful for: Productivity, Analytics, SEO
56) Keep the original data available. Have one view in Google Analytics that shows all data, and never add filters so you can always have the raw data at hand.
Most useful for: Productivity, Analytics
57) Don’t count your own traffic. Have one view in Google Analytics which filters out your IP address so you can see your traffic without your effects on it.
Most useful for: Productivity, Analytics
58) Your staff count as “advanced users” of your product or service. If you work for a large company, you should have one view in Google Analytics which shows ONLY people using your IP address so you can see how people who work for your company use your site. This can be useful to gather easy insights into what “advanced users” want from your site.
Most useful for: Productivity, Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation
59) Test out new ideas before implementing them. It’s a good idea to have an “Experiments” view in Google Analytics so you can add filters etc and test their effects.
Most useful for: Productivity, Analytics
60) When guest posting make sure you get a dofollow link. This is so that you get the SEO affect from your post. (Dofollow links don’t actually exist – just make sure your link doesn’t have a nofollow tag attached).
Most useful for: Content Marketing, SEO
61) People like article titles that have a number in them. That’s why there are so many listicles.
Most useful for: Content Marketing
62) No one cares about your industry or company’s internal terminology. Write about things using words the public uses. If you need help figuring this out, use Google Trends to compare different terms, and use the most popular ones.
Most useful for: Content Marketing, SEO
63) If you ask for an opinion, have an opinion on that opinion. Keep your target market in mind, especially when asking for someone’s opinion on something you’ve written. Your coworker (or mother) may not like your CTA, but if it’s worked before then maybe it’s worth trying again anyway.
Most useful for: Content Marketing
64) Always track conversions. ALWAYS. Conversion is the only real way to make sure you can see how effective different forms of marketing actually are.
Most useful for: Conversion Rate Optimisation, Analytics
65) If you pay on a CPC basis, expect lots of clicks NOT lots of conversions. Whoever you are advertising with will try to give you what you paid for (just like if you were buying anything else).
Most useful for: Conversion Rate Optimisation
66) CPA technically covers all forms of advertising. CPA means Cost per Action and Cost Per Conversion. As an action or conversion can be anything you want – this basically means all other types of advertising models (except CPM or CPD) are forms of CPA advertising, with the action being the specific thing you are paying for (clicks, leads, installs etc). This isn’t actually useful, I just like telling people.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Analytics
67) Google gives charities free money. If you work for a charity, you can very likely get a $10,000 per month grant from Google to spend on Google Search Ads.
Most useful for: Charity Comms, Paid Search
68) If you have a Google Ad Grant, then never set your max CPC as below $2. Unlike with other Google Ads optimising, it won’t get you anywhere, and $2 is low enough as it is (plus Google will optimise for you to make it as low as possible).
Most useful for: Charity Comms, Paid Search
69) People’s eyes are drawn to any text that isn’t a letter. In Google Search Ads, try to add non-alphabet characters as they draw the eye (e.g. ?!-£ or numbers)
Most useful for: Paid Search, Content Marketing
70) People Like Sentence Case. In Google Search Ads Write In Sentence Case (at least test it against other ads). This includes in the page-path fields.
Most useful for: Paid Search, Content Marketing
71) Sitelinks are like free ads that go alongside your ads. In Google Search Ads, always use Sitelink Extensions as they work incredibly well. Other Extensions should be used too where relevant.
Most useful for: Paid Search, SEO
Ad Extensions make an ad much larger.
72) Don’t advertise something you don’t have. In Google Search Ads if you use the Call extension make sure to time target it to when people are actually in the office to pick up. If something is sold out, stop advertising it.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Paid Search, Productivity
73) Use automatic optimisation to your advantage. In Google Search Ads have at least 2 ad groups per campaign and 3 ads per ad group so they can be optimised by Google’s algorithm.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Paid Search, Productivity, Conversion Rate Optimisation
74) Don’t advertise in places you don’t want to. In Google Search Ads you should regularly use the Search Terms report to find searches unrelated to your ads, and add them as negative keywords. If there is an unuseful word that is used in a lot of searches, then just add that word yourself to your negative keywords.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Paid Search, Productivity, Conversion Rate Optimisation
75) AI is becoming a bigger and bigger part of digital marketing. Listen to it. In Google Search Ads you should use the recommendations tab and generally do what it says. Sometimes it says something inappropriate (such as its obsession with Structured Snippets) but mostly it’s helpful.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Paid Search, Productivity, Conversion Rate Optimisation
76) Don’t pay for ads then forget about them. You should check in on Google Ads at the very least once per fortnight while you are running them. Daily is best!
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Productivity
77) Punish bad performance, imitate good performance. You can optimise Search Ads by choosing the worst two performers, and switching them off – then adding two variations of the best performers.
Most useful for: Paid Search, Display Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
78) Don’t go too broad on your targeting. To optimise Keywords in Google Search Ads, the easiest thing you can do is take your worst performing keywords and tighten the match type by one notch. E.g. Broad > Phrase and Phrase > Exact. If Exact match keywords are performing badly, ditch them.
Most useful for: Paid Search, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Social Media Marketing
79) Focus your ads and targeting on your product or service. Google Search Ads work best when you use the same words that are on the page you are targeting in the ads themselves. You should also use these words as keywords. Having an ad reflect what it is advertising really helps to increase performance as no one likes a bait and switch.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Paid Search, Display Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
80) Sometimes 1+1=3. In Google Search Ads you should support the pages on your site which are doing best with organic traffic. For some reason having an ad as well as a top organic search result works better than having both (but separately). To find which pages and keywords to target, take a look at Google Search Console in the Search Analytics Tab. Over the last 90 days, choose pages with the most clicks (or highest average position – or both). Then take a look at their top-performing keywords – and target them in Google Ads (ideally with exact or phrase match).
Most useful for: Paid Search, SEO
81) Don’t write for SEO. Write the best content you can. Most of the time, the best article for people IS the best article for SEO.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing
82) Don’t hide who you are. On your about or contact us page, have as much detail as you are happy to give. The more you put up, the more Google will see your site as trustworthy. A contact form alone is never enough – and honestly, how is it different from having a contact email address?
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing
83) Being a local business has advantages. If you are a business with a physical location, sign up to Google Business Profile and get your business verified on Google maps. It doesn’t take long and is surprisingly effective. You can import your Google Business Profile locations into Bing Places too, so once you are verified, you should do this. Also, register on Apple Connect.
Most useful for: Local SEO
84) Being local doesn’t have to mean you are stuck in one place. If your business has a physical location, but you don’t want people going there you can still register in Google Business Profile – just tick the box saying you have a service area (and then specify how far you are willing to travel).
Most useful for: Local SEO
85) Yoast is great for SEO. If you use WordPress, get the Yoast plugin to help you with SEO. People hate on it, but until you learn SEO properly it’s incredibly useful.
Most useful for: SEO, Site Owners
86) Don’t duplicate content. Apply the no-index tag to your thank you pages, internal search results pages, and category & tag pages (as they are duplicate content).
Most useful for: SEO, Site Owners
87) SEO can be simple. If you are trying to rank highly on Search engine results pages for a specific term, then use that term in the title of the page, in the first paragraph on that page, as the title of an image on that page, in the alt-tag of an image on that page, in a subheading on that page, and in the meta title and meta description of that page. Do all these things (and write more than 300 words, and have a great page that’s readable by an 11-year-old) and you’ll have a page that Search Engines like.
Most useful for: SEO, Site Owners, Content Marketing
88) Don’t compete with your own search results. Try to only have one page for each keyword you want to rank for in Search Engines – otherwise, you’re just competing with yourself.
Most useful for: SEO, Site Owners, Content Marketing
89) It’s hard to get the actual number one spot in search results. Search results are personalised, so it’s virtually impossible to get your page to actually rank number 1.
Most useful for: SEO
90) Press releases can be great for SEO. They can put a link to your site in a ton of places all at once.
Most useful for: SEO, Content Marketing
91) SEO can take a long time to take effect. This means you should invest in it early – simply read some guides while your site is small and try to build it into your working practices.
Most useful for: SEO
92) CTR is only a good measure of performance if you are trying to get people to go to a specific page. Otherwise, you want to focus on ROI or CPA.
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
93) The term Engagement can cover literally any interaction with an ad or post. If you are paying on a CPE basis, make sure you know precisely which engagements you are paying for in advance.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Ad Pricing, Conversion Rate Optimisation
94) Fill in every field on your social media profiles. It will make social networks like you more and might get your posts a tiny bit more exposure. Revisit your profile pages periodically to make sure everything is up to date.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, SEO
95) Don’t use too many hashtags per post or tweet. Around three is optimum.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
96) Schedule your social media posts/tweets using a tool like StatusBrew, Hootsuite, or Buffer. This will keep your feeds ticking over – but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post or repost things when the mood strikes you. Mix it up!
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing
97) Video ads on Instagram stories can’t be more than 15 seconds long. Optimum video length depends from platform to platform.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing
98) Give the people what they want. Infographics, white papers and original research are the most shared things on social media. Make them!
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing
99) People like pretty things. Social media posts with images work better than those without. This goes double for video.
Most useful for: Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing
100) Don’t plan to do more than you are capable of. Sure it would be better to tweet 7 times a day, but it will take a long time to set them all up. It’s better to plan to do less so you have time to review and improve (and don’t go mad).
Most useful for: General Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing
Bonus Tip: Don’t be mean, don’t be political. Unless those things are a core part of your brand, then why include them in your marketing? A cheese shop should focus on selling cheese, not promoting the political leanings of its owner.
Phew. I can’t believe you read all of that. I hope it helps. What are your top digital marketing tips? Do you think I missed anything vital? If so feel free to pester us on Twitter.