SEO is one of the number one factors that determine the success of a website. We utilize content blogs to boost our SEO strategies and rank for keywords relevant to our offerings.

While your agency already knows the power of SEO and content, you need to perform regular technical SEO audits for your client's blogs. Doing so ensures that the website is free of problematic errors that hinder the user experience and negatively impact search rankings.

In this article, we'll review what goes into technical SEO, how to perform a technical SEO audit, and how often you should provide one for your client's blog.

What is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit is a process of diagnosing a website's health regarding your quest to improve organic rankings. The auditor will use a variety of tools to crawl existing web pages, verify the sitemap, and look for errors related to navigation, page loading speed, and user-friendliness.

Performing a technical SEO audit regularly is essential as Google's algorithm is always changing. That means that you'll want to implement minor or major changes to your SEO strategy depending on the severity of algorithm updates. Website health issues can also pop up over time as you make changes to existing pages or add new ones to the site navigation.

How Often Should You Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

The frequency of your technical SEO audits depends largely on the size of your client's website. Smaller websites with a more condensed blog can get by with a comprehensive audit once every six months. As the blog grows and the website expands, you may want to consider completing tasks on your technical SEO audit checklist once every three months.

The reason for this is that the larger the client's website is, the more possibilities there are to encounter new SEO-related errors that can impact performance. The more errors you discover through your audit, the more time it takes to properly address each one.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

With the purpose of a technical SEO audit fresh in your mind, let's take a look at what we specifically need to accomplish to perform a successful audit of your client's blog.

1. Crawl the Entire Website

Though your main focus is the blog, it will benefit you to crawl the entire website at the same time.

In case you're unfamiliar, web crawling is the process of navigating or crawling a website, downloading the information, and indexing it on the world wide web. Software used to crawl a website is generally referred to as a web crawler or a spider.

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Crawling a website will not only assist you with the above actions but will also inform you of notable errors found on the website. It may also highlight areas for optimization that can further improve the site's user experience and discoverability. This is the primary reason that every technical SEO audit should begin with a fresh crawl.

However, you should be aware that Google only offers the domain a limited crawl budget each month. Google's spider bot will perform a crawl of your website naturally over time, but additional crawl requests will use up the budget. How much of your budget it uses depends on the number of pages you request it to crawl.

You can minimize the use of your crawl budget by disallowing crawler access on certain pages. For example, while websites require a Privacy Policy page, you won't be trying to rank for this page. Therefore, you can exclude it from the crawl request entirely. Because you are specifically trying to audit your client's blog, you may choose to exclude all pages from the crawl except for blog-related pages.

With a fresh diagnosis of the website's health on hand, you now have a list of actionable errors you can present to the client and the team for future SEO recommendations.

2. Set Up a Website Mirror for Testing Changes

Though setting up a mirror of the client's website is not a necessity, it can be useful for several reasons. A mirror site is an identical replica of the site hosted on the client's domain. Because the mirror site is not being visited, crawled, or indexed, you are free to test your SEO optimizations without fear.

Secondly, it allows you to experiment with changes and optimizations without taking the primary website offline for an extended period.

However, if you choose to utilize a mirror site, you need to be wary of how this can affect the site's SEO. If Google happens to crawl two identical versions of the same site, it will greatly impair the domain authority due to all of the duplicate content.

You can combat this in two ways. The first is to always utilize the appropriate canonical tags on the client's website. Using these tags will help you designate the primary version of the site so that Google's crawler understands the difference between the two. It will prevent the crawler from navigating the mirror site so that you don't use up the client's crawl budget.

The alternative is to disallow crawling of any pages you're working on in the site's Robots.txt file. The Robots.txt effectively tells the crawler which pages to crawl and which to avoid according to your set parameters. Then, after you've tested and implemented your changes, you can once again allow crawling of those pages once more.

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3. Review the XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a file that informs web crawlers of the most important pages found on a client's website. Not only can you highlight specific pages, but you'll also be helping the crawler understand the site's overall structure. This is especially important as you add more blog pages and increase the website size.

According to Google, a sitemap is limited to 50MB in size and must not contain more than 50,000 URLs. While these guidelines likely won't impact you or any of your clients, it's important to keep them in mind when planning your map.

You want to make sure that the sitemap is constantly updated with new website pages. Each time you make additions to the client's blog, you'll want to incorporate those URLs into the map, especially if no other internal links are pointing to those pages.

To get an inventory of errors found within the client's sitemap, you'll want to use Google Search Console. This tool is a godsend for your SEO and will assist with crawl requests, site health reports, and metrics regarding site performance.

You're going to be looking for common errors such as unexpected 404-page responses, 401 unauthorized requests, or pages being blocked by robots.txt. If your sitemap has too many errors, the crawler will eventually abandon the crawl altogether.

4. Perform a Link-Building Audit

This step will go hand-in-hand with your sitemap review. Google Search Console will also report any broken links found on any of the client's web pages. This applies to both internal links throughout the site and external links pointing to other domains.

Broken links that lead to 404s not only negatively impact the site's SEO but can cause the search crawler to abandon the crawl. These types of errors can be indicators that you need to update your site with the appropriate redirect protocols or eliminate the link. If you have any outdated links pointing to external sources, you'll want to update those links with the correct URL or find an alternate source for your information.

Finally, you'll want to do a separate audit of your collected backlinks. A backlink refers to any links located on other domains that point back to your domain. You can perform a backlink audit by using tools such as SEMRush and Ahrefs. If you have any backlinks from low-quality domains, you'll need to reach out to the webmaster and request the removal of the link.

Alternatively, you can submit a disavow request directly to Google by following the instructions they provide here.

5. Monitor Page Response Codes

The status of your web pages is another step that somewhat coincides with the previous steps. As you scanned for errors in your sitemap and Google Search Console, you were likely made aware of page response errors found on the website.

A page response error occurs when a user's browser requests the server, but the request is unable to be properly addressed. The origin of the page response error depends upon the type of error that occurs.

The most common type of page response error you're likely to encounter is a 404 - page not found error. This occurs when the user is attempting to access a page on the website no longer exists. It can also occur if the user follows a link with an inaccurately-entered URL. To remedy these, you'll need to eliminate deleted pages from the sitemap and update any broken links found on existing pages.

You can also alleviate page response errors by effectively utilizing 301 and 302 redirects respectively. A 301 response will redirect a user from a dead URL to an updated one permanently. Likewise, you can utilize a 302 redirect for temporary page moves.

Understanding page response errors allows you to understand how to remedy them. Thankfully, these types of errors are relatively simple to fix and can make a difference in improving your client's website health.

6. Check for Page Load Speed Errors

Fast page loading speeds are crucial in two ways. First, a slow loading speed is known to drastically increase your bounce rate. According to Pingdom, the average load time for a page is 3.21 seconds. As soon as you jump to 5 seconds, the bounce rate is a staggering 38%.

Secondly, that increased bounce rate and poor UX will also count against the site as a ranking factor. Google values page speed in providing a better experience to its users and will consider loading times when ranking the site against competitors.

Because of this, Google provides us with its PageSpeed Insights tool to check up on our latest website speeds for both desktop and mobile. Use this tool when conducting your technical SEO audit to look for website health errors that are negatively impacting your loading speeds.

7. Don't Forget About the Mobile User Experience

More users than ever are utilizing their phones for their browsing experiences. Google notices this and agrees that the mobile user experience is essential for a quality website. That's why they rolled out an update back in 2015 that would boost the ranking of mobile-friendly pages.

For this reason, you'll want to scrutinize the mobile design of the website in addition to the desktop version. Tools like Google Search Console should identify key areas for improvement, but you can also turn to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to learn more about the website.

Numerous factors can negatively impact the website's mobile UX. Not only will these tests pinpoint the problems, but they will also provide a recommended course of action. Common issues that impact mobile speeds are a lack of image optimizations, lack of a mobile-first website layout, and failure to optimize scripts for mobile hardware.

Most modern CMS platforms provide built-in features that allow you to tailor the website design to both desktop and mobile experiences simultaneously. Be diligent in examining all versions of the website before committing to any changes that might impair your UX on other versions.

8. Check Daily Site Activity Metrics in Google Analytics

Google Analytics assists website owners in tracking daily statistics and creating customized reports regarding user behavior. If your client does not already have their site tagged by Google Analytics, this will be an excellent place for you to start.

As you begin to gather user data, you'll receive valuable metrics for your audit including daily visits, bounce rate, and average session duration. You'll even be able to visualize what channels people are using to access the domain.

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These metrics can help you better explain the quality of the website to your client. If a particular blog article is getting clicks, but also features a high bounce rate and low session duration, it's a red flag that the content or layout is not up to snuff. So long as these metrics continue to remain low, the client's site ranking will continue to fall despite any other technical SEO changes you may implement during the same period.

You'll want to gather this GA data and present it in the context of an actionable plan. If you see that certain types of blog articles are generating more traction, you'll want to illustrate the importance of gearing the blog toward what the audience likes. You can also look for opportunities to start implementing an effective link-building strategy within the blog to help more users move from article to article.

9. Review Structured Data

Structured data is a type of language that helps Google better understand the type of content found on a web page. The most common type of structure data used by SEO experts is schema markup. This is a type of code implemented within the website's HTML to qualify sections of content.

Schema markup can give a huge boost to your SEO as it takes the guesswork out of Googlebot's job. Without the markup language, the crawler is left to examine the on-page content and do its best to determine what the content is and how it relates to other content on the site. When using the markup, the crawler immediately reads the tag, understands the content, and indexes it correctly.

However, when used incorrectly, schema markup can further confuse search engine crawlers. In your audit, you'll want to scan for errors in the markup language and create a plan to either fix the page and/or expand upon the existing markup code where applicable.

Presenting Your Technical SEO Audit Findings

If you follow this technical SEO audit checklist, you'll have a significant amount of information regarding the client's website at your disposal. Your job now will be to present these findings in the context of improving the site and present an actionable plan. You'll want to highlight the benefits of executing the plan along with a timeline to expect results.

After your SEO experts tackle the client's website and blog, you should execute one more website crawl. Ideally, you will now have a significantly improved website report to share with your client. These positive changes may produce some instant results, but will also help to boost blog rankings over time.

However, be aware of additional errors that might pop up following any major website changes. This is not uncommon and the client's site might require some additional care even after the major changes go live.

SEO is an ongoing process and your website will require ongoing attention as search algorithms continue to evolve. That's why using a checklist like this to guide your technical SEO audits on a regular schedule is the best way to improve a site's organic traffic and rankings. The healthier your client's website is, the more conversions they'll obtain, and the happier they will be.

If you want to retain clients for the long term, you need to confidently display the digital marketing metrics and KPIs that translate to results.

Contrary to what you may think, a quick boom in website traffic, the account follows, or page views isn't going to cut it.

At the end of the day, your clients care about acquiring high-quality customers and improving their bottom line. To that end, you need to create actual results to build a reputation that stands the test of time.

If you want to start convincing your clients to stay on board, start taking a closer examination of these 5 important digital marketing metrics now.

5 Important Digital Marketing Metrics to Show Your Client

When you measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, quality often scores over quantity. In the reports, a client is not interested in several irrelevant indicators. What matters most are the metrics that clearly show where you are and what you still need to achieve.To figure it out, we have compiled five important digital marketing metrics for different types of campaigns:-

1. Traffic to Quality Lead Ratio

Traffic is a valuable metric for any business online. If your website is your virtual storefront, then your traffic equates to getting new customers in the door to browse your offerings.

However, traffic alone is sometimes considered a vanity metric. A vanity metric is a digital marketing metric that can indicate great performance but ultimately tells you very little about your progress toward a goal.

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For example, if a business sets an arbitrary goal of acquiring 1,000 new customers from an ad campaign, page traffic tells you little about your performance. This metric simply tells you that people are visiting, but not what they actions they are taking whenever they visit your landing page or website.

Make no mistake - improving your client's online traffic significantly is something that you should share and highlight. The issue arises whenever you are not simultaneously seeing improvements in conversions, page session duration, or revenue as a result of this traffic. Your client will quickly realize that these numbers matter very little if they are getting a quality ROI.

Instead, you want to highlight to the client how much of this new traffic is high-quality. You can demonstrate this by revealing how many of these users become leads. You can highlight this by comparing the traffic increase to conversion metrics such as follows, subscribers, form submissions, or calls.

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In other words, quality is always better than quantity. If you gain 1,000 new leads out of 10,000 visits, you have a lead ratio of 10%. Compare this to 100,000 new website visitors, but only 1,000 leads, which equates to 1%. That's a lot of wasted budget and effort reaching users that are not interested in your client's offerings.

2. Conversions

Continuing from the head above, tracking conversions is crucial for demonstrating the value of your digital marketing efforts. A conversion is the result of a website visitor completing an action on your page that happens to be one of your goals. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to earn more subscribers, then any new subscriber can be considered a conversion.

Common conversion goals are purchases, submitting a form, subscribing, sharing, following, or downloading/installing a file or app.

Whenever you set up custom goals for your campaign, you are better able to gather important digital marketing metrics that better tell the story. Instead of simply using a general traffic boost as the highlight of your presentation, you can support your metrics with those sexy conversion rates. Doing so provides undeniable proof that the client's advertising budget is being put to excellent use.

The types of conversions you'll want to show your client depends upon their immediate business goals. If the primary goal for the previous and coming months is to boost brand awareness, you may want to highlight an increase in subscribers, follows, or shares. An increase in views of a specific page or time spent on that page may also help you and your client to understand user intent.

Likewise, if the primary goal is to gain direct sales from a sale or promotion, you need the purchase conversions to back up your efforts. Failure to produce these conversion metrics will not only leave you exposed but will serve as a clear indicator that your campaign requires additional testing and improvements to get the job done.

3. Engagement

Engagement is crucial for illustrating to clients what types of actions users are taking regarding their content. You can identify engagement in the form of likes, reactions, shares, follows, or even an increase in page session duration.

Engagement is valuable as it demonstrates that your marketing efforts work. On the flip side, a lack of engagement typically leads to an increase in bounce rate - quick page visits that result in no action whatsoever. Not only is a high bounce rate indicative of poor creatives, but it's also something that Google can and will hold against a site when it comes to SEO and search rankings.

You should utilize this important digital marketing metric as a measuring stick for your digital marketing efforts. Regularly A/B test ads, website pages, and social posts to determine which images or copy yields improved engagement. An increase in engagement naturally improves the amount of organic traffic your client receives, which, in turn, can further boost conversions and sales.

An increase in organic results means gaining brand awareness and increasing revenue without spending additional funds. Ultimately, this may well be the best digital marketing campaign metric you can show to a client to demonstrate an impressive ROI.

4. Revenue by Channel

Revenue refers to the amount of money gained by utilizing digital marketing tactics for a business on a specific channel. You should not confuse this with profit, which is what's left from the revenue stream after deducting expenses.

A channel refers to any platform used to implement your digital marketing tactics for a client. Examples of digital marketing channels include paid search, SEO, social media, or content marketing. You can further qualify a digital marketing channel by individual platforms (i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, or LinkedIn).

You owe it to yourself and clients to demonstrate the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by channel. While previous metrics such as conversions and engagement are important, the client's bottom line is what will ultimately have the final say in whether or not utilizing a channel is a worthwhile pursuit.

If a digital marketing channel produces a healthy revenue stream, then it's likely a no-brainer to keep improving your efforts there. If the client's brand is performing exceptionally well, you may even choose to double down. Inversely, a revenue stream that costs more than it's worth will indicate that the channel requires more love and care. It may be in the client's best interest to abandon certain channels altogether in some instances.

The important thing to focus on is your agency's actions regarding the revenue earned through a marketing channel. Every client loves to see a smashing success. However, taking the initiative to pull back on underperforming channels and prevent unnecessary budget spending can also go a long way in solidifying the trust and partnership between your agency and the client.

5. Lifetime Customer Value

If there's one thing each of these digital marketing metrics has in common, it's that each highlights the importance of gaining more for less. That's why the final important KPI we're featuring is the lifetime customer value (LCV).

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To better understand LCV, you'll first need to understand a few metrics that go into the formula.

Every customer has an average purchase value (APV). This refers to the value of all of their purchases from a business within a period. Similarly, they also have an average purchase frequency (APF), which is their number of purchases in a period compared to total purchases.

You can then determine the customer's overall value by multiplying your APV by the APF. Now that you know the approximate value of a customer, you can compare this data to the lifespan of the customer. This provides you with a customer lifetime value that you can use to better understand your ROI on a customer-by-customer basis.

While this may sound slightly complex, it's fairly straightforward. Let's say that your agency spends $200 on Facebook Ads to acquire a new customer. During that customer's lifespan, they make two purchases for a total value of $100. You effectively lost money when bargaining for that customer's business. On the other hand, if you acquire a loyal customer who completes ten purchases at a value of $500, you've now made money back and then some.

The takeaway here is being able to demonstrate that your digital marketing efforts do not simply result in one-off purchases. Such events can be classified as churn, and are generally indicative of unsatisfied or underwhelmed customers. The goal should always be to cultivate an engaged and loyal following from the conversions that you acquire. You achieve this not only from the initial point of contact but through an ongoing nurturing process.

The higher your average lifetime customer value, the more profit that awaits your client. Furthermore, a higher LCV also indicates that customers are happy with the product or service. Content customers boost your marketing efforts by providing social proof and boosting your organic traffic. The resulting snowball effect is how your agency creates a sustainable foundation for your service and will create a client for life.

Show Clients These 5 Digital Marketing Metrics to be Successful

Businesses outsource their marketing efforts to agencies like yours for a reason. They either lack the knowledge, the skills, or the time to effectively give their marketing channels the attention they deserve.

They're actively looking for you to succeed and looking for data they can trust. So long as you can provide them with high-quality metrics that indicate progress and care, they're generally willing to let you do what you must on their behalf. That means you'll have more time to cultivate a following and build better campaigns so long as you work to maintain their confidence.

You can do this successfully by regularly reporting on these 5 key digital marketing metrics. All of these not only show an increase in visitors, but also show that those visitors are interested, engaged, and willing to spend money on a product or service that they like. It's not always about maximizing attention, but getting attention from those that truly count.

Every business wants to ally with an agency that produces customers that are happy and ready to buy. By using these metrics to guide your marketing efforts, you'll be able to build long-lasting client relationships that set your agency up for long-term success.

What skills do you need for digital marketing?

The answer is primarily contingent upon your desired marketing role within a company or agency. While many marketing positions tend to require overlapping skills, you will benefit from learning and mastering the talents that are intrinsic to that station.

Let's analyze the key positions in a marketing team and determine the best skills for digital marketing you can acquire to give yourself an advantage over rival applicants.

Digital Marketing Skills You Need by Marketing Position

Paid Media Marketers

Paid media marketers are the individuals responsible for creating and managing advertising campaigns online. They are the experts that oversee the company's Facebook, Google, and Bing ads as well as manage the monthly campaign budget. Paid media marketers are invaluable as they're the ones that make your advertising dollars work and can help even small businesses gain attention in paid search.

Here are some of the skills you'll need if you want to succeed in PPC advertising:

1. Graphic Design Skills

Several aspects go into creating a high-quality paid advertisement, but graphic design is one of the more important skills you'll need to grab the user's attention. You don't need to necessarily be a master at this - that's why there are dedicated graphic designers - but a sufficient level of knowledge in using tools like Photoshop or Canva will go a long way.

Having the ability to rapidly respond to company or client requests and provide several ad creatives for the same ad will automatically help you stand out from others with the same job title. The more knowledge you have to bolster ad creatives on your own, the more effective your campaigns will be overall.

2. Copywriting

Strong writing ability is a skill that's fairly essential in every aspect of digital marketing. Content is king and being able to deliver your message effectively and succinctly is key. While you won't need to outline and write 3,000+ word articles, you'll still want to make sure those ad copy lines pack a punch. For some, creating great paid ad copy can prove to be more of a challenge as you need to communicate more with less.

Armed with the knowledge of what makes great copy, you'll be able to identify writing mistakes that lower ad quality and hurt your conversion rate. You'll be able to create several copy alternatives for similar ads to provide your company and client with equally effective options.

3. Ad Account Management

This skill is one of the most crucial for a paid media marketer and it is mandatory. While Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and the like contain similar features and functionality, they each require active participation and knowledge to make effective use of its tools.

More importantly, these platforms frequently make updates to their platform and the terms of use for businesses. This gets even trickier if you work for an agency and are responsible for creating and managing campaigns as a partner on behalf of a third party. It will be your responsibility to actively stay on top of the rules and regulations of a platform to guide your clients effectively through the process. It will also help to avoid inadvertent mistakes that can result in the takedown of paid ads or a suspension of the account.

4. Webpage Design

You've done the heavy lifting and created an engaging ad that earned the click from a new lead. However, you now need to provide them with a powerful landing page that can secure the lead's contact information. This is why having a decent level of web design can bolster your paid ad campaign efforts.

Fortunately, much of this is alleviated as numerous platforms allow you to build elegant landing pages with very little coding or IT knowledge. However, understanding the aspects that make up an effective landing page design will allow you to create a seamless transition between the ad and the final destination. Otherwise, you're simply generating some traffic without delivering any tangible results.

5. Mastery of Marketing Statistics

Digital marketing is entirely driven by data and metrics gathered from every customer interaction. However, it's not enough to simply understand what a metric represents. You need the working knowledge to understand how those statistics factor into your bottom line so that you can use that knowledge to guide your campaign efforts as they progress.

Content Marketers

1. High-quality Writing Capabilities

Content marketers generate leads and sales with their words. Few things are as immediately off-putting as a website or landing page copy that's grammatically incorrect, improperly formatted, and filled with blatant errors. Technical marketing knowledge will amount to little for content writers if they are unable to translate those ideas into engaging material.

Writing for marketing is also much different than writing an essay or a novel. The presentation of your words is highly dependent upon the audience you're attempting to reach.

2. Communication / Understanding of the Audience

This second skill builds off the back of the prior one. A major component in being able to create effective copy is to be able to quickly identify and understand the target audience. In short, you don't want to write the same way for an everyday plumbing service as you would for a doctor working in specialized medicine. The success of your content depends upon the tone, vocabulary, and delivery just as much as the actual message.

The better you are at asking the right questions of clients and nailing down the demographics you're trying to reach, the better you will fare in the copywriting world.

3. SEO

A strong marketing team will feature dedicated search engine, optimization specialists. They ensure that websites rank well by diagnosing webpage health issues, building links between relevant content, and effectively mapping target keywords for each new page. For this reason, an SEO may supply content writers with guidelines or preliminary research to guide the writing process.

Because these aspects of SEO are so essential for high-performing copy, you would do well to gain a solid understanding of SEO principles. You'll have a greater understanding of what search engines like Google look for in content so that you can pinpoint the best result in the first couple of drafts and avoid unnecessary rewrites.

4. Diverse Content Writing Experience

There are several types of content writing in marketing, but the two you may be most concerned about are informational content and promotional content. Having knowledge and experience in working with both of these will make you a more well-rounded asset to your team.

Informational content is the type of material that you'll often see posted to a website's blog to improve rankings. Users are encouraged to subscribe or follow this type of content which educates or serves the user without overtly calling them to spend their money with the brand. Your focus is to generate brand recognition, build traffic numbers, and provide a worthwhile experience when visiting the site.

Conversely, promotional content requires a different approach. You're attempting to sell either the brand or a specific product to a very specific group of individuals. You'll need the ability to dissect the ideal customer's pain points and leverage them into your copy.

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Both are very different approaches, but equally necessary to build a strong digital marketing strategy.

5. Script Writing

While text-based content will always have its place in organic search, more companies are turning to new media such as infographics, custom images, or videos for their content. Video, in particular, is hugely effective at driving conversion rates and can easily replace a landing page worth of content when done correctly.

For this reason, you'll want to sharpen your writing skills for yet another type of format. Writing for a script that someone will read aloud requires some finesse and understanding of what makes for a natural way of speaking. Being able to translate your copy ideas for a vocal vehicle is yet another skill that will make you an invaluable asset to your team.

SEO

1. Excellent Research Skills

Marketing research makes up a significant component of an SEO's role. You'll be spending hours researching the most effective keywords to implement. You'll then need to determine how to map them throughout the site as well as what type of content will best support the goal of ranking for that word or phrase.

You'll also be regularly researching the competitor's SEO strategies. You will want to remain aware of the top-ranking sites in your niche, assess what's working for them, and be able to use this knowledge to imitate where necessary and differentiate your brand wherever you can.

Finally, Google is known to regularly revise and change its search algorithm, making your job an ever-evolving one. Being able to effectively research and uncover the best SEO practices is crucial even when Google won't provide a definitive answer.

2. Data Analysis

Equally important to your research, you'll need to be able to review the data and ask the right questions once you start putting your SEO efforts into action. Even effective SEO strategies can take weeks or months to take effect for a new site, so it is imperative to diagnose issues early and get yourself on the correct path.

You'll need to be comfortable in regularly analyzing where you stand in rankings, fluctuations in traffic, and be able to pinpoint what's causing success or failure quickly with your chosen SEO strategy if you want your brand to have a chance in duking it out with the top-ranking competitors.

3. Web Design and Coding

While you by no means need to be a web dev expert, you'll need to understand the principles of page design and how it impacts a site's SEO value. While you won't be responsible for making major design changes, you'll want to identify and remedy common presentation errors and look for ways to improve the user experience where you can.

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Furthermore, SEO-specific aspects of web design such as metadata and schema markup will be your responsibility. While these are not overly complicated tasks, they do require some basic HTML knowledge to implement correctly.

4. Knowledge and Experience with Third-Party SEO Tools

Thankfully, an SEO's job is not performed blindly. There are countless recommended tools that an SEO should have in their arsenal including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Google Trends. Beyond these obvious recommendations, countless tools serve as keyword planners, link-building assistants, and mobile optimization helpers.

Experienced SEOs are all going to have their preferred program for getting the best results. It benefits an SEO to remain up-to-date and aware of the latest technology and make the best choice as to what tools can best bolster your SEO strategy. Familiarity with a powerful platform can greatly expedite keyword research and help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

5. Content Marketing

As discussed among our skills for the content marketing role, SEO and content are undeniably intertwined. While high-quality SEO offers far more than the copy on a page, that same text serves as the vehicle for providing a strong UX and ensuring that your pages rank for the correct keywords.

While you may not be creating this content yourself as an SEO, having a strong knowledge of what makes great content will make you a better asset to your team. You can not only ensure that articles work in the right direction but can greatly expedite the time it takes for a copywriter to complete a piece by arming them with solid SEO research before they begin.

Of course, it's always beneficial to have content marketing skills firsthand, so that you can always help out and deliver great content to coincide with your SEO efforts at any time.

Social Media Managers

1. Knowledge of Social Platforms and Audiences

Perhaps no one has a harder time gaining the respect they deserve than social media marketing managers. Too many brands find it acceptable to simply post whatever comes to mind on any social media timeline and then question why they aren't getting results.

Successful social media marketing requires extensive knowledge of the platforms you use. Each website tends to feature different demographics that can vary greatly by age, gender, geographic location, and income levels. Furthermore, the way those users communicate can also vary greatly either by deliberate choice or due to platform restrictions (i.e. Twitter's character limit).

You'll need to be someone who's in the know when it comes to the tricks and trades of fostering engagement on each platform. It's no small feat and you'll be juggling your efforts across multiple websites at all times.

2. Impeccable Communication Skills

You need to be a social butterfly to succeed on social media (it's in the name). Simply creating a customized account for your brand and posting any old content throughout the day is going to result in one thing - zero engagement.

What truly generates those coveted likes and shares is actively pursuing new connections with your target audience and fellow industry members. That doesn't mean mindlessly promoting your business or products. Users are looking for genuine interactions and will be able to sniff out anything that's not immediately.

You need to truly embrace your role as the voice of your brand and start getting social. You'll want to think about the people you're interacting with and come up with creative ways to incorporate your brand into conversations in a way that speaks to people personally.

3. Copywriting

The importance of content marketing reveals itself once more. Though social media content tends to be short and sweet when compared to blog articles, it's equally important for grabbing attention and inviting users to join the conversation. It's arguably more important than ever to be able to create content that actively incentivizes users to participate.

However, knowledge of social platforms can help you instantly make your copy more dynamic. Experts will be able to not simply post, but effectively utilize popular features such as Instagram Reels, Facebook groups, or various third-party media creation tools. Social media managers are less concerned about dumping loads of information, but packing a punch in a short, concise message.

4. Customer Service

Due to the conversational nature of social media, you can and should expect to use your brand's accounts to provide customer support. Not only will users frequently message you directly, but they will also comfortably see fit to tag your brand with any messages - positive or negative as they deem fit.

For this reason, an exceptional social media manager will not only be able to identify these scenarios but carefully navigate these encounters. Successful interactions can not only remedy a poor experience a customer had, but can also boost brand integrity by offering social proof to all other users that might witness your public interactions.

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5. Project Management and Planning Skills

Effective social media strategies do not work in isolation. Instead, an effective social media manager will be tuned in to what other departments are working on regarding content and devise a strategy that helps all departments succeed.

For example, your SEO team decides to pursue keywords directly related to a major industry event. Then, your content writing team moves quickly to create engaging material that's valuable to your audience and supports those ranking efforts.

Rather than allow these events to happen separately, a social media manager will have strong project management skills to coordinate scheduling for these types of events alongside their regularly scheduled postings. This not only applies to industry events, but can apply to company-wide promotions, holidays, and topics that start trending naturally on various social media platforms.

Strong social media management requires a proactive approach, not a reactive one. With a content calendar in place, you then have more agility when it comes to those times when you simply must pivot and react to the tumultuous landscape that is social media.

Arm Yourself with the Best Digital Marketing Skills for Your Position

Digital marketing will likely always be a viable career choice and it only continues to evolve with technology. However, that same viability makes this field a highly competitive one, so you need to sharpen your skills to stand out and help your company get the results it requires from you.

Not only should you take away the five skills you need based on your desired marketing position, but you should take additional care to acquire those valuable crossover skills that are consistently required everywhere.

Lastly, understand that what you learn today can become quickly outdated a month from now. To truly be the best marketer in your role, you need to actively participate in the industry, stay up-to-date with the latest changes and occurrences, and work toward where the marketing industry is going, not where it's at. Otherwise, you'll find yourself becoming stagnant and falling behind those who are gunning for your ideal marketing role.

As the owner of a startup company, you might have too many things on your To-Do List. The primary challenge is to achieve the desired return on investment within the given budget. The second biggest challenge is to let the world know about you and your products and services. If nobody knows about you and your services, it is impossible to conduct business, and in the modern digital ecosystem, search engines are the best place to begin it.

When you optimize your website for search engines, you let people know about your brand and how you can solve their problems and answer their needs. It also increases the visibility of your website on search engines. No wonder SEO is so crucial for startups!

Apart from increasing visibility on search engines, startups are supposed to do several other things to survive, such as market research, strategic planning, revenue generation, competitor analysis, brand building, etc. However, search engine optimization is at the core of everything. Before you do anything, you need to help people find your business online and build your brand.

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4 Reasons Startups Can't Ignore SEO Anymore

No wonder SEO is termed as the soul of digital marketing. With billions of searches being performed on different search engines, search dominates the digital marketing landscape. It is the primary source of traffic for most brands because most of the searches are performed with commercial intent.

Therefore, your visibility on search engines should be at the bottom of your marketing plan, and everything else, such as revenue generation and brand building, is associated with it.

Here are a few reasons startups can't ignore search engine optimization:

1. A Powerful Element of Marketing

Ā After Google's launch in 1998, search engines became the primary tool for navigation of the World Wide Web. In the 21st century, online search has become an integral part of our day-to-day activities. These searches connect brands with customers globally. So, SEO can connect your brand with your clients on the lowest budget.

For example, when you search for water sports worldwide, you'll come across a listicle by Pandotrip, and the first entry introduces you to diving in Jellyfish Lake, in Eil Malk Island, Palau. Without search engine optimization, it could have been indeed challenging to know about this exotic water sports destination.

To sum up, you cannot do without SEO. If you cannot rank on the top slots on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), try to get yourself mentioned in a top-ranking listicle or directory, and they will promote your business. A well-planned SEO strategy will improve your search engine rankings and online visibility.

2. SEO Helps You Scale Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

SEO makes the digital marketing landscape democratic. It means that search engines don't discriminate among small, medium, and large enterprises and provide you equal opportunities to appear in the search results. However, you need to be strategic in your SEO approach since the scale of the challenge is massive, especially for startups.

Startups don't have the marketing resources like the more prominent organizations and established businesses. It becomes challenging for them to compete with the existing players on the first page of search results. However, with a strategic approach towards content, on-page, and off-page SEO, you can gain search engine visibility similar to these top players. With the best SEO practices and knowledge of SEO fundamentals, you can earn the top slots with the popular keywords in a few months.

It will allow you to establish your brand identity and promote your products and services without spending heavily on advertising. Focusing on long-tail keywords is considered among the best SEO practices as it is easier to rank on these keywords. Apart from that, you get highly targeted traffic that boosts your conversion rate with long-tail keywords.

3. SEO Allows You to Collect Behavioral Data of Your Customers

With more than 66% of the global population accessing the Internet in 2021 and almost 93% online experiences starting with search, the world is becoming digital with an overwhelming intensity. Most of our decisions are based on data and technology these days. When you wish to fly abroad, you compare different airlines' prices, convenience, and safety online. You subconsciously decide which airlines to choose based on your online interactions and perceptions.

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We also call it branding. Data constantly surrounds you through streaming videos, social media posts, blogs, user reviews, news, ad clicks, and branded content. It instantaneously helps us decide which brand to choose. That's why brands have a compelling need to increase their online presence and learn from their customers' behavioral data. The behavioral data can help you analyze the past, current, and future trends and accordingly adapt your SEO strategy.

The overwhelming data available on the Internet provides you with numerous opportunities to target new customers and serve the existing ones with better products.

Look at the overwhelming data produced on the Internet every minute. As a startup, you should maximize this data for strategy formulation and business growth.

4. SEO is Affordable Yet Brings Enormous Opportunities to the Table

The startup’s journey is characterized by a bumpy ride, cash crunch, confusion, lack of experience, and enormous challenges. In such a situation, search engine optimization comes to your rescue by helping you position your products and services and target the right audience. When you identify and use the popular keywords in your niche, you make your brand more searchable, so your target audience can easily find you organically.

• Let Your CMS Support Your SEO Strategy

SEO allows you to generate more traffic and leads virtually free of cost. All you need to do is find time for SEO and work systematically and strategically for a few months. You also need to figure out how to use your favorite content management system to implement your SEO strategy or select the best CMS for SEO based on your needs, leveraging robust SEO tools and features (such as customizable meta tags, clean URL structures, and integrated analytics) that it provides.

• Set Up an Analytics Account

The next step is to set up your analytics account and learn about the user behavior on your site. You will get enough insights to improve the right features on your website.

• Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

If you can generate leads through organic traffic, it will drastically reduce your marketing budget. You can complement your strategy with the right social media platforms, blogs, video hosting sites, and other tools to market your brand.

SEO is a low-cost option compared to the other paid marketing options such as Google Ads, social media ads, and purchasing leads from third-party vendors.

SEO Tips for Startups in 2022

Since SEO in digital marketing is the oldest online marketing practice, SEO for startups can be challenging. First of all, you need to define your SEO goals and objectives as it's an ongoing process and continues as you add more content to your website.

Start with the primary keywords people use to find businesses and products similar to yours. Focus on long-tail keywords initially and come back to short-tail keywords when you start ranking for the long ones. Here are a few SEO tips for startups in 2022:-1. Start with an SEO Strategy: Determine your goals and expectations from your website and build a solid SEO strategy accordingly.

2. Set Reasonably achievable goals: It's crucial to set short-term and long-term goals for your startup if you don't want to get caught up in the daily grind. For example, if you are looking for quality traffic for conversion, don't waste your time and money on general traffic and clicks.

3. Allocate a reasonable budget for SEO: Many startups don't allocate a specific budget for SEO, so their SEO activities become inconsistent.

4. Begin with your SEO practices right from building your website: Many startups implement SEO on poorly built websites, whereas SEO starts from a functional, user-friendly website that offers an exemplary user interface and user experience.

5. Make your website load faster: Minimize unnecessary elements and make your website load more quickly. It's a crucial Google ranking factor impacting user experience.

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6. Focus on local SEO first: Local SEO is like claiming your physical existence on Google, the king of all search engines. Go to Google My Business and add all the necessary details to help people find you and know about your business.

7. Create a mobile-friendly website: Since mobile searches account for more than 70% of the overall search volume, focus on building mobile-friendly websites. Ensure that your website is fully functional on mobile devices and offers a seamless experience.

8. Spend time on competitive research: If you want to stay ahead of others, spend time on competitor research. Analyze their keywords, links, and other practices. It will save you time and money.

9. Target keywords with commercial intent: Don't work hard on every keyword suggested by your keyword research tool. Focus on the keywords with commercial intent and suitable for achieving your conversion goals.

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10. Publish high-quality content: Use analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Buzzsumo to discover high-quality content. It should solve your prospects' problems and answer their needs and wants. Engaging content can lead you to the top of search engine result pages quicker than any other technique.

11. Hire white-label SEO services if confused: You can hire white-label SEO services if SEO seems overwhelming. This way, you'll save time and money and leverage the expertise of SEO professionals at an affordable cost.

Conclusion

Launching a startup is not for the frail and faint-hearted people. It is often a rollercoaster ride with challenging terrains. Initially, you need to invest a lot of time and money to survive. You face unpleasant situations and challenges almost every day, from tactical and operational to strategic front. And there is no way you can stop them unless you quit.

However, with strategic planning, you can make your life easy to a great extent. It is crucial to avoid the rush and make hasty decisions. If a strategic step, a partnership, or a tool can make your life easy, don't hesitate to grab this opportunity.

Search engine optimization is a proven strategy to promote a startup and sustain its growth. It's a worthwhile investment that keeps on paying rich dividends for a long time. Compared to the cost of the paid campaigns, it is virtually free of charge. If you don't have the required SEO skills or can't afford to hire numerous SEO experts for your agency, you can employ white-label SEO services from DashClicks and reap its unmatched rewards.

Digital marketing is all about understanding human behavior and accordingly developing robust strategies. To succeed in your digital marketing campaigns, understanding customer psychology is essential. If you cannot understand customer behavior and psychology, even the most expensive paid campaigns cannot bring results for your business.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

According to Aha, you need a precise marketing strategy to ensure the success of your business. It's essential to create a long-term plan to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in a predefined market. It includes aligning your organization around how you will reach your target audience, explaining the benefits of your products and services, and encouraging the audience to become your customers.

Marketing is exceptionally crucial for the survival and growth of your business. These are the two significant aspects of a successful strategic marketing plan:

A. The selection of the best marketing techniquesB. The knowledge of how you can implement these techniques for marketing your business

This blog post will discuss the five most powerful digital marketing strategies brands can use to produce the best ROI.

1. Set a Goal and a Budget

You are more likely to achieve success in your marketing campaign strategy if you have specific and measurable goals tied to it. You should also set a specific budget for it to evaluate your performance.

Always set SMART goals, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. These five factors decide the dynamics of success.

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You should choose up to 5 KPIs to evaluate your performance, which includes traffic, leads, and direct revenue. You can put aside a 7-8% budget of your total revenue for your online campaigns.

Moreover, it would be best if you focused on achieving your goals and not the goals themselves. You should create a plan and a process for reaching your goals.

KPIs should be used to track and monitor your performance and to know where you stand regarding your goals.

2. Leverage Influencer Marketing

High ROI primarily depends on your campaign performance. Building influence is the key to supercharging your marketing strategies. Influencer marketing is a powerful and effective strategy that achieves a return of $6.5 for every dollar spent. Some top-performing brands also reported earning up to $18 per dollar spent.

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Therefore, for achieving better results in a limited time frame, influencer marketing is getting popular among small business owners.

Here are some of the most rapidly growing customer acquisition methods.

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Following are the steps to create a successful influencer marketing campaign.

A. Identify Your Target Audience

With the growing number of social media users and communities, influencers are also increasing in leaps and bounds. Every influencer targets a particular demographic and psychographic segment. So, first, identify your target market. It will help you to choose the right influencer.

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B. Define Your Goals and KPIs

Knowing your goals is the key to success while choosing the right influencers. Also, identifying the KPIs will make it easy for you to track your campaign. You can set several goals to ensure sales, and some of these goals can be as follows:

• Increasing leads
• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing referrals
• Becoming a thought leader
• Increasing customer value of your products
• Growing your social media presence
• Building a community
• Earning media value

C. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

Apart from the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, numerous emerge every year. All of them have specific target audiences and interest groups. You can tap the following social media platforms for influencer marketing.

• Instagram
• Facebook
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Twitter

Instagram is a popular social media platform where you can find numerous influencers according to different niches. These influencers create and post content for their target audience with a high engagement level. There are different segments where influencers dominate the social media space, such as fashion, meditation, yoga, beauty, health & fitness, travel, business, making money online, lifestyle, minimalism, animals, gaming, relationships, etc.

Find influencers whose audiences match yours. Only then you'd be able to derive some benefit from such partnerships. Also, don't stick to any single platform; instead, go for multiple platforms to explore various opportunities to tap new audiences.

D. Consider the Types of Influencers

You can find all types of influencers in the social media space, including small and big influencers. Here we have listed four prominent types of influencers in terms of their followers.

• Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)
• Micro-influencers (10K–100K followers)
• Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
• Mega influencers or celebrities (1M+ followers)

The top benefit of using small influencers is that their engagement rates are pretty high even though they have less reach than the mega influencers. Another advantage of collaborating with small influencers is that they charge much less than big influencers.

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So, you can simultaneously collaborate with multiple influencers and increase your reach. Sometimes, small influencers enjoy a highly engaged audience, but they don't experience working with brands. It might be one of the reasons why they exercise so much influence.

Their audience and friends have a high degree of trust in them, so you can hire them to build trust. Do some research, check their content and engagement levels, and ask for recommendations from brands before you shortlist influencers. You can use direct messaging and post comments on their feed to reach these small influencers.

E. Create Great Content

Last but not least, great content leads to great results. When you collaborate with an influencer, share your product with them to exhibit it in front of the camera. Unique unboxing experience often entices the prospects.

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Apart from that, you can use promotions and discounts. Promote your influencers' posts about your products. Don't forget to use the popular hashtags to boost sales and conversion.

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Brands can showcase their influencer generated content on website, like embedding Instagram feed on website. This improves authenticity of your brand, get more likes and followers, increase public testimonials and brand credibility.

F. Track Your Campaign

To run a successful, influential marketing campaign, you need to regularly track your campaign. Choose the metrics based on your KPIs. For example, to track the reach and engagement of the influencers' posts, you can use metrics such as page views and clicks. The tools you can use to track these metrics can be UTM code and Google Analytics.

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3. Focus On a Single Social Channel

Since social media is vast and powerful, it could be unproductive and overwhelming to focus on multiple social media platforms at a time. Nobody has the time and resources to focus on multiple social media platforms.

Here is the 12 step strategy suggested by Social Media Merkato to champion one social media platform:

• Define target audience
• Create buyer persona or customer avatars
• Research influencers using BuzzSumo
• Identify the social media platforms used by your audience
• Also, consider your competitors’ favorite social media platforms
• Address your audience’s pain points through your content
• Create your pillar content or content bank
• Engage with your audience and nurture relationships
• Publish consistently and regularly
• Focus on getting more followers
• Automate social sharing using tools like Hootsuite
• Track your performance and tweak your strategies

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4. Leverage Email Marketing

Email marketing is still the most effective go-to marketing strategy for various brands, especially for revenue generation.

Here are a few ways to build your email list:

• Create a content strategy to drive organic traffic and clicks
• Capture visitors’ email addresses through popups
• Offer valuable resources and tutorial videos in exchange for email addresses of the visitors
• Ask people to subscribe to your email list using a banner in your business signature
• Tools like the Designhill Email Signature Generator can be a great help to build your email list using banners links and call to action.

5. Focus On SEO and Content Marketing

Content marketing has the immense potential of driving sales for your business. Let's discuss how content marketing fits into your overall digital marketing strategy. Content marketing acts as a double-edged sword. Apart from attracting prospects and visitors, it also helps you move them through a marketing funnel for maximum conversion and ROI.

The same is true for SEO which is extremely useful for increasing your visibility on search engines and driving tons of traffic to the website. Learn how to optimize your blog post for SEO to drive targeted organic traffic.

Content marketing aims to provide the appropriate information to the prospect at the right time during the customer journey to help them move ahead in the marketing funnel.

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For example, pricing information is needed once the prospect is aware of the product and its features. It is required in the consideration stage in the marketing funnel. So, the pricing page of a product helps the prospect make an informed decision.

Here is the pricing page of BuzzSumo:

So, content is any piece of information that helps you move the prospect in the marketing funnel. Many people confuse blogging with content marketing, but content marketing is much broader in scope. You can use our content marketing checklist to ensure that you are on the right track.

Conclusion

There are many digital marketing strategies you can try, but in this blog, we have listed the five most powerful strategies that can be the game-changer for your digital marketing campaigns. We sincerely hope that through these five strategies, you will be able to increase your ROI and ensure the success of your campaign.

If you know any other marketing strategy that is equally powerful, please mention it in the comments. Share this post with your friends to achieve even more success with their campaigns. If you need a platform to monitor all your campaigns in one place, and improve your performance, sign up for free for the white-label platform at DashClicks.

Planning is the essential element of success, and the sales process is not an exception. You can’t succeed in a job as demanding as sales without a strategic sales plan.

A well-conceived plan drives more sales and helps you assess your current performance. So, you may quickly know where you are and where you should be. And the most crucial part of the whole process is how to achieve your sales targets.

This article will discuss how to create a sales plan that actually works and boosts sales.

What is a Sales Plan?

The sales team uses a sales plan as a strategy document that brings the entire team together to achieve predetermined goals and revenue targets. It helps them focus on the big picture so that the team members can collaborate, work as a team, employ the required resources and sync their activities. Here, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best results in a stipulated period.

So, a sales strategy plan will generally include:

Sales Planning and Strategy Making Process

Sales planning isn’t limited to creating a strategy document that the sales team can refer to once in a while to get the sales direction. On the flip side, it is a high-level strategy document that ensures that the sales targets are achieved consistently and with a high degree of certainty. So, it’s primarily data-driven and offers a practical approach considering all the obstacles in the way.

To create a sales business plan, you should do the following:

1. Identify your business goals and set sales targets accordingly to ensure a steady revenue stream
2. Collect and analyze the previous years’ sales data and identify trends, inconsistencies, and major issues
3. Identify the metrics to measure your sales performance
4. Do an honest evaluation of where you are and where you want to be
5. Use SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis to identify the obstacles and how you can capitalize on the existing opportunities
6. Do realistic sales forecasting in light of the past trends and demand in the market
7. Make a list of the gaps you need to plugin
8. Make a plan to capitalize on the missed opportunities
9. Collaborate with marketing and product teams and involve them in the sales strategy-making process

Once your strategy doc is ready, you need to review and update it every year to maintain your sales performance. Make sure you stick to your sales planning process.

The Benefits of a Sales Plan

The biggest challenge for a business is not to let the sales dry up, as a steady cash flow is a prerequisite for the very survival of a business. It is also the ultimate objective of a sales business plan besides the secondary goals of organizing and motivating the sales force. So a sales plan is never an option; it’s a must-have for the sales teams.

Salespeople can be efficient and at the top of their game, but they are not planners. So, unless everybody is held responsible for their tasks, you can’t achieve desired results. A written plan infuses accountability into the team members. A sales plan also promotes diligence and allows the teams to execute their best ideas.

It also helps keep everybody on the same page and work in sync with different teams. The workflow becomes smooth and efficient when you have common priorities and targets.

With a sales plan, you can ensure that you achieve your sales and revenue goals within the stipulated time. Without a sales plan, there’s a high likelihood that your team members may feel purposeless, directionless, and lazy. A well-laid-out plan motivates the stakeholders and allows you to track your performance and tweak your tactics accordingly.

How to Write a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is created for the common folks responsible for achieving their sales targets. So, it shouldn’t be too formal. A sales plan should outline everything you need to document to run your business successfully. You can tag a deadline to it. The period can range from a month to a year. The most important sections of a sales plan are as follows.

1. Goal-Setting

Goal setting is the most effective technique to achieve high productivity and success in life. However, unrealistic goals can be counterproductive and even lead to failure. So, you should set smart goals – realistic goals, yet they push the individuals to perform at their best.

When you focus on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) sales goals, you don’t just chase numbers; you build a feasible process that you can replicate over and over again.

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It doesn’t mean that you should remain in your comfort zone. SMART goals help you stretch your capabilities, yet it keeps things doable.

2. SWOT Analysis

SWOT is the abbreviation for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The SWOT analysis adds more certainty to your sales plan. The success of your business depends on your sales performance, and the prime reason most businesses fail is that their sales dry up and they run out of cash to remain afloat. SWOT analysis helps you address the core issues responsible for inconsistency in sales. On the flip side, you can use your USPs and other strengths to boost sales and find a wider audience for your products and services.

3. Your Strategy

The best sales strategy is to differentiate your product from others, and you need a documented plan for that. Another approach to boost sales is to position your products and services. It means that you should focus your advertising messages toward a specific audience and position your product that serves a particular purpose. The sales will pick up once you differentiate your services from your competition.

You can ensure consistent sales if you successfully address customers’ needs at every sales funnel stage. So, while making a sales plan, you should ensure that the customer needs are prioritized everywhere. Rest assured, this would be a foolproof plan that will not disappoint you.

Your sales plan should be balanced and incorporate both inbound and outbound tactics. These days outbound strategies work only in limited instances, but they can be convenient when your organic presence is insufficient. Similarly, inbound strategies ensure consistent traffic and sales.

4. Your Tactics

Fancy ideas are good to try, but a sales plan shouldn’t be based on that. So, be realistic. You need to use measurable benchmarks to achieve specific goals. For that, you need to be data-driven. If you can’t quantify something, it can’t be performed in a given time frame. So, set smaller yet realistic goals. Achieving small goals builds momentum and puts you in the right frame of mind to achieve the bigger ones.

You can also use tools to get actionable insights and specify your goals. According to Statista, the sales forecast for the global jacket and coat market was estimated to be around $94.5 billion in 2021. In 2016, it was just $81 billion. So, the premium jacket brands can quickly increase their sales targets by at least 5% this year.

Another benefit of having a realistic sales plan is galvanizing your entire team around your business goals. Setting a 50% higher sales target for the next five years looks fine, but that may not motivate your teams now.

Tips to Create a Sales Plan

1. Align your plan with company goals
2. Be research and data-driven
3. Involve team members in the goal-setting process
4. Use easy to understand language
5. Screen your facts and data
6. Tie organizational goals to individual goals
7. Revisit your goals regularly
8. Split it into tactical plans
9. Track previous data
10. Keep your ROI analysis-ready

A sales plan needs to be informal and easy to understand so that everybody can follow it. It serves as a guidebook that everyone can refer to for direction, and it should be kept flexible to accommodate changes in the external environment.

A. Align Your Plan With Company Goals

No organization can succeed with vague goals. That’s the reason we put so much emphasis on goal setting. However, before setting company goals, you should make sure that the entire leadership in your organization is on the same page. Lack of clarity may lead to confusion and chaos during the execution phase. The leaders must believe in the goals they set for the company entirely to motivate their team. Set achievable and tangible goals, and your body language will reflect them.

B. Be Data-Driven

You should find ways to cut through the excessive “noise” in the field of marketing. Otherwise, you’ll end up shooting in the dark and waste your energy on the wrong prospects. Study trends and data related to your niche and determine your ideal customers. Because of the dynamic nature of markets, the demographics and psychographics of our target audience keep on changing. However, most of us never adapt to these changes and keep on chasing the wrong prospects. On the flip side, you tend to ignore the rising new customer segments. When you are data-driven and use statistics to guide you, you are unlikely to commit such mistakes.

C. Involve Team Members in the Goal-Setting Process

One significant benefit of involving the team members in the goal-setting process is to see the big picture where the attainment of company goals becomes their milestones. The leadership must decide the objectives and key results for the organization. Once they do that, you should share this critical information with other team members, especially those tasked with its execution.

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It will allow them to discuss and explore what they can contribute towards the team goals. Invite suggestions from your teammates and let them contribute according to their strengths and expertise. You’ll be surprised to know how efficiently you can galvanize your team to achieve your business goals. A Gallup study suggests that team members are 3.6 times more inclined to engage when they are made part of the goal-setting process.

D. Use Easy to Understand Language

When you use easy language, you can swiftly convince the masses. Avoid using jargon and acronyms that only a few people can understand. Business jargon can be particularly complex. How would you react if some use the phrase “blue-sky thinking“? You may be tempted to use more words than you need to express yourself. But using more words can reduce clarity and flow, and people may find it difficult to understand. Use plain language and tie your company objectives to individual performance.

E. Screen Your Facts and Data

Since marketing and sales rely too heavily on facts and data, we must deal with the numbers carefully. A slight mistake can lead your marketing plan to fizzle out. Accuracy can be a game-changer. So, take your time to dig into the datasheets and screen everything from facts and figures to projections before writing your plan on paper.

F. Tie Organizational Goals to Individual Goals

People are generally invested in their performance and success. Therefore, the best way to bring about the best performance from your team is to tie the organizational goals to the individual performance. If there is a gap between these two objectives, you will hardly achieve significant results. You can reach it by employing this two-way approach.

1. Making the goal-setting process a collaborative effort where employees are equally involved in it along with the company leadership
2. Communicating with the employees in a way that they see personal growth in achieving organizational goals
3. Let the employees fully understand the objectives and take ownership of the tasks assigned to them

G. Track Your Team’s Progress

Too often, the management doesn’t track their goals along the way. The usual course of action includes:

• Briefing the team about the organizational objectives.
• Setting a time frame.
• Measuring the achievement at the end of the stipulated time.

It is not a good practice, and it can often lead to disappointment if you observe that the team is far behind its targets. The usual excuse cited is the lack of time. But, it’s devastating when you see that your expectations weren’t met at the finish line. So, the best practice is to periodically track the team’s progress and how it’s faring against the goals initially set.

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H. Split It Into Tactical Plans

Since sales comprise several tasks, splitting those tasks into smaller tactical units is crucial. This way, you can achieve it quickly without disrupting the overall flow. Some of these tactical tasks can be as follows.

• Account executives and sales representatives
• Sales operations
• Sales management
• Customer service and support

Get in touch and collaborate with the concerned teams and departments such as marketing, sales, & customer support, etc., to ensure that your sales plan is on track at different tactical levels.

I. Track Previous Data

You can successfully mirror past performance and plans to achieve your future sales targets. It’s crucial to gather insights as well. You can use the past data and stats to spot your mistakes and how you can correct those mistakes. For example, if you failed to achieve the sales number the last time, you can dig into your data sheets and figure out why that happened. It will allow you to view your errors from a different perspective.

J. Keep Your ROI Analysis-Ready

With the sales plan and projections, you also need to present detailed cost analysis and ROI to your stakeholders. It builds confidence and prevents any disagreement in the future over the proposed budget. It’s applicable for any investment in tools or software or addition in human resources.

Sales Strategy Template

You need a sales plan template before you write your sales strategy. A strategic business plan template allows you to incorporate and record every detail of your sales plan and make it user-friendly. Initiate your sales planning by using the sales plan template given below. You need to follow the prompts as the sections are already designed to enter the required information.

However, you need to make sure that the language you use is straightforward. There shouldn’t be any ambiguity or complexity because it can lead to confusion afterward. Apart from that, you should also not use jargon that cross-functional teams may find difficult to understand. You can use different content formats to fill in the information, such as text, spreadsheet, graphics, screenshots, and charts.

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The business plan template is flexible, so you can quickly adapt it to suit your business requirements.

Some of the sections in a sales template are as follows.

A. Executive Summary

An executive summary is a formal and brief document about your sales plan. It provides the reader a bird’s eye view of the entire sales plan and the strategies that you are going to use. Apart from that, it also gives you vital information about your sales and revenue goals, time frame, and strategies you will employ. Your executive summary should not be more than two pages.

B. Business Goals and Revenue Targets

Most of the business goals are inspired by revenue targets. Therefore, the revenue projections are a crucial part of a sales template. Your strategy isn’t complete unless the target revenue figures are classified in your template for different categories.

C. Review of Past Performance

The best way to minimize the number of errors is to revisit your past performance. Conduct an honest analysis of the mistakes that caused you to fail and lose track and the strengths that led to positive outcomes. This practice can alone put you on track to success in sales.

D. Specific Strategies

It’s crucial to mention the sales strategies and playbooks you will use. It brings transparency and makes sure that everybody is aware and on the same page about the sales strategies to be used. It also helps in a fair analysis and making strategy tweaks if something doesn’t happen according to your expectations.

E. Customer Avatars & Segments

Identifying customer segments and making buyer personas is the key to identifying revenue generation streams. Over time, new customer segments keep on emerging, and if you can keep track, you can successfully tap them and generate another revenue stream. You can also do it through referrals, upsells, and sales renewals.

F. Workforce and Resources

Sales can’t function in isolation. You need to provide relevant information to the cross-functional teams. In this section, you can add the summary of inputs you need for the sales process. It may include the tools, software, and human resources. Mention the current resources and proposed inputs, and justify why you need that.

E. Action Plan

The simple formula for achieving success is setting a goal, arranging the inputs needed,

and attaching a deadline. You also need to develop strategies and related tactics. It is referred to as the action plan. It also calls for assigning tasks and responsibilities to the team members recruited to implement the sales process.

Here is how an action plan looks like.

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F. Sales Tools

This section should add all the tools you need to accelerate the sales process and make it smoother. It may also include AI tools that automate various sales tasks to avoid unnecessary delays in the process. Listing sales tools is an excellent way to collaborate with cross-functional teams to know the processes, workflow and bridge the gaps.

G. Performance Metrics

Measuring the performance is as important as the sales process itself. So, the last section is meant for performance metrics. So, this section highlights how you will track your organizations’ sales performance. You can also add links to the resources or tools you are using.

This section may also include report generation and storage. It should also highlight how you interpret the report and assess the team performance.

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How to Sell Your Sales Plan?

Now that you have created a brilliant sales plan, you need your stakeholders and managers to buy-in. Your sales team is all pumped in and ready to dive in. Your management wants you to develop a plan with high chances of success, and you desperately need stakeholder buy-in. To achieve this, you need to get ready for a powerful presentation.

Still, your proposed plan may or may not be accepted by the management. The management may offer a budget that can be less than you asked for. Maybe they have some other thing in mind that you don’t know about yet. In that case, you would have to update your plan and manage to work with the existing resources.

Conclusion

It’s impossible to achieve your sales targets without a sales strategy plan. The key is to identify the major roadblocks and challenges and work your way up to overcome them. Once the implementation hassles are resolved and bottlenecks cleared, your sales plan will become a set of instructions and a to-do list that you can follow smoothly. It makes things easy to organize. What are your biggest challenges while making a sales plan? Let’s know in the comments.