You may have heard the old adage, “Those that can’t do, teach.” Well, if you have been challenged with the task of promoting training courses online, then you know that statement is almost totally false.

There are plenty of things to “do” when you are trying to support a training course with promotion online.

Organizations around the globe invest over $360 billion annually to level up their workforce in areas such as:

• Alignment
• Analytics and Measurement (click this link to learn more about our Google Analytics services)
• Automation and Robotics
• Compliance
• Content Development
• Employee Safety
• Engineering
• IT and Technical Training
• Leadership
• Performance Management
• Sales
• Strategic Planning

Developments in high-speed internet connectivity worldwide in recent years have also provided training companies with the ability to move their teachings online. Now, in addition to building a connection with people in real life, training courses can be consumed (and re-consumed) by students on demand.

Whether your company is creating a new training course or training is what you’ve done for decades, there has never been a better time to get involved in the knowledge sharing economy.

Below, I’ve compiled 20 digital marketing ideas that are both actionable and effective for you to start promoting training courses.

1. Auditing Templates

There are many ways a company might realize their need for your training solutions. Few of those ways are more effective than by giving them a template to conduct a self-audit. Creating auditing templates for prospective clients in Google Drive, Microsoft Office, or PDF format is an excellent way to:

• Help them discover their pain points
• Introduce your methodology to alleviating those pain points
• Provide natural conversation starters for your business development team

Bonus tip: For promoting training courses, you should be willing to provide these templates at no charge to potential clients. But at the same time, you should also gate these templates behind a registration form to aid your demand generation efforts.

2. Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

Employing content marketing—such as best practice guides or in-depth tutorials—allows you to showcase your organization as a thought leader.

Your potential clients likely have continuing education requirements or newly placed industry standards for which they need certification. A decision maker in HR or some other management role may not be up to speed on the new requirements.

The act of creating content serves as an educational opportunity for these people. To help them get the information they need to keep their people at the top of their craft.

Bonus tip: Embed a lot of share buttons on content like this so it can easily be bookmarked, emailed, exported, printed, or shared on enterprise communication platforms like Slack.

Are you launching a training course but also a provider of a software solution? Need more leads? We’ve got you covered with 14 more ideas just like the one above in this post… 15 Actionable Lead Generation Ideas For Software Companies

3. Blogging As A Tactic For Promoting Training Courses

Companies interested in growing their brand awareness through search engines should be creating at least one new piece of blog content per week. And yes, this applies to any company, regardless of industry.

Companies in the training industry are no different. In fact, regular blogging might be even more critical in the training industry. A higher amount of knowledge sharing should mean a more significant percentage of thought leadership.

Bonus tip: No matter your preferred communication medium, plan on creating a blog post that is at least 300 words in length once every five business days.

4. Case Studies To Promote Training Courses

Whether you provide training services to individuals or groups, what you do has an impact on the people you help level up. Let the results of your work speak for themselves by creating case studies to showcase your greatest successes.

In both personal and corporate training, people want to get the sense that you, specifically, can help them in their “unique situation.” Training companies should focus their case studies around the types of people and companies they want to attract to their business.

Are you a personal development company that wants more married businessmen as clients? Make a case study featuring one!

Do you have a leadership training course for the financial sector? Build a case study featuring employees from any of the “Big 5” accounting firms.

Bonus tip: Want to acquire visits from keyword searches to your case studies? Optimize the title tag, URL slug, and case study title in the following manner. Check out this example data set for this case study from OppenheimerFunds.

• Title: Oppenheimer Training Program: Custom Training To Identify Growth Companies
• URL: /case-studies/oppenheimerfunds/
• Case Study Title: OppenheimerFunds Improves Growth Company Identification By 80% After Training

5. Checklists and Worksheets

Checklists and worksheets are effective marketing assets to create. When they are optimized through SEO or supported through digital advertising, they can also be a high ROI item to drive sales leads into your pipeline.

One thing to remember about creating checklists and worksheets is that they can become outdated over time. This is especially true in industries where standards or regulations evolve over time. Training companies in education, government, healthcare, IT and legal will want to be mindful of this.

Bonus Tip: Create an interactive document that can be bookmarked in a browser and regularly revisited by your users. Is interactivity not possible? Host your checklist or worksheet as a branded Google Sheet for users to copy to their own Google Drive accounts.

6. Competitor Awareness

Whether you want to go toe-to-toe with an industry leader or you want to solidify your brand’s dominance, consider creating content about your competition. This is a high-value SEO and content marketing strategy for your brand if it classifies itself as a “challenger” in your industry.

Create pages of content on your site that either:

• Directly compare your training courses to the market leader and niche brands
• Identify a shortcoming of the services provided by your market leader/niche brands
• Offer an influencer the opportunity to compare you against your competitor as a guest post

Then proceed to highlight the strengths and unique value your training courses offer compared to your competition.

Bonus Tip: To promote training courses, pages like this allow your site to rank organically in keyword searches. You can also run digital advertising campaigns for keywords towards the end of the buyer’s journey like “Dale Carnegie alternatives” and “skillsoft vs mindgym.”

7. Digital Market Development Funds

“Integration and usage of technology in our day-to-day lives is at an all-time high, as we continue to shift to a ubiquitously digital world,” said Brian Fourman of Cooperate Marketing, a marketing agency in Chicago that solves complex problems for OEM’s and major service providers.

Some of the latest research by Nielsen, ComScore and other indicates that Americans spend close to 11 hours a day consuming media and nearly four hours of that consists of some form of digital across any number of platforms.

For marketers that have access to digital Market Development Funds (MDF’s), adopting a digital-first strategy can prove to be highly beneficial. Not only is a portion of your digital campaign already paid for with MDF’s, but when implemented correctly you can hyper-target your intended audience to convey the right message, at the right place, at the right time in a truly engaging and often personalized fashion. Plus, the cost of entry is significantly less than traditional media in which one is often forced to purchase the entire market (DMA).

Digital first strategy allows you to run any number of campaigns simultaneously to fulfill key marketing objectives at each level of the purchase funnel, whether to build brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, and/or to generate leads and convert them into sales. In addition, digital media allows for easy-to-implement message testing (A/B) that can be modified on the fly.

Copious amounts of readily available data further support your customized endeavor and provide quantifiable results that can easily be tracked. By knowing how to interpret and use this data, you can optimize current/future campaign creative to provide truly impactful results that guarantee the greatest ROI.”

8. Email Newsletter Sponsorship

Sponsoring email newsletters is a great way to infiltrate the inboxes of a significant number of highly targeted readers without the need to be CAN-SPAM compliant.

That doesn’t mean this tactic lacks strategic thinking. When you select an email newsletter to sponsor, here are three things to keep in mind:

1. Target professional organizations or networking groups of the industries you help train.
2. Have those organizations prove how engaged their readers are with data. You don’t want to just buy a list!
3. Create an exclusive offer to maximize engagement and conversions with your ad.

Bonus Tip: Support your exclusive offer or sponsorship of an email newsletter by creating a specific landing page for it. Extend the reach of your offer by applying SEO best practices and adding retargeting codes to the page for Bing, Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

9. Expert Roundups

You might be tired of reading “expert roundups”—but your target clients can’t get enough of them. Long list articles of helpful hacks, hints, tips, and tricks exist on nearly every business strategy out there.

Expert roundups—whether published on your site or elsewhere on the web—are a great way to improve the personal brand of your training team members. Additional benefits include:

• Increased thought leadership opportunities for your brand
• Increased visibility for your content on social networks
• Increased traffic and backlinks for expanding your SEO efforts

Bonus Tip: Need to find expert sources for your first roundup besides your own training team? Signup for a journalist/blogger account on Help A Reporter Out (HARO). HARO is a 3x per day newsletter sent to over 800K sources looking for opportunities to get media coverage.

10. Giveaways and Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like getting something for free?!

When promoting training courses, letting potential students “try before they buy” can be an irresistible way to draw them in. Simply give them access to one session, program, or class at no cost.

Sweepstakes work in a similar fashion. However, instead of giving away your intellectual property, you will be packaging something together to entice future students to give you their contact information.

One disadvantage of this strategy is that you risk receiving a large number of registrants that may not result in quality sales opportunities.

Bonus Tip: Promote your giveaway or sweepstakes in a press release or by providing exclusive demos to bloggers and other online publishers. Don’t forget you can also shamelessly promote training courses in your outreach, too! You can tap into their follower counts and subscribers for leads while also earning high-quality backlinks to your domain.

11. Historical Optimization

Over the last few years, historical optimization has become an incredibly valuable SEO strategy for companies with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find an old blog post (published six or more months ago) on your site that either:

• Generates a lot of traffic (good idea), or
• Converts (better idea)

Then refresh the content and re-publish it with a more recent date.

Establishing your trainers as thought leaders are critical to your success in promoting training courses. Historical optimization is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

Bonus tip: Have trainers who used to blog for your organization that are no longer there? Create a general author account on your blog using your company name, like “(Company Name) Team.” Change the author of a post if they are no longer a part of your team to that author.

Historical Optimization helped Corporate Visions improve their lead generation by 37% from SEO.
Learn more here.

12. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has had a ton of hype over the last year, as well as a lot of unwanted attention. Despite that surplus of hype floating around, a dedicated influencer campaign has a lot of potential.

If your company can partner with influencers on social media to increase awareness amongst a large fan base, the CPM can be very effective compared to traditional media buying. Just make sure that any influencer you invest in actually motivates their followers and fans to act.

Creating an exclusive offer for any influencer will be vital to seeing success with a campaign of this type.

Bonus Tip: Check out this comprehensive beginner’s guide to influencer marketing if you want to learn more about how to leverage this for your organization.

13. Infographics To Promote Training Courses

Infographics still have a place in the world of digital marketing, especially since most people still do not enjoy reading online.

If your company conducts its own original research or surveys, share your best statistic or a quotable statement in this visually appealing format. Engagement with your content and the likelihood that your target students remember what you wrote will undoubtedly improve.

Bonus Tip: Create a high-resolution copy of your infographic for companies that want your content as posters for their walls. You could sell them to take advantage of a non-traditional revenue stream or offer the high-res version as a piece of gated content.

14. LinkedIn Advertising

Don’t let LinkedIn Learning’s existence (formerly Lynda.com) scare you from the possibility of leveraging the most extensive professional social network to promote your training courses.

According to a case study from LinkedIn, e-learning solution provider, CrossKnowledge launched display ads, InMail, and sponsored updates for a campaign titled “Bye Bye Boss” in 2015.

The results?

“Benchmark-beating” click-through rates and over 50 leads generated on the campaign microsite.

Bonus Tip: No matter what platform you use for your landing pages, take advantage of LinkedIn AutoFill for your form fields. With the click of a button, visitors can become leads by populating your form with their LinkedIn profile information.

15. Microsite Development

“The use of microsites provides the perfect launchpad for new services,” says Denise DeSimone, Chairperson of C-Leveled, a full-service branding strategy and marketing agency.

Update: On April 21, 2022,
we announced our
acquisition of C-Leveled.

“Microsites are quick and easy to build, so they give you the ability to target particular audiences quickly. In some cases, microsites can be as much as five times more effective in generating leads than traditional campaigns.”

Bonus Tip: Optimize your main site and microsite for similar keywords, and support each site by targeting those keywords in a PPC campaign. Doing this allows presents an opportunity to occupy a minimum of 25% of a search engine results page.

16. Podcast Interviews To Promote Training Courses

Participating in podcast interviews is another opportunity for your talent and training staff to showcase their thought leadership.

But have you ever thought about hosting your own podcast? Podcasts have low production costs and listenership is rising. Plus, podcast listeners have over four times better brand recall on ads than traditional display campaigns.

Bonus Tip: If you host your own show, invite guests on your show who could be potential sales leads. In the training industry, consider hosting executives in HR or with specialization in companies you want as clients.

17. Quora Promoted Answers

Quora Promoted Answers are a relatively new advertising option on this quickly emerging platform.

You can reach a broad group of people on Quora who are researching questions and answers related to your area of expertise with a Promoted Answer.

For training companies who are already familiar with answering questions on Quora, you might not notice anything different in how you find places to share your insights.

What changes in a Promoted Answer? Two things:

1. The label next to the answer (Promoted By).
2. The name of the person and the business promoting the answer.

Bonus Tip: Has someone unaffiliated with your company answered a question on Quora that helps in promoting training courses offered by your company? Promote that answer instead of yours to get it shown to more people in any feed.

Interested in leveraging Quora for your SEO efforts? Find out if Quora can help your SEO efforts here.

18. Research and Surveys

If you want to make the case for your training solutions to potential clients, there may not be a better way to do that than by conducting research or surveys.

Do your clients have a common pain point they need addressing when they hire you? They probably are not alone.

Survey executives in your industry related to the common pain point your clients have. Then publish the results of your survey in a whitepaper or other type of report.

Then, do a press release about your research (and promoting training courses) and share it with the trade publication media in your industry for increased visibility.

Bonus Tip: Don’t forget to send the report you create to everyone who submits an answer to your survey.

19. Retargeting To Promote Training Courses

It doesn’t matter what you call this—remarketing, cyberstalking—it’s a crawesome (creepy + awesome) marketing tool.

Reach the 99% of visitors to your website that didn’t convert by retargeting them with display ads. You can use this strategy in search engines, display ads, social networks, and mobile apps.

Talk about creepy and awesome!

Bonus tip: If your training solutions require a long sales cycle, make sure you have your audience list set to as long a time period as possible prior to the start of promoting training courses.

20. Webinars To Promote Training Courses

If you are in the training business, then you likely have some comfort with public speaking. Leveraging live, web-based video conferences will be different than being in person with your clients, for sure. But it is a great way to connect with your target audience at scale, at any time they want to consume your training.

Best of all, if you host a webinar, your message can reach an audience of viewers and listeners from all over the world.

Bonus tip: It’s okay to put your webinars behind a gated form, but make sure the video content can be made available on demand. In today’s competitive business climate, you don’t want to make people wait to hear your training when there are others out there.

Key Takeaways on How to Market Training Courses Online

Develop Auditing Templates

Providing self-assessment tools helps potential clients identify their own paint points and training needs, which you are then in prime position to offer to address with your course.

Publish Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

Sharing in-depth content establishes your authority and educates your audience; this also makes them more likely to invest in your training programs.​

Maintain an Active Blog

Blogging regularly is critical in the training industry to improve search engine visibility and to keep your audience engaged with topics that you cover in your courses.​

Create Detailed Case Studies

Showcasing success stories from past clients demonstrates the tangible benefits of your training.

Host Webinars

Webinars enable you to reach people across the globe—plus, they give people a concrete sample of what your training is like.

Final Thoughts On Promoting Training Courses Online

Like many lucrative industries that are both knowledge and skills-based, promoting training courses effectively in today’s marketplace requires agility, consistency, and a little bit of luck.

This is true whether you are looking to go to market with a new training course, or you are part of an established training company looking to elevate your status.

Luckily, no matter what actionable digital marketing strategy you choose to promote your training course, they all can help you accomplish the following:

• Disrupt the market leader who is slow to take action
• Generate leads for your programs and direct sales
• Improve your company’s authority and thought leadership positions in your industry
• Increase awareness of your brand and programs through more web traffic
• Provide instant and long-term value to your most coveted buyers

You already know now is the time to increase your market share of the $360 billion training industry. If you need help from an online marketing agency to decide which strategy is the best to start snagging your share, just contact us.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 14th, 2025.

The post 20 Actionable Digital Marketing Ideas for Promoting Training Courses (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Businesses seeking to expand their global reach will benefit from this partnership. By collaborating with the ITA, DOM is able to provide companies with access to resources, expertise, and opportunities to skillfully navigate the marketing complexities of international markets.

Table of Contents

• Direct Online Marketing and the International Trade Administration: A Partnership Built for Global Growth
• Helping Businesses Find the Right International Markets
• Free Digital Marketing Audits for Exporting Businesses
• Expert-Led Webinars & Speaking Engagements
• Enhanced Online Resources to Support Global Expansion
• DOM & ITA — A Partnership Focused on International Business Growth
• Key Takeaways on DOM’s Partnership with the International Trade Administration

Direct Online Marketing and the International Trade Administration: A Partnership Built for Global Growth

To expand into international markets, you must have a great product or service. This alone isn’t usually enough to be successful, though. You have to make sure that the right people in the right places know about your business.  

DOM is teaming up with ITA to help U.S. businesses make the vital connections that facilitate selling into other countries. 

The International Trade Administration is the agency within the United States Department of Commerce with a mission to promote the competitiveness of U.S. businesses worldwide. This includes providing concrete insights and market data to help U.S. companies export their goods and services. 

ITA’s vast trade network and DOM’s nearly two decades of digital marketing experience make for a potent mix of resources and expertise that businesses can take advantage of as they try to grow into international markets.  

Global Markets — An ITA Program That Drives Results

Global Markets is the particular unit under the umbrella of ITA that promotes and protects U.S. exports around the world.

In 2024, Global Markets helped U.S. businesses in substantial ways:

93,000 Companies Assisted

Global Markets helped 93,000 companies with exports and foreign investment. 81% of these companies were small and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

$161,000,000 Impact

Global Markets made possible $52 billion in foreign investment and $109 billion in exports.

519,000 Jobs

The exports and inward investments that Global Markets facilitated supported the employment of more than half a million Americans. 

460-to-1 ROI

The international connections that Global Markets made resulted in $460 in return on investment for each $1 of Global Market’s operating costs.

At DOM, we’re excited to be partnering with ITA and the standout unit that is Global Markets. This relationship will help U.S. businesses make inroads to countries all over the world. 

Helping Businesses Find the Right International Markets

Where to start? One of the biggest blockers to exporting is simply a lack of information. It can seem daunting. How on Earth do I make the kinds of connections necessary to get my product into the hands of people all the way across the globe? 

Filling this knowledge gap is a prime benefit of DOM’s partnership with the ITA. 

Free Digital Marketing Audits for Exporting Businesses

DOM will be producing Export Digital Marketing Starter Plans: a customized assessment of your current market readiness that identifies high-growth opportunities in target markets. These plans offer a clear, data-driven path for businesses to take their first steps into global expansion with confidence.

With an Export Digital Marketing Starter Plan you will be empowered to confidently expand your international presence.

Expert-Led Webinars & Speaking Engagements

We will be participating in a series of webinars and speaking sessions; these will feature leading export marketing experts from ITA, DOM, and other organizations.

The goal is to empower businesses with tried-and-true digital marketing strategies. These presentations will deliver advice tailored to particular industries and target regions. Each session will feature practical takeaways and live Q&A opportunities.

These sessions will cover topics essential to successful international marketing, for instance:

• Leveraging digital marketing ahead of trade missions to maximize impact
• Using targeted, low-cost advertising campaigns to connect with buyers abroad
• Understanding global search engines like Google, Baidu, and Yandex
• Optimizing websites for international audiences
• Navigating global eCommerce platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Mercado Libre

We’ll also be attending key ITA events, such as Discover Global Markets and overseas trade missions, where we’ll share our expertise through presentations and roundtable discussions.

Enhanced Online Resources to Support Global Expansion

In addition to the digital marketing audits and webinars, the DOM–ITA partnership will also bring you blog posts, videos, and downloadable resources to help businesses stay informed on the latest trends and best practices for international digital marketing. 

Informative blog posts with accompanying videos
Explore digital marketing tactics and gain actionable insights from DOM and ITA experts.

In-depth guides and infographics
Peruse easily digestible resources that lay out key digital marketing strategies.

Compelling exporter success stories
Learn from the experiences of other businesses that have successfully expanded into international markets.

From measuring global visibility, to foreign SEO, to advertising tips, these resources will provide businesses with the knowledge they need to compete effectively on a global scale.

DOM & ITA — A Partnership Focused on International Business Growth

Our partnership with ITA represents a significant step forward in our mission to help grow people, communities, and businesses across the globe. We’re excited to work hand in hand with ITA to provide you with the tools, resources, and support you need to achieve your international business objectives.

ITA’s deep knowledge of international trade and DOM’s expertise in digital marketing will be a powerful combination. We are confident that this partnership will remove barriers to U.S. businesses so that they can succeed in new markets.

Key Takeaways on DOM’s Partnership with the International Trade Administration

• DOM and ITA are partnering to help U.S. businesses expand internationally.
• Free Export Digital Marketing Starter Plans will help exporting businesses assess their market readiness and identify high-growth opportunities.
• Expert-led webinars and speaking engagements will provide valuable insights into international digital marketing strategies.
• Exporting-focused blog posts, videos, and guides will equip businesses with the knowledge to expand globally.

The post DOM & the International Trade Administration — A Partnership for Global Growth appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

When your website loading speed is slow, your page load times can affect every metric that matters to you.

Gone are the days of dial-up Internet when the average load time for a page was eight seconds. That might not seem like a lot, but for visitors to your site, it can feel like an eternity.

Consider that in an age where our time and attention is limited, users are less likely to bounce from websites that load quickly. No matter what kind of content your website serves, — e-commerce, informational, SaaS, etc.— its success is affected by site speed.

In this article, we cover how to tell if your website is just too slow.

Why You Should Care About Website Loading Speed

Site speed matters because a faster website makes you more money.

As mobile technology and Internet connections continue to improve, the average person browsing the Internet has high expectations for load speed.

A Note About U.S. vs. Global Site Speeds

If the majority of your prospects and customers reside within the contiguous United States (excluding Hawaii and Alaska), load times will generally be consistent. However, a lot can impact someone’s load times, including their connection speed (cable, mobile data, fiber optics, etc.), distance from servers, the capacity of your hosting, and more. For smaller businesses, it is important to fully vet your hosting situation’s details, such as location. Here’s a list of hosting solutions for small businesses that might be helpful to begin your journey.

More importantly, your site speeds will vary across the world. If you’re in the U.S. and serve people all over the world, you need to assume that their load time, depending on location, is going to be much longer than you see at home.

Most often, think of  Africa and many parts of Asia. Internet is slower in many of these places and a large number of users are accessing the web via their mobile devices. If you have ever spent extended periods in an area with less than ideal data coverage, you’ve probably noticed that download speeds are far from consistent.

And if you’re in China, the Great Firewall can put a major damper on speed.

How a Slow Website Impacts Your Bottom Line

In one study, over a quarter of participants stated they would abandon a webpage that takes four or more seconds to load. Additionally, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

To get a better sense of how that one-second delay impacts your bottom line, let’s suppose you have an e-commerce store that, on average, pulls in $100,000 a day. With a 7% reduction in conversions, this translates to a $2.5 million loss in sales per year.

Ouch.

How Does Pagespeed Impact Conversions?

If that’s not enough of a reason for you to think site speed is important, consider the following:

1. 20% — The percentage of shoppers that will abandon their shopping cart if they perceive the pages as being too slow. (Source)
2. $1.6 Billion — The revenue lost per year, per second of site speed decline according to Amazon’s internal testing. (Source)
3. Eight million — The number of searches that Google has calculated it would lose per day if search results were to load just 0.4 seconds slower. (Source)
4. 15.4% — The decrease in downloads reported by Firefox when average load time increases by 2.2 seconds. (Source)

Website Load Test: How To Measure Website Speed

There are multiple ways to perform a website load test:

1. Use one (or more) free online tool(s) to measure the speed of a single page – like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom, for instance
2. Use a tool to measure the speed of every page (or a group of pages) on a website

But first and foremost, there is an even easier way to measure your site’s speed based on its performance: user and employee feedback.

Regularly requesting feedback is one of the best methods for understanding if your site is loading so slowly that you must take action. If your website is slow, customers and employees should be encouraged to speak up if they experience long load times.

It might not be a bad idea to use a service like Google Surveys to gain insights into your customers’ true feelings about your website. This tool can be invaluable when seeking market research to drive business decisions.  Tons of other choices for survey software exist if you’re looking for more advanced features.

How to Measure Page Speed

Many free tools across the internet can give you a good idea of how your website loading speed performs. The downfall of these tools is almost always the same — although they are accurate, they do not allow you to test more than one URL at a time.

However, these types of tools are helpful if you already know what pages frequently have long load times or if you want to benchmark performance before applying site-wide optimizations.

Many of these tools also give very helpful readouts that may help diagnose the cause of page load issues and some even go as far as to recommend actions you can take

Here is a list of the tools that we recommend for testing a single page’s speed:

1. Google’s PageSpeed Insights
2. Google’s Lighthouse
3. Pingdom Website Speed Test
4. GTmetrix
5. WebPage Test

How to Measure Website Loading Speed

After using one or more of the tools above, you should now have data that indicates just how slow certain pages are loading.

But what if you don’t have a list of frequent offenders for slow load times. How do you figure out what those pages are, and to what extent does their page speed impact your site?

To answer these questions, we would recommend utilizing tools that bulk analyze the pages on your site. Here are two and how to use them:

1. Batch Speed

Batch speed is a bulk page speed checker that relies on Google’s Page Speed API. To get the most out of this tool, we recommend using an XML sitemap generator to generate a sitemap for your website (if you don’t already have one on your website) or using a tool like Screaming Frog to generate a list of your website’s URLs.

You can use a sitemap or URL list as input to the bulk page speed checker. Here are the results of a batch speed test for our own site:

The details section of each page can be expanded to see how each detected issue contributes to the page’s load time.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) has a site speed section that can be helpful if you know what you are doing. You can find this section by logging into GA and navigating to Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings. Here you will find a chart like the one below:

At first glance, this is very valuable information, but if you compare any of the timings found in GA with those found in any one of the five tools for measuring individual page speeds, you will more often find that these timings won’t match up.

By default, GA only collects timing data from a fraction of your site visitors – 1% to be exact. The value of the data in this report is questionable, or even non-existent if your website traffic is relatively low.

The same can be said for sites that have a great deal of traffic as GA also limits timing data to 10,000 hits per day.

There is, however, a solution that allows you to increase your GA page speed hit limit — and we highly suggest it. If you want to know how to do it, shoot over an email to info@directom.com, and we’ll share some of our favorite resources.

Benchmarking to Fix Website Loading Speed

With any issue, you need to understand all the factors thoroughly to identify a plan of action. Here are a few simple steps to begin benchmarking page speeds:

1. Use bulk page speed tools like GA and Batch Speed to compile a list of slow loading pages in a spreadsheet.
2. For each individual page, run that list of common offenders through website load test tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom.
3. Record page timings and routinely update new data.
4. Identify high priority pages based on extremely high load times or pages with valuable content (home page, product / sales / service pages, contact pages, etc.).

Simply put, if your website is running slow, money is being left on the table. You must take action, or you risk losing out on new business and Google rankings.

Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below. Or, to get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as Google Partners before you reach out.

• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• How To Crush Your Unminified JS And CSS Issues
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• Readability Analysis: Tips to Improve Your Writing and SEO

The post How To Tell If Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business (2024 Edition) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Questions To Ask When Hiring A Digital Marketing Agency

With the infiltration of AI into all forms of digital marketing, this article has been updated for 2025 to include questions about AI and how a Digital Marketing Agency, like Direct Online Marketing, works with it to help keep a human in the loop so you do not get crushed by Google algorithm updates.

Digital marketing will only become more complex as the landscape changes along with consumer behavior. Thank you for checking out this list of essential questions to ask a digital marketing agency before you set out to hire one.

Businesses that hesitate to adopt modern digital strategies will eventually fail without bringing on the right people to carry them out. For companies that don’t have the resources to expand their internal teams or just need a partner with specific expertise, digital agencies are the perfect solution. Choosing the right agency is nothing short of a monumental task.

By the end of this resource, you should have the answers to the most critical questions to ask a digital marketing agency as you are going through the evaluation process of seeking a new one to help your business grow with confidence.

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Digital marketing is a vast field with countless strategies, concentrations, and nuances. Some of the largest companies on the planet have huge teams of marketers, all of which must be at the top of their game to stay ahead of the latest trends. As each discipline and digital platform evolves, keeping up with it all ends up being extremely taxing for smaller businesses that can’t maintain such large teams.

Acquiring new business online requires having seasoned talent with hands-on knowledge regarding the benefits and strengths of different platforms. Not only that, but these individuals also need to know how to execute. Strategy and consultation are meaningless without the people who can provide results.

Companies that wish to explore new territory or improve performance in a specific area of digital marketing will end up considering whether to hire fresh talent or partner with an online marketing agency. Evaluating the merits of in-house versus outsourced marketing is complicated; there are numerous factors to consider.

However, the fact that agencies leverage a pool of talented workers with diverse experiences means that companies who partner with them have the potential to get the highest return on their investment. Hiring specialists to work in-house usually equates to the cost of hiring an agency and very often even ends up being more expensive. Companies that partner with an agency can take advantage of a whole team of experts for less risk than hiring new internal employees.

How To Find The Best Digital Marketing Agency

Hiring an agency is far from easy, though.  Finding the right fit can be time-consuming and downright frustrating. The agency selection process can feel like an awful chore:

• Some agencies make grand promises on which they can’t
• Some agencies fail to provide substantive proof of how they get
• Some agencies only specialize in extremely niche areas.
• Some agencies have restrictive, long-term contracts.

The above highlight just a few of the challenges in choosing an agency. Ultimately, results are what matter. While there’s no way of telling for sure whether investing with a specific agency will generate a positive return, vetting an agency is extremely important.

Be sure to ask and receive answers to the following questions to ask a digital marketing agency as part of your vetting process.

20 Questions To Ask A Digital Marketing Agency Before You Hire Them

Digital Marketing Agency Question 1. Are My Expectations And Their Promises Realistic?

One of the biggest ways companies set themselves up for failure is when the bar is set beyond realistic heights. Having goals is good, but not when it involves going after the unachievable. When this happens, falling short of that high bar becomes inevitable.

This problem can go both ways. While a company may come to a prospective agency with impossible goals, many agencies make promises they simply can’t keep. It’s best to disqualify any company or agency that guarantees results.

Goals can more realistically be set for tasks pertaining to the quality of services, such as communication and reporting. Pay attention to these kinds of promises. Never be afraid to push to better understand how an agency intends to keep itself accountable with deliverables on a predetermined schedule.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 2. Does The Contract Restrict Me Even When I’m Not Satisfied?

The contract length is something to keep in mind when choosing an agency. A common practice in the agency world is to draft contracts where clients must agree to minimum commitments of anywhere from six months up to a full year. That means that no matter if the agency is doing the work, the client still has to pay. That’s not to say that an agency with a year-long contract doesn’t do good work, but it doesn’t offer a whole lot of flexibility for the client if a marketing campaign goes south.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 3. Do They Provide Unique Or Cookie-Cutter Strategies?

Agencies should have refined processes and procedures that empower them to provide repeatable outcomes. However, every business has unique needs, and formulating a strategy should not rely on a templated approach.

Assuming a company understands its goals, the right agency should be able to tailor a strategy in such a way to satisfy that client’s needs. In a perfect scenario, an agency would build all of its client strategies from the ground up, designing them individually to reach business goals and objectives.

When an agency puts forth a contract, understanding every aspect of it is crucial. Be aware of how long a contract will be and that longer ones are more restrictive. Some agencies offer month-to-month agreements where clients can choose to end the relationship for any reason.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 4. Are They Both Tactical And Strategic?

Strategic planning is meaningless without boots on the ground to get things done. Depending on goals and needs, a company likely doesn’t just need a strategic partner; they also need a tactical one.

The only way to get a  sense of whether an agency can execute is if they provide strategic timelines with deliverables and hard deadlines. While an agency won’t have specifics, make sure to ask about what the timeline will look like.

But the opposite must also be true. An agency that gets itself far too into the weeds, focusing only on tactics won’t get the job done either. The strategy ultimately dictates what tactics to use, and it is possible for an agency to be too tactical. Long-term campaign success requires always having an eye towards the future without getting too caught up in the day-to-day.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 5. How Regular Are Communications?

Marketing success hinges upon routine and free-flowing communication. A disadvantage of outsourcing to an agency is that communication takes longer and can be a bit more difficult.

At a bare minimum, the best agency will always offer recurring meetings and campaign updates, typically weekly. This frequency is a default best practice; clients may, of course, have specific preferences outside of this schedule. A good agency should be flexible enough to provide the amount of communication the client needs to demonstrate campaign health.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 6. Will I Get A Dedicated Point-Of-Contact?

No matter the size of an agency, the answer to this question should always be “yes.” Some agencies are so large that clients have to deal with customer service call centers rather than a dedicated account manager. It’s best to avoid agencies like this. Clients will end up feeling like just another number in a system.

Agencies need to provide that human touch, and an account manager should do exactly that. An account manager—as opposed to a more junior employee— ordinarily serves as the primary point-of-contact, as this person should have a comprehensive understanding of every aspect of the client’s campaign, coordinating with their team members accordingly. Account managers are there to serve. They should make themselves available to answer questions or provide insights with reasonable turnaround times.

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Digital Marketing Agency Question 7.  How Important Is Data To Them?

Every marketer should treat performance data like gold. Making decisions in today’s world without relying heavily on data is a mistake. While other factors should also be part of an agency’s decision making, campaigns live and die by data analysis.

Data should inform everything an agency does since it informs what’s going well, where to adjust, and where they need to go in the future.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 8.  How Tech-Savvy Are They?

An important consideration for selecting an agency is how they approach technology adaptation and innovation. Working in digital marketing requires knowledge of complex technology. Which is continually evolving. What may have generated results a decade ago may not be feasible in the present day.

For example, if you are seeking an agency that specializes in paid search, you should ask how they use automation tools and tactics to improve the overall return on investment.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 9.  Can They Help A Business Of My Size? 

Many businesses care about whether an agency has direct experience with helping other companies in their industry. While some industries have specific tactics and strategies that work best, a competent digital agency has experience assimilating data quickly and adjusting to almost any industry and business.

The more important question is whether an agency is the right fit for a business of your size. An agency with mostly enterprise-level clients likely isn’t the best fit for a medium-sized manufacturer. Inversely, an agency that only assists local restaurants likely won’t be a good fit for a corporate franchise business.

Figure out what factors you value most in an agency relationship and choose accordingly.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 10.  Who Will Be Working On My Account?

Because companies pay agencies for their pool of talent, decision-makers have a right to know who works on their account. In addition to having an account manager, many agencies also provide a dedicated secondary or “backup” point-of-contact who has extensive knowledge on the account.

Your primary point-of-contact should have the necessary experience and support from a second person with the experience to fill in knowledge gaps.  Keep in mind that while people leave from time to time,  there shouldn’t be frequent changes in your contact to ensure consistency and maintain a positive long-term relationship. Additionally, you should never get the feeling of a “bait and switch” when your senior contact shortly after switches over to a more green person.

Beyond that, try asking questions about how many team members will work on the account as well as their qualifications. Note that due to the management of workloads,  agencies may not be able to commit a specific person to your account until you commit to partnering with the agency.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 11. What About The Agency’s Corporate Culture?

The core values of an agency foretell the kind of relationship you will have. Generally, consider agencies that are collaborative, innovative, and proactive.  The best agencies really stand out when transparency and accountability are also baked into their corporate culture.

By asking questions about their corporate culture, this should also give some insight into an agency’s hiring process. Since the greatest benefit of partnering with an agency is its team, getting a measure of the agency’s talent is essential. Also, be sure to check out what employees say about working at the agency on sites like Glassdoor.

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Digital Marketing Agency Question 12. What Areas Do They Cover?

You need to understand the company’s needs and objectives. If the idea is to partner with someone to fill those gaps, focus on the areas that matter most. Some agencies specialize in one area or have a team that covers many. For example, a company may think they only need help with an SEO site migration, but fail to consider the need for ongoing SEO work.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 13. How Exactly Do They Generate Results?

Not every agency will have the same approach for a given marketing area. The best ones have carefully created their own process to account for every single step of the way, including potential bumps in the road.

Selecting an agency is also tough because oftentimes decision-makers don’t know enough about a subject to ask the right questions. Perhaps a company does great work with content marketing but doesn’t have detailed SEO experience. Agencies who provide insights into their processes will always be the best choice.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 14. Are They A Partner Or A Provider?

Companies should only seek agencies that act as an extension of their marketing team. An agency must deliver results, but they should also be proactive in improving the overall client relationship and the quality of their results.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 15. Are They Transparent?

In addition to regular communication,  choosing the right agency should also involve considering if they’re accountable and transparent. Results speak for themselves, and agencies need to be upfront at all times. A competent agency will know when to admit failure, and they will also know how to right the ship.

Companies hire agencies to get things done. A lack of clarity and honesty is a recipe for disaster.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 16. What Credentials Do They Have?

Certifications and accreditations are essential indicators of an agency’s quality. These credentials must be bestowed by a reputable third-party to vouch for the work of a given agency. Some credentials even have different tiers to consider. Let’s say a company wants an agency that knows Google Ads inside and out. Their best bet would likely be to go with one that’s a member of the Top 200 Premier Google Partner program, an elite group of the best digital agencies that specialize in Google Ads.

Learn more about our team, credentials, and qualifications here.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 17. Do They Have Case Studies Demonstrating Their Work?

Case studies communicate past success. They are summaries of challenges faced and solutions found. Reading over these pieces of content should grant a sense of the types of companies they help as well as what tactics generated such good results.

Steer clear of agencies that don’t have several compelling case studies to their name.

Check out a selection of our marketing campaign case studies here.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 18. Do They Have Testimonials?

Testimonials say an awful lot about an agency. In particular, client testimonials that use branding and a direct quote from an actual person are huge credibility signals. These clients are so confident in the results of the agency that they put their name on it.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 19. What Do Their Online Reviews Look Like?

Although similar to testimonials, online reviews are another significant credibility signal to examine. Testimonials usually require the agency to reach out to the client for a direct request, whereas clients can submit online reviews at their leisure.

Even if an agency has a high review score, be sure to read both positive and negative reviews to identify common threads across them. On top of the usual review aggregators like Google and Yelp, be sure also to check out agency-specific review platforms like Clutch.

One corollary of this item is the measurement of customer satisfaction.

Two industry standards for this measurement are Net Promoter Score (NPS) and SurveyMonkey’s global benchmark score. One thing to note about benchmarks is that they can vary widely among industries. For example, educational institutions tend to average an NPS of 71, while healthcare companies are lucky to get much higher than 27.  

NPS is calculated using a simple survey question: how satisfied are you with the service you received? More detailed surveys are also available, but all it takes to create a reliable baseline is that one question, answered on a scale of 1 to 10. It is a fast, simple way to gather customer data. According to Retently.com, Digital Marketing Agencies average an NPS of around 61. 

The other primary benchmark is calculated by surveys provided by SurveyMonkey, the leading provider of information-gathering services across many different business sectors. To calculate a SurveyMonkey Global Benchmark for each question, the company adds up individual scores to generate an average across all surveys. A digital marketing agency average at 44. 

Digital Marketing Agency Question 20. Do they use AI to generate content or optimizations?

In 2025, virtually all digital marketing agencies integrate AI tools into their content creation and optimization processes. AI assists with tasks such as generating drafts, analyzing data, and identifying trends to improve efficiency and performance. However, while AI provides immense value, it is crucial that agencies maintain a human in the loop to ensure content aligns with a brand’s voice, remains unique, and meets Google’s ever-evolving quality standards. Human editing plays a vital role in reviewing and refining AI-generated content to add authority, creativity, and personalization. This safeguards against penalties from search engine algorithms that prioritize originality and user relevance. When discussing AI use with a prospective agency, confirm that their approach involves both leveraging AI for efficiency and retaining human oversight to ensure top-tier, authoritative results.

Digital Marketing Agency Question 21. What About Pricing?

Companies should only seek agencies that act as an extension of their marketing team. An agency must deliver results, but they should also be proactive in improving the overall client relationship and the quality of their results.

21 Questions To Ask A Digital Marketing Agency: 4 Key Takeaways

Gathering as much information as possible about an agency will go a long way towards finding the best fit. Finding the right questions to ask a digital marketing agency may feel challenging; make no mistake. But in the end, any company can select a great agency provided that they always consider:

• The value of an agency is in its talent
• Regular communication is key
• Execution trumps good strategy
• Credibility is extremely important

Video: SEO or PPC?

Looking For The Best Digital Marketing Agency?

Ready to learn more about Direct Online Marketing and how our digital marketing agency can help your company grow confidently online? Contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation with one of our digital marketing experts.
Take a moment to read why we are The Best Digital Marketing Agency For B2B Businesses.

Oh… and if you do contact us, feel free to pick from this list (or add to it) if you have any questions to ask a digital marketing agency.

The post 21 Essential Questions To Ask When Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency (Updated For 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

As highly capable digital marketers, we have an unprecedented number of tools to help us do our jobs. Last time we checked (a few minutes ago), the most popular marketing automation software, coming in with around 20% of the market share, was Adobe’s Marketo platform. If you have anything whatsoever to do with digital marketing, you know how prevalent Marketo is. Most implementations are centered around their handy landing pages. So most of our Marketo SEO tips are most relevant for the landing page templates, though you can use that platform for other things, too.

Just like anything else you want your customer to find via a search engine, your Marketo pages need to be optimized for SEO. Here are our top tips to get the most out of your SEO for Marketo.

Marketo SEO Tip 1: Just do the SEO thing.

You know the thing we’re talking about: optimize that page for search engines! If you want to know more about how to do that, we have a whole bunch of resources to help you. Trust us, we’re experts. In fact, below is a list of blog posts we’ve written over the years to help you out with some of the SEO basics.

• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Why SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions Are Still Important
• Does Duplicate Content Affect SEO?

That said, if you’re up to speed already on the SEO basics, this post is for more advanced users who really want to squeeze the most value they can out of their Marketo assets.

Marketo SEO Tip 2: Learn how to edit html.

We’re not trying to be glib (well, maybe a little), but you will get a lot of mileage out of the simple small step of popping open a copy of HTML Programming for Stupid People, or whatever those books are called, and teaching yourself some basic coding. It’s not difficult—html is definitely one of the easier programming languages to learn—and you’ll enable yourself to do stuff like these sub-tips.

Need a reason to learn to code HTML? Here’s why you should learn to code HTML in case you want some reasons why.

Marketo SEO Sub-Tip A: Add canonical links to your header tags.

Don’t be alarmed, it’s easier than it sounds. You can freely edit the HTML of the Marketo headers (everything between the <head> tags on a webpage). One of the most useful ones is the canonical link. We use canonical links all the time as a way of telling search engines that potentially duplicate content is intentional and need not be indexed. Google famously dislikes duplicate content, and we all know what happens to content Google doesn’t like.

It gets ranked lower. That’s all.

You won’t lose your listing, but your organic searches will suffer. This is especially true for Marketo pages because they tend to multiply based on the SKUs, products, or services being marketed, and similar page content can trigger false duplicate flags to Google’s crawlers. That’s the opposite of what we want.

Marketo SEO Sub-Tip B: Add Google Analytics code and various pixels to the header tag manually.

While you’re editing the header, you might as well take this step while you’re there. By “manually” we mean “by hand,” as in “you have to code it yourself” because Marketo doesn’t let you do it as easily as other web design interfaces (like WordPress, for example). You can get the embed codes from the websites you use to track whatever it is you’re tracking, and your little bit of coding knowledge will come in very handy.

Marketo SEO Tip 3: Make sure your gated content is protected by noindex tags.

One of the most useful techniques for a digital marketer is to put valuable content behind a conversion link, like a newsletter signup. This lets us get something valuable in exchange for something valuable, which your gated content most definitely should be. But if that valuable content is visible to Google, then simple searches can bypass your gate and your hard work goes unrewarded.

Make sure to add the noindex tag in the headers of the pages that host your content, not the landing page itself. That’s a great way to make sure Google loses track of your page, which, again, is the opposite of what we want. Don’t take our word for it—check out Google’s own knowledge base about noindex tags.

Want to get more in-depth on our tips for gated content besides making sure search engines can’t crawl it? Check out our definitive guide to gated content.

Marketo SEO Tip 4: Link to your landing pages on your website.

This could probably be included in Tip 1, technically, but we see it so often that it merits its own mention. The tendency is to pretend like your landing pages aren’t part of your website’s ecology, but that’s not doing your SEO any favors. We’ve already seen how much Google likes links, so don’t be afraid to link it in your site navigation, in blog posts, wherever your favorite links live.

Marketo SEO Tip 5: Make sure you’re secure.

You have to make certain you’re using the https prefix with Marketo, especially when you’re linking to it from your website. Not only does Google prefer secure pages, but a link from a secure site to an insecure one might raise a flag on your customer’s browser. And flags are bad.

Marketo SEO Services

Those might be our most important MarketoSEO tips, but we could go on. If you’re using Marketo then SEO is extremely important for driving leads and sales to your website. Luckily, we’re experienced in optimizing Marketo sites and helping drive growth for your Marketo stores with our SEO services. Schedule a free consultation today and maybe we’ll share them with you.

The post SEO For Marketo: 5 Advanced Tips For Marketo Success In 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Below is a quote from the great Jack Welch that we’re almost certain you’ve never heard get applied to B2B digital marketing.

“In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”

Business-to-business marketing (B2B) and business-to-customer marketing (B2C) are two entirely different beasts requiring different approaches.

The most obvious difference, and the foundation behind the different marketing strategies, is found in the nature of whom you’re selling to.

In B2C, customers are generally looking for entertainment and products to make their lives easier. They’re looking for deals, and their desires are most often driven by impulse and emotion. They want a new blender because they want smoothies. Thus helping these customers imagine and visualize themselves enjoying the benefits of these products should be a priority focus of your marketing efforts.

B2B customers, on the other hand, are looking for something to increase ROI. They want more efficiency and productivity. They want services that bring expertise to their operations. Their purchasing decisions are made using logic and data. They require objective justification whenever possible to make their purchasing decision.

Understanding these different customer motivations is what will drive successful marketing to one audience or the other. Trying to sell your product or service to a business using the same marketing tactics that worked for B2C simply isn’t going to cut it.

Below, we’ll talk about some of the core components of successful B2B marketing, but first let’s take a deeper look into what B2B customers want.

Motivations Behind B2B Digital Marketing vs. B2C

Like we mentioned above, B2B purchases are driven by ROI potential. Businesses want products and services that will help them increase their profits. In other words, everything they buy needs to be justifiable from a business standpoint.

Furthermore, you’re usually not just selling to one decision maker in B2B.

In B2C endeavors, you’re mostly just trying to form a connection with, let’s say, Mary Spindleworth while she’s browsing for a new cute tee shirt for her dog while being slightly buzzed on merlot.

With B2B, you’re selling to the manager of a developer team at a company, and that manager will need to bring your product or service to the person who holds the company purse strings and justify why the purchase is necessary. Your marketing material had better be making that justification as clear as possible.

On that front, businesses are also looking for education about your product or service and what makes it effective. Whereas individual shoppers might check some user reviews or skim over product descriptions, businesses are looking for the whole shebang. They want features, they want benefits, and they want numbers to back it up.

That also means that selling to businesses is going to be a more involved process that involves account representatives forming a relationship with the business’s representatives. It’s not like B2C commerce where the individual is just looking to add items to their cart and check out.

Businesses want somebody to talk to, to provide support if needed and answer questions.

The better your B2B marketing material is able to speak to these needs, the more successful it’s going to be.

Now, let’s look at the B2B marketing strategies that work.

Develop Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy!

“Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.” — Henry Mintzberg, management thinker and “enfant terrible” of strategic planning theory

The most important part of a B2B strategy is, well, having a strategy. Hold on, it’s more complex than it sounds.

Develop Customer Personas

B2B Digital Marketing Strategies: Personas

Before you write a single ad headline or compose even one outreach email, you need to define your customer. A great way to do this is by creating personas of your ideal buyers.

Personas are essentially fictionalized people whose lives and personalities are created by your marketing team to represent the kind of people you want to be selling to. It’s basically playing make-believe on a business level.

For instance, let’s say you’re manufacturing lightsabers. A persona for your ideal customer may look something like this:

Luke Skywalker

• COO of Jedi Temple
  • Key decision-maker
• Demographics
  • Age 35-75
  • $90,000/yr
  • Remote location, probably on top of a mountain
  • Jedi Master
  • Unmarried, probably no kids
• Goals and Challenges
  • Create a learning environment where young padawans can flourish and learn the ways of The Force
  • Protect padawans from straying to the dark side
  • Attract more students to temple
• How we can help
  • Supply lightsabers to be used for training purposes
  • Provide ongoing support to ensure continued satisfaction

Of course the most effective personas will be created using hard data and research. That means combining user feedback and web analytics data to get a complete picture of your customers’ behavior. The more sources of data you can find to assess your ideal buyer’s motivations, attitudes, behaviors, and desired outcomes, the more successfully you can create your personas.

This guide from Hubspot is a great learning resource on personas and how to create them.

B2B Digital Marketing Strategies: SWOT

Build a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis is a key component of creating your B2B strategy.

The strength and weakness components are internal things that will take some hard honest analysis to compile. These are things that are found by analyzing your team, your IPs, your location, and basically what you’re able to bring to the table.

Opportunities and threats are things that are happening outside of your company, within the larger market. What are your competitors doing? How much are materials costing right now? What are the current customer shopping trends?

Let’s break it down by category and take a look at specific questions you should be asking.

Strengths:

• What do you do well?
• What are the unique resources that you can leverage?
• What do 3rd parties see as your strengths?

Weaknesses:

• What needs improvement?
• What are competitors doing better?
• What resources are you lacking?

Opportunities:

• What are some currently present market opportunities?
• How can you leverage your strengths to take advantage of opportunities?
• What trends can you make work in your favor?

Threats:

• What is your competition doing right now?
• Do your weaknesses expose your business?
• What are the threats that can hurt your business right now?

To accurately complete a SWOT analysis, it’s best to gather representatives from each of your company’s departments. Ask questions based on the four categories and let everybody give their input. At the end of the session, rank the thoughts and ideas for importance and relevance.

Build Your Plan

After you’ve created your personas and completed your SWOT analysis, you’re ready to start creating your plan for reaching potential customers and selling them on why they should purchase your products and services.

There are frameworks out there that can help you build your plan, and there are diehard supporters of each of them.

Some of the more popular frameworks are RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage), the 5 Ps, the 5Ss, and countless others with names like that. Do your research and find what works best for you.

There are also plenty of marketing agencies and consultants out there who can help with this. It’s not a bad idea to consider leveraging the expertise of others when creating your B2B marketing plan.

B2B Digital Marketing Strategies: Website Audit

How’s That Website Looking?

Your website is probably the most important tool you have for selling to B2B clients, and it should be treated as such.

That means your website should be regularly reviewed and refreshed to be as up-to-date as possible. It should have pages and information for every step of the sales funnel, from cultivating interest to driving home the sales.

Your product pages should be straight and to the point. This is what you’re selling, this is what it does, this is our proof that it’s effective.

One of our favorite examples of a great B2B website is Shopify.com. The homepage provides value within the first couple of sentences at the top. “Anyone, anywhere, can start a business,” it says. Then, right there in front of you, is a call to action to start a free trial simply by entering your email address.

Scrolling down reveals concise descriptions of the product’s features. Then there are clear-as-day numbers to provide social proof. 1,700,000+ businesses around the world using Shopify for over $200 billion in sales. Wow.

In short, a good B2B website does all of these things:

• States exactly what the product is. If your potential customers look at your site and aren’t sure what exactly it is you’re offering within the first few seconds, they’re probably going to lose interest.
• Provides immediate value. This can be a call to action for a trial or consultation. Reward potential buyers for clicking on your link.
• Uses visuals the right way. You don’t want your images to distract from your message. You want them to enhance the experience of being on your website.
• Uses concise text. The Shopify site doesn’t have a single sentence that doesn’t add value to the content. Any words that aren’t directly relevant to your product or service are adding to the work the visitor has to put in to navigate your information. If there is any text whatsoever that isn’t helping, it’s a distraction. Remove it.

These principles are important to adhere to across your homepage and any product pages. Testimonials are always good, too.

B2B Digital Marketing Strategies: SEM!

We’re often a little taken aback by how many companies there are that don’t use any PPC or SEO.

Let’s just say this off the bat: PPC and SEO are essential for reaching potential customers.

That’s right. Not just one of them. BOTH of them.

Adam Boyd, one of the principals at B2B consulting firm Northwood Group, reinforces the need for this dual approach to your B2B marketing strategy in this roundup of demand generation experts. According to Boyd:

“The real challenges for most B2B companies haven’t changed. Most are too dependent upon one channel to deliver leads, whether email, or cold calling, or PPC.”

PPC is necessary for reaching out to potential customers. We’ve already talked extensively about the powerful reach of Google Ads, so we won’t bore you with that discussion again. Needless to say, you need to run Google Ads campaigns.

While there is always a temptation to get creative with your PPC ad headlines, the reality is that it’s always better to be direct with your message.

“Lightsaber supplies for Jedi Temples” will perform better than “Need a way for your students to feel the force in their hands? Try our lightsabers!” Why? It’s more direct. People want to buy lightsabers, so tell them that you sell lightsabers.

B2B Digital Marketing Strategies: SEO For B2B

SEO will help your product pages rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and make it much more likely that customers will find your name when searching for solutions.

For B2B, long tail keywords are usually better targets. For instance, if you’re selling lightsabers to Jedi temples, it’s better to optimize your content for keywords like “lightsabers for padawans” or “lightsabers in bulk” than just “lightsabers.”

Not only will the keyword difficulty be much more manageable, but it targets the intent of the search. People who are just searching for “lightsabers” are probably mostly looking for decorations for their nerd caves or LARP (Live Action Roleplaying) props. You’re looking for institutions who need to purchase a bunch of lightsabers for their students.

Revealing the Iceberg That Is B2B Digital Marketing

Those strategies are really just the tip of how involved B2B marketing can get, and it’s okay if you feel like it’s a lot to take in. Remember, there are people out there who devote their entire professional careers to learning the ins and outs of B2B digital marketing strategy.

It just so happens that we have a lot of those people working here at Direct Online Marketing.

If you or your company are looking to learn more about B2B digital marketing services, or you want to talk to somebody about creating a strategy for you from scratch, contact us today for a free consultation. And if you need more info, learn about why Direct Online Marketing is the best Digital Marketing Agency for B2B Businesses.

Marketing and marketing strategy are what we do best, and we’d love to work with you to help you find one that works.

The post B2B Digital Marketing Strategies that Get Results appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

• Introduction
• User Experience Matters
• Backlinks Build Authority
• Keywords Are the Compass of SEO
• Technical SEO is Your Site’s Foundation
• Quality Content is King
• Conclusion

Staying afloat in the organic search ocean is a challenge we’ve had to figure out since search engines began. As long as there has been an algorithm or machine logic behind Google’s SERPs, there have been different ways to get to the top of them. 

It’s natural to feel adrift like a castaway, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Certain principles remain as steadfast as bedrock. For CMOs and marketing professionals looking at all those SEO strategies and best practices, understanding these fundamental rules is a must. 

This post isn’t about chasing the latest SEO craze (like Google SGE, for example). It’s about grasping those fundamental concepts that have stood the test of time in the SEO universe. We’ve narrowed it down to five, but the last one is the most important. 

If you really need to TL;DR this blog post, then we’ll save you a scroll: your content still matters the most. 

5. User Experience Matters

Focusing on user experience is a cornerstone of SEO that consistently proves its worth. The experience users have on your site influences how they perceive your brand and, importantly, impacts how search engines rank your pages. 

User experience covers various aspects, from how quickly your site loads to how easily users can navigate your content.

Firstly, site speed is a critical factor. Slow-loading pages test users’ patience and often lead to higher bounce rates. Search engines, particularly Google, prioritize sites that load quickly, ensuring users find what they need without unnecessary delay.

Secondly, consider mobile responsiveness. With more people accessing the internet via smartphones, a site that performs well on mobile devices is no longer optional. It’s essential. 

Mobile-friendly sites rank higher in search results, as they cater to a large portion of internet users.

Lastly, clear navigation and ease of use keep users engaged. A well-structured site with intuitive navigation helps users find information effortlessly. This positive interaction signals search engines that your site is valuable, thereby improving your SEO ranking.

4. Backlinks Build Authority

Backlinks are a vital aspect of SEO, often considered a vote of confidence from one site to another. A strong backlink profile can significantly boost your website’s authority and search engine rankings. 

But it’s not just about quantity.; Tthe quality of backlinks matters immensely.

Building a natural, high-quality backlink profile is a strategic endeavor. It involves creating content that other reputable sites want to link to. This could be informative blog posts, original research, or any resource that offers value. 

Reaching out to industry influencers and participating in relevant online communities can also help in acquiring quality backlinks.

It’s important to steer clear of outdated practices like buying links or participating in link farms. Such tactics can lead to penalties from search engines. Instead, focus on earning backlinks through genuine, valuable content and networking.

Monitoring your backlink profile is crucial. Tools like Ahrefs or Moz can help track your backlinks and identify any potentially harmful ones. Regular audits allow you to maintain a clean, effective backlink profile.

Backlinks should be nurtured through creating shareable content and engaging with the online community in your industry. This approach ensures a sustainable, long-term boost to your SEO efforts.

3. Keywords Are the Compass of SEO

Keywords play a fundamental role in SEO. They are the tools that connect what people are searching for with the content you provide. Effective use of keywords means understanding not just what your audience is searching for, but how they are searching for it.

The key is strategic placement, not overuse. Gone are the days when stuffing a webpage with keywords could boost your ranking. Now, it’s about placing them where they matter most – in your titles, headings, and throughout your content in a way that feels natural.

Keyword research is crucial. It involves identifying the terms your target audience uses when searching for products or services like yours. 

Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find the right keywords. But it’s not just about volume. It’s about relevance. Choose keywords that align with your content and overall marketing strategy.

Remember, keywords are not just for Google to understand your content -; they help real people find the solutions or information they seek. Your goal is to use keywords to guide users to your site and ensure they find what they are looking for once they arrive.

2. Technical SEO is Your Site’s Foundation

Technical SEO is the backbone of your website’s relationship with search engines. It includes everything from site structure to crawlability, ensuring search engines can easily navigate and index your content. 

This part of SEO might seem daunting, but it’s crucial for your website’s success.

Site structure matters a lot. A well-organized website helps search engines understand your content hierarchy and the relationship between different pages. A logical structure, with clear categories and internal linking, improves user navigation and search engine crawling.

Crawlability is another key aspect. It means making sure search engines can access and index your web pages. Use tools like Google Search Console to identify and fix crawl errors. Regular audits help spot issues like broken links or pages blocked by robots.txt files.

Load times play a significant role too. Fast-loading pages not only enhance user experience but also contribute to better search engine rankings. Optimize images, minimize code, and leverage browser caching to improve your site’s speed.

Remember, technical SEO is an ongoing process. Regularly monitoring and updating your website ensures it remains compatible with search engine algorithms. It’s not the most glamorous part of SEO, but it’s a crucial one. 

Think of it as laying a strong foundation for your house – without it, everything else might crumble.

1. Quality Content Is King

In the domain of SEO, the supremacy of quality content is undisputed. This rule is simple: content that offers value, insight, and relevance not only engages readers but also garners the attention of search engines. 

Picture a library filled with countless books. The ones that offer unique perspectives, compelling narratives, and accurate information are the ones people reach for time and again. 

Similarly, in the vast digital library of the internet, content that stands out is content that delivers quality.

But what exactly makes content ‘quality’? It’s not just about well-written prose. Quality content solves problems, answers questions, and provides useful information. It’s the type of content that readers bookmark, share, and reference. 

This kind of engagement sends positive signals to search engines, indicating that your content is valuable and deserves a higher ranking.

For a practical spin, consider a company blog post explaining a complex industry trend in simple, digestible terms. Such content not only establishes authority and expertise but also encourages backlinks from other reputable sites. 

These backlinks are like nods of approval from the web community, further boosting your site’s SEO standing.

Remember, search engines are getting smarter. They can differentiate between superficial keyword-stuffed articles and genuinely informative content. So, the focus should be on crafting content that resonates with the audience and adds value to their lives or businesses. 

In the realm of SEO, content isn’t just king- it’s the ace in your deck.

Get the DOM Difference For Your Business

Figuring out SEO can feel like a journey through a labyrinth, but these five bedrock principles provide a reliable map. From the enduring power of quality content to the influence of backlinks in building authority, these rules form the foundation of effective SEO strategies. 

They have withstood the test of time and the evolution of search engine algorithms.

Remember, SEO is ever-changing. Staying informed and adaptable is key. Yet, grounding your strategy in these five principles will keep your SEO efforts focused and effective. Embrace these guidelines as you refine your approach to SEO, and watch your website’s performance improve.

For those seeking expert guidance in crafting and executing top-notch SEO strategies, consider Direct Online Marketing. Our team tailors SEO solutions to meet your unique business needs and goals. 

Want to transform your SEO efforts into tangible business results? Contact us to get started.

Key Takeaways

• User Experience is Fundamental: A seamless user experience, characterized by fast site speed, mobile responsiveness, and clear navigation, is essential. These elements not only enhance user satisfaction but also boost SEO rankings.
• Backlinks Build Authority: Quality backlinks are crucial for establishing your website’s authority. Focus on earning these through valuable content and authentic networking, rather than resorting to outdated tactics like link buying.
• Strategic Keyword Use: Keywords are more than just search terms -; they’re the bridge between user intent and your content. Proper research and strategic placement are key, moving away from overuse towards relevance and natural integration.
• Technical SEO as a Foundation: Pay close attention to technical SEO, including site structure, crawlability, and load times. Regular audits and updates ensure your site remains accessible and appealing to search engines.
• Quality Content Reigns Supreme: High-quality, informative, and engaging content is the top priority. Content that genuinely adds value attracts readers, encourages sharing, and earns the favor of search engines.

The post The 5 Bedrock SEO Rules That Will Always (Probably) Be True appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

• Introduction
• Understanding AI and LLMs
• Content Creation on Autopilot (Almost)
• Personalization at Scale
• Chatbots Turn Frustration into Frictionless Service
• The Future is Now, But Use It Wisely
• Google Ads and AI and You
• Avoiding AI Pitfalls in Digital Marketing
• Experience the DOM Difference

AI is not a buzzword or a distant future concept. Although the launch of ChatGPT in early 2023 put AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) into the mainstream, marketers have used AI tools for many years. You could even argue that the entire industry of search engine optimization is really just a way to figure out how to make a website rank highly with the extremely active and very busy artificial intelligence that has powered Google’s search for decades: PageRank. 

Regardless of how we got here, we’re in the midst of an AI revolution. It’s a natural impulse of curious creatives everywhere to ask what AI can do for them. We’ve got some old favorites, some new ideas, and some mistakes to avoid.

Understanding AI and LLMs

Artificial intelligence broadly refers to machines or software mimicking cognitive functions that humans associate with the human mind, like learning and problem-solving. In digital marketing, AI powers tools and systems that analyze data, predict trends, automate tasks, and personalize interactions, among other things.

LLMs are a subset of AI technologies that understand, generate, and interpret human language. Think of LLMs as the English majors of the AI family, trained on vast amounts of text data to recognize patterns, nuances, and contexts in language. 

While AI encompasses a wide range of technologies, including machine learning, neural networks, and robotics, LLMs are specifically designed for tasks involving natural language processing (NLP), such as content creation, language translation, and customer service automation.

The difference between AI and LLMs is like to comparing a Swiss Army knife to a specialized carving knife. Both are valuable tools in their own right, designed for different tasks but under the same umbrella of technology. In digital marketing, using both AI’s broad capabilities and LLMs’ language proficiency can offer a competitive edge that lets marketers craft strategies that are data-driven and also resonant with their target audience.

Content Creation on Autopilot (Almost)

Here’s something that a lot of eager content marketers figured out about ChatGPT: it can churn out blog posts, product descriptions, and social media captions without writer’s block. LLMs generate content based on very specific specifications, saving its users time and resources. 

But we forget about the human in the loop at our peril. An LLM can mimic styles and generate ideas, but it lacks the critical thinking and emotional intelligence to craft the kind of content that really resonates with an audience. Consider them brainstorming partners, not replacements for your creative team.

Personalization at Scale

Personalization is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. AI can analyze vast amounts of customer data to predict preferences and deliver tailored experiences. Email campaigns can speak directly to each recipient’s interests, and websites can make recommendations that anticipate their needs. This level of personalization fosters deeper connections and boosts engagement.

But remember, respect for privacy is paramount. Be transparent about data collection and usage, and prioritize ethical practices to build trust with your audience. In some cases, and in some locations, you might not even have a choice–the local laws made that decision for you, and you’d better be compliant.

Chatbots Turn Frustration into Frictionless Service

AI-powered chatbots can handle basic customer inquiries, freeing up your team for complex issues. But poorly designed bots lead to frustration. Ensure your bots understand natural language, offer clear solutions, and escalate seamlessly to human representatives when needed. Remember, chatbots are tools to enhance, not replace, human interaction.

The Future is Now, But Use It Wisely

AI and LLMs are powerful tools, but they’re not magic bullets. Integration requires careful planning, ethical considerations, and human oversight. Use them to augment your creativity, personalize experiences, and streamline tasks. But always remember the human touch is irreplaceable. 

Google Ads and AI and You

Google’s Performance Max campaigns leverage AI to optimize ad placements across Google’s platforms, including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps. This innovation builds on the foundations of Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding, a feature that uses machine learning for auction-time bidding to optimize for conversions, paved the way for Performance Max by demonstrating the effectiveness of AI in enhancing advertising outcomes.

Performance Max utilizes AI to automate ad format, placement, and targeting decisions, aiming to achieve the advertisers’ specified goals by analyzing vast amounts of data. Smart Bidding is integral to Performance Max, adjusting bids in real-time based on predictive analytics to maximize conversion potential.

Advertisers utilizing Performance Max have reported significant improvements in campaign performance, with some seeing over a 30% increase in conversions at a comparable cost per action. 

“Make it simple for the bots to understand!”

Billy Wright, Lead SEO Strategist, Direct Online Marketing

SEO For AI

Whether you’re trying to do SEO for ChatGPT or you’re looking to optimize your Amazon listings and do SEO for Amazon so that the A9 AI will showcase your products to the right people, SEO for AI is blossoming right now in 2024. Some of the things you need to keep in mind when attempting to optimize for AI are:

• Optimize Deliberately and Explicitly – When you’re writing SEO content for AI, you need to be as verbatim as possible. Imagine that the AI is a young child – it has a hard time understanding things, so you need to give it as much info as possible and as simply as possible, or it cannot connect the dots. If you are selling Red Widgets, you need to refer to yourself as a Seller Of Red Widgets and a Red Widgets Company. Make it simple for the bots to understand!
• Get Off-Site – You want to do sample searches on ChatGPT and other AI systems and determine where you are showing and what sites are being scraped by the bots to form their answers – then you want to appear on those sites. If a bot uses a particular website to determine the best companies in your field – get on that site – then also list yourself, verbatim, as The Best.

Avoiding AI Pitfalls in Digital Marketing

While LLMs offer exciting possibilities for content creation, automation, and personalization, neglecting key considerations can lead to costly mistakes. Here are some pitfalls to avoid:

1. Blind Faith in Fact-Checking: LLMs are adept at mimicking human language, but they’re not fact-checkers. While grammatically correct and engaging, the text they generate can contain factual inaccuracies or biases in their training data. Always fact-check and edit LLM-generated content before publishing. Remember, AI amplifies, not replaces, human expertise.
2. The “Set-It-and-Forget-It” Fallacy: AI automates tasks, but it isn’t magic. Every AI implementation needs human oversight and guidance. Define clear goals, monitor performance, and adjust strategies as needed. Don’t expect AI to solve problems without your active involvement.
3. Black Box Blindness: Many AI tools function like black boxes, making it difficult to understand their decision-making processes. This lack of transparency can lead to biased outputs or unintended consequences. Choose AI solutions with explainable AI features or consult experts to understand how they work.
4. Ignoring Ethical Considerations: AI raises ethical concerns, particularly around data privacy and potential biases. Ensure your AI usage complies with regulations and aligns with your brand’s values. Be transparent about data collection and usage, and avoid discriminatory practices.
5. Neglecting the Human Touch: While AI excels at automation and data analysis, it lacks the creativity, empathy, and emotional intelligence inherent in human communication. Don’t replace human interaction with AI entirely. Use AI to enhance campaigns, but let human creativity and understanding guide your overall strategy.
6. Overhyping Results: The AI hype machine can be tempting, but avoid making exaggerated claims about AI’s capabilities. Focus on realistic outcomes and be transparent about limitations. Overpromising risks damaging trust and credibility.

By understanding these pitfalls and using AI thoughtfully, you can use its true potential to personalize experiences, streamline workflows, and enhance your digital marketing efforts. Remember, AI is a valuable tool, but it’s humans who define its purpose and impact.

Experience the DOM Difference

Don’t let AI become your marketing monster. By keeping these pitfalls in mind, you can harness its power responsibly, avoiding ethical hiccups and maximizing results. Remember, AI is a tool, not a replacement for your marketing savvy. Use it wisely, inject your human touch, and watch your campaigns soar – without getting lost in the algorithm.

If you’re still not sure about how all these AI tools and tricks can help you with your own digital marketing endeavors, DOM is here to help. We’ve been doing this since 2006 and we’ve seen every single trend come and go. We know how and why to use AI and machine learning in digital marketing. We know the pitfalls because we’ve stepped in some of them already. Get in touch with us today for a free digital marketing checkup. 

Key Takeaways

• AI’s Deep Roots in Marketing: AI and LLMs have been integral to digital marketing long before their mainstream attention, with SEO being an early form of AI optimization.
• Defining AI and LLMs: Artificial intelligence encompasses a broad range of technologies aimed at emulating human cognitive functions, while LLMs specialize in processing and generating human language, offering unique advantages for content creation and customer interaction in digital marketing.
• Strategic Application of AI: Leveraging AI and LLMs offers a competitive edge by enabling data-driven strategies and language proficiency that resonate deeply with target audiences.
• Content Creation: LLMs can efficiently produce various forms of content but require human oversight to ensure relevance, creativity, and emotional connection.
• Personalization at Scale: AI facilitates unprecedented levels of personalization in marketing, enhancing customer engagement and loyalty through tailored experiences.
• Enhancing Customer Service: Chatbots and AI-driven tools can improve customer service efficiency, but they must be designed to complement, not replace, human interaction.
• Performance Max and Smart Bidding: Google Ads’ innovations, such as Performance Max and Smart Bidding, showcase AI’s role in optimizing advertising campaigns for better performance and ROI.
• Navigating AI Pitfalls: Marketers must be cautious of over-reliance on AI for fact-checking, maintaining human oversight, addressing ethical concerns, and ensuring transparency and fairness in AI applications.
• Continuous Learning and Adaptation: The dynamic nature of AI in digital marketing requires ongoing education and adjustment to leverage new technologies effectively and ethically.
• The Human Element Remains Crucial: Despite AI’s advancements, the human touch in creativity, empathy, and strategic decision-making remains irreplaceable in digital marketing.

The post AI in Marketing: Where Machine Intelligence Meets Human Creativity appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

How Can I Grow My YouTube Channel?

Back in 2006, Google bought a little website by the name of YouTube for the bargain price of $1.65 billion. Since then, YouTube has become, in effect, the internet’s second most popular search engine. Now was YouTube already on a path to web prominence? Or was its acquisition by Google key to YouTube’s success? The world may never know. (Much like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.) No matter how it happened, YouTube’s rise is clearly our new reality. Ignore YouTube at your peril. Embrace it and bask in its glory. Here’s how to get the most out of YouTube’s video marketing.

Make Great Content To Grow Your YouTube Views

This seems like a no-brainer, but most YouTube videos tend to be, generally speaking, less than broadcast quality. Whether you’re showing off the new fishing rod you just bought or teaching college students how to unclog an apartment shower drain, the jump from “barely good enough” to “great” is smaller than ever. In other words, you can easily improve your game just by following some simple guidelines. A cheap clip-on microphone, compatible with every phone on the market, will immediately elevate your videos’ quality and help you grow your YouTube views.

Utilize Closed Captioning For Your YouTube Videos

YouTube offers automatic captioning, but you should upload a verbatim transcript whenever you can. This will provide a better user experience for anyone who relies on closed captions. Heck, even people who don’t rely on closed captions often use them, especially if they’re using YouTube to learn something. Captions allow users to get the information without turning up the volume on their phones or computers.

Not only is providing captions the friendly, neighborly thing to do, but it can also help your SEO, too. YouTube indexes all of the words contained in your uploaded transcript, which is like getting the milk and the cow for free.

Use the Appropriate Ad Format On YouTube

The variety of ads you can implement on YouTube include 6-Second Bumpers, Pre-Roll Ads, and In-Stream. Are you looking for awareness and brand recognition? Deploy some 6-Second Bumpers. Do you want clicks and conversions? Then you’re probably in the market for Pre-Roll ads. They can’t be skipped and run 15-20 seconds in length. Do you have a 30-second commercial that you want to repurpose? Think about using that for an In-Stream ad. If you want to see all of these in action, just open YouTube and search for something. You’ll see it all.

Target Precisely When Using YouTube Ads

While it’s a bit tongue in cheek to describe YouTube as the second biggest search engine,  it does still have the world’s biggest search engine powering it. They inform each other, too, so what’s good for one is often good for the other. You should leverage that enormous YouTube/Google data network through targeting. Target and find your desired audience using the options for gender, parental status, and personal interests. Narrow down your video placements by searching for specific channels that would be of interest to your ideal viewers. If you find that one type of audience is responding better to your message than another, you can always re-target. That’s the beauty of digital marketing.

Use an End Screen To Grow YouTube Engagement

You’ve made some great content, added closed captions, and targeted the appropriate viewers. Now you should reinforce your brand and inspire your viewers to take their next action. Use the end card as a digital signpost, directing your viewers to their next destination–a landing page with more info and a form to fill, or a product listing or external website, or even a link to your YouTube channel with more videos.

Support Your YouTube Growth Efforts

YouTube is great for extending your brand and driving conversions. However, a multi-faceted strategy embracing many platforms is going to open the door to more success. Use multiple ad types on YouTube, and experiment with your targeting options. Consider running companion campaigns in Microsoft Bing and Google Ads while leveraging your common keywords and targeting wins across every platform you use, whether you use YouTube advertising services or you use SEO services.

If you want even more help upping your YouTube game, get in touch with us today.

The post How To Get More Views On YouTube – The DOM Guide appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

This year, AI has quickly gone from “having a moment” to dominating the daily headlines in digital marketing.  

In this webinar, marketing leaders from across the world will gain a better understanding of the remarkable potential artificial intelligence has for improving their digital strategies.

Are you still waiting to open your eyes to the vast number of advantages AI can bring? Are you a marketer looking for ways to be more creative and simultaneously boost your efficiency?

AI can help you come up with more creative campaigns, enabling your business to grow with greater confidence by reaching more customers and increasing audience engagement.

It can also automate some of your tedious, time-consuming tasks. 

The right suite of AI tools can also help you make better data-driven decisions for your company.

Our experts are here to share how they are doing it, and how you can use these tools to your advantage.  

What Can You Expect To Learn In Our Webinar With Semrush

Marketing leaders and emerging professionals interested in attending the webinar should prepare to discover:

• What AI tools should be prevalent in the marketing tech stack of growing companies
• What Semrush’s research tells us about AI’s impact in all digital marketing channels
• How humans-in-the-loop are essential for a productive harmony with AI
• Ways that AI tools can improve your work and marketing strategy

Don’t want to get left behind as a marketing professional who failed to embrace the possibilities presented by working alongside AI? Then the time is now to understand what options AI can provide you to increase your creativity and simultaneously make you more efficient.

The Experts Sharing AI’s Advantages For Digital Marketing

Speaker: Fernando Angulo, Senior Market Research Manager, Semrush

Fernando has been with Semrush since the beginning of the company’s marketing efforts and has built its all-star marketing team.

He specializes in B2B search marketing, e-commerce, influencer marketing, and has trained marketing teams at companies like Expedia, T-mobile, Prestashop, and Bing.

Speaker: Billy Wright, Lead Digital Marketing Strategist, DOM

Billy is a Lead Digital Marketing Strategist specializing in SEO with a background in Local and eCommerce SEO.

He’s optimized the online personas and websites of clients from the Entertainment Industry to the Political world and everything in between.

He’s been in love with The Internet since he built his first website in 1996.

Host: Justin Seibert, President, DOM

DOM President and 20-year digital marketing veteran Justin Seibert started in the field in 2001 as a one-man digital marketing department for an LA-based firm.

In 2006, he founded DOM and has grown it into an Inc. 5000 digital marketing firm who’s worked with clients on every populated continent that is recognized by Google as one of it’s top 3% Premier Partners.

Should You Sign Up For This DOM + Semrush Webinar?

If you are responsible for leading a team of marketing pros but have yet to take the time to figure out the best way to make AI work in your department, this is DOM + Semrush webinar is one you need to attend.

In addition to marketing leaders who are done putting off the AI revolution, you may also be the right person to register if you are responsible for:

• Data-driven decision making
• Using chatbots or AI to increase your productivity
• Tasked with “figuring out this AI stuff”

You don’t want to be a marketing professional who got left behind because you failed to embrace the possibilities presented by working alongside AI. 

This webinar is scheduled for 12:00 PM EST / 9:00 AM PST on Wednesday, June 7 and will broadcast exclusively here at directom.com.

Ready to save your seat? Register here.

The post DOM + Semrush Webinar On June 7 To Share The “AI Advantage” For Digital Marketing appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.