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Fortunately, at Go Fish Digital we have a lot of experience in providing digital marketing support for the dental community. While there are many different digital marketing channels that you can use, there are some that are a particularly good match for the localized nature of dental businesses.

What Are The Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Dentists?

The best digital marketing strategies for dentists are:

• Local SEO
• Traditional SEO
• Google Search Ads
• Local Search Ads
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• UX Improvements
• Reputation Management

Below you can find more information on each one.

1. Local SEO For Dentists

In dentist digital marketing, one of the most important areas of SEO is the “map pack” results that you see in Google’s search results. These are a type of local SEO result that you see when searching for businesses that serve a particular geographical area. Oftentimes, you’ll see these results when you search for keywords that contain geographical information (city/town/neighborhood) or when users query terms like “near me”.

However, this isn’t the only time when Google will show local results. Even broader keyword searches will show them. Take this example of a search for “dentist” where you can see Google displaying dental practices in the immediate area.

This is because even though the geography isn’t specified, Google implicitly understands that users are looking for local businesses to solve a local need. Therefore, the search engine only shows results in that particular area.

This is an extremely powerful concept for dental businesses to understand. This means that your company could appear for very broad keywords such as “dentist” or “cosmetic dentist” in your local geography. In order to improve the chances that your business appears in these results, you’ll want to be sure that you’re implementing local SEO best practices. While there are a variety of strategies here, one of the best ones that you can implement is claiming and optimizing your Google Business profile.

Google Business Profile Optimization For Your Dental Office

Your Google Business profile is the single most important element of your dental local SEO strategy. Without one, your business won’t be eligible to appear in the map pack results.

The first step you should take is to claim your Google Business profile. To start this process, you’ll simply:

1. Search for your practice name on Google Maps
2. If you find your business address, you’ll select it and choose “Claim this business”

Once you’ve claimed your business, your next step is to ensure that you’ve properly set your business categories. If you don’t set your categories, you won’t be eligible to appear in the local results for keywords related to those categories. You’ll want to be sure that this is filled out as thoroughly as possible.

Here you can see categories set for an orthodontist business that also provides dental implants.

While the categories that you set will be completely custom to your business, here are some popular ones that you could consider choosing from:

• Dentist
• Cosmetic dentist
• Pediatric dentist
• Dental implants provider
• Dental clinic
• Orthodontist
• Dental hygienist
• Emergency dental service

Doing these steps to claim and optimize your Google Business profile will set you on a good path to ensuring that you have a strong local SEO foundation. Of course, you may need to take this even further and work on generating citations, reviews and local backlinks to your website.

2. Standard SEO For Dental Offices

When performing dental digital marketing, you’ll also want to take steps to improve the “standard SEO” of your site. Here, “standard SEO” just means any results in Google that aren’t part of the “map pack listings”. These results won’t have an interactive map or business location pins.

Instead, they’ll look more like the default search results that you’re used to seeing.

These results aren’t influenced by the information in your Google Business profile or other signals like proximity to users. Instead, these results are more based on universal SEO principles such as quality of content, relevant landing pages and internal/external linking signals.

While there are many elements that need to be reviewed from an SEO perspective, one of the best initiatives that your dental practice can take is to ensure that you have dedicated landing pages for all the services that you offer. If your practice offers dental implants, sedation dentistry, and teeth whitening, you’ll want to be sure that you have dedicated pages for each service.

This will ensure that your site has specific pages mapped to your practice areas. Now these pages will be eligible to appear for high intent queries such as “dental implants near me”. Ensure that you inventory all your core services and ensure there’s a matching landing page for each one.

3. Google Search Ads For Dentist Offices

While SEO initiatives are an extremely lucrative way of improving your dental digital marketing in the long term, it can take time to see results. If you’re looking for immediate return, paid media advertising could be a good path for your practice. With advertising you’ll pay for prominent placements directly but will start seeing results as soon as your campaign begins.

One of the most popular forms of advertising is Google Ads search campaigns. With search campaigns, your practice has the ability to appear at the very top of the search results. Here you can see an example of Google ad results for the keyword “sacramento ca family dentist”

The most powerful feature of Google search ads is that you can choose exactly which keywords you want your results to appear for. For instance, if you want your dentistry to grow more clients for “Dentures” and “Sedation”, you can create campaigns where your results will only appear when users search for keywords related to those practice areas.

With search ads, you’ll be able to leverage the popularity of Google’s ad platform to drive traffic to the exact pages that you want. This helps you connect with customers at the exact moment that they’re looking for your services.

4. Local Search Ads For Dentists

Another way to enhance your dentistry’s digital marketing is to advertise directly on Google Maps using Local Search Ads. By utilizing local search ads, your ads are more integrated into the Google maps experience. This further encourages users to take vital actions such as making calls, requesting appoints or getting driving directions to your office.

Local search ads can often appear at the very top of the map pack, directly above the organic listings.

They can also appear directly in the Google Maps interface as users are scanning a very specific geographic area.

Local search ads will be dedicated by the optimization of your Google Business profile. Before starting them, ensure you followed the steps in the “Google Business Optimization” section to ensure that you have claimed and set all relevant categories for your local business page.

5. Content Marketing Strategies for Dentists

Content marketing is another dental digital marketing strategy that your practice should consider.

Broadly, the premise behind content marketing is to create helpful and educational online resources. These resources help educate and solve the problems you users have, increasing their touch points and affinity for your brand. Over time, content marketing initiatives can help your company be the one that comes to mind when consumers of that content are eventually ready to become customers.

While content marketing can come in many forms, a blog is by far the most popular method. Here, you can write about your solutions to common customer problems that may tie back to your services.

For example, Donald Snyder Orthodontics wrote a specific guide on “Can You Whiten Your Teeth While Wearing Braces?”

As a result, this page generates 1,700 sessions a month for users looking for information on how to solve this specific problem.

Here’s another example of a dentist site that wrote an article on “No Toothbrush? No Toothpaste? No Problem“. This article dives into best practices for how to brush your teeth without toothpaste or toothbrushes and gives several helpful examples. As a result, they perform well in the search results for terms such as “brush teeth without toothpaste”.

Ideally, you’ll want to identify types of problems your potential customers are having and create content that helps solve those problems. From there you’ll create assets on your site that you can show prospective customers, can rank in the search engines or be utilized in your other marketing initiatives.

6. Email Marketing For Your Dental Patients

For almost any business, developing an email list can be a great digital marketing strategy. Email marketing provides a lot of benefits that other digital marketing mediums don’t possess. Emails provide direct access to your core customers and your messaging is less likely to get lost in noisy feeds. Emails are also algorithm independent. Your visibility won’t be at the mercy of major tech companies that make changes to how their algorithms work. Email marketing can help you not only connect with new patients but help maintain your relationships with existing ones.

While how you utilize email will depend on your marketing goals, below are some campaigns that you could consider:

1. Dental health best practices & tips
2. Appointment confirmations & reminders
3. Company news
4. New service & product announcements
5. Internal promotions
6. New patient email sequences

If you’re interested in exploring more, Constant Contact has created a great guide for email marketing best practices for dentists.

7. User Experience Improvements To Increase Patient Leads

Reviewing the overall user experience of your site is another great digital marketing strategy for dental sites. This is an extremely scalable approach as UX improvements can help bolster the performance of all your channels. Traffic from search engines, advertising platforms, email marketing and other channels can all be positively impacted.

While there are many ways to think about UX improvement, here are some initiatives that you could look into:

1. Calls to action: Elements such as “Schedule Appointment” CTAs should be easily accessible and highlighted in the design
2. Mobile UX: Can users easily navigate the site and find key information on mobile devices?
3. Website navigation: Can users find key information such as insurance, services, photos, payment and more?
4. Site performance: Faster performance can result in improved conversions from a digital channels?
5. Site imagery: Do your key pages use strong images that clearly demonstrate the content’s value proposition?
6. Trust signals: Do you clearly highlight trust signals such as industry certifications, credentials and reputable organizations?
7. Competitive reviews: How does your UX compare to key competitors in the same market or even different geographies?

Improving the overall UX can be a fantastic way to improve the quality of each session. In turn, this improves the efficiency and performance of all digital channels that are driving traffic to your site.

If you feel that quite a few significant changes need to be made, you might even consider looking for options to completely redesign the site.

8. Reputation Management For Dentists

As your customers get closer to the point of narrowing in on your dentistry, it’s likely that they’ll perform more research online about your specific brand. They’ll want to find any information they can about other people’s experience with your office in terms of the staff, environment, professionalism, wait times and much more.

Generally, to perform this type of research, users will perform searches related to your company or individual practitioners. This is a critical point in the conversion path and could significantly influence whether a user turns into a long-term patient. You’ll want to be certain that you have a strong online reputation and users are mainly encountering positive information about your business.

For example, a user may have had strong interactions with your website by discovering it multiple times via paid advertising and organic results. However, upon looking further into your business, they may encounter negative results that put them off the path of conversion.

To audit your dentistry’s reputation, perform the following searches on Google:

1. Company name
2. Dentist names
3. Company + reviews

If you’re finding any negative results in those searches, you’ll want to take immediate steps towards improving your reputation.

For example, if you’re seeing Yelp pages with lower than 4 stars, you might consider improving Yelp reviews. If you’re finding negative stories or press around your company, you might even consider options to suppress negative search results.

Its also worthwhile to check your reviews on individual review platforms to ensure that users looking via those methods are seeing positive sentiments about your brand. The most popular platforms for dentists include:

1. Google
2. Yelp
3. US News
4. Healthgrades
5. Sharecare

If you’re seriously undertaking dental digital marketing strategies, don’t underrate this step. Ensure all of your hard work isn’t lost due to reputation issues that users could be finding in the search results.

Digital Marketing for Dentists: The 8 Best Strategies is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Good online reputation management for your brand starts with search results and online review sites. The majority of our digital reputation management projects here at Go Fish Digital revolve around suppressing negative search results and review site rating improvement. Optimizing these areas is a good start for taking control of how your brand is perceived.

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But there are other places where negative sentiment about your brand may be showing up. If online reputation management is going to be a focus for you or your business, it’s important to develop a strategy for these often-overlooked channels. 

1. Autocomplete & Related Search

Before a searcher even gets to your SERPs, they will be greeted by a search engine’s Autocomplete predictions. Rest assured that a negative phrase like “complaints”, “scam” or “lawsuit” appearing here is going to immediately influence the reputation of your brand.

Don’t overlook the “Related Search” section either. Although these predictions appear at the bottom of the SERP on Google and Bing, a curious user will stumble across these terms – which are often different from the Autocomplete phrases. 

The exact algorithm for how these predictions are pulled is difficult to unpack. But we do know that factors like search volume, recency of searches, and location of the searcher are part of the equation. We work with clients on developing a content and optimization plan to increase the frequency of positive phrases we see in Autocomplete, influencing the predictions as much as possible to replace negative keywords.  

2. People Also Ask Boxes

People Also Ask has been a hot topic in the SEO world for the past few years, but it’s often overlooked as a reputation indicator. Just like Autocomplete, the predictions here can help shape public perception. We’ve seen questions related to product recalls, workplace safety, bad press and everything in between pop up. This SERP feature is appearing more and more frequently, yet is often skimmed past when brand managers are monitoring online sentiment.

We’ve found a few useful strategies for converting or suppressing negative People Also Ask questions with schema and third-party content. As part of your ORM dashboard, it pays to keep tabs on what’s appearing in this section of relevant SERPs. 

Have a question about People Also Ask from an SEO or ORM perspective? Feel free to contact our team by following the link at the end of this post. 

3. Video Carousels

While we’re on the topic of SERP features, we need to talk about video carousels. Your brand’s YouTube channel may already be full of product/service overviews, workplace culture highlights, customer testimonials, and other reputation-building content. But not all of these videos are guaranteed to appear in a carousel. We’ve seen businesses with sterling reputations be victimized by an angry YouTuber or past customer who airs their frustrations in a video. With the right title or view count, these videos can leapfrog your owned content and appear on the first page of search results. 

Our strategy here is to promote existing videos or create new ones that can eventually suppress a negative target at least outside the first three videos in a carousel. That takes an attention-grabbing and keyword-optimized title, useful information for the viewer, and distribution that will garner maximum views. 

4. Social & Web Mentions

Ok, so you’ve nailed down your search rankings, autocomplete, review sites, and any other unique SERP features. What about monitoring the chatter of past, present, and future customers online? After all, any dialogue on your social channels is another opportunity for people to weigh in on your brand. Maybe you already have a go-to social media person on the team who can answer any questions on Facebook or Twitter, but what about conversations happening outside of your owned social channels?

It’s important to monitor untagged brand mentions or anything outside the purview of your own pages. Tools like Awario and BuzzSumo are great for picking up mentions of your brand on Facebook groups, subreddits, online message boards and everything in between. For anything else, old standbys like Google Alerts or a page monitoring tool like VisualPing are simple and free ways to catch and address a reputation threat before it gets worse. 

5. Glassdoor/Indeed

Employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed seem like obvious places to try and control your company’s reputation. However, we’ve seen plenty of organizations who believe that, unless a searcher is a job-seeker, star ratings and reviews on these sites don’t really matter. The truth is that everything a searcher sees online factors into their perception of the brand, and Glassdoor and Indeed almost always rank high for searches of business names. A company that values its employees is likely to value its customers. 

There are a few different ways to improve star ratings here. Both Glassdoor and Indeed encourage employers to request reviews, and Glassdoor even provides free email templates for obtaining new reviews from different employee groups. We also use our knowledge of these sites’ review guidelines in order to re-verify or remove certain negative reviews. 

With these overlooked areas on your radar, your ORM strategy will be much more comprehensive in the new year. For more tips and tricks, or to learn how Go Fish Digital can help your brand improve its reputation, you can contact us here.

The 5 Best Online Reputation Monitoring Tools is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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What Is an Email Marketing Newsletter?

An email marketing newsletter can take many forms. However, for most businesses, an email newsletter is an informative email sent on a routine basis. Some businesses choose to send email newsletters more frequently than others. The typical cadence for an email newsletter can be weekly, monthly, bi-annually, or anywhere in between.

The purpose of email newsletters can also vary. Some are strictly meant to inform readers about company or industry updates. Others are intended to provide readers with curated information around a particular theme or topic. Some email newsletters even balance providing information while nurturing leads or upselling services. Regardless of your goal, knowing exactly what you intend to achieve and how it adds measurable value to your business is key to determining what exactly an email newsletter is for you and your business.

Are Email Marketing Newsletters Effective?

Email newsletters can be incredibly effective when they’re born from a particular need and crafted to achieve a particular goal with a particular audience. Unfortunately, many businesses fall into the trap of starting with the conclusion first, “I want to start a company newsletter,” and answering the question of “why I want to start a company newsletter” after. This line of thinking often makes newsletters less effective.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Create a Email Marketing Newsletter

To avoid this common pitfall, start with what you’re trying to accomplish. Before you even commit to the idea of starting a newsletter or start thinking about its look or tone, start by crafting concrete, measurable answers to the questions below.

What Do You Want to Accomplish With Your Email Marketing Newsletter?

As mentioned above, there are many reasons why a business may want to invest time in connecting with contacts through regular, frequent email newsletter campaigns. Before you start to think about how to design your email newsletter, you first want to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Are You Trying to Upsell & Retain Existing Customers?

Newsletters can be a great way to communicate company updates, new products, or services existing customers may be interested in. They can also be a great way to retain existing customers by fostering a sense of community and a brand with which customers are proud to associate. You can see how Canva uses this strategy in their email newsletter.

By inviting existing customers to participate in a fun, lighthearted contest, Canva is creating an active and engaged creative community—making it more likely that Canva users will continue to look to Canva as their go-to platform for their current and future creative endeavors.

Or, Are You Trying to Nurture Top-of-Funnel Traffic?

Another reason newsletters can be beneficial is that they provide a channel by which businesses can nurture leads over a long period of time. This can be done by providing credible, helpful information that establishes the brand as a reliable, informative source. Although this strategy can be very long-term, it’s especially helpful in targeting customers who may be newly aware that they have a problem they’re interested in solving and who are just starting to consider potential options.

Using newsletters to provide prospects with credible, industry-related information can be a way to stay top-of-mind and establish your brand as an excellent option they should consider.

Hubspot uses this email marketing strategy often in its newsletters. They will even go so far as to promote or provide information on other platforms that could be considered competitors. While they don’t often directly encourage subscribers to sign up for Hubspot services, they will promote webinars or other informative resources that may be of interest or provide meaningful value to subscribers. By providing this content, HubSpot is continuing to establish itself as one of the most prominent thought leaders in the digital marketing space, making it more likely that prospects will consider them first when looking to sign up for digital marketing platforms or support.

You May Also Be Trying to Expand Your Audience or Prospects.

Another reason a company may want to start a newsletter is to expand its prospecting pool with other, qualified prospects. Companies often approach this model by incentivizing current subscribers to recruit additional subscribers. This can be done by offering current subscribers discounts, exclusive content, or other incentives for recruiting a certain number of new subscribers. This strategy is often combined with one of the content strategies above.

By leveraging this strategy, a company is able to expand and nurture a larger pool of potential customers who have already heard of the company through a positive recommendation from a personal source. In fact, this is the current email marketing model Go Fish Digital uses to expand our prospect list.

Regardless of what your goals are in starting an email newsletter, you want to make sure that you and your team have clarity on those goals. While you may start with a more general goal like, “I want to connect with customers” or “I want to build a brand community,” you eventually want to make sure that you narrow in on exactly what that means for your business and how it will add measurable value. Why do you want to connect with customers? What are you hoping they do in response to that connection? Why is building a brand community important from a business perspective? Answering these questions in clear and measurable ways will help you land on an actionable goal and purposeful format for your email newsletters.

How Long Should Your Email Marketing Newsletter Be?

For better or worse, there is no set, recommended length for email newsletters. Your email newsletter should be succinct, but long enough to effectively communicate the information you promised your users in your subject line. So, for some email newsletters, that may only be a few lines of text and a call to action. For other newsletters, that could be longer paragraphs of information. It all depends!

When you’re first starting out, don’t get hung up on sticking to a specific word count. Simply focus on being concise, clear, and actionable. Hubspot offers a great guide on how to write compelling email newsletters if you’d like to learn more. All in all, when it comes to email newsletter length, prioritize quality content and clarity over word limits.

How Will You Track the Success of Your Email Marketing Newsletter?

Once you have a clear and actionable goal in mind, the next step is to define the KPIs by which you’ll measure your success in achieving that goal.

Common KPIs for email newsletter goals can vary. However, below are some common KPIs for the goals we’ve outlined above:

• If your goal is to upsell & retain existing customers – You may want to consider the following KPIs: upsell revenue, customer retention, open & engagement rates, click-through-rates to content 
• If your goal is to nurture top-of-funnel traffic – You may want to consider the following KPIs: open & engagement rates, click-through-rates to content (conversions can be considered over a LONG period of time, but should not be the main KPI)
• If your goal is to expand your audience or prospects – You may want to consider the following KPIs: subscriber growth, open & engagement rates, click-through-rate to content

These are certainly not the only KPIs, but they can help to provide insight on the performance of your newsletters in relation to your goals. Defining the most important KPIs for your business is an important part of planning your email newsletter before you start the design process.

Who Should Receive Your Email Marketing Newsletter?

Once you’ve defined the purpose of your newsletter, it’s important to define who will receive it and how you plan to segment your existing audience so that the newsletter lands in the right inbox.

If you’re unsure about where to start with customer segmentation, start with the biggest buckets first: Is your email newsletter targeted to existing or prospective customers? Can it be of interest to both parties? Sometimes even getting a newsletter off the ground with the broadest audience first can help you get to a place where you can collect data on what type of content your audience engages with most. From there, you may be able to use that data to define more targeted audiences.

Once you have your big buckets defined, you can start to get even more granular by using tracking mechanisms to target newsletters to specific types of customers or prospects that are at different levels of the prospecting funnel. While targeting newsletters to this level often takes some support from a development team, many email service providers like Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, or Mailchimp make it easy to add these tracking pixels to your site.

How Should You Design Your Email Marketing Newsletter?

Lastly, once you’ve defined the purpose of your newsletter and the audience, the final step is to design your newsletter so it accomplishes your goals and speaks to the interests of the target audience. This is often one of the most exciting pieces of the newsletter ideation process. However, as mentioned above, it’s important to wait until the questions above are answered thoroughly and KPIs have been defined before you start the design process. Otherwise, you run the risk of designing a beautiful newsletter that doesn’t accomplish much of anything at all.

Below are just a few examples of the format newsletters can take:

Color-Block Formatting
Color-blocking can be a great way to communicate an idea quickly and narrow in on a single call to action. It’s a great option for companies that place heavy emphasis on their brand colors and/or aesthetics. It can also be a great option for companies that want to provide information, but also encourage their readers to do something that adds business value. The trick with color-blocking is to keep content simple. With this format, you really want to narrow in on a singular idea and/or call to action.

Trying to communicate too much information in too many colors can quickly become overwhelming.

If you’re looking for a simple approach to content, want your readers to take action from your email, and are more concerned with the branded look of your email newsletters, color-blocking is a great place to start.

Text-Based Formatting
Text-based newsletters are great for providing a lot of information in an easily digestible way. With text-based formatting, the emphasis is definitely on content over design. This email format is great for newsletters that intend to inform their audience about a particular topic or list of topics. It can be a great option for those hoping to establish themselves as thought leaders. Text-based email newsletters tend to include content that is interesting enough to capture a reader’s attention without relying on a more eye-catching visual design.

Again, with text-based emails, you’re looking to inform a reader more than you’re asking them to perform an action. So, while this format can be great for establishing yourself as an industry expert, it’s less effective in encouraging a reader to take action.

Minimalist Formatting
As you may have guessed, minimalist formatting is, well, minimal in both visual design and content. If you’re trying to target an audience with little time on their hands or super quick attention spans, this format might be a good option for you. These emails tend to work well if they fit a brand’s aesthetic and communicate information or a call to action quickly. With these emails (as with all emails), it’s important to know your audience. Do they need to be convinced to take action, or are they pretty ready to do so with a simple nudge? Are they looking for detailed information? Or, can they be incentivized to learn more with a simple hook statement?

In many cases, there’s a place and time in your email newsletter sequence for minimal formatting. Since this style can require less investment in both content creation and copywriting, it’s a style worth testing at some point in your newsletter cadence when you have a clear and simple call to action or a really interesting piece of content you could likely incentivize readers to click through to read.

When It Comes to Email Marketing Newsletter Best Practices, Start With a Goal

Starting an email newsletter can be an exciting and valuable next step for your brand or business. When crafted with a goal in mind, email newsletters can add significant, additional value to your other marketing efforts and go a long way in building a loyal customer base. Regardless of the form your email newsletter takes, starting with a goal in mind and testing how the formats you pursue achieve that goal will undoubtedly lead to success.

Good luck and happy emailing!

What Is An Email Marketing Newsletter And Will It Work For My Business? is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Here are some things our digital PR agency keeps in mind when browsing social media or media outlets to help strengthen your campaign ideas: 

1. Consume with purpose

In this industry, never underestimate the importance of seeking content from a variety of outlets on a daily basis — Even the ones you don’t necessarily enjoy. Look at consuming media as less of a time killer and more as a part of your daily job expectation. Set aside time everyday to browse your favorite sites and take notes.

2. Browse when you’re hitting a roadblock 

Reading Reddit, watching TikToks, or scrolling through Twitter are all research methods vital to a successful brainstorming session. Follow accounts or tags that are relevant to your clients’ industries. If you’ve hit a creative roadblock, spend some time reading content that’s trending that week across all platforms. What can you contribute to the bigger picture? Ask yourself how you can use trending topics to build a great campaign for a client.

3. Don’t be left behind

In order to stay relevant and build links, you need to be on top of viral trends as they come — And avoid being late to the game. People’s attention spans are shorter than ever, and they’re moving on to the next big thing quickly. Always research if your campaign idea has been done before and if it was covered by big publications recently. You don’t want to create old news.

4. Jot down ideas as they come to you

If you see content that’s captivating or if you have an interesting question, jot it down quickly on your phone to present to your team in your next brainstorming session. You should always be seeking campaign ideas as you go about your day, even off the clock. Are you on a date and wondering who should foot the bill? Maybe that’s a topic worth exploring. Inspiration is everywhere. 

These are examples of some ideas I jot down throughout the week:

Once you adapt your mindset to scroll with purpose, you’ll have a better understanding on what platforms produce the best content inspiration for your specific needs.

Here’s How I Use Media Platforms for Campaign Inspiration: 

TIKTOK

If you think TikTok isn’t your cup of tea, think again. As painful as it might be to scroll the app targeted for Gen Zs, it’s provided me with an abundance of quality ideas geared toward a younger demographic. Because of the variety of content that’s constantly posted on the app, there’s unlimited inspiration in real time. If you need to brainstorm around home topics, seek out relevant hashtags like #homedecor or #interiordesign to see what’s trending. There are plenty of communities to explore like real estate, LGBTQ+, finance, or entrepreneurship. I like to spend 30 minutes to an hour scrolling through TikTok daily to stay on top of viral content.

REDDIT

I get a lot of news from Reddit, but I also look at what folks are saying in the comments of newsworthy articles. Read conversations and observe what people are discussing and what they are curious about. Are they upset at something Joe Rogan said, or are people calling for more public parks in their city? How can you incorporate these discussions into a survey or data campaign? You can also look at subreddits like r/DataIsBeautiful or r/News for current campaign inspiration as well. Although Twitter is a good source for news-related discussion, I find Reddit produces more well-articulated comments and has less trolling overall. 

DREAM PUBLICATION SITES

So you want to be in Business Insider? Or maybe you dream of being posted one day in the New York Times? Look at these publications you admire every day and observe the content being covered. View the sites they’re linking to, find the source of the content, and study newsworthy topics in that industry. Look through articles written by a specific journalist on your media list, too, and brainstorm new content these publications might be interested in featuring as a guest post. Ask yourself, what piece of content can I create that would fit on this site or for this journalist? 

PODCASTS

In any given podcast, you’ll find hours of thoroughly discussed topics, thought-provoking conversations, and listeners asking hosts for advice over an array of subjects. Use your favorite shows to your advantage, they’re a great source of relevant material! Here’s an example: One of my favorite podcasts, Girls Gotta Eat, did a recent episode on sharing finances in relationships, and some of their talking points became survey inspiration for a campaign. How can your favorite podcasts inspire your own creative content? 

Creative ruts are a part of the content development process, but there are plenty of ways to find inspiration you can bring to your future brainstorming sessions and meetings with clients. Next time you’re struggling to find ideas, look at these tips to help create your next successful link building campaign. Good luck! 

How to Stay on Top of Trends for Campaign Inspiration is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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From Accessible to Universal

The Seven Principles of Universal Design

Equitable Use

Provide Flexibility in Use

Simple and Intuitive Use

Perceptible Information

Tolerance for Error

Low Physical Effort

Size and Space for Approach and Use

Size and Space for Approach and Use ensure ease of approach and use regardless of the user’s mobility. This is another principle intended for physical design, however, it can apply to web design as well. One of the easiest ways to ensure ease of use is by making large, clear buttons. Especially on mobile, this helps users with less dexterity. Providing ample negative space also allows users to avoid unwanted actions.

Universal Design and Marketability: How to Improve the Inclusivity of Your Website is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Once a visitor lands on your site, is it clear what you want them to do next? 

Whether you’re collecting leads for your B2B product, selling products on your eCommerce site, or building a list for your editorial publication, each additional conversion action contributes to the value your website brings. 

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In this blog post, we’ll review five common conversion rate optimization mistakes we’ve seen and share solutions to help you avoid them. No matter what industry you’re in, this checklist can be used to help ensure that you aren’t costing your site valuable conversions. 

Five Common Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Mistakes & Solutions to Avoid Them 

1. Mistake: Using ‘Click Here’ as your only call-to-action.

Solution: Make your call-to-actions descriptive.

This mistake is an easy fix, but one that I still see far too often. There’s almost never a case where I would recommend using ‘click here’ over a descriptive call-to-action, specifically because it tells the user exactly what they’ll be getting when clicking a certain link or button. 

For example ‘Click here to subscribe to our newsletter’ can be easily shortened to just ‘Subscribe to our newsletter.’ With the appropriate link or button styling, users will understand exactly where to click and what will happen when they do. This keeps your call-to-actions succinct and clear. 

Additionally, if you are using phrases such as, ‘To see more, click here’, replace the click here text with exactly what they will be seeing. On its own, ‘click here’ doesn’t give users (or search bots) any indication about where they are going, which can delay them from taking the next step. 

2. Mistake: Using too many call-to-actions. 

Solution: Focus on the most important action you want your users to take. 

Call-to-actions are necessary for conversion rates, but having too many call-to-actions can actually hurt your overall conversions. If you have multiple call-to-action buttons in your site’s hero, for example, you may be giving your users too many choices, which can cause them to take no action at all. 

Rather than offering multiple call-to-actions, place the focus on the most important action that a user can take. For example, if your ultimate goal is to get a user to book a demo for your product, make this the primary call to action on your product page. 

This is all about clearly featuring the call-to-action that is most relevant to your audience in that moment – one that they are prepared to take the next step for, and one that you know will lead them successfully through your conversion funnel. 

3. Mistake: Applying ‘best’ practices that may not be ‘best’ for your audience. 

Solution: Use data to get to know your audience. 

There are a lot of marketing and website best practices that you can apply on your site, including the ones I am sharing here. These best practices are a great start for your site, but they should not take the place of getting to know your audience. 

Getting to know your audience is essential to the continual improvement of your site’s CRO strategy. There are a lot of quantitative tools that can be used for this. I recommend starting with your Google Analytics data. Looking at demographics data in Google Analytics can tell you the age and gender breakdown of your site visitors. Engagement metrics, like bounce rate and time on site, can help you understand how users are interacting with your site. 

There are also tools like Hotjar which generate click maps and scroll maps of how users are moving around your pages. Finally, running A/B tests in tools like Google Optimize will provide insights and data specific to your audience. Qualitative research, like surveys and user testing, can be very helpful in understanding your audience and ensuring you’re building an experience suited for their needs. 

It’s important to keep taking the pulse of your audience and continue collecting and reviewing this data that can help keep your CRO strategy informed and fresh.

4. Mistake: Forgetting EAT (expertise, authority, trust).

Solution: Keep your trust signals top of mind.

Anytime you are asking for someone’s personal information, which is the case for most conversion actions, establishing expertise, authority, and trust is incredibly important.

If you’re asking for someone’s credit card information, you want to make sure that you’ve provided details on how the transaction will be encrypted and secured. If you’re asking for someone’s email address, they’ll want to understand who they are giving this information to and what you plan to do with it. 

In addition to providing very specific details at the time of conversion, keeping trust signals top of mind across your site will help provide users with an understanding of your organization that can lead to trust and confidence when they’re taking the next step. These trust signals could include things like awards you’ve won, organizations you are affiliated with, partnerships, or testimonials. If you don’t have these items present on your site, adding them to your homepage or within your footer is a great place to start. You want to show off these great accomplishments and they can have an important impact on your site’s value! 

5. Mistake: Leaving human behavior out of the equation.  

Solution: Leverage behavioral tactics in your offers and copy. 

Using behavioral insights to understand how certain messaging and tactics can influence decision making is very important as you are developing conversion offers and actions for your site. Behavioral tactics I’ve seen used effectively include messaging around urgency, scarcity, loss aversion, and social proof. Here are some examples of messaging that target each of these tactics. These can all be mixed, matched, and customized based on your offer. 

1. Scarcity: “Only X spots left”
2. Urgency: “Sign-ups close in X days”
3. Loss aversion: “Save $X if you sign up today” 
4. Social proof: “XX members have already reserved their spot” 

Always keep your user’s best interests in mind when leveraging these behavioral insights. When used effectively, they can lead to impactful and improved conversion rates. 

Check Your Top Landing Pages for These Common CRO Mistakes

Are you guilty of making any of these five mistakes on your site? As a next step, I recommend opening your site’s homepage or top landing page to identify how many of these mistakes may be present. If you do notice any, brainstorm how you can apply the solutions I outlined above effectively to your page. You’re spending the time and money to get traffic to your site, so be sure that it’s converting once it’s there! 

Does your company need help with their conversion rates? If so, feel free to reach out today to learn how we can help!

Solutions To Avoid Five Common CRO Mistakes is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

“This is a strategy we’ve incorporated into our routine where we sit down and swap campaigns that are in need of attention and a fresh perspective. Each of us has different viewpoints and areas of interest, from sports to beauty to personal finance. For example, if I lack extensive knowledge about sports, swapping my pitch with a team member who is knowledgeable adds tremendous value to my pitch and insight into that beat.”

Our pitch swaps allow us to lean on another team member’s experience and expertise. As the promotion team mainly works independently, it’s one of the most valuable ways for us to get time collaborating with one another. Read on to learn our reasoning behind pitch swaps. 

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They See Something You Don’t See 

We all process information differently than other people, so it’s very possible that a coworker can visualize a pitch in a way you never thought of. When you look at the same thing over and over, it’s easy to overlook something that someone else might notice right away. Whenever my team swaps pitches, it’s likely that they will find another way of representing the data in my pitch, find grammatical errors, or change up my writing style to flow better. There are always going to be missed opportunities if you don’t get a second set of eyes to help identify them, so I highly recommend pitch swapping for this reason alone. 

They Know Something You Don’t Know

Bill Nye once said, “everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t” and he’s absolutely right. 

Leaning on your team members’ expertise can be crucial to the success of your campaigns, especially those in areas you aren’t too familiar with. For instance, last year I – the girl who only knows about sports players based on the celebrity they’re dating – pitched an extensive data campaign about major league teams. I thought I was heading into the campaign with enough knowledge to pitch the right thing to the right people, but it turns out I wasn’t. For this specific campaign, I needed to know what was happening on a week-by-week basis in the NFL, change my pitch accordingly, and find new reporters constantly. 

I had almost every member of my team that knew anything about the NFL help me with that pitch (i.e. crafting new angles), and thanks to their insights, I was able to secure multiple organic links. 

How to Stay on Top of the News Cycle During a Pitch Swap

While it’s not possible to have extensive knowledge of every topic, there are ways you can be in the know about the news cycle. When I’m pitching a topic that I’m not too familiar with or helping a team member out with their pitch during a swap, I find the following tools to be extremely helpful. 

Exploding Topics 

Every Tuesday, Exploding Topics sends me an email of trending topics online before they become too saturated and take off. You can search for exploding topics based on a category that can help you hone in on what’s being discussed in a certain beat. The interesting thing about this tool is that it will also tell you when interest for a topic has peaked. This is helpful because, when you’ve found a topic that has peaked, there’s less online chatter surrounding it which is a good indication of how well a certain piece of content might perform coverage-wise. 

Twitter 

Twitter, as we all know, is an incredible way to receive news without having to search for it. I go on Twitter multiple times a day to follow what news stations, national outlets, reporters, and other PR professionals are saying about a certain topic or industry, so my feed is constantly churning out new information. 

Google Alerts 

Many of us set up Google Alerts for our clients, but do you have topic-specific alerts set up? If you don’t, I would get on that sooner rather than later. They offer huge insights into what’s being written about for your selected topic, which can help you and your pitching strategy in the long run. Let’s say, for example, you’re preparing to pitch a campaign about esports, but you have no knowledge about what it is. With Google Alerts, you can set up an esports alert so you can know which outlets and reporters are covering the topic and what kind of stories are being told about it so you can craft your pitch accordingly. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re 10 years, 5 years, or 2 years into digital PR – it’s always a good idea to handoff your pitch to another team member. Although specific team members are assigned as leads on a campaign, we’re all in it together. When one person wins, we all win. When one person struggles, we all struggle. 

Don’t underestimate the wisdom of the crowd.

Here’s Why You Should Handoff Your Pitch to Another Team Member is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

What we’ve found, overwhelmingly, is that there isn’t an all-purpose recommendation that will work for every single one of our clients. Social distancing and an economic downturn will impact each industry in completely different ways, so there can’t be a one-size-fits-all answer. We also know that things are changing daily, so the right answer today may be different than the right answer tomorrow.

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Despite much uncertainty, we’ve been able to provide guidance to our clients as they begin to reshape their strategies. Here are some of the ways we’re advising our clients to navigate the current climate.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Paid Media

• As always, make data-driven decisions. We can make assumptions about how our customers will respond to this crisis, but we’ve also never been in this situation before. Look at your analytics often, paying close attention to the most recent 1-2 weeks to see how the numbers are changing, then dive further into your data to try and understand where those changes are stemming from. 
• Find creative ways to take your business online and be proactive in getting the word out. If you normally do in-person consulting, find a tool that allows you to offer a seamless virtual meeting. If you typically depend on store visits for customers to see your products up close, amp up the use of video to showcase your products online. If your business is exclusively brick-and-mortar, consider options like e-commerce, delivery, and virtual content. Once you’ve worked out a new online model, let people know via your PPC campaigns and social media.
• People have questions, so make it easy for them to find answers. Keep your branded search ads running so that people can easily find your site or phone number. Have you created a COVID-19 FAQ page? Add it as a sitelink to your search ads. By making answers easy to find now, you’re more likely to win a long-term customer once things are back to normal. 
• Know how your competitors are responding to the crisis. By using tools like SEMRush and Auction Insights, you can get a good (although imperfect) sense of how your competition may be changing their PPC strategy. You may find that there are now gaps that you can leverage, meaning lower competition and lower CPCs. You may also find that your best bet will be to max out your advertising for a specific niche audience that isn’t being targeted by the competition. 
• Above all, be sensitive. Don’t be the company that takes advantage of the situation to play into people’s fear in order to sell more. Be aware that, yes, life is still going on, but it’s not business as usual. Empathy will go a long way here, and by putting yourself in your audience’s shoes, you may be able to understand how best to continue reaching them with information and content they find valuable.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• SEO is a long-term strategy. On-page optimizations, technical SEO, and link building all work together to yield results that you may not see take hold for a few weeks or months. We don’t know when life will get back to normal, but it will eventually, and if you can continue to work on long-term SEO initiatives, you should. That’s the ideal answer. The realistic answer is that resources may change during this crisis. A good agency partner can help you prioritize the initiatives that will have the biggest impact on your search visibility and customize your scope of work accordingly.
• If you’re having to pause your business or close locations, work closely with your agency to update your Google My Business profile, structured data markup, etc. Doing so correctly now will help a return to normalcy go as smoothly as possible.
• Because more people are staying at home, consider how user behavior may have changed and, if possible, adjust your strategy. For example, an e-commerce site might be seeing traffic to product pages decrease, but traffic from queries relevant to the blog are still strong, making it a good time to research and post more informational content to your site.
• Utilize your agency to monitor top-ranking competitors. These sites may be intelligently adjusting their strategies in creative and unforeseen ways that might make sense to emulate.
• One possible silver lining you may find is that you now have more space and time to work on those important but not urgent projects that are somehow always being pushed to the backburner. Think building out site content, refreshing blog posts, systematic conversion rate optimization, and more.
• One question we’re helping clients answer right now is “Should we continue to push out content that isn’t related to COVID-19?” The answer is “probably”, but be mindful in promoting it. You may be adding in coronavirus-related content to your content calendar, and centering your promotion around that, but a lot of your “normal” content can still go up as well. Maybe the timeliness of your coronavirus content brings people to the site, but your evergreen content keeps them there.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

• Anticipate how you would handle coronavirus-related press about your business if, for example, one of your employees or customers were to test positive. Make sure that you have a “crisis playbook” in place for how you would respond and which channels you would use to share your response.
• Pay close attention to your social monitoring tools. People are also asking a lot of questions like “Is X open?” or “Is X canceled?”. Being responsive and helpful will foster a positive reputation for your business. 
• In the event that your brand becomes associated with COVID-19, and the search result sticks, know what options are available to help mitigate the negative impact of your new branded SERP. Biogen and its conference where the virus spread rapidly is a great example of COVID-19 taking over a brand’s story, and there are ORM solutions out there to help mitigate the negative impacts. 

We can expect the coronavirus situation to evolve and have a heavy impact on our society and economy for months to come. Digital marketing can be incredibly agile, and we should be prepared to be nimble in our approach as well. Hopefully, this provides some guidelines for your digital strategy, and if you’d like to get more specifics on solutions that can help your business weather the storm, we’d love to chat with you. 

Digital Marketing in the Era of Coronavirus is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Running A/B tests on your website is a great way to identify how to improve your conversion rates without having to undergo an entire site redesign. In fact, it’s becoming more common for brands to use A/B testing to guide decisions typically made during redesign discussions. For example, your design team might be struggling with the decision of what image to place within the homepage header or how to create the most effective calls-to-action (CTA). Running an A/B test can provide data-driven insights that may help inform design decisions. 

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But before you can start running A/B tests, you’ll need to successfully set up a test. At Go Fish Digital, we use Google Optimize as our testing tool and we’ve created an easy step-by-step guide for getting your first A/B test quickly up and running in the tool.

Identify a Clear Hypothesis & Test Objectives

Identifying Clear Test Objectives

A key part of setting up a test in Google Optimize is to identify the test’s primary and secondary objectives. Objectives are the metrics you want to monitor while you’re testing. For example, if my objective is to increase revenue by redesigning a portion of my website’s homepage, I will want to set transactions as my primary objective. If I just want to increase the number of clicks a CTA receives, then I would want to set “Add to Cart Button Clicks” as my primary objective. 

Secondary objectives are optional and less essential to define, but can provide helpful insights that you would not have gotten otherwise. For example, if you want to improve transactions coming from a product page, you would want to set transactions as the primary objective and “Add to Cart” clicks as the secondary objective. During the test, if you notice your audience is clicking on the “Add to Cart” button, but there’s an overall decrease in transactions, this could be a sign of an issue with your shopping cart user experience. With that information in mind, you can make positive changes to your website that can lead to more conversions.

Writing a Clear Test Hypothesis

Once you’ve identified what your primary and secondary objectives are, you’ll want to generate a clear hypothesis statement. Your hypothesis will help keep your team aligned on what change you want to make and how it will impact the website’s performance.

In order to write a clear and effective hypothesis statement, you’ll want to think through three major questions: 

1. What element are you modifying on the site?
2. What do you think the outcome will be?
3. Why do you think this will be the outcome?

Once you’ve answered these three questions, you’ll be able to write your hypothesis statement using an “If, Then” format.

If (we change element A), then (expected outcome will happen), because (reason behind your hypothesis). 

Identify Optimal Testing Page

Whether you want to run an A/B test to inform design decisions or improve your site’s conversion rate, it’s important to run the test on a page that will deliver results. For example, pages that receive a lot of traffic, such as the homepage or a popular product page or blog post, are great options for A/B testing because you’ll receive a significant amount of data, which will lead to a more accurate result in the end.

One way to identify good test pages is to look at your top landing pages over the last 6 months in Google Analytics. You can find this information by navigating to Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages. Then you’ll want to configure the date range in the top-right corner to display data from the last 6 months. 

Consider seasonality when you’re choosing your test pages. If you’re running a test in the off-season, it may take longer to collect data and you might not get data from the most qualified audience, as it’s likely regular users are no longer searching for a specific product or information. Selecting the right landing page can have a major impact on your overall timeline and test results. It’s important to consider these factors carefully when making your selection. 

Calculate Test Duration

Calculating how long it will take for a test to deliver desired results is important as it will help you set clear expectations with internal and external teams. There are many calculators online that help you do this. Our favorite tool is VWO’s a/b test duration calculator.  It takes into consideration how many visitors your site receives and how much you want to increase your current conversion rate to calculate the expected test duration.You can easily use the calculator to manipulate different factors to try to predict an optimal timeline. 

Setting Up & Monitoring Your Test

Once you’ve figured out the specifics of what you’re testing, why and how long, you’re ready to get the test up and running in Google Optimize. Google Optimize has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for people with no prior design/dev experience to make changes to test landing pages. 

10 Steps to Set Up Your A/B Test

1. After logging in to Google Optimize, click “Create experience” in the top right corner.
2. Enter the experiment name, target URL and the type of test you plan to run (i.e A/B test, multivariate, redirect test). 
   1. A/B – tests two or more variants of a page.
   2. Multivariate – tests variants with two or more different sections.
   3. Redirect – tests separate web pages identified by different URLs or paths. 
3. Next, select “Add variant” and name the variant you plan to change for your test. For example, if you’re testing a different CTA color, you would want to name your variant “CTA Color – Blue”. 
4. Click edit and begin editing the page using Google Optimize’s visual editor. 
5. The best way to make changes to a specific element is by clicking on what you want to edit and using the visual editor in the bottom right corner. The visual editor enables you to intuitively change the background color, font size, font type, etc. 
6. If you select “Edit element” on the pop-up, you also have the ability to edit the existing HTML, insert new HTML or run javascript. You also have the option to remove the element entirely. The optimize resource hub has a great overview of using the visual editor.
7. Once you’ve made the desired change, click “Save”, then “Done” and return to the main dashboard. 
8. Next, you’ll need to add targeting rules. Targeting rules are necessary in cases where you might be testing a templated change. Regular expressions can help effectively target traffic from all URLs that utilize a specific template. By clicking “+Add rule”, you can see different options for customizing URL targets.
9. Now you’re ready to set your test objectives. In the “Measurement and objectives” tab, click “Add experiment objective”. Here you can either choose from a list or create a custom objective. This is where you input your objectives identified earlier. Choosing from the list is a great option when you want to track the performance of an existing goal configured in Google Analytics. Creating a custom objective is another good option when you might want to measure the performance of an entirely new or more broad goal. For example, do you just want to see if a different page design gets more clicks overall? You can use Google Optimize to create a custom test objective. For more information, Google has a detailed guide for creating test objectives.  
10.  Before launching your test, be sure to run a diagnostics check to make sure Google Optimize is running smoothly on your site. You can do so by clicking “Run diagnostics” in the “Settings” section. 

Now that you’ve implemented your test change using the visual editor, defined targeting rules, selected test objectives and ensured Google Optimized is running smoothly, you’re ready to launch! 

Pro tip: Create a daily reminder to ensure you frequently check in on your test’s progress. It’s important to keep an eye on daily sessions and statistical significance in case there’s an opportunity to end the test early. 

Reporting

Google Optimize will indicate statistically significant results by highlighting whether a change is performing better or worse in red or green. You can view ongoing test results by clicking on the reporting tab in the top left corner. Here’s a great resource for interpreting Optimize’s report data. 

Conclusion

A/B testing can yield incredibly powerful results and now you have the information to begin setting up your own tests. Whether you decide to use Google Optimize or another platform, you’ll still need to make sure you have fundamental questions answered about why you’re running your test and what results you expect to see. We hope our guide has provided you with valuable information and has shown how achievable setting up an A/B test is. If you still have unanswered questions about A/B testing, feel free to reach out to us today!

How To Set Up an A/B Test Using Google Optimize is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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It’s important to know when to consider running an A/B test so that when you come across these opportunities, you’re able to set up a test that will help you make a data-driven decision and create an experience that’s best for both your users and your goals. 

5 Instances When You Should Consider A/B Testing 

1. You’re implementing a change to your site and want to make sure you don’t hurt your conversion rate. Making changes to websites is pretty common, but if you want to ensure that this change won’t affect your conversion rate, running an A/B test is a great option. Before adding the new feature to your site, you can run an A/B test so 50% of users will see your site with the new feature and 50% will see the control version of your site. This way, you’ll be able to see how some of your audience interacts with the new feature. The best case is that it will actually help boost your conversion rate. A null result which happens if both versions perform similarly, is also successful, however, and will tell you that adding this new feature to your site will not detract from your primary goals. 
2. You want to boost your conversion rate. Let’s say that there’s a page on your website that’s getting a lot of traffic, but you’re not seeing the conversions or engagement you’d like to. If you run an A/B test, you’ll quickly get feedback on what impact small changes to the page can have. The great thing about identifying conversion rate opportunities for these high volume pages is that you’re able to get insightful data quickly, as you’re able to show each version of your page to a rather large sample size. Start by reviewing the user experience and identifying any areas of friction for users, then create a hypothesis to test how removing that friction might boost your conversion rate. You can also test small things like your call-to-action button color or text because sometimes these small changes make a big difference (more on that below). 
3. You have two ideas and you’re not sure which will work best. Perhaps you’ve mocked up a couple of options for a change on your site, but you’re not sure which will perform better. This is a great opportunity to run an A/B test and make a data-driven decision for which option you should add to your website. You’ll want to choose your primary metric of success for the test by identifying what you’re hoping this section of the page will do. Do you want them to click a button, stay on the page longer, fill out a form, or something else? Set up your test according to this metric and see which version of the page has more success, then you’ll be able to implement that version for all users.
4. Best practices may not apply to you. In digital marketing, it’s easy to rely on best practices to inform our decisions. Best practices can be a useful starting point, but it can also be dangerous to rely too much on them, as they aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all. Running A/B tests can help you understand what works best for your specific audience and what they are looking for from your brand. For example, email marketing best practices will say to send your email on Tuesday morning. But, the best time to send an email could vary greatly based on if you’re email lists include work or personal email addresses. Running A/B tests allows you to identify how your audience interacts with your brand which, in turn, will help you confidently create what is best for your users. 
5. Small tweaks can make a big difference. As a digital marketer, you always want to improve upon your marketing efforts. And when it comes to these optimizations, small tweaks can have a big impact. Consistently running meaningful A/B tests on your site allows you to continue to optimize your site for your audience and goals. When thinking about what changes to test, they don’t have to be (and probably shouldn’t be) large. Small, easy changes, like changing your button copy from “Download Now” to “Get My Copy”, could have a meaningful impact on your most important metrics. 

Finding your next opportunity to A/B test

A/B testing allows you to feel more confident about the changes you’re implementing and gain a better understanding of your audience. So, the next time you find yourself in one of these five scenarios, we recommend that you consider running an A/B test to help you make better, more data-driven decisions for your site.   

Does your company need help with their conversion rates? If so, feel free to reach out today to learn how we can help!

When Should You Run An A/B Test? is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.