Top 5 tips for marketing teams to taste success

Whether it is shopping, consuming content, payments, communication, every imaginable activity has gone digital. The pandemic has further accelerated this trend. A study showed that more than 40% of customers now shop online for products they had previously bought in stores.

In addition, retail industry data in the US showed that online sales increased 32.4% in 2020 and are up 39% in Q1 2021.

It is not just on the brands' website or app. Other customer interaction platforms like social media, emails, push notifications, digital ads, etc., have all come together to become an essential part of running a successful online business. Therefore, to help the business succeed, you need to deliver an excellent, consistent digital experience as a marketer.

To do this and create memorable experiences that your users can relate to, remember, and keep coming back for more, here are a few things you can put in place.

Make your on-site experience faster with media optimization

Let's start with our websites and apps. A bad user experience here will kill any off-site marketing efforts you put in to get a user to land on your website. The images and videos used on these platforms are often the heaviest elements in terms of size and, if not handled correctly, can single-handedly bring the website to a halt and drive away your users.

Start by optimizing the media used on your website, i.e., make them lighter and load them faster on the page. Ensure that you are using the correct format for each media element used on the page. Or better, use an image optimization tool to handle it for you.

Optimize experiences for mobile

Most of the new users are coming online via mobile. This is true especially for any B2C or D2C business. This trend requires us to depart from our strategy to just focus on faster websites and re-imagine the entire experience for a mobile device.

Marketers have to depend on customer demographics. Are your users tech-savvy to understand out-of-the-box experiences? Do they use high-end, high-performance mobile devices or a basic smartphone that will screech to a halt with the fancy visuals?

Mobile phones also suffer from flaky internet connections forcing serious businesses to go an extra step to ensure a world-class mobile user experience. Once you have decided on the experience, you want to offer to your mobile users, optimize your media for these devices.

Resize them to a smaller dimension to help them load fast. This would ensure a quicker load time, more conversions, and better SEO for your brand.

Measure every detail

Indeed, you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Therefore, any change you make on your website or app, or any off-page marketing activity that you do, needs to be measured for its impact.

Whether it is a change to improve SEO, a change to your website's UI for better conversions, or optimizing it for better performance, or an external ad, identify the metrics you need to measure and get the tools in place even before you work on the changes.

Google Analytics is the holy-grail for every marketer serious about understanding how users use and navigate through your website. Use Pagespeed Insights to keep track of your page performance with a special focus on Web Vitals on mobile as they are a crucial SEO ranking factor now. Use Google's search console to see how your search rankings change and to identify other SEO-related issues.

You can take it a step further and use tools like Clevertap or Mixpanel to measure event-based user behavior inside the app. These tools would help you make objective, data-driven decisions for your next campaign or iteration.

Use a digital asset management system

Marketing has come to rely on content heavily. We can now see an explosion in the amount of content produced, its format, and the platforms it caters to - social media, emails, push notifications, and a lot more. Additionally, teams have become larger and more distributed because of the pandemic.

With so much content produced, each with multiple stakeholders, it is essential to centralize digital content management. Whether it is storing your files in one place, sharing feedback, managing who has access to what, collaborating with third parties, or finally disseminating the content, a digital asset management system does it all and more.

It will help you unlock the marketing team's potential, bring everyone on the same page and help them execute campaigns faster, therefore, helping the business grow faster.

Reduce rework of assets for improved efficiency and consistent experiences

With marketing teams producing assets in multiple formats and for several different platforms, it is important to find what has already been created in the past to be able to iterate on that quickly. Given the amount of content produced, searching for files by their name or endlessly scrolling through folders is a waste of time.

You now need better systems to help you search for assets created at a specific time, for a specific platform or device, with a specific dimension, color, or coupon code. Again, this is something that DAM systems, combined with ML/AI capabilities, can make more manageable for you.

If your team can find out old content, they will avoid rework altogether, maintain consistency in the next iteration, and execute faster.

High-quality, high-performance visual experiences built by marketers will play a pivotal role in unlocking a business's true potential in the future. With both rich content production and consumption on the rise, marketers need better tools at their disposal coupled with a new vision for mobile performance to deliver on this promise.

This article has been written by Rahul Nanwani, Co-founder and CEO, ImageKit.