Let’s cut to the chase, we are all working with limited time, and sometimes – we can use all the help we can get to get our digital marketing campaigns off the ground! It’s easy to flounder around for a while trying to get a reasonable social media reach or a front page website listing, but you may get buried in buzzword articles and completely miss your target goals. If this is you, here are a couple of options: 1. Find a partner like The Focus Group. We are here to make your budget work FOR you. We’ll help you match realistic expectations for any project or digital marketing campaign, and we take a vested interest in you! 2. You’re a DIYer and you have the time to invest in creating a really strong integrated digital marketing campaign (website, social media, SEO, online ads, etc.).  There are some tools that are going to make your life much easier to measure your ROI, your reach, your success AND they’re free! So let’s get started.

1. Nibbler → link

Are you trying to figure out why your website isn’t ranking anywhere on the front page of a Google search result? This Nibbler test will give you a wealth of information about your existing site. Within just a few minutes you can sample your site for the following categories to see a score on a scale of 1-10.

• Overall site popularity
• Social interest
• Incoming links
• Mobile readiness
• Server behavior
• Page titles

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! The Nibble overview is a free test that reviews 5 pages of your overall site. If you’re wanting to test the entire site, they do have a full pro-version called Sitebeam that will allow you to test more pages, or even run a comparison test against another website. It will give you a great idea of what you’re working with when it’s time to upgrade your current site.

2. Google Analytics → link

I want to be very clear, Google Analytics provides the best insight you can have into how well your site is performing. There’s nothing that even comes in as a close second. To accurately measure benchmarks and performance, you need to have it linked to your site. If your site is on a platform that doesn’t support Google Analytics, it’s time to find another web company. It’s that important. It’s also on this list because it’s free. There is a service called Google Analytics Premium, and if you’re interested it’s available for $150,000 per year. If you’re familiar with Google Analytics and want to learn more about all of it’s basic features, there’s an online training and certification process that will give you all the tools you need to implement, read and create reports to identify your best opportunities for reaching new customer online.

3. Facebook Blueprint → link

Facebook is massive, now reaching over 1.3 billion registered users and the Facebook-owned Instagram accounts for more than 1 out of every 5 minutes spent online! It’s also a very fluid platform with changes that happen every six months that can affect how you’re reaching users. This month, Facebook rolled out a new tool to help marketers and brand managers keep up with all of the changes, and to provide insights into some of the techniques to help you create a dynamic and vibrant Facebook brand page. They called this platform Facebook Blueprint. On Blueprint you’ll be able to go at your own speed in dozens of mini-session that take about 15 minutes of your time to learn some of the tips and tricks to help you become a Facebook master. How about some classes on the Facebook Ads Manager, or troubleshoot tying an App (like Pinterest or Instagram) to your Facebook page? Need a refresher on Facebook brand best practices? Take a course and in 15 minutes, you’ll have a foundation to do some really great things instead of wondering why you’re not reaching enough people with your post.

 

There are lots of great tools out there, but these three are a great foundation on which all of your success is built upon. If you can improve your site, master your analytics and reach your audience on Facebook, you’ll be well ahead of the competition!

Thomas Broadus
Director of Interactive & New Media