If you saw this headline and thought, “I’m having the same problem,” this guide is for you.

At the start of 2023, we surveyed 97 small to medium-sized businesses to find out how they’re feeling about digital marketing — what their priorities are, what’s been working for them, what hasn’t been so successful, what they think about AI marketing, shoppable video platforms and more.

But we don’t just want to share some graphs with you and be done with it. That’s not our style.

We’d rather provide actionable advice that you can do, rather than just reflect over.

If you just want the data, you can download the graphs here. Nice and square for your social media resharing pleasure. You’re welcome.

There are a few digital marketing stats that really stood out to us in 2023’s survey:

• 55% of marketers said they struggle to understand why their target audience doesn’t convert
• 72% of marketers struggle to get insights from the data they have or don’t understand the data
• 30% of marketers surveyed said they’re finding it hard to keep up with AI changes
• 77% of marketers say that SEO is the most important digital marketing channel for their business
• 70% of marketers say blogs are very important for earning search traffic
• 88% of marketers find PPC to be too expensive or ineffective
• 43% of marketers will be investing more in shoppable video platforms in 2023
• 71% of marketers aren’t cutting spending despite a looming recession

We saw a lot of trends in this year’s digital marketing ROI survey, but none stood out more than the challenges marketers face when it comes to their target customers.

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How to Find and Understand Your Target Customer

If you struggle with understanding your target customers, you’re not alone.
In fact, 55% of marketers we surveyed said their biggest marketing challenge is understanding why their target audience doesn’t convert, and 31% struggle to understand what their target audience wants.

Your audience influences every aspect of your marketing strategy — your tone of voice, your digital marketing channels, and even the colours and imagery on your website.

If you don’t have a well-defined target audience, you’re going to struggle to get an ROI from your digital marketing efforts.

If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve got a well-defined target audience, take the following things into consideration:

Are you looking at psychographics as well as demographics?

Identifying your customers’ demographics — things like their age, their gender and their geographic location is a good start, but the real gold is in the psychographics.

These are the things that make your customers tick — their hobbies, passions, beliefs — the list goes on.

Think about how you’d market a product to a female customer, aged between 25 and 35, who lives in the UK, has two children, a mortgage, goes abroad twice a year and is always keen to get the best deal.

Now think about how you’d market a product to someone with the same demographics (female, 25-35, UK) but in a different city every week, cares about the environmental impact of her purchases and has three cats.

These two people have the same demographics, but their psychographics are totally different. You wouldn’t market a product to them in the same way. You might not even sell the same product to both of them.

So if you’ve fallen into the demographics trap, take the time to define your audience further. It can seem scary to reduce the pool of people you’re marketing to, but by doing so, you can focus your efforts in the places that matter.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well actually, I have multiple customer types, so I don’t need to narrow things down”, make sure you’re creating different content for those audiences.

They’re likely to buy your product or service for different reasons, and they’ll have different journeys and questions on route to purchase.

If you’re getting a healthy amount of leads and sales but realise that you’ve achieved that with a basic demographics profile, you could get even more if you define your target audience further.

With something like this, it’s hard to know where to start. We always recommend that you begin by speaking to your existing customers.

Speak to existing customers

Speaking to your customers is a great place to start if you want to improve your digital marketing strategy. It helps you:

• See patterns in customer behaviour
• See patterns in demographics and psychographics
• Understand why they chose you over competitors
• Understand which of your USPs actually appealed to your audience
• What they love about your product and business
• What you could be doing better.

Speaking to customers is a window into where and how you should focus your marketing efforts.

We see this time and time again — businesses assume that their customers love a certain USP and put time and money into shouting about it, only to find out that, when speaking to customers, they were drawn to the brand by something completely different.

We worked with a custom shelving company that thought their customers liked them as they were a local business. Turns out customers didn’t really care about that aspect, but they loved that they could get custom shelves at a good price.

How to Prioritise Your Marketing Channels

Another trend in our digital marketing ROI survey is that marketers often struggle to prioritise their marketing channels.

For example, 44% of marketers plan to prioritise organic social in 2023, despite 74% claiming it has a low ROI.

Now, there are two ways of thinking here.

The first is that because these marketers have not prioritised social media marketing in the past they have not been able to get a good ROI.

Social media is just something they’ve done because they feel they should, but this is the year they will prioritise it and get an amazing return on their investment.

The second is that they aren’t getting a good ROI from social media because they aren’t using it in a way that resonates with their target customer. This could be the platforms they use or the content itself.

As a result, they’re getting a rubbish ROI, but because many people use social media, they feel like they need to have a presence there.

We saw this reflected in other data, too — 36% of marketers surveyed don’t know which traffic source earns them the most valuable leads.

There are so many marketing channels that it can be difficult to figure out which are the best for your business.

There are marketing “gurus” across the web touting the platforms they had success on as the be-all and end-all, when really it was just a good fit for their business in particular.

Other marketing “pros” tell you to put yourself across as many platforms as possible — more platforms, more eyes, more sales, right?

WRONG!

It’s far better to do high-quality marketing using the channels that your target audience are using rather than trying to master every platform.

Use what you learnt from understanding your target customers to choose your channels. You can also look at the data from your existing digital marketing efforts to see which platforms have resulted in the highest ROI.

According to our survey, 72% of marketers either struggle to get insights from the data they have or don’t understand the data. Let’s make things a little easier with a cheat sheet of the metrics you want to look at for each channel to get the data you need, and what they might mean.

Important content marketing metrics

These metrics can be found in Google Analytics 4, which you should migrate to now if you haven’t already.

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• Users — the number of unique individuals who have visited your website or app within a specific date range
• Page Views — the total number of times a page on your website or app has been viewed within a specific date range. Each time a user views a page, it counts as one page view.
  • If users or page views have dropped or plateaued, it could mean that your content is no longer ranking as high as it has previously, which could be due to more competitor content being published and ranking higher, taking your place, or changes to the Google algorithm.
  • If users or page views have increased, but conversions haven’t, it could mean that they couldn’t find what they needed to make a purchase. For example, clear information about your product or service, and shipping cost/time.
• Average Engagement Time — the average amount of time users spend on your website or app within a specific date range. Engagement time is the time a user spends actively engaging with your content, such as scrolling, clicking, or watching videos.
  • If your average engagement time has dropped or plateaued, it could be that your website is hard to navigate so users are leaving the site quickly. Or, it could be that they’re landing on a page via search, but it’s not answering their query as well as it could, so they’re heading back to search.
  • If your average engagement time has increased, but users aren’t converting, it could be that you’re providing great content but not including enough relevant CTAs.
• Conversion Rate — how many users converted on your site. What counts as a conversion depends on what you set up as conversion events in Google Analytics 4. A conversion could be a sale or a user completing a form or signing up for a mailing list.
  • If your conversion rate is down or has plateaued, review your CTAs and compare your offering against competitors. They could have a better value proposition or more enticing offers. This doesn’t mean you need to copy them, but it will help you position yourself as a more attractive option.
  • If your conversion rate is high but you’re not getting many return customers, consider ways to reconnect with them. Are you making the most of your mailing list? Could you offer a subscription with a discount as an incentive to keep them coming back?
  • If one page has a high conversion rate but another page doesn’t, compare the two and see if you can replicate the success of the high-performing page on the low-performing page.

Learn more about the most profitable metrics in Google Analytics 4.

Important email marketing metrics

These metrics are most commonly found in your email marketing platform, although you may also find conversion data in Google Analytics 4.

• Open Rate — how many people who received your email opened it.
  • If your open rate has dropped or plateaued, it could be that your subject lines and preview text aren’t enticing people enough. Subscribe to competitor emails to see the type of subject lines they use, and make sure it’s clear what your email is about and why they should read it. No more subject lines saying, “New blog live now”
• Click Through Rate — the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked a link in that email. If 100 people opened your email and 1 clicked through to your website, your CTR would be 1%.
  • If your click-through rate has dropped or plateaued, consider the CTAs you’re using and where they are placed. You don’t want to overwhelm readers with a giant “BUY NOW” button at the top of the email, but including relevant CTAs throughout the email will help increase your CTR.
• Conversion Rate — the percentage of people who open your email and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an app. For example, if your email is opened by 100 people and 5 of those people convert, your conversion rate would be 5%.
  • If email readers aren’t converting once they click through to your site, consider the pages you are sending them to. Make sure they are relevant to the content of the email and not just a product page you want them to see in the hopes they’ll convert.

Important PPC metrics

You can find this data in the platform you use to run your ads. Learn more about PPC.

• Conversion Rate — the percentage of people who click on your ad and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an app. For example, if your ad receives 100 clicks and 5 of those clicks result in a conversion, your conversion rate would be 5%.
  • If your conversion rate is low or has plateaued, you should review the pages your ad links to. If you promote a specific product or service but then link to your homepage, those who clicked on your ad are more likely to bounce.
• Click-Through Rate — the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions (the number of times your ad was shown). For example, if your ad was shown 1,000 times and received 100 clicks, your click-through rate would be 10%.
  • If your click-through rate is low or has plateaued, then you should review your ad creative and compare it against competitors. Make sure you’re grabbing the viewers’ attention and giving them a reason to click through to your site. Include USPs, high-quality images or video, and make it clear what you are offering.
• Cost Per Acquisition — the amount of money you spend to acquire a conversion. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of your PPC campaign by the number of conversions you received. For example, if you spent £100 on a PPC campaign and received 10 conversions, your cost per acquisition would be £10.
• Cost Per Click — the amount of money you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. It is determined by the competition for the keywords you are targeting and the maximum bid you set. For example, if you set a maximum bid of £1 and someone clicks on your ad, you will pay £1.
  • If your cost per acquisition or click is higher than you’d like it to be, then you should review your ad targeting to make sure you’re targeting the right audience, consider adjusting your bids and potentially review your ad creative and copy.

Important SEO metrics

These metrics can be found in Google Analytics 4, and tools such as Semrush*.

• Organic Traffic — the traffic that comes to your website from search engines, such as Google or Bing, without you having to pay for it through advertising. Organic traffic is driven by the content on your website and the keywords you have optimised for.
  • If your organic traffic has dropped or plateaued, look at your website’s content and make sure the keywords and phrases you are targeting are the best ones for your business. It could be that search trends have changed and consumers are making different searches to find what they want.
  • You should also pay attention to competitor content in search – if you search for a term and a lot of what appears is how-to guides, then you should create better how-to content than what’s already ranking.

• Keyword Rankings — how well your website ranks in search engines for specific keywords. The goal of SEO is to improve your keyword rankings for the keywords that are most relevant to your business. The higher your website ranks for a particular keyword, the more likely people will find and visit it.
• Search Visibility — the overall visibility of your website in search engines. It takes into account your keyword rankings for all the keywords you are targeting and calculates the percentage of searchers who are likely to find your website when they search for those keywords. The higher your search visibility, the more traffic you are likely to receive from search engines.
  • If you’ve seen a drop in rankings or search visibility, then you should review competitor content to see if a new style of content is taking over the search results, similar to organic traffic drops.
  • If you’ve seen an increase in rankings or search visibility, but new traffic isn’t converting, you need to review your CTAs and ensure they fit well into the content.
• Organic Conversions — the number of visitors who come to your website from search engines and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Organic conversions are important because they represent the ultimate goal of your SEO efforts — to attract relevant traffic that converts into customers or leads.
• Referring Domains — the number of other websites that link to your website. Backlinks from other websites are an important ranking factor in search engine algorithms, so having a large number of high-quality backlinks can help improve your keyword rankings and search visibility.
  • Review your strategy if you don’t have as many backlinks as you’d like. Are you reaching out to the right websites to get your content featured? If you’re struggling with outreach, then you can download our tried and tested outreach templates below, or check out our link-building guide.

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Important social media metrics

These metrics are most commonly found within the social media apps themselves.

• Reach — the number of unique users who have seen your social media content. It can be measured by the number of accounts your content has reached, regardless of whether they interacted with it.
• Impressions — the total number of times your social media content has been displayed on a user’s screen. Impressions can be measured by the number of times your content has been seen, including multiple views by the same user. Essentially, impressions are the number of times your content was displayed.
  • If you’ve seen a drop or plateau in reach and impressions, review the type of content you are putting out on social media. Pay attention to current trends and see how to leverage them to promote your brand. That doesn’t have to mean jumping on every TikTok trend out there. You can also jump on design trends which have a longer lifespan.
• Engagement — the number of interactions that users have with your social media content. It can include actions such as likes, comments, shares, retweets, clicks, and direct messages.
  • If you’ve seen a drop or plateau in engagement, consider whether you’re creating engageable content. Do users have a reason to comment or share the post with their followers? The content should serve the users, not just be used to sell your products.

How to Integrate AI into Your Marketing Strategy

The impact of artificial intelligence on marketing is already the hottest topic of 2023.

Since the start of the year, AI tools have taken off, with giant leaps in technology every few weeks (and increasingly, every few days).

It can be a lot to take in, and 30% of marketers surveyed said they’re finding it hard to keep up with all the changes, and 60% have yet to use AI in their digital marketing.

The area we’re seeing AI used most is in content marketing — 33% of marketers are using AI to help write content. The team here at Thinkplus use AI tools like Surfer, Jasper and ChatGPT to help with content outlines and inspiration but not to write our content.

Another great use for AI is taking something you’ve written and getting the AI to “translate” it into a different tone of voice or for a different audience.

For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a paragraph explaining how Wi-Fi works:

“Wi-Fi is a technology that uses radio waves to provide wireless high–speed internet and network connections. A Wi-Fi network consists of a wireless router, which transmits the data signals, and one or more wireless devices, such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets, which receive the signals and connect to the network. When a device connects to a Wi-Fi network, it sends and receives data via radio waves in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz frequency bands, which are unlicensed and free to use.”

And then ask ChatGPT to rewrite this in a way a 5 year old would understand:

“Wi-Fi is like a special kind of magic that helps us use the internet without using any wires. It’s like having a superpower that lets us connect our phones, tablets, and computers to the internet without needing to plug anything in. It works by using special radio waves that travel through the air and help our devices talk to each other and share information.”

That’s a fairly extreme example, but it shows the capabilities of AI and how it can be used to take complex information and explain it in a new way.

In fact, 49% of marketers surveyed believed that there would be stricter parameters from Google when it comes to AI content. In August 2022, it seemed like Google was planning to penalise AI- generated content, but they’ve since done a u-turn (conveniently after announcing their own AI tools) and said that they will be “rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced“.

Of those using AI in their day-to-day marketing activities, 30% believe AI makes them more effective, resulting in more pieces written in a limited time, and 52% believe AI will help with time efficiency.

It’s no surprise that 23% of marketers believe that AI will replace the role or take on a large part of writing tasks — often AI written content is indistinguishable from human-written content.

The challenges lie with getting the AI to produce content in your business’ tone of voice, and risks with the AI “confidently lying” — it’s been known to include incorrect facts in content and occasionally even make up sources.

Because of this, AI still needs a lot of human intervention, but this isn’t the only place humans are needed. Unless you input a high-quality prompt, AI won’t just produce content on its own.

How to Improve Your SEO Strategy

Marketers still see SEO as one of the most important digital marketing channels. In fact, 77% of businesses say that SEO is the most important digital marketing channel to their business and 57% plan to spend most of their marketing budget on SEO in 2023.

SEO is a great investment for any business — here’s how to ensure you don’t waste your budget.

Keyword Research

Start with solid keyword research, keeping your target customer and goals in mind.

Next, decide what type of content will best fit your keywords and phrases. Shorter keywords are best for your homepage, category and product or service pages.

People searching for these simple keywords are often further down the sales funnel and are best served by clear pages that show off your USPs and make it easy for the visitor to convert.

Longer keywords and phrases, often in the form of questions, are better served by blog content. Searchers using Google to ask questions are often higher up the sales funnel, unsure if they want to make a purchase. Your content is what will help them make a decision, but only if it’s genuinely helpful.

Don’t waste your time creating content for keywords that are too competitive or that aren’t being used by your target customers.

Instead of loads of traffic and sales, you’ll get disappointment and sadness. Boo.

On-page optimisation

You don’t have to create brand-new content for every keyword — you can optimise your existing content.

• Check your meta titles and descriptions are relevant to your chosen keywords (so don’t call your homepage “home”)
• Update copy to include your target keywords and variations of them.
• Look at the search results for your target keyword and see what type of content is ranking. You might find that changing the format and making it more user friendly will make a big difference.
  • We saw the opportunity to improve a fairly well-performing blog about starting an Etsy store for a client. By updating the content format to be a step-by-step guide, adding an FAQ and expanding on the original points, we saw a near 300% traffic increase.
• This might not seem like an SEO problem, but making your website more user-friendly can have a big impact on SEO. One of the signals Google uses to rank your website is the average engagement time of your users — and if they’re not finding what they need easily on your site, they’ll be leaving faster.

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Local SEO strategies

If you’re a local business, you’ll want to use local SEO strategies in your digital marketing. Check out this video from our founder Tim all about creating a fantastic local SEO campaign.

 

How to Improve Blog Content to Get More Leads

In fact, 80% of businesses get no leads from their blogs, yet nearly 70% say blogs are very important for earning search traffic. Also, 42% say they’re very important for impressing customers.

It is possible to turn that traffic into leads — you just have to be smart about the content you’re creating and the CTAs you include.

First, consider who your content is for and which stage of the buyer journey those people are at. A CTA asking someone to book a consultation makes sense on a service page – these visitors are nearly ready to convert.

That same CTA wouldn’t work in a beginner’s guide blog as those visitors are likely to be at the start of their buyer’s journey.

Next, look at the content that appears in the search results for your target keyword. The content ranking highly on Google has already done something right, so this will help you see which types of content Google deems the best for searchers using these terms.

If the results are full of rich blog content that includes downloadable resources, calculators and infographics then you will want to replicate this in your own blogs.

If you’re not sold on how blog content can help your business, then consider this — 49% of marketers surveyed believe their blog enhances their brand, and 37% believe their blog helps them develop relationships with new and existing customers.

It’s too valuable to skip. If you haven’t seen much traffic coming to your blog, make sure you review the type of content you’re putting out. If you’re just sharing company “news” you’re unlikely to have much success.

How to Get More From Your PPC

A whopping 88% of marketers find PPC too expensive or ineffective — a story we hear all too often (before our PPC Ninjas get involved, of course).

Businesses know they should be running some paid ads but they don’t know where they should be running them.

This all comes down to your target audience.

Are you tired of hearing us say this yet? Sorry (we’re not really sorry — it’s crucial advice)

Where and how you run PPC ads also comes down to the stage of the sales funnel you’re targeting.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of running ads on the platforms you know rather than the ones best for your audience. Maybe you’ve made purchases in the past due to seeing Facebook ads, but the same might not be true for your audience.

For example, 45% of marketers surveyed saw great results from LinkedIn ads. They could have tried running ads on Instagram and Facebook, but they might not reach their ideal B2B audience.

The same goes for the reverse — you’d be surprised to see an eCommerce brand advertising on LinkedIn, even if their customers use the platform occasionally.

It’s also important to remember to test your PPC campaigns. If you know you’re running ads in a space your audience is spending their time, whether that’s on a social media platform or on a search engine, but aren’t getting the ROI you want, then it could be that your ad content isn’t resonating with your audience.

Take a look at the ads that your competitors are running. You can do this by typing the keyword you are targeting into search and looking at the ads that appear or by searching for your competitors in the Meta Ad Library, depending on where you are running your ads.

This will give you an idea of the type of things you should include. If competitors make their USPs loud and clear, you should do the same. If they’re putting their product front and centre, you should be too.

We’re not saying you should copy what competitors are doing — your ads should be uniquely you — but it helps to see what others are doing and take inspiration from what they are doing well.

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How to Ride the Shoppable Video Platform Wave

A recent trend we’ve seen taking off is shoppable video platforms. Actually, 43% of marketers will invest more in shoppable video platforms in 2023.

So what do we mean by a shoppable video? And which platforms are leading the way?

Shoppable video is video content that allows viewers to buy products instantly, sometimes without needing to leave the video.

It’s becoming popular with eCommerce brands as it allows them to show off their products more engagingly and connect with their target customers on the platforms they’re already using.

In fact, 53% of marketers surveyed said they expect video ads as a whole, not just shoppable ads, will be the most successful form of social media advertising for their business in 2023.

This has led to a rise in “shoppertainment” — videos which offer tutorials, product demos, live Q&As and more. Not only does this help brands make more sales as a direct result of this content, it also helps to build brand awareness and loyalty. If consumers feel like they have a genuine connection with your brand and the people behind it, they’ll be more likely to purchase.

Platforms that use shoppable videos include Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

How to Plan Your Marketing Budget in 2023

If you’re worried about cutting costs due to economic uncertainty, let us put your mind at ease — 71% of marketers aren’t cutting spending despite a looming recession.

If you’re facing budget cuts in your department, ensure you put this stat forward to your leadership team. They might think that most businesses are cutting down on marketing when in reality it’s quite the opposite.

Check out this blog about how to plan your marketing budget for 2023. It’s full of pointers to help you create the most solid budget you can.

Download all the graphs as a handy zip. file here.

What to Read Next

• Learn how to read the data in Google Analytics 4 that will help you get an ROI
• Get to grips with the basics of email automation.
• Find out how to get more organic traffic in 10 steps.