The best way to start developing a marketing strategy is to reflect back on your business’s successes and failures. By assessing what worked and what didn’t work from past campaigns, you can identify tactics to focus on or avoid in upcoming plans. You can see gaps in your marketing initiatives and point out places where you need to improve.
From there, you can take what you learned to work on developing a marketing strategy that will help you upgrade your online appearance, improve your search rankings, and use your digital authority to grow your business.
Use these tips and tools as you go through your marketing strategy development process.
Start developing a marketing strategy by reflecting back on your successes and failures. Click To TweetReflect Back on Your Past Marketing Strategies
An important part of developing a marketing strategy is using past data and information to get a good look at your current situation and results of past strategies. So begin your assessment by performing the following research.
Check your Alexa Ranking
Start by getting a good look at where your website stands online by checking your Alexa Rank.
Your Alexa Rank is an estimate of how popular your website is. The lower your numeric rank, the more authority your website has. For example, Google has an Alexa Rank of 1, and a lesser-known site, Social Media Examiner, ranks at 4,164. Alexa scores are relative to other sites, and websites that get more traffic and engagement have a better Alexa Rank than sites that have less traffic.
A sign of a good marketing strategy is one that is improving your Alexa Rank. Click & Tweet!
Use Alexa’s Site Overview Tool to check your Alexa Rank and monitor trends. If you see a dip or a rise in your score, look back and see what happened at that time that could have impacted your score. Focus on strategies that led to improvement and avoid tactics that weakened your Alexa Rank.
Review the number of sites linking back to your site
Another metric that offers a good look at your site’s standing online is its number of backlinks. The number of sites linking back to your website says a lot about the authority of your brand online.
The number of sites linking to your site (and the authority of the sites linking back to you) is an important SEO factor. When a lot of high-authority websites link to your site, it positively impacts your SEO and improves your chances of ranking in search results. It also shows that your brand is successfully getting attention, publishing great content, and building authority because more sites are linking to you as a source.
A good marketing strategy increases your number of backlinks. Click & Tweet!
To see how many sites link back to yours, use Alexa’s Sites Linking In tool. This is one of Alexa’s SEO tools that produce a report on all of the sites linking back to your site along with the URL that includes the link. The report also includes the Alexa Rank of the linking sites, so you can rate the site’s online authority and value of the link.
Assess your site keywords
To look closer at your site as you start developing a marketing strategy, you also need to explore the keywords that are currently driving traffic to your site.
Prospects and customers discover brands when they search for terms that relate to the company’s offerings and industry. To make sure those interested buyers find you, your website must be optimized for the terms searchers are using. To find out if you are optimized for the right terms, review your site keywords.
A strong marketing strategy helps your website attract traffic from keywords closely related to your offerings and industry.
To see which keywords are driving traffic to your site, use Alexa’s Site Keywords tool. The report shows which keywords are sending the most organic and paid traffic to your site. It also includes data on the competition, popularity, and traffic for each keyword.
Pro Tip: To see only topic-level keywords that are not tied to branded searches, exclude branded terms using the search filter.
Check your share of voice for related keywords
Your top keywords also offer insight into your authority online. They show you how well you match up against your competitors. Keyword share of voice, or the percentage of searches for a keyword that sends traffic to a website, shows how much control a brand has over a search term.
If a brand has a high share of voice for a keyword, it indicates that most of the people who search for that term end up on that brand’s website. You want to have a large portion of the keyword share of voice for terms that are related to your business and industry.
To check your share of voice for a keyword, you can use the Site Keyword report to view data as it relates to the terms driving the most traffic to your site. Or you can use the Keyword Share of Voice Tool to produce a report on a specific keyword. The report shows the sites with the most ownership over a term’s share of voice so you can compare your own score.
You can also find data about your keyword share of voice as it relates to your competitors using Alexa’s Keyword Matrix tool. Enter your site and up to nine of your competitors. The report will list the most popular keywords that are related to each site and display which site has the highest share of both paid and organic keywords.
These reports offer data that should be included in any simple marketing plan example. From here, you can create plans for improving these numbers and your status in these categories.
Plan Ahead for New Marketing Strategies
Now you know where you stand, and it’s time to create a plan for improving your status. Use the following tactics and begin developing a marketing strategy.
Increase your site’s number of backlinks
Increasing your site’s number of backlinks helps you rank better in search, drive more traffic to your site, and increase your Alexa Rank. So if you need work in these areas, focus on developing a marketing strategy that gets your site more backlinks.
To build and find backlinks, use Alexa’s Competitor Backlink Checker. Run a report on up to 10 of your competitors to produce a list of sites that link to your competitors. This report shows where there may be opportunities for you to earn links as these sites have already linked to your competitors. You can also click on a site to see the exact URL that links to your competitor, giving you more insight into how the site was linked to and how you can earn a similar type of link.
Find guest blogging opportunities
Another way to get links back to your site and improve your site’s online authority is through guest posting. Guest posting not only builds links back to your site (as you typically get a link back in your bio or article), but it also helps you grow your audience as you get in front of new readers.
So when developing a marketing strategy, create a plan for guest posting. Use Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to find guest blogging opportunities. Enter up to 10 websites that are either competitors or share an audience similar to the one you want to attract, and run the report. The tool will find similar sites and produce a visual map of sites that have an audience you want to reach and would, therefore, be a great target for your guest blogging outreach.
Target keyword opportunities
To grow your traffic and increase readership, you need to drive more people to your site through organic search. You need to help audiences land on your site after searching for terms that relate to your brand, offerings, and industry.
So as you are developing a marketing strategy, create a plan for targeting keywords that will lead your ideal customer back to your site.
To identify keyword opportunities, use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. Enter a keyword that is closely related to your industry, products, or services. Then review the report to identify variations of the keyword you could target. Look for terms that have a high popularity score (which indicates that users are frequently searching for that phrase) and a competition score that is within your competition range (your site has enough authority to rank for the term). The Keyword Difficulty Tool will make keyword discovery faster, helping you to identify terms you should target in your new marketing plans.
Improve your website’s SEO
Finally, all good marketing strategies should include plans for improving your website’s overall SEO. When your site is properly optimized, you will show up more often in search, drive more traffic to your site, increase your Alexa Rank, and connect with more customers.
To determine where you should focus your SEO improvement efforts for the upcoming year, analyze your site to look for errors that are holding you back and opportunities that could improve your rankings.
To produce a full review of your website with just one click, use Alexa’s SEO Audit Tool. Enter your site to receive a comprehensive report on your current SEO standings. The report grades major SEO categories and also includes detailed instructions on how to make changes to improve your grade and make your website more SEO-friendly.
Developing a Marketing Strategy Using Alexa Tools
This post includes a marketing strategy examples list that helps you reflect on past marketing tactics and plan for the future. These tactics are important if you plan on developing a marketing strategy that will build your online authority and grow your business.
To get all of the tools included in this post and simplify the process of creating a marketing strategy for the new year, sign up for a free trial of Alexa’s Advanced Plan. It includes all of the tools mentioned in this post along with other powerful SEO, keyword, and competitor research and planning tools.
