Many of us enter January with a renewed sense of what we can achieve, equipped with the knowledge of everything we learnt last year and determined to use this to succeed. At Relevance, we are here to help you turn that positive mindset into tangible positive actions, transforming your online presence and elevating it above that of your luxury competitors. Below, discover our digital checklist for the new year, as well as some quick wins you can implement to kickstart 2021.
The ultimate LUXURY digital checklist for 2021
1. Sometimes we need to go back before we can go forwards, and this is certainly true when planning out a digital strategy. Take another look at your 2020 luxury marketing plan. What worked? What didn’t? What didn’t you get a chance to try? Use this to build your 2021 digital strategy, centering your plan around key areas of your business that you want to grow.
2. Do your market research and create detailed personas for your audience – even if you did this in 2020, you still need to ensure that these are up to date. This is not a new idea but even more important in 2021 – as technology develops to better understand luxury audiences, it is a case of investing or risking falling behind the competition. At Relevance, we have our own set of UHNW personas developed over a decade of working in the luxury industry. We also recently started working with Audiense to identify even more relevant audiences for our clients, discover actionable insights and inform strategies to grow their businesses.
3. Finding that you struggle to meet your targets? Implement SMART goals as part of your 2021 digital marketing strategy checklist: SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Ensuring your goals conform to these five criteria means that they will be a lot easier to work towards and track.
4. Reassess and update your analytics dashboards to ensure they are set up to help you measure these SMART goals from the offset – this will further encourage you to stick to them.
5. A new year is a great time for a luxury content audit: take a good look through your site and identify content that you can remove, update, correct, or repurpose into something new. Check out which pages are currently your most important – e.g. are driving conversions, engagement and traffic – and be sure to keep these pages up to date. Likewise, pages that are not ranking as well may need more information, clearer wording and better structure. Some of these changes will not take very long and could be the difference between a page two and a page one ranking.
6. Next on your luxury digital checklist for 2021 is to create a varied, multimedia and multichannel content plan. You want to engage with your potential HNW clients on the channel that works best for them, and so you ideally want to make sure your brand is visible on everything from TikTok to Bing – of course, your market research will help you identify the platforms that it is most worth investing in. For social media, ensure your content is backed up by a well-researched hashtag strategy – find hashtags that are relevant, catchy, and don’t have any negative associations.
7. Reassess the digital tools that you currently invest in – are you using them all? Are some draining your budget and not providing ROI? Are there new and better options on the market? Ensuring you make the most of intelligent software could be the key to your success in 2021.
8. Ideally, luxury businesses will be busier than ever in 2021, but this means less time to keep up with admin tasks. Luckily, there are so many ways to automate these tasks – this is something else to consider as part of your digital marketing strategy checklist. Platforms such as HubSpot, which offers a full spectrum of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM software, will save you time and allow you to focus on the things that require your expertise.
9. 2021 is likely to see a continued emphasis on local listings and voice search. So, when considering your luxury SEO strategy, you should prioritise local SEO by honing in on local keywords, keep your Google My Business account up to date, using location pages, and more. To optimise for voice search, you should ensure that content that is optimised for Featured Snippets, as these often feature in voice search results, with question headers written in a way that someone might ask them.
10. Google’s John Mueller spoke at the SMX conference in December about the importance of diversity in SEO, highlighting the need to hear from a broad range of people and gain different perspectives and insights. Mueller said that as well as being the right thing to do, offering a diverse selection of information will help luxury websites function and rank better in search. To work towards this, be proactive about diversity in your workforce and attend and host diverse events.
Quick digital wins in 2021
Compress your images – shaving even half a second off your load speed can make a big difference, both for the reader and for Google.
Advertise on your brand terms to gain No.1 position in Google SERPS and outmanoeuvre luxury competitors trying to hijack your brand name.
Make sure all pages on your site have meta tags. These are what sell the page and make someone want to click through from the search engine, choosing your site out of all the possible options. Make your meta tags explanatory and enticing.
Use Grammarly on your site to ensure you are not making spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, which look unprofessional.
Turn the most frequently asked questions you receive via email, phone, or in person, as well as the ‘People also ask’ questions listed on SERPs, into pages on your website, explaining the answer clearly. This makes for truly useful luxury content that is likely to receive high traffic.
Make sure all of your headings directly relate to the content below them – unrelated or unclear headers can lead to web pages being ranked lower.
Break up your blog posts into social posts, and use them to drive traffic to those blog articles. This is an easy way to create social content.
We hope that the above luxury digital checklist offers plenty of ideas to get 2021 off to a great start. To discuss any of these concepts in more detail, please just get in touch with our team.
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