Whether you’re making a special cocktail, a mixtape for your new paramour, or just trying to get your new digital marketing campaign off the ground, the balance of ingredients matters!
The success of any digital marketing campaign is based on the balance (and quality of the following ingredients: content, social media, and search engine marketing (SEM).
Learn how to get the most of each of these inbound marketing techniques below.
Content Marketing
Creating quality content for your audience is the first step to a successful digital marketing campaign. As we’ve said time and time again: content is king.
Follow the steps below to ensure that your content will keep your readers wanting more and help to move them along their buyer’s journey!
Timely
For your content to mean something to your customers, it needs to be current. Tying content to something recently in the news (for example, our writeup inspired by a recent gas shortage) is a perfect way to make your content timely.
Relevant
If it’s current, then it’s relevant–at least for most of your audience. If not, then develop content relevant to your customers. Think solutions—what problem is your content solving?
Interesting
To make your content interesting you need to write in a conversational tone.
This is not a legal document or a formal college paper, it is content that needs to be accessible and easy to understand. And keep in mind that if you can’t write it yourself, you should hire someone who can!
Educational
What are your customers learning from your content? What can they take away from your content and share with others?
How-To’s and infographics tend to have the best engagement and sharing, because content consumers want to learn to do something, or learn interesting information.
Engaging
Decide what emotion (anger, joy, excitement) you want to evoke from your customers and write your content to engage your customers with the appropriate emotion.
Responsive
Ask for a response from your customers. Do you want them to share the information, click to get more information or print out a timely coupon? Make the call-to-action clear and relevant to what your topic is.
Accurate
Don’t mislead or overpromise. This goes for more than just the content itself, but your meta descriptions, the title of the content, etc.
The more accurate the information displayed in these components of your content, the more likely potential leads will be to click on the content and stay on the content, whether their coming from a social media post or an organic or paid search engine result.
Social Media
Social Media marketing is a great way to tie SEO, local outreach, and customer relationship management together. Social media campaigns typically incorporate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Some companies leverage Instagram and Snapchat followers, as well.
If you want to network at all online, your company needs to be involved in social media. B2B companies tend to focus on LinkedIn and Twitter, while B2C tends to focus on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat because of the direct interaction with consumers.
If your company has any desire to build an online community, be engaged in social media.
Best Practices
There are only two rules to using social media successfully. One – only commit to what you can maintain – and two – avoid controversy. Other than that, enjoy interacting with customers. Respond to their questions and comments, and submit posts that offer value to consumers.
Businesses can improve their outreach by monitoring the best times for posts to garner much-wanted views.
Sometimes messages receive no attention and others gather clicks and interactions for what appear to be no reason. According to various studies, Facebook engagement appears to be higher on Fridays. Posts are more likely to earn a ‘Like’ or a share at the end of the work week. You should experiment to determine your company’s optimum posting time and frequency for each social media platform.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing seems like a vague term, but the important takeaway here is that your digital marketing campaign should include both SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click) efforts.
SEO
Search engines attempt to do one thing – provide value to the search user. SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of helping search engine “spiders” crawl your website.
To oversimplify the process, websites are read and sorted into various filing cabinets. The spiders help label and sort the site content. When a user goes to type in something in the search engine bar, it then retrieves a list of results that match that search. With millions of results available at a user’s fingertips, it is of the utmost importance that your website provides clear value and information that makes it easily standout.
SEO efforts are beneficial to ALL businesses. More than 85% of consumers used the internet to find local businesses. Without a website, how can those consumers find your business? Short answer – they won’t.
The amount of SEO work needed depends on the amount of content the website contains. Some websites need very little work, like the Dallas Taco Stop (personally, I’ve used this example probably too many times. But who doesn’t love tacos?) The website needs very little optimization because there’s nothing to optimize.
Other sites, like Moz (which sells SEO toolkits) have thousands of pages with varying content. Sites like these need more work because more things can go wrong. Links break, topics and trends change, search engine ranking factors shift, and best practices change. In order to keep content fresh and relevant, ongoing SEO work is necessary.
PPC
We’ve discussed the benefits of a well-crafted pay-per-click campaign many times before. We’ve even written guides on the topic!
PPC involves paying Google and other search engines for ad space. This is a tool designed for those looking to drive more online traffic. If your company has a specific buyer in mind, PPC can help you target that specific buyer based on browsing habits.
Even Costco, known for spending very little on advertising, spends somewhere around $15,000 per month on PPC (according to Spyfu and iSpionage)!
Be sure to come up with a budget that will ensure that you make the most of every marketing dollar spent. Additionally, fine-tune your targeting metrics using extensive A/B testing.
Remember that PPC is important, but it’s only one side of the SEM coin!
Wrapping It Up
In case the length of this blog post wasn’t already enough of a testament: a well-crafted digital marketing campaign is a lot of work!
You need to invest time (and money!) into a variety of disparate marketing endeavors, from optimizing your web presence via SEO and PPC to creating engaging and traffic-driving content and social media posts. Make sure that you’ve got the perfect blend of all of those factors and succeed today!