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SEO Best Practices for 2019

Most SEO best practices posts don’t tell you anything new.

The posts usually contain the same old SEO information and the writers simply add the current year to the title.

We want to be different.

This post is going to cover the SEO best practices you won’t hear anywhere else.

Above and beyond the normal advice like “create epic content or use the Skyscraper technique” we’re going to look at SEO insights that really move the needle. 

Let’s dive in.

The Most Important SEO Best Practice of Them All

The SEO industry has a lot in common with the weight loss, self-help, and finance industries.

Every year, millions of articles come out in these spaces with either the same old advice:

“Count calories”

“Write down your goals”

“Save 20% of your income”

Or there’s a hot new fad everyone wants to jump on:

“Do the Keto diet”

“Wake up at 5 a.m. and meditate”

“Buy cryptocurrencies”

In the case of SEO, the common advice would be something like “perform outreach to get backlinks” and the advice of the day might be in relation to the latest algorithm change.

In all cases, you’re choosing the wrong strategy if you dwell too long on either type of advice.

The most important SEO best practice is simple:

  • Experiment with new strategies
  • Analyze your findings
  • Double down on what works

Instead of reading articles about writing epic content, write epic content (or hire someone to do it) and measure the results.

Instead of watching videos about blogger outreach, take the last piece of content you wrote and promote it as hard as you possibly can.

If you’re a business owner who’s on the fence about working with an agency or getting marketing help, stop reading blog posts about “finding the right agency,” pick one and give them 12 months to build a successful campaign.

SEO has much more to do with implementing sound advice than it does being an expert.

Someone with less SEO knowledge but more commitment can rank their websites higher than the competition. Speaking of…

The Easiest Way to Outshine Your Competition

Imagine you’re a local business owner in Cleveland, Ohio who sells plumbing services.

You think you’re in a “boring” business.

With that belief in mind, you don’t go the extra mile when it comes to marketing. Maybe you try writing some SEO content, but you don’t take it any further.

You can’t see past ranking #1 for “Plumbing services in Ohio.” You have modest goals because you run a modest business in a modest industry.

Instead of doing what every other plumber in the city does and wishing for the best, why not go above and beyond your competition — not just in SEO, but building a brand that stands out in your entire industry. 

For local SEO, here are some techniques you can use that most of your competitors won’t:

  • Write detailed blog posts about interesting ways your business connects with related topics, e.g., your new green plumbing system/fighting climate change
  • Add humor and personality to your content marketing like Dollar shave club and Blendtec
  • Create an animated infographic showing how easy it is for normal objects to clog a drain
  • Ad humor and flair to your PPC ads

In your case, look for these two simple and easy ways to differentiate yourself from the competition:

  • Break one of your industries “norms”
  • Use a content marketing technique that requires either too much money or effort for your competitors to even think of copying

Don’t Start with SEO in mind at all

You’ve heard that backlinking is a key piece of the SEO pie, but what if I told you there were websites earning tens to hundreds of thousands of visitors per month without actively backlinking at all?

Enter the Cup and Leaf Blog.

Nat Eliason, owner of Cup and Leaf, Growth Machine, and a fascinating personal blog, has been growing his tea blog by using something called the wiki strategy.

Here’s an excerpt from the post discussing the strategy:

The first principle of the strategy is that you should only write something if it’s going to be the best article on that topic on the Internet. Anything less than that is a waste of time. If there is already a better article on the topic out there, then you’re only adding to the infomania pollution of the Internet by publishing yours, so you must only publish something if it is truly the best article on the topic.

Why does this strategy work?

Because it focuses on the user first and SEO second.

Google is not (just) interested in your website’s authority score. It’s interested in whether or not your website — and business as a whole — serves the needs of searchers.

When it comes to creating content, designing your website, creating a site structure, and more, start with the premise that you want to provide the best user experience possible.

This means:

  • Writing in-depth content that answers readers questions
  • Having a great user experience
  • Adding entertaining elements like media

After you’re done, go back in and use the core SEO techniques.

Understand this Core Behavioral SEO Best Practice

Remember when I said SEO and marketing are a lot like finance, weight-loss, and self-improvement?

These industries have another thing in common:

The need to commit to goals.

Consider adding the commitment to your company’s marketing to your list of goals for 2019 and follow through with it.

SEO can take up to a year before it really starts to kick in  — just like losing weight or saving money.

This year, consider suspending your judgment and spending a full 12 months — either on your own or with the help of an agency — doing a full scale 100% effort digital marketing campaign.

What would that look like?

Research Keywords to Create Content for a Full Calendar Year

You want to have enough keywords to create as many new pieces of content you decide you need for the next 12 months.

How do you decide how many pieces of content to create? Some useful guides are:

Keep these thoughts in mind while you research.

Go In Through the Side Door

In our article about real estate SEO, we talked about how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a key phrase like “Homes for Sale in Minneapolis,” without a big brand with a lot of authority.

We suggested focusing on less competitive long-tail keywords like “Condos for sale in Stillwater, MN. (Stillwater is a suburb of Minneapolis.

Creating unique pages for these types of key phrases can help you grow your organic traffic as a whole over time.

Use This Obvious But Under-Utilized Technique

There are a ton of articles about ways to verify the quality of your keywords.

One piece of advice many business owners — and even SEOs miss — is taking the time to read and analyze the content that appears on page one.

It seems simple and obvious, but reading and analyzing 10 blog posts or website pages requires time, patience, and effort.

Our analysis found the following.

All the posts in the top 10 results talked about what to do, but not the mindset you need to follow through with SEO best practices:

SEO best practice example

 

This led to us creating tips not just about SEO best practices, but the behavior and mindset you need to pull them off.

We also noticed the #1 result came in at about ~1,100 words. Is that really enough word count to explain SEO in detail. We don’t think so, so we doubled the word count with useful information.

Remember the standard best practice that content length matters for SEO:

word count and google rankings chart

 

Follow this Rule When it Comes to Choosing Topics

How do you become an industry thought leader?

How do you build an audience that respects your opinion?

You only talk about topics you know inside and out and avoid everything else.

Artificial intelligence and voice search are hot SEO topics — ones we’re fascinated about and plan on focusing on more in the future.

But, as of this moment, we’re not trying to become the go-to experts about these topics.

Why?

First, because we focus on providing useful content for business owners and marketing employees, we want to write about topics that are the most actionable for our audience.

We’re not discussing A.I. in strategy meetings with potential clients, so why write about it?

Second, as of this moment, we simply can’t write about those topics with a level of authority we’d feel comfortable with.

This is the exact opposite attitude of many other SEO companies and digital marketing agencies.

They might write a paragraph about artificial intelligence in their blog post, but if you reached out to ask them to build a custom A.I. based digital marketing strategy for you, they wouldn’t be able to do it.

SEO is at the peak of competitiveness in 2019. Writing “me-too” content isn’t going to work. Mentioning topics that are hot and trendy, but you know nothing about, won’t work either.

Focus on becoming the best at what you know and sharing it with your audience. This 80/20 approach will reap massive rewards.

Run Your Content Marketing Campaign, Add Experiments Along the Way, and Double Down on What Works

You have your content planned out for the year, but written content can’t be your only content marketing channel.

You’ll have to use a combination of these channels:

  • Social Media
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Visual/Graphic content

The goal and steps are simple — test marketing channels and run experiments until you find a channel worth mastering.

You don’t want to throw spaghetti at the wall forever. When you find a channel that works, do it again.

Model your thinking after this excerpt from a blog post about making $2.5 million dollars with an online course:

“Everyone who’s ever launched a product—a book, an event, a course—has asked this question. It’s the number-one question every amateur entrepreneur wants answers to. It’s the question I asked after launching my first product.

And it is absolutely the wrong question to ask.

I made the mistake of asking this question to Derek Halpern right after my first successful course launch.

I had released a brand-new course for writers called Tribe Writers. Even though I launched it to a list of less than 2,000 people, I sold over 400 courses and made $25,000… in a week

“What should I build next?” I asked Derek.

“Whaddya, stupid?!” Derek said in his most wonderful New Yorker accent.

“Uh, no?” I said.

“Why would you go build something new when you have a product that is selling?”

“…”

“Let me ask you something,” he continued. “Do you really think everyone who needs this product has heard about it yet?”

“Oh, definitely not.”

“Good. And do you think everyone who has heard about it and is going to buy it has bought it? Or do you think more people on your list will eventually buy it?”

“I think more people will buy it.”

“Ok. So why are you talking about another product? Why don’t you just keep launching this product and learning how to sell it better and better?”

Once you find a marketing channel that works for you – double, triple, or quadruple down on it.

Here are some excellent examples of people doing just that.

Neil Patel and Eric Siu

Neil Patel owns an agency called Neil Patel Digital and runs a popular marketing blog.

Eric Siu owns Single Grain, Growth Everywhere, and a SaaS product called Click Flow.

Together, they both host the Marketing School podcast where they create a short daily episode about marketing.

At the end of each episode, they use the same call to action – help them reach 1,000,000 subscribers:

 

marketing school podcast

They’re building towards an end goal.

They started the podcast as an experiment and doubled-down on it when it worked.

What do other marketers do? They either rest on their laurels or try a new strategy.

You should try new strategies – Eric and Neil both use many other marketing channels – but only after you’ve mastered and optimized a channel or technique that’s working.

Track Everything (And Don’t Forget to Do What I’m About to Tell You)

You want to track the success of your marketing efforts, but that’s not the most important part of a successful campaign.

What is?

Let’s (for the last time) take a look at one of the related industries we talked about earlier — finance.

Take a Look at this excerpt from a post titled The Psychology of Money:

[…] managing money isn’t necessarily about what you know; it’s how you behave. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed. The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.

This quote doesn’t just describe finance, but many other industries including SEO.

Add Sub-Head Here

See, it’s easy to nod your head when you work with an agency and they tell you that SEO takes 12 months.

It’s hard to stick with the campaign after you’re 6 months in, spent $15,000 on the campaign, and haven’t got the flood of traffic you hoped for yet.

Facebook ads seem like a great way to promote your content.

But sticking with them when your ads are bleeding money could mean the difference between disappointment and marketing pay dirt.

Our SEO best practices guide contains much less tactical information and much more behavior-oriented and psychological information.

Why? Because winning the SEO game is about what goes on between your ears, not the techniques themselves.

Trust the process long enough to get real insights.

Conclusion

The SEO best practices that work have nothing to do with simple techniques and strategies. Often, they have more to do with comittment, persistence, and long-term thinking.

What do you think?

Are there any SEO best practices you’d like to add?

Have questions about SEO?

Let us know in the comments.

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Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working (and How to Fix That)

Is your content marketing strategy failing?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “content is king,” I could retire.

Content marketing works, but it doesn’t work for everyone. The same can be said for SEO, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing.

Marketing channels work, but you have to make them work. It’s easy to throw money at something like PPC ads, but it’s hard to figure out how to get ROI from them.

Marketing isn’t a magic potion. It’s a tool to help you grow your business.

The good news? You can always fix your content marketing strategy and sometimes it doesn’t take an overhaul — a few simple changes can make all the difference.

Let’s dive into the tips.

The #1 Content Marketing Strategy Mistake 99 Percent of Business Owners Make

Here’s what will happen when you start a content marketing campaign (or hire someone to do it).

You’ll get excited to see all the new content published on your blog.

You’ll anxiously check your analytics and Google the keywords you targeted with your content.

A little time will pass without any major movement. No worries, things will pick up soon. But they don’t.

You’re a few weeks (or months) in and your rankings haven’t budged.

Your traffic is stagnant.

Then you start to worry.

You spent a ton of time working on the content.

Or you spent a lot of money for an agency to do it.

Either way, you’re worried about your return on investment.

Do you wait it out and give your strategy time to work, or do you bail?

The answer to that question makes or breaks your content marketing strategy.

Google is slow 🙁

It can take months, a year, or even multiple years for your strategy to truly take off:

average age of page one rankings chart

Source: Ahrefs

You have to think like an investor.

Content Marketing Creates Exponential Results

Investors know compound interest will make their money grow faster over time.

If you think like an investor and use a lot of resources up front, you’ll reap rewards later.

This means:

At first, your traffic and rankings won’t move much, but after time, they’ll rise up the rankings. Higher rankings mean more traffic and more authority for your website.

When some of your pages start to rank high, they’ll attract backlinks and gain authority on their own.

Why? Because people often Google information to use in their own content and tend to cite results that show up on page 1.

If you write evergreen, in-depth, and useful content, people will link to you naturally, which gives your entire site more authority.

When a single page ranks for one keyword, it will start to rank for other related keywords — these are called LSI keywords. 

A single page can rank for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of keywords.

You can go back in and sprinkle these LSI keywords into your content, which will help it rank better overall.

Stop Doing This Immediately

Marketing experts are aplenty in 2019.

They’re all giving the same advice.

People who take that advice give the same advice so on and so forth.

This becomes a content marketing pyramid scheme.

Everyone copies each other, meaning no one is original or has anything truly useful to share.

Did you develop a strategy based on copying your competitors? It’s time to rethink that.

How? Figure out ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.

One Strategy No One Can Copy

Ayetkin Tank, founder of Jotform, writes a blog on Medium.com

What separates him from other people in the space? He tells personal stories. Look at the story he used to open a blog post about the taste of customers:

storytelling in your content

You can’t replicate someone else’s personal experience. Stories shape the world and humans love learning through stories.

Try to think of ways to inject more narrative into your content strategy.

Do you have unique testimonials and case studies from people who’ve bought your products or services? Use them.

Do you have industry insights you gained from unique experiences? Sprinkle these stories into your content.

Zig When They Zag

Is everyone in your niche writing blog posts? Do more videos.

Are all your competitors on Facebook? Try LinkedIn.

An innovator is simply someone who has tried something other people haven’t.

Always think…what’s the opposite of what your competition is doing. Do that.

It won’t always work, but it helps you think outside the box. With so many businesses creating content, creativity is at a premium.

Kill the Sacred Cows

Fun fact: a lot of conventional wisdom is completely wrong.

People just repeat mantras over and over again until they become accepted.

If you can discredit the “sacred cows” in your industry and provide better solutions, you’ll stand out.

Nat Eliason is a great example of this. In his post about the Wiki Strategy — which includes creating a ton of content with a heavy internal link structure like Wikipedia –, he called out the sacred cow.

He said backlinks and typical SEO optimization aren’t all that important.

According to Nat, as long as you write the best content possible and cite credible sources, you can rank your posts without any backlinks. 

Not only does this fly in the face of typical SEO advice. It’s useful and it works.

You Chose the Wrong Partner

You can work with an agency who can create content for you.

Here’s the problem, though: some of them just aren’t that good.

The marketing waters are…murky to say the least.

Some agencies have good intentions but can’t execute.

Some are flat out incompetent.

Agencies who can help you create stellar content are the exception, not the rule.

Business owners know this, as many of them have been burned by shoddy SEO and content marketing companies.

Fortunately, there are a few simple ways to find out if you’re working with the right agency.

Check Their Own Content Marketing Skills

We kid you not, there are some content marketing companies who don’t do it very well, or often, for themselves. 

Would you take workout advice from someone who is out of shape?

Here are a few tells the agency you’re working with isn’t cut out for the job:

  • Thin content – content length is a ranking factor. If the company you want to work with doesn’t write 1800+ word long guides and posts, run.
  • Unoriginal content – read and analyze the style and voice of the content on agency websites. If theirs is dry and drab, why would yours be different?
  • No proof – if you don’t see reviews, testimonials, and case studies, there’s a good chance there aren’t any

Choosing an agency to help with content marketing is a big decision, don’t make it lightly.

Want to ‘feel us out’? Fill out the form below and get one of our marketing proposals, 100% free:




 

Your Content Marketing Strategy is Off Target

Everything in your content campaign should strive toward an ultimate goal.

This could be traffic.

Or leads.

Or sales.

Figure out the metrics that make sense and measure the success of your campaign by them.

If you notice the strategy is working, consider this: you’re targeting the wrong people, writing the wrong content, or sending out content at the wrong time.

Targeting the Wrong People

We’re an SEO company.

Naturally, we’d love to rank on the first page of Google for the phrase “SEO.”

But if we did, would it be worth the effort to get there?

Someone searching the phrase “SEO” could be doing so for a number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with becoming a lead or a sale for you (not that this always matters, but still).

Instead of trying to rank for broad keywords with many different types of search intent, we focus on keywords that complement broader topics like SEO and content marketing.

Long-tail keywords are more targeted and have a narrower audience, meaning you can create content that better matches what searchers are looking for.

Writing the Wrong Content

Each industry has its own standards for content marketing.

If you’re running a Pizza shop in Boise Idaho, you don’t need to write a 3,000-word treatise on pizza toppings to rank well.

If you’re in a competitive and information heavy industry like we are, you’ll have to write 10x content to rank.

Either way – the lesson is the same. See what content is already doing well, emulate what works, and add more to make yours stand out.

Sending Out Content at the Wrong Time

An awareness funnel shows the process people go through before they trust you enough to become a lead or buy your product/service:

inbound marketing funnel

If you sent the right content at the wrong stage, it won’t have the effect you want it to have.

This is why it’s important to create a digital marketing strategy from start to finish before you start creating content.

You need each stage of the funnel ready to go when the time comes with the right content for each stage.

Your 1 Track Mind Gets You in Trouble

Creating more content isn’t the solution to all your woes.

Some people think creating a bunch of content will magically make their site explode with traffic and get more sales and customers.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Content marketing isn’t just about writing content. It’s about experimenting with different strategies and iterating over time.

Too many marketers and business owners are running on the content treadmill.

It’s time to step away and analyze your results.

Here are some useful tips.

Use This Technique Improve Your Rankings Fast

The easiest way to get more out of your content marketing strategy?

Improve the content you already have.

If you’ve been creating content for a while, odds are you have pages that are ranking well.

Why not just make those pages better?

“Because marketers keep yelling at me to create more content!”

Ok, don’t listen to them. Listen to me.

Make Your Content Visually Stunning and 10x Your UX

Design and user experience play a huge role in SEO and content marketing.

Make sure your website loads lighting fast, has interesting media and use different techniques to make your content appealing.

Look at this example by Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You to be Rich.

His personal finance ultimate guide goes from bland and boring to exciting, not just with content, but design:

content marketing example

Notice the unique way he breaks up with words with design and adds calls to actions:

content marketing calls to action

 

If you can think of ways to go above and beyond with design, you can outshine the competition.

Harness the Power of LSI Keywords

Remember earlier when we told you that your blog posts and content pages can rank for more than one keyword at once?

You can take those secondary – LSI Keywords – and add them back into your content.

If you use a tool like Ahrefs, the process is simple.

Enter the URL for a piece of content into the Ahrefs dashboard and click on organic keywords:

LSI keyword examples

Then, find the keywords ranking from positions 4-20 for that keyword (keywords on page 1 and 2 excluding the top 3 positions):

organic keyword finderUse the keywords you see and:

  • Add them to your body content
  • Add them to headings
  • Create entire new sections based off of LSI keywords

Remix, Rematch, Combine, Create

You can get a lot more mileage from your content by simply…being more creative.

Content marketing is frustrating when you continue to use the same tired strategies and content over and over again.

The good news? There are plenty of ways to reinvent your content marketing strategy, techniques, and the content itself.

Combine Content

Often, you have too many pieces of content competing for attention because they’re too similar.

Better to just combine them. Nathan Gotch with Gotch SEO calls this The Cake Technique:

  • Find similar content assets
  • Choose the most authoritative one
  • Combine the content and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, monster-sized content asset

Recycle Content

There’s no rule saying you only have to publish content on your own website.

There are other websites who will let you republish your work on their platform.

Medium is an example of this. It has an important tool that lets you publish your content on Medium without suffering a duplicate content penalty.

The import feature automatically adds a “rel canonical” tag to the republished version of your post, which lets the search engines know which piece of content to rank.

Remix Content

A single blog post can be turned into…

A video:

 

Several visuals for social media:

social media content recyle

An infographic:

content marketing infographic

And more.

You can use one single piece of content in a variety of ways.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a long game.

You need patience, skills, and lots effort to succeed.

But it can be done. Make these fixes to your content and watch the ranking and traffic roll in over time.

What is your biggest challenge when it comes to creating content for your business?

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How to Promote Your Business in 2020 (with 15 Tips and Examples)

If you’re a business owner, you want to know how to promote your business the right way.

You’re learning more about marketing — especially online marketing — because you know promoting your business online is necessary in 2020.

The problem? There are a million different ways to promote your business and a million different “experts” giving you advice on how to do it.

How do you know which way is the right way?

Before we dive into specifics, let’s talk about the truth you need to understand to promote your business the right way.

Online Promotion in 2020 Means Adding Value for Your Customer

Whatever content you put on the web has to genuinely engage your target customers.

Inform them. Entertain them. Teach them.

Simply putting your customers first relates to SEO in a lot of ways.

When you build a well-designed and user-friendly website because you want your visitors to have a great experience, you get “SEO-credit” in the form of “dwell time” and a low “bounce-rate.”

When you create content people want to share and link to, your site builds authority naturally.

The better your product itself, the easier it is to get positive engagement both online and word of mouth, which helps boost the “engagement signals” Google uses to rank websites.

All of our tips on how to promote your business revolve around putting your customers first.

…But Your Product Has to Follow Through

Here is an aspect of business promotion that goes overlooked — improving your product or service.

  • Have you been going the extra mile with customer service?
  • Are you actively listening to customer discussion and feedback?
  • When was the last time you did a deep analysis of product development?

When you start to hear back from customers online, listen to them. Engage with them.

Take their experiences to heart when they discuss your product, for good or bad.

And when you do improve your product or service, promote the heck out of it. Get that message out. Let the customers know you listened and you acted.

Nothing compares to the reputation of a business that’s sincerely tuned into its customer base. That good sentiment is invaluable in a market that increasingly rewards companies with transparent operations.

Smart digital marketing will take that sentiment, amplify it, and share it with as many potential customers as possible.

#1 – Invest in Your Website

When it comes to promoting your business online, all roads should lead to your website.

Why?

Your website is the one piece of the internet you totally control. You own it.*

Social media can drive engagement with your business, but you’ll never have 100% control of those spaces.

When you invest in your website, you build equity for the long-term. You develop an asset that never stops working for you. You build a home base for your customers.

Build a beautiful, easy-to-use website, and fill it with content that’s useful for your customers.

*(Or you should own it. All too often we’ve seen small businesses pay a monthly fee to a web development company for a custom website. NEVER do this! If you decide to engage an agency for a custom web site, make sure you 100% own it.)

 

#2 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is an example from one of our clients, demonstrating about a 3x increase in organic traffic. Organic SEO will still work well in 2020, but it’s going to get harder as Google (likely) exerts more influence on its results.

SEO continues to be relevant in 2020, and you should still (mostly) care about Google, whose sites receive over 90% of search queries.

It’s true that the SEO game is changing. One SEO expert notes that June, 2019, was the first time when fewer than half of all Google searches resulted in no clicks.

What does that really mean?

Many people nowadays use Google search and then find their answer without actually visiting a website.

Google continues to grow as an answer service rather than as a simple (but massive) index.

Still, organic SEO drives traffic to your site—but your SEO has to be smart. You must be able to identify relevant keyphrases with strong click-through rates.

Organic SEO will build equity in your site, keeping it working for you in the long-haul. That’s why we recommend organic SEO over pay-per-click ads in many cases.

A couple of factors to keep in mind:

  • Your market – what keywords do your customers use when searching for services or products you offer?
  • Competition – Who else is ranking high for your best keywords?
  • ROI – Some industries have searches with more “buyer intent” than others, meaning people use search to make purchasing decisions more in some industries than others

Organic SEO is STILL a great way to promote your business online, but it’s getting harder in 2020 and will continue to do so.

#3 – Reviews

google reviews

Google and other search engines use online reviews as a ranking signal.

You should seek reviews on these platforms from your customers.

Also, reviews are a basic kind of social proof, demonstrating your quality.

To get those reviews, you have to have an awesome product or service.

Here are some quick tips for improving your product/service to get more reviews:

  • Actively seek feedback from your customers and use it to improve your product/service
  • Make sure to ask for reviews after your service has been performed or product delivered
  • Follow up with customers regularly (for long-term customers)
  • Aim to have the best customer service possible (this is not a trivial insight)

#4 – Brand-Building

Marketing expert Neil Patel wrote an article about the future of SEO. In it, he mentioned brand building as one of the top ways to promote your business.

Why is brand building important?

Google trusts established brands.

If you have an established brand, your website has a better chance to rank.

If you create a product or service people rave about, more people will search for your business online by name.

The more searches your business gets by name, the more brand credibility it has.

Focus on putting yourself on the map in your industry with both product/service quality and digital marketing.

 

#5 – Content Marketing

“Content marketing” means producing content (blogs, videos, graphics, memes, etc.) that resonates with your customer base.

Content marketing is NOT writing a blog post about the 10 reasons someone should buy your product. That’s an advertisement (and a bad one, too).

Content marketing is the long game. Imagine it like you’re building a fanbase for your business. You’re building a following of people who are interested in what you say and do.

You build that fanbase using consistent, engaging content.

And remember: “engaging” is determined by your audience!

Content marketing from a CNC manufacturer might mean white papers and case studies. Something a purchasing manager at an OEM would like.

Content marketing for a B2C company like Casper, who sells mattresses and sleep products, looks like this:

An instructional “how-to” video like this is useful content that adds value for your customer. It’s not a straight-up advertisement. It makes your business look good, establishes authority, and keeps customers tuned in.

Content marketing has mixed results for different companies.

This excerpt from Smart Blogger highlights why:

content marketing

You need to plan your content around your business as a whole.

You need to keep the following in mind when creating your content:

  • How familiar is the visitor with you when interacting with a certain piece of content?
  • What type of content is needed to build more awareness so visitors know, like, and trust your company?
  • What are the goals of your campaign – building an email list, increasing brand awareness, increasing conversions for a particular service or product?
  • What problems, pain points, aspirations, and desires are your content addressing?
  • Who does your content need to target (this changes based on the stages of awareness)?

Content marketing is a topic worthy of an ultimate guide of its own.

The bottom line – content marketing is a tool that works for any business when done the right way.Top of Form

Next we’ll look at some specific forms of content – especially what will be most relevant in 2020.

#6 – Optimized Blog

Blogs will continue to be a relevant way to promote your business in 2020.

An optimized, consistent blog is the backbone of your website’s organic SEO.

A solid blog takes time and a regular commitment to research, writing, and revising successful posts.

Here’s what an optimized blog can do to promote your business online:

  • Generate traffic. Blog posts should target keywords that relate to your business and that are frequently searched. Blog posts can be great ways to target longtail keywords.
  • Build an email list for email marketing (see more below). Write engaging and useful content for your audience, and they’ll be more willing to sign up for email communications.
  • Drive conversions. Blog posts cannot simply be advertisements for your business. However, they can drive good traffic to the parts of your website that are designed to convert visitors.




#7 – Video

There are two great frontiers in digital marketing in 2020: video and podcasts. Let’s talk video first.

Look at these video marketing statistics:

  • The 25-34 (millennial) age group watches the most online videos and men spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than women. (Wordsteam)
  • Cisco has projected that more than 80% of all Internet traffic will be video by 2021. (Impact)
  • 45% of people watch an hour or more of video per day (Hubspot)

There are many different ways to promote through video.

You can add a humorous twist and make creative commercials like Dollar Shave Club:

 

You can make “how-to” videos for using your product:

Or, you can leverage video in paid ads to grab people’s attention:

 

video marketing example

 

#8 – Podcasts

Podcasts are becoming the next big frontier in online promotion.

The audience for podcasting is growing significantly.

Check out these key stats from this 2019 Edison Research study:

  • 32% of Americans over 12 listened to a podcast monthly
  • 41% of Americans say they’re listening to podcasts more than they did last year
  • Americans averaged SEVEN podcasts per week during the period studied

What does this tell us?

There is surging demand for podcast content.

Podcasts are becoming the new radio – but much cheaper, easier, and with far greater reach.

If your company can pull it off, a regular podcast can be the center of your content marketing strategy. A good podcast will build an audience and establish your brand’s authority.

Don’t have the resources to do a good podcast regularly?

Few do.

However, you can still promote your business with podcast advertisements.

Many podcasters include advertisements in their regular shows.

If you can identify niche podcasters with audiences relevant to your business, they can be a goldmine for targeted advertising.

#9 – Infographics

Infographics are another engaging medium. Here’s an example from a demo version of our employee referral tool – Referral Factory Pro:

 

infographic

Like all your content, a good infographic should add value for your audience. Teach them something. Show them something useful. Don’t simply advertise your business with an infographic.

Share a good infographic through your online channels – blogs, social media – to engage with your audience and link back to your website.

The bottom line – the more relevant and engaging media you can use the better.

Each of these content marketing channels should lead back to your home base, your website.

Not only is it informative and entertaining for your visitors, but it helps improve important SEO metrics like:

  • Dwell time
  • Bounce rate
  • Total time spent on site

#10 – Email Marketing

If you don’t already do it, you might not think about emails when you think of how to promote your business.

But why should you do it?

For the same reason you should invest in your website:

When you invest in building email lists, you create a long-lasting asset for your business.

According to Hubspot:

  • “More than 50 percent of U.S. respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.”
  • “59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.”
  • “>59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI.”

These stats are HUGE—and only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to email promotion.

Just about everyone today has an email and pays attention to it.

If you can get them to trust and value your brand, they’ll be more than willing to share their email address.

Implement smart (read: not annoying spam emails) marketing, and this list can generate leads and repeat sales.

To build this list, you need compelling, useful content. You need to demonstrate to your audience that you’re worth listening to.

The takeaway: email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business. It’s not going away anytime soon. Invest in it–though it’ll take time to create an email list, it’ll be worth it.

#11 – Social Media Marketing (duh)

Yeah, of course social media plays a big part in promoting your business online.

It IS useful, but don’t come to wholly rely on it and expect it to do all the heavy lifting.

Again, invest in your website first — the piece of the internet you do own.

You can spend a lot of money on social media channels, but you’re not building a long-term asset like you would for a website.

That said….

Instagram is top-notch for visual marketing, so make-up would look great there.

For B2B companies, LinkedIn is your place to be.

You’ve probably said to yourself “I need to promote my business on social media more.”

But which platforms are right for you?

Each comes with its own pros and cons.

Let’s take a look.

#12 – Facebook

Facebook has excellent audience targeting features for paid advertisements.

Facebook’s organic reach – traffic you can get for free – is not so great for businesses.

It’s still wise to have a Facebook page for your business to get likes and reviews, which count as a ranking signal for Google.

Bottom line: You should probably have an active Facebook page for your business.

The best organic activities on Facebook are:

  • Sharing content and media – blog posts, videos, and other forms of content should be shared on Facebook
  • Reviews – encourage people to leave reviews on Facebook and respond to them
  • Engagement – if you have a community based-product, e.g., an education business for parents and children, answering questions and interacting with users works well on the platform

Facebook does tout one of the top social media paid advertising platforms.

Here are some excellent articles on creating Facebook ads the right way:

#13 – Instagram

Instagram works well for products and services you want to show. 

Custom home builders, health and nutrition companies, and landscape design companies are all examples of businesses who should leverage Instagram.

Also, if your target audience is in a younger demographic (<50), odds are they use Instagram.

If you can create quick, punchy, and entertaining/informative videos about your brand, Instagram is a great cross-promotion channel, too.

You can run Facebook ads to both Facebook and Instagram, too, since Facebook owns the company.

#14 – LinkedIn

If you have a B2B business, you should be promoting it on LinkedIn.

Over the years, LinkedIn has improved its features in both paid advertisements and organic reach.

The trend shows LinkedIn is gearing up to become a much more user-friendly and community-oriented platform, shifting away from its old identity as a dry B2b social media company.

While companies like Facebook and Instagram had explosive growth, LinkedIn has played the long game.

LinkedIn has been steadily building its userbase and functionality for years. It’s getting more solid as time goes on. That makes LinkedIn more than worthwhile to continue using in 2020.

Marketing expert, Neil Patel, has been doing a ton of videos on LinkedIn. Always pay attention to the early adopters in marketing trends:

IinkedIn video

Notice the engagement on a simple and short video.

If you can create bite-sized content:

  • Short videos
  • Short excerpts of posts
  • Shared posts with insights

You can reap the rewards of LinkedIn’s algorithms.

Look at the insane amount of reach from one shared article:

linkedin posts

All B2B brands should utilize sharing, curating, and storytelling to promote their business on LinkedIn in 2019.

#15 – Twitter

Twitter engagement varies from industry to industry.

In the content marketing and SEO space, Twitter is a great tool for promoting content about marketing because users engage with it.

Businesses with a heavy focus on media do well on Twitter:

twitter promotion

Online magazines, public figures, marketing companies, authors, news outlets, and personal finance experts are all examples of businesses who can benefit from Twitter.

Local carpet cleaning companies? Not so much.

If your business uses content marketing as the main tool, Twitter is a great place to promote your work.

Think Long-Term

If you can’t think long-term, digital marketing won’t work for you.

Neither will marketing in general.

Digital marketing isn’t a cookie cutter solution.

You have to learn what works — and what doesn’t — after a long period of time.

How long, you ask?

Well, when we work with companies, we tell them SEO and Content marketing takes 12 months before the campaign fully kicks in.

It can take even longer to build a stellar brand and reputation that stands out above all the competition.

It’s counterintuitive. Some of the most important aspects of marketing have nothing to do with the marketing tactics.

They have everything to with your vision, outlook, tenacity, persistence, and willingness to collaborate with other smart companies like digital marketing agencies.

That’s why we call ourselves “strategic partners” to our clients.

It takes more than tactics to succeed online. It takes a level of dedication and patience that doesn’t come easily for everyone.

This also makes digital marketing easy, in the sense that most companies aren’t willing to invest the right time and resources into their marketing.

If you differentiate yourself, you can win in 2019.

Commit to Promoting Your Business in 2019

Above all else, you need to commit to promoting your business online to succeed in 2019.

The biggest marketing secret isn’t a secret at all.

Either on your own or with the help of a smart digital marketing agency like MLT Group, make this your year to invest more in marketing than any year previous.