Category: content marketing

What is inbound marketing?

If you’re a business owner or marketing employee at your company, you’ve heard the term before.

You get the gist of it from the name — inbound marketing is the process of attracting people to engage with your business.

It sounds great in theory, but you’re curious about how it works in practice.

It’d be great to not have sales making cold-calls and scouring LinkedIn for leads.

We’re sure you’d love it if your phone was ringing off the hook or your inbox was filled with requests for your product or service.

In the back of your mind, however, you’re wondering if inbound marketing can work for your business.

You want to make sure you’re getting a return on investment for your marketing.

You’d be willing to invest if you were sure there were tangible results you could expect from an inbound marketing campaign.

In today’s post, not only will we answer the question, “What is inbound marketing?” but we will give you a full understanding of the process from A to Z.

How Inbound Marketing Works

Have you ever read a blog post about a topic, service, or product you’re interested in? Especially one you found through Google search?

Have you ever signed up for an email list where you receive something free in exchange for providing your email address?

Then, later on, you might see advertisements from the same company on Facebook.

Since you’ve seen the company before or are familiar with the brand, you might click through to the website through that ad.

At some point, you’ve purchased a product or service from a brand you first experienced online by watching or reading their content.

That’s inbound marketing in a nutshell.

It’s the exact opposite of the old form of marketing where businesses spent as much money as possible on advertisements to blast their message to consumers as many times as possible.

Why the shift from outbound to inbound.

Here’s what the numbers say:

• 90% of searchers haven’t made their mind up about a brand before starting their search (Source: Hub Spot)
• Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
• 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders (Source: 2018 Demand Gen Report)
• 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Source: 2016 Demand Gen Report)

We live in a world of a massive number of choices. We have stronger filters to ignore ads from companies trying to force their message on us.

Instead, we search for the products and services we truly want. And we search for them on our time. We’ve become more shrewd with our buying behavior — reading reviews, buying from companies who educate and entertain us first, and using the internet to make more informed buying decisions.

There’s still room for advertising, but at some point, you’ll have to market yourself well on the internet.

So how do you create this inbound marketing strategy?

Here’s the step by step process.

Step 1 – Understand Your Audience

Quick question for you — what’s your target audience?

Do you know their hopes, fears, and desires?

Do you know their demographics?

Have you been keeping an eye on the channels they use to interact with businesses in your industry?

Before you move into the next steps of the process like keyword research, content marketing, SEO, social media, email marketing, and more, you want to have a great idea of who your target audience is so you can create the right campaign.

Here are some great customer research tips you can use to define your target audience.

Use What You Know

If you’ve been in business some time you know some facts about your target audience.

Brainstorm the following and get the answers to these questions on paper:

• What are the current demographics of your target audience (here’s a great article on finding them if you don’t know)?
• What are the pain points and problems your product can solve for them?
• Can you name some of the goals and aspirations your product can provide them?
• How does a member of your target audience see themselves?

Using this brainstorming technique can give you some raw information to make a more detailed customer profile or avatar.

Go Straight to the Source

Sometimes the best method for discovering the needs of your target audience is asking your current customers about your product or service.

If you have an email-list with contacts for current clients, send out a survey with questions related to why they bought your product or service and how it can be improved.

Get on the phone with your current customers and ask them about their needs.

Track every review for your business and comment on your social media profiles and engage with those customers to get deeper insights.

Keep an Eye on Your Industry

There are many ways to keep tabs on the pulse of customers in your industry.

You can go to these sources to find out what customers like and dislike about the products or services in your industry.

Quora

Quora is a question and answer social media website.

You can search for terms based on your industry and get great information about what people in your target audience want and need:

Amazon

Amazon isn’t just one of the biggest retailers in the world, it’s one of the largest qualitative research resources you can find.

Search for products similar to yours on Amazon (if you have a service based business you can find books about the industry).

Read the reviews, especially the 3-star ones. Why? Because 3-star reviews strike the perfect balance — they’re not overly negative or positive. Someone who leaves a 3-star review has honest insights to share.

Forums and Facebook Groups

Forums and Facebook groups provide unfiltered insights you can use to understand your customers.

This is great for industries that require a lot of technical knowledge like welding supplies. In that example, you could search for metal working forums and find out which processes and parts are working well (or not) and why.

Often when searching across the industry landscape, you can find useful information. You can even go as far as swiping the actual words people use to describe your product or service and add it to your marketing messages

Create a Customer Avatar

After you’ve done your due diligence, you can compile all your customer research into a profile you can use for your marketing.

A customer avatar is a detailed description of a member of your target audience. You create a description of the person including information like their interest, job, age, gender, etc

Creating this profile crystallizes who you’ll be talking to in your messaging. You need to have a clear picture of your target audience before you create content for them and know which channels to place and promote your content to attract the right type of visitor.

Here’s a great guide on creating a detailed customer avatar.

Step 2 – Research for Content Marketing and SEO

We recommend content marketing and SEO for each business we work with.

You can use other marketing channels, but these two are core elements of any successful inbound campaign.

Content marketing is the process of creating content to attract people in your target audience to your website. Blogging and page content are the main channels used for content marketing through SEO, but the term covers a broader range.

Search Engine Optimization goes hand in hand with content marketing. SEO is the process of adding relevant information about your product or service to your website to rank its pages on Google.

Both activities combined can increase the organic traffic to your website.

If you can convert some of that traffic into leads, content marketing, and SEO starts to work as an ‘automated salesman’ that draws people to your site and through the awareness stages of an inbound marketing campaign.

Source: Hubspot

After you have a great idea of the wants, needs, and interests of your target audience, you can research the phrases they type into Google. This helps you create content that will rank in search engines for terms people use to find your product or service.

Keyword Research

How do you find the right keywords?

There are many different processes and tools, but some core strategies when looking for keywords are:

• Relevance – You want to find keywords relevant to your business. Keywords that sound good and get a lot of traffic are worthless without the right intent.
• Volume – Keywords have a monthly volume – or an average number of searches. If a keyword sounds good to you, but the data says the volume isn’t there, try a different keyword.
• Competitiveness – Keywords with higher search volume are usually more competitive, meaning you’ll need better content and more backlinks to rank for those words.

Keeping these items in mind, you can use a combination of brainstorming and competitor research to find keywords to use.

Brainstorm Using Keyword Research Tools

There are tools that help you find important keyword information.

These include the Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Uber Suggest, and more.

Take all of your different product or service offerings and brainstorm potential topics and put them into a keyword research tool.

These tools will often provide recommendations and suggestions based on your input.

Here are some great deep dive guides on keyword research:

• Keyword Research for SEO: A Definitive Guide
• How to Do Keyword Research – Hubspot
• Moz Keyword Research Guide

Competitor Keyword Research

One of the simplest ways to find out which keywords work well is finding the terms your competitors already rank for.

Then, you can create better content and promote it more, which can help you leapfrog them on search engine results. 

You can plug your competitor’s websites into these tools and find great keyword information.

Here are some great competitor research guides:

• Competitor Keyword Research for SEO
• SEO Competitor Analysis: Discover Your Competitor’s Keywords

At the end of the process, you should have keywords based on the main topics, products, and services of your business.

You also want to have keywords based on sub-topics and variations of your main ones to use for landing pages and blog posts.

The structure you’ll use for your sitemap should look something like this:

You will want to have a complete sitemap for the main pages and other landing pages you want to create for your site.

You’ll assign keywords to each of those pages.

Then, the rest of your keywords can be used as part of your blogging strategy.

This Sounds Like a Lot of Work Doesn’t It?

We want to provide useful information regardless of whether or not you work with us.

That being said, content marketing and SEO can be an arduous process.

If the process we’re showing you looks promising, but you want a helping hand, fill out the form below for a site audit and marketing proposal:

Submit

Step #3 – Put the Channels and Tools in Place for Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

Once you have the research done for content marketing and SEO, you need the right tools to implement the campaign and decide if you’re going to use other channels to market your business.

Let’s start with the bedrock tools and channels you need for content marketing and SEO.

A Technically Sound, Responsive, and Built to Convert Website

You need to have a high-performing website because search engines use user-experience as part of their algorithm

This means your site needs to meet these standards

• Fast loading speed – If your site is slow, users will leave quickly and search engines track this behavior with a metric called bounce rate
• Mobile responsive – Your website needs to look appealing on a mobile phone.
• No broken pages – Broken pages disrupt the flow of your website, which causes users to leave as well
• Site architecture – Your website pages need a clear and logical structure

Also, your website should be built to covert, meaning you have multiple areas of your site to turn casual browsers into e-mail list sign-ups or get them to contact you.

You can use embedded forms:

Via- Shopify

Pop-ups:

Via- Optin Monster

Strategically placed calls to action:

There’s no use having tons of traffic coming to your site if you can’t convert it.

Here are some great in-depth guides on conversion optimization

• Moz Conversation Rate Optimization Guide
• Conversion Optimization Made Simple
• Full Wikipedia Entry – Conversion Rate Optimization

Each page of your site should have an intention behind it. Consider the behavior you want visitors to take on each page when creating design and content for them.

Tracking and Reporting

You need data to make informed decisions for your inbound marketing campaign.

There are tons of tracking tools out there, but here are some metrics you need to track and best-known tools to use.

Traffic

Your website needs to track information about the traffic coming to it. Google analytics is the go-to software for this.

It comes with lots of useful information you can use to guide your campaign.

Some great guides on understanding Google Analytics are:

• Google Analytics Training via Google

• Google Analytics: a Guide To Setup, Track, and Measure Results

• A Complete Guide to Google Analytics

You can also use Google Search Console for additional analytics insights including impressions, click through rates and some keyword ranking data.

Check out these guides on getting the most out of Google search console:

• Google Search Console: The Definitive Guide
• Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Console

Keywords

You want to track how well your keywords are ranking over time.

This helps you spot which terms are doing well and which ones need some TLC to improve their rankings.

These companies provide the gold-standard in keyword tracking:

• Ahrefs
• SEM Rush

Other Tools

If you focused on just the tools above, you’d know the bulk of the information you need to optimize your campaign over time.

There are a plenty of others you can use, however, and smart SEOs have put together some great curated resources:

• SEO Tools: The Complete List
• 25 Simple and Free SEO Tools to Instantly Improve Your Marketing

A System to Nurture Visitors and Leads

Once you attract visitors to your site with content marketing, SEO, and other inbound marketing channels. You want a system in place to nurture those leads, engage them, and turn them into sales.

The most common lead capturing and nurturing system is email marketing software. Companies like MailChimp, Convertkit, and Aweber work well. You can also use more advanced tools like infusion soft, click funnels, and Ontraport that collect emails but also handle payment processing and other sales features.

You can also create a system where you entice visitors to request to learn more about your service, set up a demo, or a free strategy session.

Either way, you are drawing visitors into a marketing funnel.

The goal of a marketing funnel is to engage with people further after their first visit.

You want to capture their information and continue the conversation.

Here are some great guides on creating marketing funnels:

• Email Funnels 101

• How to Use Email Marketing Funnels for your Business

These are the basic tools and systems you need to get your inbound marketing campaign started.

There are a bunch of other channels you can use to pour ‘gasoline on the fire’ and get additional traffic.

However, the bottom line – Your business will usually get the most long-term benefit from a content marketing and SEO campaign.

Other Inbound Marketing Channels and Platforms

There are other channels and platforms you can use for inbound marketing.

Let’s walk through each and talk about how they work and whether or not they can work for your business. 

Paid Advertisements

Paid advertisements can work well when combined with content marketing and SEO.

You want to use paid advertisements to catch people’s attention in a way that’s not intrusive.

Nobody is going to respond to your ad if it’s nothing more than a half-hearted attempt where you basically shout out “buy my product!”

Smart advertisers use paid advertisements to capture attention based on the context of the user’s experience.

What do we mean?

If someone is searching for something on Google, this means they have the intent to either learn more or buy your product.

In this context, it makes sense to send them to a landing page with an offer for your product or service with a paid ad.

If someone’s on social media or browsing websites that display banner ads, they aren’t necessarily in the mood to buy right then and there, especially if they aren’t familiar with your brand.

In this context, you want to use ads to provide value and get people familiar with your brand.

Let’s say someone has visited your website and now you want to remarket them with an ad. You could be more aggressive here since they’ve already shown some interest.

Let’s look at the platforms and the best context to use them in.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a pay per click platform where you can display ads based on keyword data.

Here are some in-depth articles on using Google Adwords:

• How much are you charged for a click on your ad words ad?
• Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords
• How to Use Google Adwords for Your Business (Beginner’s Guide)

Google Ads is best for products and services that users show buyer intent for. This means you should only run Adwords campaigns based on phrases for people who seem more ready to buy.

Someone searching for “Size 12 Blue Nikes” is a great example.

Google Ads works well for business owners who want to get a pretty accurate direct ROI number. It’s also great if you are looking to get results a bit sooner as SEO and content marketing take months to start showing great results.

Google Display Network

The Google Display Network allows you to show banner ads on other people’s websites who participate in the Google Adsense program.

If you see a banner ad like the one above, the business is using display network ads.

The only problem with these types of ads is…nobody pays any attention to them. 

So why use these type of ads at all?

These ads only work if you have something valuable to give away or useful information that might pique casual browsers interested like a free white paper

Direct advertisement of products doesn’t work well for banner ads.

Facebook/Instagram Ads

Facebook ads can work quite well if you do them right. Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can post ads to both platforms at once.

With Facebook ads, you want to provide value up front to build awareness for your brand and get people to engage with you.

This is why a lot of companies offer something free in exchange for an email address. This gets casual browsers into their funnel so these companies can further educate and persuade them.

Video works well on both platforms as well because people are used to seeing videos pop up on their feed and it’s an “easy to digest” form of communication.

Here are some excellent guides on Facebook Ads:

• Facebook Ad Specifications (From Facebook)
• How to Create the Perfect Facebook Ad

• How to Set Up an Effective Facebook Ad Campaign

These platforms have another great feature you can use to directly sell to customers – remarketing ads.

Remarketing ads show advertisements to people who’ve interacted with your brand already.

You can create remarketing ads for people who have:

• visited your website
• watched one of your videos
• liked your page
• interacted with your posts

You can get advanced with remarketing and create all sorts of ads based on what the user has already done, e.g., creating a specific ad for people who read a single blog post on your site.

Here are some great guides on remarketing advertisements:

• The Ridiculously Awesome Guide to Facebook Remarketing

• A Comprehensive Guide to Start Facebook Remarketing in 2018

Other Advertising Platforms

Google and Facebook are the two major players when it comes to paid advertisements.

You can expand your advertising efforts across these platforms too.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads are best for B2b Sales.

Useful guides:

• How to Use LinkedIn Ads to Generate Sales
• The Complete Guide to LinkedIn Ads

Youtube Ads

If you’re handy with a camera or have access/budget for studio time, you can create amazing ads for Youtube

Useful guides:

• 123 Point Youtube Advertising Guide
• 2018 Youtube Ads Guide

Twitter Ads

Again, you’d want to provide useful and entertaining info on this platform as people on Twitter don’t have buyer intent.

Useful guides:

• Twitter Ads for Beginners
• How to Set up a Successful Twitter Advertising Campaign

Organic Social Media

Organic social media means social media promotion without the use of paid advertisements.

There are many different methods you can use for social media marketing.

Before we get into those, here’s our #1 tip – be social on social media. 

Social media isn’t a megaphone for your products or services.

It’s not just about likes, comments, and shares.

It’s about engagement.

The best marketers use social media to actually talk to other human beings with the primary purpose of connecting with them.

We cover social media marketing in a bit more depth here, but you can use social media in lots of cool ways like:

• Running contests
• Repurposing blog content – photos, infographics, video
• Creating groups based on the industry
• Creating polls and quizzes
• Hosting live sessions to answer followers questions
• Promoting blog content and interacting with commenters

This is just a short list of the infinite ways you can use social media.

Remember, the tactics aren’t as important as the goal – engage, engage, engage.

Email Marketing

Email marketing helps move casual browsers through the stages of awareness.

You get someone to sign up to your email list and then create messaging that informs and entertains them. The messaging should become more promotional over time.

The bottom line – you want people to know, like, and trust you to get them to buy from you.

The time cycle for how long this takes depends on the business, industry, and audience, but you have to get the person on the other side of the screen ready to take the next step.

There are different stages to the email marketing process to be aware of.

List-Building

For your e-mail list to be successful, you need to get people on it.

In short, you want to generate traffic to pages on your website with e-mail sign up forms.

You can do this in a number of ways.

Here are some guides that go in-depth about the process:

• List Building: How to Build an Email List in 2018

• List Building 101

List-Nurturing and Copywriting

Once someone signs up to your list, you need to create the right messaging to compel them to take the desired action.

This usually starts with creating an engaging “welcome email” and sending messages with smart copywriting that persuades them with each message you send.

Check out these guides on messaging and copywriting:

• GrowthLab’s Ultimate Guide to Email Copywriting
• How to Write a Marketing Email
• Tips for Email Based Lead Nurturing

Making the Offer

Eventually, you’re going to need to make the offer to sell your product or service and get people to buy.

There are many ways to lead to the ultimate sale.

These guides can point you in the right direction:

• How to Write Emails that Sell
• Selling with Email: How to Spot the Close of the Deal
• Selling on Email With Storytelling Techniques

Tying it All Together

The tools, channels, techniques, tips, and tricks you can use for inbound marketing are endless.

They do, however, all move people through a similar process.

These are called the stages of awareness

Each stage has different goals and you need to know which of your resources works best for each stage.

We broke down the actual tools and techniques you need to use in each of these stages because we felt too much of the opposite occurs — people tell you the stages, but not the tools.

With this overview understanding and the insights and resources we provided, you should have everything you need to start putting together your inbound marketing campaign.

What questions do you have about inbound marketing? Let us know in the comments.

When you Google “digital marketing Minneapolis,” you’ll see a wide range of results. How do you know which digital marketing agency is right for you?

You’re here because you’re curious about how digital marketing can help you grow your business.

As a business owner or decision making employee, you know you should be marketing yourself online, but you have questions.

Do you need search engine optimization (SEO)? Do you need to run ads on Google? Should your site be mobile optimized?

Should you be on social media? If so, which channels? Does social media marketing matter in your industry? 

Perhaps the most important question is what will digital marketing actually do for your business?

You want to take your business to the next level, but you want to make sure you’re getting a return on your investment.

Before we dive into specific answers to each question, let’s start with this premise.

Digital Marketing is a Tool to Grow Your Business

At MLT group are digital marketing goals for you are simple.

We use digital marketing to help you find more customers, increase your brand awareness, and engage your visitors.

Instead of starting with digital marketing tactics and going back towards the needs of your business, we start with your business goals in mind and create digital marketing solutions to meet your needs. 

The best digital marketing campaigns are customized because one size fits all solutions don’t work in business on or offline.

In our guide, we’ll discuss some of the individual components of digital marketing and give you the insights you need to make an informed decision for your business.

Why Digital Marketing is a Necessity for Minneapolis Business Owners

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a second.

He or she is looking for a product or service you offer.

What do they do next?

Do they grab the nearest phone book? Look in the newspaper?

No. Either on their desktop or phone, they go to searching for information online.

They go to Google and enter the service or product you offer into the search box. When they see the results, do they find your business? 

This is someone with either the curiosity or intent to buy your product or service.

From a logical standpoint, it seems like a no-brainer to display your business in front of people who are already looking for what you have to offer, right?

If the idea of putting your products and services in front of people who are actively searching for them isn’t enough, consider some startling pieces of data:

• 93 Percent of online experiences start with search engines
• 50 percent of users who perform a local search on their smartphone visit a physical store within one day
• 87% of smartphone owners use a search engine at least once per day

These numbers suggest that core digital marketing strategies are needed in 2018. Let’s talk about each of the individual components that can go into your strategy.

Digital Marketing Strategy # 1 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Consider search engine optimization the backbone of any digital marketing campaign.

Google accounts for a large amount of traffic on the web. SEO puts your business front and center for people looking for the services you provide.

If you search for a product or service online, chances are the results you see didn’t make it to the top of the list on accident.

SEO uses a number of different techniques. When you combine them, your website can begin to climb the search engine rankings.

On-Site Seo

On-site SEO is the process of optimizing your website by entering researched keyword data into your sites code, content, and link-structure.

Effective on-site SEO combines dozens of techniques implemented on just a single page of your website such as:

• Adding keywords to your title tag
• Creating keyword rich content
• Adding keywords to photo alt tags
• Adding keywords to headings
• Providing relevant links to your pages
• Creating a great overall user experience

Just take a look at Brian Dean’s infographic, the anatomy of a perfectly optimized page:

Not only do these techniques need to be used on a single page of your website, rather for each page of your website.

This is where working with a smart digital marketing company comes in. At MLT group, we take the guesswork out of your hands and do the heavy lifting to make sure each page of your website makes Google go gaga for your Minneapolis business.

On-site SEO is just the beginning. You must also use different techniques to show the search engines why your site deserves the top spot.

Link-Building

Google uses links to determine how much ‘authority’ your site has.

It considers a link from another site to yours as a vote for the quality of your information. In digital marketing terms, we call links from another site to yours ‘back-links’

To increase the authority of your website, you want to get as many backlinks from quality sources as possible, because they increase two important metrics:

• Domain Authority – This metric measures the authority of your entire website
• Page Authority – This metric measures the authority of a single page on your website

Take a look at our DA and PA shown from the Moz Backlink Researching Tool:

犀利士
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To gain our current level of authority, we had to earn links from 107 different sources. 

Link-building is an art form, one that doesn’t come easily to business owners with little digital marketing experience.

We’ve built a network of reputable sources in various industries to help our clients gain the links they need to boost their authority and climb the search engines.

How does it work? Sparing you the nitty-gritty details, we reach out to our network to find reputable places on the web that feature businesses like yours.

If you work with us, you can focus on running your business while we focus on getting the right websites to notice it.

Research, Tracking, and Strategy

Research, tracking, and strategy are important before during and after you launch your SEO campaign.

Pre-launch, you need to make sure you’re using the right phrases in important areas of your website.

For example, you may consider yourself a ‘maid service’ but the phrase ‘house cleaning’ might receive more searches per month.

Once you find the key phrases you want to use, you’d perform on-site optimization and begin your link-building campaign.

You’d want to track the following important metrics to measure growth over time:

• Positions of target keywords – Even a well-optimized page will take time to reach page 1 on Google, so it’s important to know where the pages on your site stand in the beginning. This helps set expectations and keep you focused on long-term growth.
• Traffic – You’d expect to see your traffic numbers grow over time. Quarterly measurements provide solid data.
• Traffic sources – Traffic can come direct, via search engines, from social media, or from people clicking on links to your site from other sites.

MLT Group Provides ‘Done for You’ Tracking and Reporting

We consider an SEO campaign mature after 12 months and measure the progress of important key metrics each quarter.

We provide our clients quarterly ‘scorecards’ giving them an easy to understand snapshot of their site’s SEO progress.

Imagine you’re working with us on an SEO campaign after 12 months.

You check your scorecard to find many of your services ranking on page one.

Your traffic has improved quarter over quarter, meaning more leads and customers to your business.

You notice a service doing well but in need of a little love. What do you do? You simply speak with one of our digital marketing specialists and we alter your strategy, implementing several micro-techniques you’re unaware of but get the results you want.

That’s the power of working with a digital marketing company. 

Keeping up with your digital marketing on your own and running a business is a tall task. Why not work with a professional?

Case in point, Search Engine Optimization is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digital marketing.

Digital Marketing Strategy # 2 – Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is different than search engine optimization (SEO).

With SEO, you can perform techniques on your own or work with a Minneapolis digital marketing agency to get traffic through your website from ‘organic’ search rankings.

Organic simply means you didn’t pay for the search results. As we discussed earlier, Google uses a variety of techniques to choose which pages show above others.

Search engine marketing involves the use of paid listings, which can come in many forms.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Take a look at this search engine results page (SERP).

At the top, you’ll see the paid listings (PPC), move further down and you’ll see the organic listings:

You’re probably wondering how pay per click advertising works in comparison to organic search techniques.

Here’s the way to look at both.

Pay per click advertising does work, but it isn’t as effective as ranking your website using SEO.

Why? Because the click-through rates are much lower.

Source: Modern Marketing Partners

Think of your own user experience. How often do you click on advertisements?

With PPC advertising, you can spend your way to the top of the results. With organic search, you must earn your spot, which is why they’re more trustworthy and convert much better.

The benefit of PPC advertising over organic SEO is the fact that PPC can provide instant results. 

Since an SEO campaign can take up to 12 months to mature, a PPC campaign can help you get traffic, leads, and sales in the short term. Many companies opt for using PPC while their organic results improve. 

How Pay Per Click Advertising Works

Pay per click advertising involves bidding dollar amounts (per-click) to get your business to show up in paid listings.

You can create a PPC campaign and set metrics like:

• Daily budget
• Bid amounts (the highest you’re willing to spend to receive a click for ‘x’ term)
• Ad groups – these groups contain the keywords you want to target for the campaign

Each campaign will have a set daily budget limit, and you pay each time someone clicks on one of your results that appear for one of the search keywords you targeted.

The highest bidders get the top results. You must decide whether the terms you want to target are worth the cost-per-click (CPC).

This can be based on the price of your product, the number of leads you can convert to sales, and potential conversion rate of the page you send the ads to.

If you do use a PPC campaign, the following techniques will help them perform their best.

Keyword Research

For your campaign to be effective, you must make sure to use the right keywords as part of your PPC campaign.

How do you find the right keywords?

A few techniques are:

• Competitor research – You can use tools like SEM Rush to see where your top competitors are spending their money on ads
• Google Keyword Planner – The Google Keyword Planner is a tool provided by Google to give you important data such as average bid amount, traffic volume, and competition (example below)
• Brainstorming variations – Once you have a sample of keywords you find through the keyword planner, search for variations of those terms to see if they are viable too

Implementation

You can then use this data to come up with a comprehensive PPC plan.

After setting your target keywords and budget amounts, you can run a test period (one to two weeks) and check the results to answer important questions like:

• How well are the ads converting to leads/sales?
• Are you spending too much/too little for your target keywords?
• How does your click-through rate stack up against your impressions?

These insights provide information you can use to alter your strategy over time.

If this sounds like a tall task, you can rely on a Minneapolis digital marketing agency like MLT Group to handle the process from start to finish.

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Digital Marketing Strategy #3 – Content Marketing

Content marketing goes hand in hand with SEO 

Many smart SEOs know the benefits of a solid content marketing campaign.

The search engines want to provide the best results to users and it analyzes content to help make that decision.

Content marketing comes in many forms, but it’s the process of creating content that gives users what they want, is optimized for search, and persuades your readers to take the desired action.

So what forms of content does content marketing encompass?

• Page content – From homepages to category pages to service/product pages and more, each page on your site can be used to attract visitors
• Blog posts – You can use your blog to cover a wide variety of topics related to your industry
• Social media – We’ll discuss in-depth soon, but social media can be an effective content marketing tool to build your brand and even convert casual visitors into loyal audience members or customers
• Email marketing – Email is another useful channel to communicate with your audience, share informative content, offer promotions, and more
• Media – Videos, infographics, photos, and all forms of media count as content marketing even though they aren’t in written form

These are just a few examples of content marketing. It’s an all-encompassing term that covers any aspect of communicating with your audience.

If you decide to work with us, we can explore each option in-depth. For now, let’s talk about how to create a successful content marketing campaign regardless of the medium.

How to Create An Awesome Content Marketing Strategy

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a second.

What impression will they have about your business when visiting your website?

Does your content answer their burning questions and address the problem they need to be solved?

Can they find the information they need quickly?

Will they stick around to check multiple pages of your site because they’re informative and persuasive?

Is your offering clear? Do they know why they should choose your business over the competition?

Do they feel like you understand not only their needs but the means with which they like to interact with your type of company?

Is it easy for them to engage with you?

These are the questions you need to answer before you create any piece of content.

Once those questions are answered, you can create a content marketing campaign that works.

Content Marketing With MLT Group

When you work with MLT Group, we collaborate with you to understand both your business goals and the target audience you serve.

Then, we conduct research to decide the best types of content to create, which channels to use, and a strategy to continue drawing in new visitors while keeping your current audience engaged.

Instead of treating content as an afterthought, we consider it a core piece of your digital marketing strategy.

Without content that reflects your brand, engages visitors, and works toward the desired result, you’ll end up with wasted time, effort, and money.

This is why choosing the right digital marketing agency in Minneapolis is important. You need to know they have the expertise and resources to help you grow your business with content marketing.

Our company puts you in touch with one of our SEO specialists to create the perfect campaign.

Then, we work with our staff of SEO content experts who can write content both humans and search engines love.

We’ll distribute your content across the right channels and track the results to make sure your traffic, brand-equity, and other important business metrics are seeing steady growth.

Digital Marketing Strategy # 4 – Design and Build

When you think of words like digital marketing, SEO, content marketing, etc you don’t necessarily think about the way your website is designed and built.

These two factors are critical to SEO success for many reasons.

User Experience

At the end of the day, Google’s number one priority is giving their users the best experience possible.

Again, putting yourself in your users’ shoes, imagine how they view your website.

Does your design look professional? Does it match the impression of your business you want to portray?

Is the site navigation simple and easy to understand?

Does your site appear and function well on a mobile device? Does it load quickly?

Designing and building a website with responsive coding, SEO-friendly coding, a simple-sitemap, and clear calls to action (CTAs) showing the visitor where to go or what to do next are all hugely important for digital marketing.

Let’s look at some of the important digital marketing and SEO factors related to design and build.

Design and Build Related Digital Marketing Metrics

Search engines keep track of the following factors that are informed by design and build:

• Mobile friendly – Your site must be mobile friendly or it won’t receive favor on search engines, period, because Google has switched to mobile-first indexing
• Bounce rate – A bounce occurs when someone visits your website and leaves right away. Slow loading websites, unprofessional looking design, and difficult to understand navigation can cause more bounces, which harms your SEO
• Dwell time – The longer a visitor spends on your website the better. Professional design with effective calls to action and simple navigation can keep visitors on your site longer
• Crawlability – Search engine bots ‘crawl’ through your website to find pages to ‘index’ or place on search engine results. Your sitemap, link-patterns, and site errors (or lack thereof) affect crawlability.

As a full-service marketing company, we keep your digital marketing goals in mind from start to finish, including design and build along with content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media, and all other forms of digital marketing.

Digital Marketing Strategy # 5 – The Suite of Additional Strategies and Services

When you work with us, we focus on providing the best solutions for your business.

This is why we’ve created an ‘a la carte’ menu of services where you can see exactly how much each service costs, how it benefits your business, and information on if the service is a good fit.

SEO, content marketing, SEM, and design/build are all core services almost any business should employ.

The following list includes services that can add even more value to your business.

Social Media Marketing

You know your business should be on social media, but which platforms do you use, how do you use them effectively, and how do you know if social media will provide good ROI for your business?

Working with a digital marketing agency will help you answer those questions in-depth.

There are two forms of social media marketing you can use — free and paid.

Paid Social Media Marketing

Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linked in have paid advertising platforms you can use to promote your business.

You have many options to target potential customers like demographics, interests, geography, and more.

You can pay for impressions (simply the number of people who see your ad), clicks to your web page, or even more advanced metrics like email sign-ups, video views, page likes, and more.

There is a lot of opportunity to do well with paid advertising on social media right now because it is a newer industry, which means (for now) the costs aren’t as high as PPC ads on Google.

This is a section that deserves an entire guide of its own. The simplest way to understand the breadth of paid social media marketing is to talk to us.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Similar to SEO, you can create content for social media on your own or work with a team of experts at a digital marketing agency to help you.

The key here is to remember that social media isn’t just about likes, comments, and shares.

Just like SEO and other digital marketing techniques, it’s first and foremost a tool to help you grow your business and brand by giving users what they want and love.

There are many aspects that go into a social media campaign, but here are some useful tips:

• Promote all blog content through social media to give it extra reach
• Share interesting and informative tips with your audience
• Use creative forms of media like video and infographics
• Update your pages regularly
• Gear your social media content toward a certain result and use strong calls to action

Online Review Campaigns

Did you know that the number of positive reviews your website gets affects your search engine rankings?

Positive online reviews also let potential customers know your brand is trustworthy and provides quality services or products.

We can help you create a review building campaign to reach out to your customers and generate positive buzz around your business.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the best marketing channels because it provides direct access to your customers and potential customers.

You can use email marketing to:

• Share useful tips and information directly with your audience
• Offer promotions and discounts
• Sell directly to your customers (after educating them about your product)
• Gather reviews
• Encourage your audience to share your brand with their networks

We can help create custom messaging, design, strategy, and implementation to use email to reach your business goals.

Media Services

From creating corporate videos and commercials to creating logos to making infographics to creating custom graphics to use in your content, we provide a wide array of media services to add flair to your digital marketing campaigns.

Marketing Strategy

Our marketing strategy services help to create a full marketing plan for your business.

We can help you define your target audience better by using in-depth market research techniques and tools like surveys, data-driven research, and interviews.

We can help you craft a unique selling proposition, tag-line, and promotional messages.

We’ll help you cover every aspect of your marketing campaign from budget amounts to recommended channels, target campaign launch dates, the frequency of messaging and promotions, and much more.

Some companies come to us with a good idea of where their marketing needs to be and we provide the right solutions. If, however, you need a ‘ground-up’ solution requiring a digital marketing agency that works just like an in-house marketing professional that handles everything, we’ve got you covered.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a tall task.

As a business owner, you already have a ton to focus on.

Why not work with a digital marketing agency that helps you save the time, headache, and frustration of having to be a marketing expert for your business.

We have the expertise. You have the drive and ambition that made you a successful business owner.

Let’s work together to build a successful digital marketing campaign. Fill out the form below and let us provide a custom plan to help you grow your business.

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