Instead of thinking of how much online marketing costs, think of how much it’s costing you not to market your business effectively online. Even if you have a steady client base, good service, or healthy revenue, chances are you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t get the most out of your web presence.
Here’s something we can agree on…
We live in a digital world. Keeping up with the trends in the marketplace won’t be optional much longer. Deep down, you know this, but we have some facts and data to back our findings.
Are you making one of these 5 online marketing mistakes?
Online Marketing Mistake # 1 – Not Having and Search Engine Optimized Website
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 buy into the search box — both paid and organic.. 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:
How many leads and customers are you missing out on by not having an optimized site?
For example:
Let’s say you sell a product that costs $100. Let’s also say an average of 500 people searches for that product in your area.
The number one result receives 33 percent of all traffic to a results page. If you were the number one spot, you’d have 165 leads coming in every month. If you converted 10 percent of those leads into sales, you’re looking at $1,650/month and roughly $20k /year of extra sales and that’s from an optimized page for one product. Think of numbers like those with multiple products and/or services.
This example illustrates what we’ve been able to do for clients in various industries. Do the math. Think about how putting your business in front of hundreds or thousands of people will do for your revenue.
Online Marketing Mistake # 2 – Not Blogging
If you thought the search engine optimization statistics were startling, take a look at the data behind the magic powers of blogging:
First, search engines want to know you’re regularly updating the content on your website. Search engines use this as a ranking factor because they want help users to find businesses who are proactive about keeping their site information up to date.
Second, people want to know you’re proactive about keeping your site information up to date. If they visit your blog to find you haven’t posted anything new since 2012, what will they think about your business?
We know what you’re thinking. You don’t have time to write a new blog post once a week or once a month.
That’s where MLT Group comes in. We provide blogging and other content marketing services to help you work on your business instead of in your business.
Online Marketing Mistake # 3 – Having a Slow Website
Did you know your website loading speed directly affects where your website ranks on Google and other search engines?
Think about it.
Doesn’t it annoy you when a site loads slowly? Haven’t you clicked away from a slow loading site to find a faster one?
Google uses certain measures as clues to how fast your site loads including:
Bounce rate – A bounce means someone visits your site and leaves quickly. Slow loading websites cause bounces. Google penalizes your site for having a high bounce rate.
Time spent on site – Google and the other engines also monitor how long people stay on your website. The longer they stay the better. Having too many bounces reduces the average time spent on your site.
According to a study analyzing 143,827 different websites, there is a significant drop off in site loading speed after the top five ranking results. What does this mean? To compete with other businesses trying to rank highly in Google, your site must be coded for fast loading speeds.
At MLT group, we use proven hosting technology and code all of our websites to load quickly. This creates a positive user experience and a site Google goes gaga for.
Online Marketing Mistake # 4 – Treating Your Site Content As An Afterthought
Words are so prevalent they almost go unnoticed.
You see them in emails, ads, on websites, and seemingly everywhere you turn.
What if we told you the words you used on your site could mean the difference between a sale and a customer clicking away from your site?
Far too often, business owners treat website content as an afterthought instead of a core piece of their marketing. This is a mistake because words have power.
Does our team use a few of these remarkably effective and authoritative psychological content techniques? Maybe 😉
The point is this — unless you’ve dove deeply into the untapped power of content marketing, you have no idea how powerful it can be for your business.
Think about it.
While your competitors use the same old cliches and buzzwords to describe their business — words every business uses — like quality, efficiency, and customer service, you can shock and awe your site visitors with stellar content.
Maybe you’re no Hemingway. No worries. We employ a tightly knit group of a few dozen copywriters with expert digital marketing knowledge who can help your business attract and engage customers.
Here’s how it works. You sit down with our head editor. She interviews you. We take your answers and spin them into content gold.
Noticing a trend here? Working with a smart digital marketing company fills the gap between the results you want and the methods needed to achieve them.
Online Marketing Mistake # 5 – Ignoring Design and Multi-Media
Maybe you have a website, but it’s — to put it nicely — outdated.
If you think you can just get around to redesigning your site, think again.
Remember those two important metrics we mentioned earlier — bounce rate and time on site? Your website design affects both metrics in various ways.
If your design isn’t appealing, some visitors will visit it and leave creating a bounce. If on the other hand, you have an attractive website, visitors will stay longer and increase your average time on site statistics.
In addition to having an appealing design, you can incorporate other multi-media elements to keep your visitors’ eyes glued to your website:
Video – From commercials to product tutorials, video helps inform your users and gives them another option to learn more about your business aside from reading
Infographics – Infographics provide an effective way to display your companies benefits. For example, sharing an infographic about the benefits of working for your company can increase employee referrals
Images – Images on pages, in blog posts, and in photo galleries add another visually appealing element and can also show your product or services benefits. For example, you can display before and after pictures of a service you provide for homes.
The Bottom Line
Online marketing matters.
Investing in online marketing will provide the return you’re looking for as long as you do it the right way.
You have to work with a company you can trust. One who has intimate knowledge of the space.
How can you know who to trust? Take a look at the companies’ own online marketing.
With each update, business owners like you must alter your strategies to keep getting traffic, leads, and sales to your website through Google.
What’s the SEO focus in 2018? Google wants quality content and not just written content, either. Video and multimedia are now cornerstones of both SEO, paid marketing, and content marketing. Just take a look at the numbers.
59% of those surveyed in this study agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video.
Social video generates 1200% more shares than written content and images combined.
Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more.
Landing pages with videos are 53% more likely to show up on page 1 of the SERP.
Blog posts with videos receive triple the number of backlinks as blog posts without video.
Are you missing out on web visits and leads if you’re not using video? The numbers say ‘yes’ emphatically.
You can use Video in two different ways — as an SEO tool or as part of your content marketing.
How to Use Video SEO to Drive Traffic to Your Website
You’d have to be living under a rock to ignore the fact that ranking highly on Google can send visitors to your website.
What many business owners don’t know, however, is that Youtube – a company owned by Google – has its own unique ecosystem and search function with comparable power to send new leads to your website.
Imagine the following scenario. You’re an e-commerce store selling uniquely branded makeup. The makeup industry is one where video search makes a huge impact. Just look at these results for the query ‘makeup tutorial’:
The top search results for this query have millions of views. If your company creates makeup tutorials, ranks them highly, and siphons some traffic from your videos to your e-commerce store, you have the potential to dramatically increase your sales.
Even better videos for certain subjects — mainly how to material — ranks at the top of search results themselves:
Here’s an example of video potential for a healthy snack company:
1 million views for top results
And one for a fish and tackle company:
The bottom line is this — if you have creative videos to share, you can use them to drive traffic with video SEO.
Some key points to understand about Video SEO using Youtube are:
Videos can be optimized – Videos on Youtube utilize titles, descriptions, and tags for SEO purposes. The same methods of keyword research and use of key phrase rich content derived from website SEO apply to Video SEO.
Youtube uses similar ranking factors – Google uses time spent on page as a ranking factor for websites. Youtube uses time spent watching videos as a ranking factor. Google measures click-through rates of search engine results pages as a ranking factor. Youtube does the same. Google measures engagement as a ranking factor and experts say social sharing matters. Youtube ranks videos using similar metrics like comments per video.
Content is king – When it comes to ranking highly on Google, nothing is more important than the quality of the content itself, especially with new Google updates like Rank Brain suggesting depth and quality of content will soon become the top ranking factor. Conversely, your videos must also provide content that informs your audience about the topic you optimize your videos for. Yes, Youtube can track the content of your videos just like Google tracks keywords in your content.
The steps to building a traffic engine using Youtube and Video SEO are:
Do your research – In search engine optimization, keyword research is the cornerstone of a successful SEO campaign. You must know how many people are searching for certain terms to decide how to optimize the pages on your site. For Video SEO, follow tried and true methods like brainstorming, using the Google keyword planner and following suggested results on Google search engine results pages. After you have your list of words, take them to Youtube and test your results by typing the researched phrases into Youtube search box. Youtube has a different results page and the words you research won’t have the exact number of viewers as they do searches on Google. Using the results strategy helps you see if there are viable numbers of viewers for your topic.
Leverage existing videos – If you have company videos available that match researched topics, use them! Make sure the video title, descriptions, and tags include an optimized keyword. For each video, you’re allowed to enter a URL in the description – this is where you want to add your site’s URL. You can also add calls to action within the video itself. You can find a guide for doing that here.
Create new videos – If after doing your research you discover a huge potential for site traffic and views, consider shooting new professional quality videos. Using a video production company like MLT group will help your videos rank higher on both Google and Youtube because high-quality videos increase viewer engagement and retention.
Promote your videos – Share your videos on social media repeatedly, send them to your email list if you have one, and embed them into the content on your website. Speaking of the last point, there are more benefits to video than ranking on Youtube and Google.
How Video Has Become a Content Marketing and SEO Staple
We’re long past the days of newspapers. Even “newer” methods of content creation like blogging are seeing rapid changes. Video has become a major part of the content marketing conversation and will only grow from here.
Let’s just take a look at a few of the goals of content marketing and SEO:
Engage your target audience – You want your target audience to know, like, and trust you. What better way to build a relationship with them than provide your content in a medium that’s both easy to digest and fun to use?
Keep visitors on your website – You want visitors to stay on your website for long periods because Google uses this as a ranking factor. Users have been known to visit sites and leave quickly. If however, while reading your content a user discovers a video in the middle of the page, they may find themselves staying on your site well past the industry standard two to three-minute mark for effective SEO.
Give the people want they want – The easiest way to turn off site visitors is to give them content in a way they don’t want to receive it – think providing a written manual where a video could be much more informative. Some people simply don’t enjoy reading, so video provides all-inclusive option to attract new visitors, leads, and customers.
Blendtec provides a great example of video content marketing.
How do you market something as simple as a blender?
Blendtec thought outside the box and created a video of their blender shredding different items like iPhones. The campaign went viral.
When you think of marketing your business, don’t look for the obvious only. Be creative with your marketing because it’s more fun for customers and ‘Mother Google’ wants you to as well.
Let MLT Group Take Your Digital Marketing to the Next Level
If this post made you interested in the power of video production, let’s talk about creating amazing video together.
Thinking of putting together a cool campaign to build buzz for your business? We offer full marketing strategy, social media management, and an entire suite of services to draw eyeballs to your business.
Does the thought of keyword research and SEO make your head spin a little? No worries, that’s what the pros are for. From start to finish, we can help you achieve results that help you grow your business.
When you’re looking for a digital marketing company to work with, check their digital marketing strategy.
With literally thousands of pieces of content, we aim to prove we’re the cutting edge and go to option in Rochester, Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, and across the U.S.
You’ve made it to the end of this post, which means you’re interested. If you’re interested, what you do next is simple. Pick up the phone, call 507-281-3490 and learn how to skyrocket your business’s marketing.
The process can be complex, but there are a few simple steps you must follow.
In today’s post, we’ll walk through each step and provide tips and insights you can use for your business right away.
Organic SEO Step 1: Keyword Research – What are people searching for?
If you’re like most people you get excited about a project and jump into it before doing all of the prep-work necessary to make it a success. The same rule applies to organic SEO. You need to do the right prep work before optimizing your website.
You need to first determine if:
people are actually searching for the phrase
how much competition you have for that chosen phrase.
Thankfully there are many tools to help you find great keyword information.
Say you are a website design company in Minneapolis, you probably want to people to find your website by searching “Minneapolis website design.”
Putting this phrase into Google AdWords returns some interesting data. The competition for that phrase is stated as “High” with around 5,000 searches a month. Competing for this phrase directly will take a considerable amount of time (and money).
What to Look For
Most businesses should look at the keyword ideas section and find keyword phrases that are either “Medium” or “Low” in the competition column. You can also take phrases from the keyword ideas section and add a geographic location to them, such as “corporate website design Minneapolis”. You can see that the competition drops considerably, however so does the number of searches. This is something in which you’ll have to weigh the return on investment.
These long-tail niche phrases can drive a considerable amount of traffic compared to the high-level key phrases and can be much easier to rank well with.
Before committing to a list of keywords for your website you should do some first-hand research and run the searches through Google to see who you are competing with online. Review their websites to see what they are doing in terms of keyword targeting, website structure, and on-site optimization to achieve the rankings.
After determining a list of phrases that fit your business you need to figure out how you want to work these keywords into your website content.
Each page of your website should cover a specific topic or keyword / key-phrase. Use natural language and sprinkle in the keyword. There’s no need to overdo it because Google wants you to write content for people, not search engines.
To recap, before optimizing your website you need to do some prep-work. Research your target keywords to see what the competition is and if people are actually searching for that phrase. Remember to be patient with your search engine results as they can take time to increase.
Organic SEO Step 2: Improve Your Website Structure
If you are starting with a brand new website, making sure you build your website with a friendly organic SEO structure. Make sure your code is clean and concise.
Google, just like people, will read and follow your thehttps://www.mltgroup.com/local-seo-services.php information on your website more often if the content is laid out in a straightforward manner.
An SEO friendly site structure follows a logical path and organization. From the main pages to sub-topics, and more, the site should be easy to navigate:
Your website should validate at W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) although this is not completely necessary for good rankings, it does help with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance and ensuring your code is well formatted.
Give Your Webmaster These Guidelines
Keep this note in handy if you work with a developer. Often, developers tend to overlook the website “head” (<head>…</head>). The head tags often contain Javascript, CSS and META tags for the page. Since the data in these tags doesn’t show up on the actual display of the website this area tends to get ignored and can become unnecessarily large. All CSS and Javascript code should be referencing external files. This not only speeds up the load time of the website (which is becoming more important to Google’s algorithms) it also makes editing the code later easier.
Finally, we come to the meat of the website, the body tag <body>…</body>. Between these two tags is what your visitors will see on screen. This is also where the majority of your on-site SEO will take place. In keeping with an organic SEO friendly architecture, your site should make proper use of the HTML tags.
Don’t build your website with tables. Instead, use div tags modified with CSS (CSS based layouts). Although tables can produce a similar result on screen as a CSS based layout, the code to create the same functionality with a table can be 3-4 times as large. Remember: the more code a page has the longer it will take to load, affecting its results in the search engines.
Organic SEO Step 3: Your On-Site Optimization
On-site optimization is still crucial to help search engines and people find your products and services. Think of it this way: if you don’t put the right information on your website how will the search engines know what you do?
Your on-site website optimization goes hand-in-hand with a search engine friendly website architecture. If your site has a poor architecture, your on-page efforts won’t work as well. There are a few HTML tags to optimize properly that is a must for every page on your website, they include the “title” tag, “meta description” tag and “h1” tag.I’ll go into detail about each one below.
Title Tags
Search engines use your title tag to understand what that specific page is about. The title tag shows up at the very top of your browser window. Having a well-written title tag should be common sense if you are wanting your page to come up for that keyword, however many people overlook this and leave the default “Untitled Page” text in it.
This is great if you want to rank for “untitled page” however I doubt that is what you want.
Here are a few title tag rules to follow:
First: Be Concise. You only have 70 characters that the search engines will respond to, so make them count.
Second: Include Your Keyword. I can’t stress this enough: if you want to come up for “blue rolling widgets”, by all means, put “blue rolling widgets” in your title tag.
Third: Include Synonyms. If people search for “blue rolling widgets” you can also try variations on those words such as “rolling widgets” “blue widgets” etc. Each of those is words that your potential customers may search for.
Fourth: Be Local. Local business should include their location. Most people that are searching for a local service or product will put in the region they want to find it in. Adding a local identifier to your title tag greatly increases your chances of getting found locally.
Fifth: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible never duplicate a title tag on your website. This confuses the search engines when serving up searches to your website.
Meta Description Tag
You can find this tag in the head of the website. This tag doesn’t directly affect your page ranking, but you want to have a compelling title tag to get people to click through to your website.
Here are some good guidelines for writing meta descriptions:
First: Be Concise. Again you have a limited amount of characters to use, about 150 for the description tag.
Second: Be Informational. Be sure to describe what someone would see on the page. For our blue widget example above our meta description tag could look something like this: “Buy blue widgets from ABC company, a provider of blue widgets to Anytown USA since 1988”.
Third: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible write a unique description tag for every page on your website. This helps to tell Google what each page is about and gives them the ability to offer your customers the correct information.
Organic SEO Headings
Think of the H1 tag like a chapter heading in a book. It tells you what the entire section is about. H2 – H6 tags are for sub-headings and breaking up content logically on the page. The H1 tag has similar power as the title tag in the ranking algorithms of Google and other search engines.
Check out our rules for writing great headings:
First: Only One Time. Each page on your site must contain only one H1 tag. Use sub-headings to give directions for sub-topics
Second: Be Concise. The H1 doesn’t have a limit, but people should easily be able to tell what the page is about by reading it
Third: Include Your Keyword
Fourth: Don’t Duplicate. This actually is important for two reasons, you don’t want to have the same H1 tag across multiple pages and you don’t want to just copy your web page title tag. The H1 tag should compliment your title tag.
So to recap, your on-site website optimization is a critical step in making sure you are well optimized. Having well-written title, description and H1 tags give Google a good understanding of what your website is about, making it easier for them to give your users the correct page on your website.
Organic SEO Step 4: Off-site Optimization
On-site optimization is done at the front-end of an SEO campaign. Off-site optimization moves you up the ranks.
While the off-site optimization can be the most difficult and tricky part of the search engine optimization campaign, I will help you through some of the most common issues.
Let’s discuss some techniques and tips on the best (and worst) off-site organic SEO tactics.
Link Exchanges
Most people think that a link exchange (where I put a link on my website to yours and you put a link on your website to mine) works well for improving SEO authority. They can be helpful if you’re getting a link from a well-respected site (ex: technorati.com).
However if both sites have a low page rank this can actually hurt as your links will “bleed page-rank”, basically meaning that you are passing page-rank from your site to someone else and canceling out the effect.
You want one-way incoming links to your website. These are much more effective because they tell Google “I am a good quality resource on this topic. Others have linked to me because of it.” The more one-way incoming links you can get to your site the better.
Poor Quality Links to Avoid
If you have been researching how to generate links back to your website you may have seen links or ads directory submission services. While you can get a ton of back-links to your site quickly, they are generally of lower quality and Google won’t pay as much attention to them.
If your link profile (the break down of links on your site) skews heavily towards the low-quality sites it will take considerably more links to compete with someone who has a better link profile.
Good Quality Back-links
A good quality back-link can be priceless to a search engine campaign. These high-quality back-links require work on your end to foster a relationship with the website owner. These types of links can come from industry-specific journals or blogs, distributors or educational resources. You generally cannot simply ask the website owner to link to you (unless you are a well-known company), you will need to become an active member on their website. Show that you are an expert in a field and you may receive a link.
Write GREAT Content
This goes without saying for anything you do online. Writing good quality content helps you gain links to your website. If you have a blog, people may put a link to it naturally on their site as your information explains a subject they reference. You can become a guest contributor on authority websites to build your influence and link back to your website. These websites are usually looking for great content and having an experts view on the topics they cover can give you a lot of exposure.
Be Social
Social media and social networking is here to stay. Be sure that you fully utilize your online profiles. Be sure that what you are posting to these places is interesting and informative, not a sales pitch. Your social followers are much more fickle than the general website searcher as they are inviting you into their profile. Be respectful and don’t bombard them with posts. Unless your company has a lot of news, posting once a week or so would be ideal. You want to keep your users aware of your business but not get annoyed with you.
Press Releases and Articles
Both press releases and articles have their place in a well-rounded organic search engine optimization campaign. You can describe your company, services, and offerings all you want in them, just make sure it is newsworthy. Most press release services will charge a fee for submitting your release but for this fee, your press release is getting submitted to actual news organizations such as the AP, large market newspapers and high profile bloggers.
So to recap, your off-site optimization should be done on a consistent basis. Gathering a ton of back-links at once and then never looking at it again will give you a short boost but you won’t maintain your rankings. Always write good content. Be a good online neighbor and social friend. Link to people who you feel do a good job and you will tend to receive the same. As for social media don’t over post. You don’t want to be de-friended.
Organic SEO Step 5: Analytics (Measuring your results)
After you have made your website live the first thing you should to do is install Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics (or a similar program). I like Google Analytics for a few reasons. First, it’s completely free and second, you can gather a ton a data on the traffic to your website.
When you log into Google Analytics you’ll see a graph showing the traffic for each day. This is great to get a brief overview of how much traffic your website is receiving, but doesn’t give you a ton of data as to where people are coming from or what they are viewing.
Click on the Visitor’s Tab
This tab provides moredetail about your viewers on the site including the number of unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site and new visits. Each of these sections can be clicked on to get additional data.
Next, look at the Traffic Sources tab.
This tab gives me a quick overview of where people are coming to my site from, whether it be search engines, direct traffic or referring sites. As with the visitor’s tab you can click on each of the sections to gather more detail about each site or search engine. If you drill down into a specific website you can see how many visits came to your site for a particular day.
Last, let’s review the Content tab.
This section shows you the amount of traffic that each specific page on the site is driving. If you are using a landing page for an advertising campaign you can see from this section if your ads are working.
You can also see if people are not following to a certain point on your site, such as a check-out page. If your customers are not flowing to where you want them you may need to revise your on-site content to help drive them to the correct locations.
As you can see Google Analytics can supply a ton of information about your website. Even just scratching the surface you can gather powerful information about your company’s website and find places to make improvements. Google Analytics has a great help section as well if you have additional questions on what you are looking at.
Conclusion
You’ve learned the basic steps of creating a successful organic SEO campaign.
Now you have two choices.
One, try it out for yourself.
Two, work with an expert to get “done for you” results. If you want to try the latter, fill out the form below to get a free marketing proposal.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
In today’s post, we’re going to break down some of these terms – mainly SEO vs SEM – so you have the type of understand you need to make a smart decision.
We’ll describe the techniques in a bit more depth soon, but SEO is the process of making changes to your website that make it more appealing to search engines. Also, it involves techniques used outside of your website to achieve the same goal.
Search engine marketing (SEM) includes SEO, but it encompasses other forms of marketing, most of which involve paying directly for website traffic.
There are many guides on SEM Vs SEO on the internet. Why did we decide to write one? We checked the results for the topic and noticed one key element missing.
Most companies don’t talk about the psychology of using these channels.
We understand business owners are human beings who want to see results. Not only should you know the difference between SEO and SEM, but you should also understand the type of mindset you’re going to need to have when using each channel. One favors patience. The other favors instant (but also more costly) rewards. Both work, but each has a different level of value depending on the industry and business owner.
Let’s dive into each type. By the 犀利士 end, you’ll know which route is best for you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO helps your site rank well on organic search results, like these:
How can you create a website Google loves?
You use the following techniques.
On Site SEO
On site SEO involves doing things on your website to help the search engine understand what it is about.
The first step involves researching the type of words people type into Google when looking for your product or service. This process can get complicated, but in short, it’s a combination of brainstorming and using tools that tell you how many people search for certain phrases each month,
Once you understand how people search for your type of business online, you can use that information to optimize your website.
You can optimize your website in the following ways:
Content – When you use the words people type into Google for your product or service — keywords — it lets the search engine know your page is about that topic.
Tags – There are sections in your website’s code where you can add these keywords to help the search engines get an even better understanding of your page
Links – Linking to a relevant source on another page of your website or another website is valuable because search engines use links as a vote of confidence to what you reference
These are just the basics, but they’re good to know for understanding the on-site process.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO helps your site perform better.
See, the search engines don’t just want to see that your site has great information. They want to know you provide a good user experience.
Why? Because search engines care most about providing great results for real human beings.
If your site loads slowly, has sloppy code, broken links, isn’t secure, and is missing important data, search engines are much less likely to rank your website.
Technical SEO can get very in-depth, but here are the cliff notes:
Error pages – Error pages can pop up when you delete pages without redirecting them — telling the code that people who visit the deleted page should be forwarded to a new one. This happens often and can harm your SEO
Broken links – Broken links – links on your site that point to broken pages – can occur for the same reasons
Redirect chains – We won’t get in-depth on this topic, but you want to make sure to properly forward links of broken pages to other relevant ones
Load speed – You don’t want a slow website, period. It harms your chances of ranking well. If your site loads slowly, work with a webmaster to fix those issues
Again, there are many more technical SEO issues we can cover, but these are the core ones to know. Once your site is optimized and performing well, you can use off-site techniques to improve your chances of ranking even more.
Off Site SEO
You need to use off site SEO techniques to increase your site’s authority.
What does authority mean?
Search engines use links to your business’s website as a ‘vote’ for it’s quality. This makes sense. If many other websites link to yours you must have useful information on it.
They also use mentions of your business that aren’t linked. These are called citations.
Combined, getting both will help your website become more authoritative. The more authoritative your website and its individual pages, the higher — on average — you will rank on search engines.
Link-Building
You could write an entire book on link-building. There are an endless amount of tactics you can use to get links to your website. For your purposes, here’s what it’s important to know.
You want to get the right links. What are the right links? The right links are links from other authoritative websites that are related to your business.
Example, getting a link from a less authoritative but related website can and often will count more than getting a link from a more authoritative yet less related one.
We help our clients get back links by reaching out to related websites and telling them why our client’s website content makes sense to link to. That’s a simple way to explain a sometimes complex process we use.
Citations
A citation is anytime someone mentions your business online.
Someone posts a Facebook status about your company? It’s a citation.
You fill our your Yelp profile. It’s a citation
You become a member of your local chamber of commerce. You get it.
We help our clients build citations by finding relevant directories in their niche and submitting their sites for consideration.
The last two words are important.
When it comes to link building and citations, we reach out to other websites to consider linking to or citing your site. Getting the links or citations isn’t guaranteed. This is important because it’s the only way search engines can serve up good and honest results. If everyone was guaranteed these links and citations they would have no value.
This is the very small gist of the SEO process. For deeper insights you can check out these articles:
The ins and outs of SEO aren’t as important as the mindset you need to have a successful campaign.
SEO is a Long-Term Strategy
If someone promises you page one rankings in a short amount of time, run for the hills.
SEO takes time.
You can start to see good results in 4 to 6 months, but you have to be able to handle the wait.
Google is slow.
If you’re not the type of person who can delay their gratification, SEO might not be the right strategy for you.
If, however, you’re a forward thinking business owner who understands quality results take time, SEO could be a good fit for you.
Organic Search Accounts for Most of the Traffic
There’s a reason why it pays to be patient and rank your website using SEO.
Organic search results – ones you don’t pay directly for – get the majority of clicks through to websites.
Here’s some data to check out:
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SEO Has a High Long-Term ROI
Once you start to rank your website for a number of different key phrases, you’ll notice your traffic can increase in leaps and bounds.
As time goes on and your site increases its authority, it reaps even more rewards.
The “rich get richer” phenomenon is present in SEO.
Imagine you get your website page to rank #1 for one keyword.
It can start to rank for a bunch of other keywords too.
This means you can have traffic coming to your site for a variety of different phrases based off one one page. That’s the power of a successful SEO campaign run over the long term.
Now that you have an understanding of SEO, let’s talk about SEM.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing includes SEO, but uses other techniques, mainly paid advertising.
Google and other search engines have platforms you can use to pay directly for advertising in a few different ways.
Here’s a breakdown of each relevant platform.
Google Adwords
Google Adwords is a platform you can use to pay for listings on search engines.
Either by yourself or working with a smart digital marketing agency, you can monitor the campaign and pretty much discover the direct ROI of your results:
You spend a certain amount on clicks
A certain number of those clicks become real leads
You close a certain number of those leads
If the profit you make from those leads is more than you spend, you’re happy
On top of Adwords, there are some other search engine marketing platforms you can use to spread your reach.
Google Display Network
The big difference between normal pay per click ads and display network ads is that display network ads appear not on search engine results pages, but other websites.
You might know them as “banner ads.”
Websites can participate in displaying these ads on their site through Google Adsense.
Other site owners participate in increasing the ads themselves through the display network.
Display network ads tend to have pretty low click-throughs (do you click on them?) but they can be useful if you’re creative with them and use them to share valuable information as opposed to trying to sell with them.
Now, why would you want to create ads on the display network for any other reason but to sell your product or service?
You can use them to build awareness about your business so people will know, like, and trust it. This can lead to them becoming customers down the road.
This is important to remember – marketing isn’t just about selling right away.
Think of display network ads like digital billboards.
We could go in-depth about all the various forms of SEM but we aren’t going to.
The purpose here is to help you understand why and how these marketing channels work so you can choose one or both.
SEM Provides Instant Results
With SEM, you can “pay to play.”
If you want to get results now and you don’t like waiting, SEM might be your best bet.
Keep in mind, however, these instant results come with a cost.
The more competitive your industry, the more you will have to spend.
SEM Provides Great ROI Metrics
The best part of SEM is the fact that you can pretty much verify the ROI you are receiving from the money you spend. For pragmatic business owners, this could be the right route.
There’s a saying that goes, “you can’t go broke making a profit.”
If your ads are profitable and have a great margin, you can spend more money without much worry because you can rely on your money making money for you.
Of course, this is no easy task or exact science either. SEM is anything but a “set it and forget it” strategy, which is why working with an expert often makes sense.
Conclusion
Both channels work. Both channels make sense.
It’s up to you to decide which one is best for you.
Our recommendation? Use SEM to kick off your campaign and SEO over the long haul to get consistent results.
An even better recommendation? Talk to us and figure out the best strategy. Fill out the form below
Time is an important asset in business and you want to make sure you’re spending it well. How can you create an SEO campaign that gets you the results you need? What should you look for if you want to work with an agency to get the job done?
In today’s posts, we’ll cover everything you need to know about getting the fastest SEO results possible for your business.
The #1 Method for Getting Fast SEO Results Isn’t What You Might Think
If you’re familiar with SEO, you’ve probably heard the following advice:
All of these techniques contribute to a successful SEO campaign, but they’ll work much faster if you take these steps first.
Google wants to display the best search results possible.
While based on an algorithm, the search engine first and foremost caters to people.
Many of the new updates to Google’s algorithm have everything to do with the way people interact with your website. Before you work on any fancy SEO techniques, cover the bases regarding your websites performance and impression on visitors first.
Optimize For Load Speed
Have you ever visited a slow website before?
How did it make you feel?
Did it make you feel like you wanted to engage with the company or do business?
No. It made you feel frustrated and annoyed. You likely left.
Google treats load speed as a factor for ranking websites because of the way it affects visitors. If your site isn’t up to par, you won’t get the fast SEO results you’re looking for.
Google provides a tool you can use to test the speed of your website and provides insights on how to improve it. Other tools like Pingdom do an excellent job as well.
Since Google now bases its rankings on the mobile version of your site (or lack thereof) having a mobile-optimized site isn’t a choice anymore.
Your site needs to be mobile-optimized yesterday. Even better, you should build your site to be responsive. This means the design of your site will adjust to look great on any sized screen.
Curious about making the needed coding changes to make Google love your website? Enter your details below:
Focus on User Experience
There are basic SEO techniques, tips, and tricks. But the best strategy you can use involves focusing on your visitors.
Content length is a key factor in search engine rankings. The longer your content the better according to many experts:
But what if you’re a local pizza shop? Do you need to write a 3,000-word guide on different types of toppings? No.
The best SEOs know that matching the search intent of site visitors matters most.
If your service or product needs explanation, then long-form content will work for you.
If you sell a product that’s visual, providing more images (as well as optimizing your images) would make sense.
This is where working with an agency can come in handy. At MLT Group, we sit down with each individual business owner.
Instead of talking about the tactics that get the fastest SEO results, we talk about their target audience and the goals and vision for their business first. This dictates the strategy.
SEO isn’t just about creating content with keywords. It’s a philosophy that affects every single aspect of your website.
You should always begin your campaign by making your website as healthy as possible by fixing things like:
Broken links
301 redirects
404 errors
Duplicate content
Missing tags
Don’t get bogged down with the lingo. You can use tools like Ahrefs site auditor to discover issues and get solutions. You can then work with your webmaster to fix these issues.
If you don’t have one, you can work with an agency to help fix these problems on a recurring basis.
Once you’ve covered the basics of Technical SEO, UX, and other performance issues, you can work on the nuts and bolts of your SEO campaign to start seeing the results you’re looking for.
The SEO Process Explained
You know that SEO is the process of getting your website to rank on search engines, but what does that process actually look like?
Here are the steps required for creating a campaign.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding out what words people type into Google to look for your product or service.
When you know the right keywords to use, you can use them in your content to let the search engines know what your website and business are about.
When we work with clients, we start the process by talking to them about their target audience. We don’t dive right into the tools.
Understanding your audience and market is crucial to doing the right research.
After discussing the details of your target audience’s goals, dreams, hopes, fears, desires, and everything in between, you can go to the tools and fight the words that match those emotions.
Good keyword research combines the following techniques:
Good old fashioned brainstorming
Competitor research – Neil Patel has a great guide on this topic
Use of tools like the Google Keyword Planner
Once you have a great list of words to use in your site content, you can optimize your site for SEO
Optimize Your Website
There are many factors that go into optimizing your website for SEO.Keeping things simple, some important techniques are:
Using keywords in page title, headings, photo alt tags, and content of each page of your rite
Using SEO friendly coding to create a great navigation and site structure
Having a sufficient amount of content on each page of your site
Adding multi-media to different pages of your site
Once your site is optimized, you can use content marketing and link-building to increase the speed of your SEO results. Perhaps you can even sprinkle in a bit of PPC to spice things up.
Use Content Marketing to Increase Search Engine Rankings
Content marketing and SEO work together. SEO involves using the right researched keywords in your content and content marketing is the process of creating content that meets your users needs.
The better your website uses content marketing the faster SEO results you will achieve.
When done right, content marketing can dramatically increase the speed of your SEO results.
Of course, if you don’t want to go through the trouble of creating an entire content marketing campaign on your own, you can put your website’s traffic generation in the hands of capable experts.
Who would we suggest you work with?
Hm…we wonder 😉
Conclusion
Anyone who promises instantaneous SEO results isn’t telling you the truth.
Even the best SEO campaigns take time to kick in.
You can start to see results as soon as a few weeks to months, however, and using the right strategies or working with the right team can help you get the results you’re looking for.
If you’re curious about how an agency can help, let’s talk. Just fill out the form below and we will send you a free marketing proposal.
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:
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.
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
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:
paid listingsorganic results
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.
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.
Enter your information below and we’ll send you a free digital marketing audit
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.
Some business owners see content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) as two separate techniques that may or may not be used together. It’s no surprise as to why; business experts have long pitted the two marketing techniques against each other, trying to determine which is superior. We’re here to tell you that not only are SEO and content marketing both essential to your overall marketing strategy, but these two techniques actually work hand in hand.
If you don’t have a robust marketing strategy that utilizes SEO and content marketing, you’re missing out.
Today, we’re going to dispel the myth of SEO vs. content marketing and show you how the two techniques work together to help you gain visibility, improve your rankings, and market to your target audience.
Here are three reasons you should integrate your SEO and content marketing strategies.
1. They Overlap:
SEO is typically defined as specific, keyphrase-based marketing, whereas content marketing addresses broader concepts and ideas.
Although these are different techniques, they overlap in many ways. Think of it as SEO and content marketing having a “conversation” with one another. SEO requires certain things like using keyphrases and content. Content marketing meets these requirements. For example, you’re trying to rank for the keyphrase “custom flower bouquets.” To fulfill this part of your SEO strategy, you need original content that uses the keyphrase. Like a team, SEO states what is needed while content marketing delivers, both techniques complimenting each other.
2. Gain Backlinks:
Part of your SEO strategy should be getting quality backlinks. How do you get backlinks? Have great content other sites want to link to! Whether it be another industry leader linking to your blog or a visitor linking to your service page, backlinks can give your site a great SEO boost. But without engaging, useful content, you won’t get the backlinks you need.
3. Maintain Consistency:
To be effective, both SEO and content marketing require consistency. Just like you can’t set up your business and let it run itself, your SEO and content marketing strategies require consistent maintenance and engagement. Search engines like Google want to see your site is active with frequent updates, new content, and growth. Just another way that these two marketing techniques work hand in hand.
If you haven’t integrated your SEO and content marketing strategies, there’s no doubt your business will suffer. When working together, these marketing strategies can achieve maximum impact.
Ready to take your SEO and content marketing strategies to the next level? The professionals at MLT Group are here to help. With extensive experience in SEO, content marketing, SEM, and a dedicated team, we can create and implement an integrated strategy that helps your business achieve its goals. Give us a call at 507.281.3490 or email our team at sales@mltgroup.必利勁 com today!
E-commerce marketing can do wonders for your business. With the right strategies, you can engage people who are interested in your products, build a base of loyal customers, and grow your influence to reach every corner of your market.
In today’s post, we’re going to teach you different e-commerce marketing strategies ranging from SEO tips, content marketing, social media marketing and more.
If you use just one of these strategies, you’ll see results that can help you grow your brand and your bottom line. Before we dive into the tips, let’s talk about the unique power of e-commerce businesses.
Why E-Commerce Businesses Are The Future
The internet has changed the way people buy and the benefits of e-commerce businesses are impossible to deny.
Here is a short list of benefits e-commerce businesses provide their users:
Convenience – You don’t have to leave the comfort of your home to purchase from an e-commerce store
Speed – Most e-commerce businesses offer fast shipping. Just look at Amazon, who’s gone so far as to test ’30 minute drone deliveries’
Options – When shopping online, you can hand pick the products you want without ever having to visit a store and you can compare prices between different businesses without having to visit them
There are numbers to shed light on the shift in markets too:
In 2017, e-commerce was responsible for around $2.3 trillion in sales and is expected to hit $4.5 trillion in 2021
As you can see in this graph from the Census Bureau, e-commerce market share is steadily rising:
It’s unlikely that retail will disappear, but it’s obvious the internet is here to stay.
If you’re an e-commerce business owner, providing a great user experience and solid marketing strategies allows you to reach a larger audience than you ever could with a physical location.
As an e-commerce business owner, you’re already sold on the power of the internet. For those who have the potential to move into e-commerce, but haven’t yet, consider how you can market and sell your products online to keep pace with the changing trends for the future.
SEO works well for e-commerce businesses who do it right. Just take a look at this search engine results page for the phrase “green tea for sale.”
Each page that appears in this picture represents an organic search result. Organic means the businesses achieved these results without using paid advertisements. That’s the beauty of SEO — you can achieve results through effort and sound strategies alone.
These e-commerce SEO strategies will help you rank your business on Google and put it in front of buyers looking for your product.
Here are the e-commerce SEO strategies you must use to succeed.
Optimize All Site Pages
The most important pages on an e-commerce website are it’s category pages, product pages, and blog poss.
You want to optimize your pages using the following techniques:
Use key phrases in your page titles
Use key phrases in your meta description
Place key phrases in your content
Optimize images by placing key phrases in their ‘alt tags’
Make sure your content length meets SEO standards
Add media to your pages like pictures, infographics, and videos
Here’s a great example of an optimized e-commerce website.
Cup & Leafs E-Commerce Product Page SEO Analyzed
The Cup & Leaf blog sells tea products. When you visit one of their product pages you’ll see organized information that also serves an SEO purpose.
Most product pages use the product name in the title. In this example, you’ll see an optimized key phrase as the product title:
When you scroll down, you’ll see a product description that’s optimized but also very informative and persuasive to customers (key phrase highlighted in red):
The content is in-depth, but not overwhelming. It uses key phrases but doesn’t stuff them in the content. It’s informative, describes benefits, and cites reputable sources.
It takes time, but providing on page SEO to each of your products will help them rank on search engines.
Cup & Leafs SEO Content Analyzed
The Cup & leaf blog uses content marketing and SEO through their blog. When you look at their blog page, you’ll see posts with titles that match topics tea lovers might type into Google:
Each blog post has optimized content, but also provides useful and relevant information for readers. This is key because content marketing and SEO are more about making users happy than search engines. Typical optimization doesn’t work anymore. The search engines are ranking content that’s useful for readers. It’s now their number one priority:
Notice the techniques used here:
Optimized page title
Key phrase in the first sentence of the content
Internal & outbound links
In-depth content
Imagine you’re a tea lover who searches for tips on making great tea. You land on this page and read articles giving you the exact information you’re looking for. Then, when you read the post, it ends with a call to action to check out the company’s products.
This is exactly what Cup & Leaf does.
At the end of one of their posts, you see a call to action to buy their products at a discount:
The owner of the company — content marketing expert Nat Elision — shares the entire SEO & content strategy he used to start the company in this guide.
Highlights from the post:
Research topics – using tools like ahrefs, the Google keyword planner, and more, you can perform keyword research to find topics with traffic volume.
Design the blog to drive sales – each post has a call to action to enjoy a discount or try related products
Gain product reviews – this increases social proof and is a positive ranking factor for SEO
Write long-form content – long-form content is a positive ranking factor.
With a sound SEO strategy employed, you can use more e-commerce marketing techniques to build awareness for your company and ultimately drive leads and sales.
Use the Following E-Commerce Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing works especially well for e-commerce businesses. To have an effective content marketing campaign, you need to understand the full breadth of the phrase.
Check out this definition of content marketing from the content marketing institute:
Content comes in many forms, including but not limited to:
Written content – pages and blog posts
Video
Photos & infographics
Social media
Let’s walk through examples of different types of content marketing and discuss what they do well.
Written Content
We discussed SEO and content marketing for e-commerce businesses already, but it’s important to know the details of running a successful content marketing campaign. Here are some need to know items.
Research
When you do the right research, you can create a strategy that targets the right customers and creates the types of content they want to read.
You can use keyword research — a staple of SEO — to discover topics people are actively searching for.
Check out our guide to keyword research for more detail.
You can also research what your competitors are doing well to create better content and use strategies like link-building to leapfrog them in search.
Here’s an example. Using the Ahrefs tool, you can discover a lot of useful information about a competitor. Sticking with our tea example, I found a tea company and looked for search data:
In the organic keywords section of the tool, you can see the keywords that get the most traffic and links to the pages receiving the traffic:
Then going into the individual pages, you can see where they’re gaining links from, as well as important metrics to know like site authority, the number of backlinks, and the phrases the single page ranks for:
Using the ahrefs keyword analyzer tool, I can estimate the number of links I need to build to the page:
Next, I’d create a piece of content about chai tea lattes and make it more detailed entertaining and informative than the competitor’s post.
Then, I’d build links to the page by sharing the content with people who are likely to link back to the page. This is known as the skyscraper technique.
You can also leverage reviews to discover what your customers like and dislike about your type of product. Check out this review on Amazon for a green tea product:
Using these insights, I make create content discussing both the quality and cost-effectiveness of my product.
Question and answer sites like Quora provide useful information as well. I typed in “chai tea” on Quora and got the result:
Knowing people want to know the difference between masala and chai tea, I could create content on this topic. My result may even show up in a cool Google snippet like this one:
Implementation
Once you have solid e-commerce marketing research you can implement your campaign.
It’s important to know your target audience, goals, and key performance metrics before you begin creating content.
You also want to create a content calendar with topics you want to write about and block out time to create content.
If you’re an e-commerce business owner, you might not have time to create the content yourself. This is where a digital marketing agency can come in handy.
At MLT Group we have the staff, resources, and creativity to create a content marketing campaign for your business.
If you’re interested in a done for you e-commerce marketing strategy, fill out the form below for a free audit:
Video content marketing has grown in popularity in recent years.
Pay attention to how they used humor, shock value, and intrigue to make a boring product suddenly interesting.
In addition to branding power, video content marketing can help your business rank on search engines.
Photos & Infographics
Visual content has multiple benefits.
First, it’s a different form of branding and marketing people love.
Second, you can use them to increase important SEO metrics like time spent on page and reducing your bounce rate.
An example from Gadget Snob shows great use of photos on an e-commerce landing page:
When you click into one of their products, you see excellent use of captivating photos in their “related products” section:
This clean and crisp site design and photo usage compel visitors to check out the site’s products.
You can also use infographics within the body of your blog posts to keep readers engaged (pro tip: use a plugin to make your images pinnable on Pinterest).
Social Media
You can write an entire guide on social media usage for e-commerce marketing.
Shopify has an excellent breakdown of social media tips on their infographic:
You can use social media to market your e-commerce business in a variety of ways.
You can create streaming videos and commercials educating users about your product, sharing benefits, and entertaining them.
When you create a new blog post, you can cross-promote your content through all social media channel.
You can become a member of social media groups related to your niche and become an active participant.
Paid social media ads are always a cost-effective way to build your e-commerce brand and drive traffic to your website.
Here’s an example of a product display ad on Facebook:
When running Facebook ads as part of the e-commerce marketing strategy for your business, you can use a ton of different techniques to drive traffic to your website:
Run promotions and discounts
Create a giveaway of your product where users enter their email address as a ‘raffle ticket’
Put commercials and videos in your ads
Create remarketing ads that display to visitors who visited your site but didn’t buy
Create a lookalike audience based on metrics and demographics of your target audience
Use ‘boosts’ to drive traffic to your blog posts to aid your content marketing efforts
Cross promote your Facebook ads to Instagram
Social media has many applications. Whatever channel or method you use, make sure to make social media a core part of your e-commerce marketing strategy.
Conclusion
These e-commerce marketing strategies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to growing your business.
Choose one, or a few, and utilize them to gain traffic, leads, and sales.
Use them to build your brand and stand out in your industry.
If you’re looking for expert content marketing and SEO help, learn more about becoming a strategic business partner with MLT Group.
49 percent of businesses do not have a clearly outlined digital marketing plan. Are you one of them? Plenty of businesses use digital marketing techniques, but they are often not fully realized or consistently utilized. This results in time and money spent with lackluster results. However, utilizing an effective, fully fleshed out digital marketing strategy can boost your business’ site traffic, conversions, and help you better reach your target audiences.
Don’t throw techniques at the wall and hope for the best. Instead take the time to create an actionable digital marketing plan. Here’s how to get started:
Analyze: Before implementing a new plan, learn if and how your current digital marketing strategy is working and adapt accordingly. Begin by analyzing your current digital marketing strategies. Ask yourself the following questions:
What is the goal of your digital marketing strategy?
How do your current techniques help with your ultimate goal?
Are you reaching your target audiences?
What platforms are best for reaching your target audiences?
Which marketing channels are most effective for your business?
How do social media platforms factor into your marketing strategy?
Which techniques are working? Which aren’t?
Choose Your Metrics: There are plenty of metrics you can use to measure the performance of your digital marketing campaign, but depending on your ultimate goal, not all may be useful. For example, if you’re trying to boost traffic, you may want to focus on traffic sources and the rate of returning visitors over return on investment or conversion rates. Before starting your campaign, determine at least three metrics you’ll use to evaluate your campaign’s performance.
Engage Your Audience: Whatever your strategy includes, it’s important to engage your audiences. Engaging them helps to develop a relationship, build awareness of your business, and help drive sales. You can do this by connecting with your audiences on their preferred social media platforms, creating targeted content that connects to your audience, and making sure your message visible. You can also utilize ad campaigns to quickly get to the top of searches and entice your audience to visit your site. The better you engage your audience, the greater your online presence, and the more customers will find your business!
Evaluate: Don’t engage in digital marketing blindly. Evaluating your strategy, using your predetermined metrics, will help you determine what’s working, what’s not, and how you can improve. If your digital marketing strategy is not proving effective based on your chosen metrics, you should go back to the analysis step and determine why it’s not working. Are you targeting the right audience? Are you effectively reaching them? Are you using the right metrics to measure your campaign’s performance?
Get Professional Help Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy
Creating and executing an effective digital marketing can be a time-consuming process. Make it easy by getting help from the digital marketing pros at MLT Group. We’ll create a personalized digital marketing strategy based on your business, industry, and goals. Then, we’ll execute it, so you have more time to put towards your business.
Ready to get started with your digital marketing strategy? Don’t wait! Contact our friendly professionals at sales@mltgroup.com or (507) 281-3490 today!
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