In today’s digital age, successful marketers are embracing a mix of online marketing in conjunction with their traditional marketing activities. In order to stay competitive, you need to understand how digital channels can support your campaigns and help you reach your audience.
Content marketing should be a part of your digital toolkit. Optimising your content for search, an area which continues to evolve, should be a major component in every marketer’s overarching strategy.
What can content marketing do for your brand?
A well devised content marketing strategy can:
- Increase visibility and drive more traffic to your websites
- Increase conversion rates
- Reduce Google AdWords bid spend
- Increase brand awareness and recognition
- Allow targeting audiences with more accuracy
- Reduce the costs for lead acquisition
- Boost the performance of above the line marketing activity
- Disrupt and hijack competitor marketing activity
The often lonely world of SEO
There’s a tendency to believe that doing some keyword research, building some links and posting a weekly article on your blog is where you content marketing strategy ends. The pitfall with this approach is that, often your SEO activity becomes isolated from your other marketing activities, resulting in less effective search campaigns with reduced conversion rates, and a disconnect between your campaign goals and how your audience is actually experiencing with your brand online.
By following best practice SEO, and integrating your content marketing in all stages of your marketing activity, you will be able to own the digital space.
Indiana Jones-ing over the gap
As with traditional marketing, consistency and adherence to your brand and marketing campaigns are the key to a successful content marketing strategy. Involve your content marketing team during the planning phase of campaigns, rather than at the end of the process. Make sure that your website and landing pages reflect your campaign and offers. Look for opportunities to integrate content marketing as a major part of your campaign engagement with your audience and tailor your campaign to suit the online space.
Some strategies include:
- Plan regular meetings between your internal marketing team and your digital agency throughout all stages of your campaign, to ensure goal and work congruency.
- Create relevant landing pages for social media posts. (e.g. link to an article on your own site, rather than another site)
- Look for easy wins by incorporating keywords your already rank well on, or that have low competition, in your radio ads and TVC’s. Focus on optimising for keywords your audience easily recall and type into search engines to find your brand or product.
- Regularly update the content on your website to match your current campaigns.
- Use analytics to inform the structure of your site, funnelling prospective customers towards a conversion and keeping people on your website longer.
Marketing will always be a highly competitive industry and, with the digital space constantly expanding, content marketing and SEO have never been more important. It can take a bit of a change to the way you plan campaigns, but it’s such a cost-effective way to reach customers and drive conversions.
By following best practice SEO, and integrating your content marketing in all stages of your marketing activity, you will be able to own the digital space.