This isn’t an article about the famous saying ‘Content is King’ or who said it better Bill Gates in 1996 or Sumner Redstone in 1974, but an acknowledgement on how visionary they were, especially when building connections with customers across all forms of digital marketing.
Digital marketing is full of buzz words; Inbound, outbound, push marketing, pull marketing, organic or paid. Lucy Alexander in her article “What is Digital Marketing” simply explains Digital Marketing – in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.
Then there’s content marketing, when creating content you need to consider a few things such as;
– the needs of the audience,
– does it highlight the requirements of leads and customers,
– address the pain points or deliver services they require.
and can take several different forms; videos, blogs, infographics, e-newsletters, white papers, tweets, posts, vlogs, live feeds etc.
Connecting with your customers, building brand presence and attracting leads, creating original content is key.
When you provide original content it helps to confirm your credibility and experience and also to establish yourself as an expert in your field. One thing it all has in common is its sole purpose to establish and maintain your brand identity.
“According to the Content Marketing Institute, the most successful B2B marketers report spending 40% of their budget on content marketing as of 2018 — up 1% from 2017”
Justin McGill, Hubspot
When used on your website, it also keeps things fresh, gives customers a reason to keep coming back and helps with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you haven’t already, you should assess if your inbound techniques are maximised on your website. In short, I mean — do you have you a good business presence, with relevant and updated content and can it be found easily by Google or other search engines? Search engines rank content that provides value highly and hence there is a high chance of you being found in organic searches provided your content is also optimised for SEO.
People spend a lot of their time engaging on social media channels, when I say people — its people from all walks of life which means potentially your customer.
Having good visibility on popular social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest is known as social media optimisation.
If you have got some budget to spend then you can try some display advertising and pay per click (PPC) ads.
Display advertising is advertising on websites or apps or social media through banners or other ad formats. The main purpose of display advertising is to deliver general advertisements and brand messages to site visitors.
With display advertising available on Facebook ads or Instagram you can target your message to prospects in a particular demographic or with particular behaviours. Try producing a video to create brand awareness among your prospects, then you can create valuable content like ebooks, white papers to generate more leads. You can also use these to retarget your prospects. Experiment and see which ads are giving you the highest Return of Investment (ROI) and you can double up our efforts on that to generate high quality leads and retarget prospects who visited but didn’t sign up.
PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.
Here are my 5 Top Tips for Optimising your Digital Presence:
- Establish and maintain your brand identity
- Build credibility through original content
- Engage in Social Media
- SEO structured content on your website
- Paid advertising
When optimising your digital marketing to build your brand presence, create connections, generate leads and customers, it seems, ‘Content really is King’.
