Digital marketing is a fickle beast. It can leave you feeling accomplished one second and demoralized the next. It’s exciting, but at the same time unnerving. There’s always a challenge to tackle.
For businesses, though, the ups and downs of digital marketing are more nerve-wracking than exciting. So if you own a business, you don’t want to constantly be worrying. To help keep your digital marketing results consistent, it’s a good idea to diversify your efforts.
Here are a few ideas to not only help you better succeed online, but keep all of your necessary bases covered:
Start Blogging
While blogging has become fairly typical for business, it’s still not something that’s been completely adopted as part of a standard digital marketing strategy. The problem? It needs to be.
According to studies conducted by HubSpot, companies with blogs received 55 percent more visitors, 97 percent more inbound links, and 126 percent more leads. This is because blogging offers value to both visitors/potential customers and your website.
Visitors get fresh, interesting content related to your products or services, which may ultimately help them make better decisions as consumers, and your website gets valuable content that aids in building more authority.
But how do you actually get started?
Identify Your Audience
The most important part of blogging at any level is understanding your audience. What are they searching for? What do they want to know? How can I solve their problems?
Create a List of Key Topics
Once you’ve got an idea of the person you’d like to target, you can nail down a few key topics to use on your blog. These should be broad so that they can later be broken down into more targeted areas. At the end of the day, you want your blog content to encompass every part of your business.
Flesh Out Individual Ideas
With your audience and key topics in the bag, it’s time to come up with a few starting ideas for individual blog posts. Start by breaking down those key topics to find your first great idea. This can be done for any industry, no matter how boring or “unmarketable” it may seem. For example, let’s say your company sells a new type of mouse trap.
An informative and entertaining idea would be “Homemade Mouse Traps: Creative Ways to Trap a Mouse” You might now be thinking that it’s crazy to write about homemade mouse traps when your business depends on people actually buying traps. Here’s why it’s not:
The goal isn’t to sell people directly with your blog content, it’s to drive them to your site and assist in creating authority that grows rankings for your most valuable keywords.
Experiment with Social Media
One mistake most businesses make with social media is thinking that their page/profile and its content should be all about them. But unless you’re Coca-Cola, Disney, or another household brand, no one’s going to want to like your page if all you have to offer is news about your products and sales pitches.
Instead, work on experimenting with different types of content in order to grow your presence and increase user engagement. Think of yourself as a publisher instead of a business in this regard. Your goal is to get people to follow, like, and share your content in order to reach more and more people.
Here at Wikimotive, our automotive social media strategy involves three key components for car dealers:
- Original, Relevant, Entertaining Content
- Interesting Local Content
- Sharing Blog Content
This may not be the absolute best approach for all businesses, but it provides incredible and consistent results for our clients.
Take the time to think of a few ways you could better connect with your audience and just go with the flow. As long as you’re not posting anything incredibly offensive, you can build your own path to social media success through trial and error.
Give Video a Try
While consistently producing written content is an important part of building authority in order to increase rankings, video offers a unique way of connecting with an audience and acquiring links.
For one, video is much more engaging than written content, and is much more likely to be shared on social media than a page with written content on the same subject.
Videos are also much more likely to rank, and are easier to rank, than other types of content. According to WordTracker, 80% of videos that appear in SERPs are also informational. So that “viral” video you’ve been thinking about producing should probably stay on the backburner for a little bit longer. Instead, think about subjects relevant to your products and services that you could tackle through video.
Let’s stick with our mouse trap company for another example. Here are a few ideas that are interesting, yet still relevant to the business of selling mouse traps:
- How Smart is a Mice?
- How to Set Mouse Traps
- 5 Humane Ways to Catch a Mouse
You don’t just want to shoot cheap or low-quality videos, though. If you’re going to give video a try, you have to do it right. People expect high-quality video, high-quality value, and they don’t want their time wasted. This doesn’t mean you need a professional production crew, it simply means that shooting with your iPhone in a dark basement won’t cut it in 2015.
Host an Event and Invite Local Press/Bloggers
For small businesses, it can feel impossible to build links to your site or get the attention of local press/bloggers. But the only problem there is you don’t have a lot to offer them, and it probably doesn’t involve free food.
To correct this issue, brainstorm the various types of events you could hold that would not just be worthy of free press, but would make reporters and bloggers actually want to cover it. This means doing a lot of the heavy lifting yourself and making sure you reach out directly to them with personalized invitations.
You can include a press release, but be sure to make the reporter/blogger feel special. They probably receive hundreds of press releases each month; it’s the real messages from real people that stand out in their inbox.
In conclusion, don’t think of these as just random things to try in order to figure out some way of seeing results. Instead, stick with each of these efforts consistently and always be on the hunt for new strategies to employ. The more work you put in to add value to your business’s website and brand, the better your results will be with each passing month.