CASTING A WIDER NET
Improving Your Digital Marketing Strategy
liquifiedcreative.com
CASTING A WIDER NET Improving Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Contributors Meghan Fletcher.. ........................................Editor Jamie Czajkowski......................................... Writer John Corsaut............................................... Writer Layout/Design Shawn Noratel............................. Creative Director Karyn Insler..............................................Designer
ŠCopyright 2015 Liquified Creative. All rights reserved. Duplication and reproduction of contents are strictly prohibited without approved and written consent by Liquified Creative. Data and statistics provided by online sourced providers.
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Technology advances at a rapid pace. To compete on a level playing field in the marketplace, it’s becoming extremely important to conform to your consumers’ needs without getting burned at the same time. Digital marketing is marketing that utilizes electronic devices to captivate potential stakeholders. Similar to an ecosystem, a digital marketing strategy has many underlying dynamics that strategically work together to create a successful plan. Everyone else lives and breathes on the Internet—why should your brand be any different? (Of course, conventional advertising mediums come into play as well, but that’s a topic for another time—find out more about conventional advertising here.) Feel the need for speed? Let’s develop a digital marketing strategy for your brand. Well, hold your seahorses before making any knee-jerk decisions about shooting your brand across the ocean of portals. You certainly should have an understanding of successful current marketing tactics in order to propel your business to the next level.
SUCCESSFUL CURRENT MARKETING TACTICS + TRENDS
1. CONTENT MARKETING Content marketing is the process of creating valuable information with the intent of building trust and, thereby, establishing credibility with your consumers. The theory behind content marketing is to incentivize your potential customer or client by providing clientsourced information education—a learning experience initiated by your client. An educated buyer is a confident buyer. Progressive brands realize producing handfuls of offers to their clients is no longer acceptable. Instead, brands must be a vast resource of information—willing to provide reams of content—are earmarked for consumption by their information-driven clients. The brandspecific copy should then be strategically integrated throughout a company’s website, blog and social media. Call it breadcrumbs on a trail or bait to capture attention—it all leads to increased page impressions and greater awareness as clients explore the depth of your information that they’ve been searching. 1
http://www.stateofinbound.com/
41% PERCENTAGE OF MARKETERS REPORTING THAT CONTENT MARKETING PRODUCED A POSITIVE ROI IN 20141
NEW VISITS
80% OF BLOG VISITS ARE NEW VISITS. You can maximize repeat visitors by growing your email lists and fans/followers on social media. Engage and grow your traffic.
SIZE WEEKLY
2. BLOGGING A blog is factual or conversational content created for a website that inherently provides clients with information. This information should always reflect your brand and promote your culture, opinions, ideas, updates, etc. A blog not only lends itself well to content marketing efforts, but as a strategy, should be incorporated and integrated within the creation of social media content, and pay-per-click (PPC) efforts. Blogging serves several purposes, including increasing rank through Google’s algorithms as well as encouraging communication between brands and their consumers.
DAILY
DOES MATTER
On average, blogs that post daily tend to receive 5 TIMES MORE TRAFFIC than those blogs that only post weekly or less.
MANIC MONDAY VERSUS THIRSTY THURSDAYS Monday blogs tend to get the highest readership, whereas Thursday posts tend to obtain the most social shares.
DEEPER POSTS ATTRACT MORE BACKLINKS. Articles that are at least 1,500 words long and contain images, infographics or videos tend to attract more opportunities for backlinks and sharing.
THROUGH CREDIBILITY AND QUALITY DESIGN
The average percentage of people that learn about a company from content versus ads. Quality content has greater value than temporary ads.
QUALITY CONTENT AND DESIGN are the top factors to add credibility and engagement when attracting your audience online.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING Social media is no longer just an option for businesses— it’s a necessary part of the digital marketing strategy and implementation efforts. According to data collected by Pew Internet, nearly 75% of adults with Internet access use social media websites. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of a direct line to their target audience? Social media allows companies to communicate with their audience in a very personal and ‘connected’ way. This includes targeting niche groups, and generating new leads at substantially lower costs. TIP: Take advantage of media management tools. Management tools combine and integrate social media platforms allowing opportunities to set up streamlines for posting, scheduling and tracking. It’s illogical to have all of these accounts separate—they all work together. Save time and post all the newest updates, pictures, and videos to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram from just ONE platform tool.
80% US SOCIAL NETWORK USERS PREFER TO CONNECT WITH BRANDS VIA FACEBOOK
4. PAID AMPLIFICATION Although organic SEO is still prevalent throughout the upper echelon of companies, frequently the real edge is provided for those with the deepest pockets. Consider the mass amount of social noise competing against your voice. The few with the bullhorns can be heard across the crowd. According to KISSmetrics, every month thirty billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook alone. Paid amplification (boosting) improves your target audience visibility immediately—delivered in a strategic manner chosen by your preferences. It also offers more immediate results. In order for website pages to move up in search results, SEO requires an indexing ‘waiting’ time while pages are crawled by Google, indexing them accordingly by content. Your company will need a strategic ‘blend’ of paid and organic social exposure in order to thrive this year.
SUCCESS TARGETED
NON-TARGETED
TARGETED ADS HAVE DOUBLE THE SUCCESS RATE VERSES NON-TARGETED ADS
6. TARGETED MARKETING Although the creative advertising and marketing concepts presented in the movie Minority Report seemed pretty futuristic at the time, some proved more realistic in present day. Billboards may not read our IDs from retina scans as we pass by—just yet—but personal online information is available for public viewing and can be used to target and market individuals on many levels. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon track consumer viewing habits and use that information to not only improve, but also re-target paid advertisements.
5. HUMANIZING OF BRANDS It’s time to have a little fun! Brands that take on relatable personas—which potentially correlate with their target audience—are fun, likable and ultimately easier to trust! If you haven’t considered your brand’s persona, it’s time to put your creative hat on and start thinking from your client’s pointof-view. Remember, your brand’s persona is a key factor to your company’s success and should be based on a strategic plan. Who loves you, baby?!
Consumers sign-in to accounts which, in turn, establish an online database of personal information followed by details of buying—and viewing—habits. Additionally, each company account uses this in-depth information to better serve you by anticipating your next buying thoughts. Most accounts that consumers establish with companies are ever-expanding databases—updated essentially, strictly by the consumer. The integration of buying habits, combined with new product appeal allows companies to deliver landing pages that serve up additional product ‘sides’ to accompany the full plate of goodies being built in the shopping cart. How about some socks for your new shoes?
8. ENHANCED ANALYTICS
58% PERCENTAGE OF COMPANIES THAT BELIEVE ANALYTICS IS IMPORTANT TO THEIR COMPANY 82% SAY THAT IT WILL BE NEEDED IN THE UPCOMING YEAR
7. DON’T GET LOST AT SEA — IF YOU DON’T HAVE A FOG HORN, GET ONE! It has always been important to stand out from your competitors and in 2015, getting noticed is still the best strategy. Rethink your brand, image, and marketing strategies - what separates YOU from the other schools of fish? Are you swimming with the school or is the school following YOU? You’re passionate about your brand, but why should everyone share in your passion? There’s no better way to attract your market than with providing the pertinent information that they’re already searching for—inbound marketing at it’s finest. Build the page and they will come.
Digital tracking accuracy continues to improve as alternative and supplemental online marketing technology deployments are held accountable for performance. Analytics—accountability— should play a key role in your overall marketing plan. Minute details of traffic acquisition and resulting website performance are key measures for attaining and satisfying your target market. Conversion analytic data also provides in-depth opportunities to reformat and redesign website architecture—both visual and content—to continually stimulate key traffic. Through analytics, analyze your audience metrics carefully—from where they originated to how they selected to click onto your website to how long they reviewed your information. Then, after the tide has risen and gone back out to sea—take another walk on the beach to discover new opportunities.
9. PENGUINS AND PANDAS AND HUMMINGBIRDS...OH, MY! Rest assured, it’s not if—but when—updates to Google search algorithms change again. Time will certainly tell the nuances for consideration when moving forward with search engine marketing and optimization (SEM & SEO). Evidence leads us to believe that future updates will focus on latent semantic indexing—LSI, a mathematical based algorithm—that differs from the current booleanbased algorithm. Research indicates that LSI will overcome many problematic constraints—as presented in Boolean keyword queries—and will provide more accurate and relevant search results. Google continues to keep us on our toes—or is that tows?
10. MOBILE-FIRST MARKETING Make sure your marketing plan appropriates funds destined to target, attract and appease mobile users! The amount of internet time consumed on mobile devices is growing 14 times faster than time spent on desktop devices. So, creating a mobile-specific marketing strategy is not only more important than ever, but in time, mobile traffic may well be your largest market share exploring your brand online. Considering the real-time transition favoring mobile users, acknowledging, accommodating and anticipating their traffic patterns—through improved mobile visitor experiences—will most certainly add a new layer of opportunity to increase revenue. According to a recent study by the Mobile Marketing Association, nearly 70% of the “mostly mobile” generation almost exclusively visits websites from mobile devices.
AND THE CLICK GOES ON. Clearly, there are many digital online tactics and strategies to consider when creating—and finalizing—your digital marketing plan. Hopefully, “Casting a Wider Net” provides some key insights toward researching, selecting and implementing the tools useful for your company to increase online presence. At Liquified Creative, we firmly recognize that “Marketing isn’t just one thing. It’s everything.” The research, focus, insight, strategies, and tool implementation allocated toward developing your company’s marketing plan will deliver measurable results. Is your plan accountable. Dig deep and analyze your metrics today. Document the results to use as a benchmark to gauge future success. Ensure that your company is truly full throttle digital with as many online marketing opportunities engaged as possible. Measure results. Eliminate the chaff. Plant seeds. Enjoy the harvest as your online strategies continue to flourish and produce bushels of clicks.
Ready to Dive Deeper into marketing this year? Contact Liquified Creative today for an assessment of your company’s digital media and marketing strategy.
443-949-9284 info@liquifiedcreative.com LiquifiedCreative.com