iSmart Communications Blog

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has evolved so much in the last couple of years. You can’t just stuff keywords everywhere and expect to climb the rankings in search. Now, you need to create informative and relevant content that specifically addresses your target audience’s problems and interests.

Keyword Research involves finding the words and phrases your target audience uses when typing their queries into a search engine. It allows you to build a list of keywords you want to rank for. It works together with your content strategy helps you develop a strong SEO standing. Hence, this is why keyword research tools are essential for any content marketer’s toolkit.

1)    Organic Traffic Is Still Crucial 

For every company, organic traffic remains one of the most important sources of traffic. Appearing on the first page positions yourself as the industry expert to help others solve their problems. Moreover, by appearing on the first page for multiple but relevant keywords, people will engage with your content more.

By continuing to provide informative and relevant content, it creates a good impression in the eyes of your visitors. And with proper usage of CTAs and content offer, you can turn them into leads. 

According to statistics, the higher your ranking, you will attract more readers to come to visit your site. The first position on Google search results on desktop draws a 30% click-through rate. The click-through falls the lower your rankings.

2)    Four types of Keywords to Consider

Generally, people use four different kinds of keywords when they’re using a search engine.

Informational
It usually starts with a question because the people are looking for tips, solutions and insights on a specific challenge.

Navigational
Very often, the searcher already knows a particular feature or a product or service. Often, they will search by typing a product or brand name.

Transactional
For this, the searcher has probably done some research and understanding their problems. Now they are ready to dive deeper, that is to convert.

Commercial
Keywords could include pricing, buy or even subscription, keywords and phrases that indicate their readiness to purchase.

3)    Never-ending Research

Keyword research is an ongoing task, just like of your digital marketing tactics which you should aim to optimise. Your list of keywords will change according to the search behaviour of people. Your list will evolve and grow over time, especially when reaching out to new markets or introducing new offerings. Therefore, you can’t keep creating content around a specific list of keywords and must continuously keep up to date.

4)    Keywords Relate to your Topic Clustering Strategy

In order to stay ahead of the competition, organisations and marketers have to ensure your keywords are linked to your topic clusters constantly.

Topic clustering works when you create a single pillar page that acts as a comprehensive resource covering an overarching generic topic. There, you can create other content pages that cover related subtopics of that pillar page and ultimately, to link them all together internally. Using topic clustering together with keyword research will score big for your SEO.

5)    Spy On Your Competitors

So how do we define success in your SEO efforts?

Of course, part of measuring your success will likely be influenced by how well you’re standing out amongst the market you’re in.

It is where competitive intelligence tools come into play. You need to use tools to track your rankings and see how they change over time as compared to your competitors. It allows you to identify where you are gaining or losing traction and find opportunities to improve your content strategy. This competitive intelligence reports should be part of your keyword research strategy because they influence one another.

As your SEO evolves, your keyword research game should keep pace as well. It remains a vital part of your SEO strategy. Together with informative and relevant content and prominent CTAs, your website is on the right path to converting visitors into leads.

Nearly everyone has an electronic reading device, be it a phone, tablet or even a Kindle.
Reading is one way to obtain information quickly and make use of downtime. eBooks are especially ideal for busy decision makers.

Early marketers have likened eBooks to something like a long-form blog post. Since then, technology has improved, and people’s behaviour has changed. So, the concept of eBook has to change as well.

To answer the question: Yes, it is still relevant but only if you do it right.

Ebooks are still valuable and essential in your digital marketing strategy, especially for B2B businesses. They are a form of content which helps to convey a large amount of information in a professional yet accessible manner.

Here are some of the reasons why eBooks are still relevant in your digital marketing strategy.

1. EBooks Are Professional and Impactful

Of course, anyone can write and publish on today’s web. However, publishing an eBook will help you position you as a kind of expert that is similar to those who appear on bookstore shelves.

EBooks are especially great when your target audience is in the B2B Business. A well-designed and well-written eBook also positions you as a thought leader in your field. Moreover, it is a preview of the care and effort you put into your work. In other words, you build trust with your B2B target audience. Hence, they will more be willing to work with someone like you.

2. EBooks give you versatility for Marketing

They are seen mostly in the top of funnel marketing, very early in the marketing process. However, you can find uses for almost anyway in your marketing campaign.
Now, let’s consider the three-stage buyer journey which most digital marketers adopt:

Awareness stage: An eBook can define a problem or provide a step-by-step “how-to” to guide.
Consideration stage: An eBook can walk readers through buying criteria for a solution.
Decision stage: An eBook can review the value buyers would get from using your product.

As above, eBooks can be used in the buyer’s journey. In other words, marketers often use them throughout the lead nurturing process. eBooks work well on other channels as well. Another alternative is social media ads such as Facebook. They are usually used an ad offering to drive visitors to the landing page to download the eBook. A way to help you capture your leads.

3. EBooks help your Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing means providing relevant and informative content to your customers and prospects. Other than the benefits it offers to your target audience; another is the usefulness for content creation.

An example: You can break your most useful eBook into a series of blog post. Likewise, it could also work in reverse. They could also be used to churn out a checklist, infographics, videos, or other forms of content which is easier for your target audience to digest.
With this, you are accelerating your content creation and strengthening your SEO which depends very much on content as well. With a strong content marketing strategy and SEO to boot, it improves website ranking and lead generations overall.

4. EBooks Help Your Team Members Learn and Grow

Although this point is not really about your customers or prospects, it is essential to the growth of your team and ultimately your strategy. The more time your team spends researching about the topics or issues in your field, the easier it’ll be to communicate those ideas to your potential customers.

Some people might think eBooks are old-fashioned. However, they are a tried and tested way to connect with your potential buyers. To make better purchasing decisions, decision makers are always hungry for information. And with eBooks, you help satiate their hunger to make better business decisions.

Verdict: Yes, eBooks are still useful in Digital Marketing strategies.

That said, your digital marketing strategy should not revolve only around eBooks. Complement it with your other strategies or channels to help your business grow.

Are you still resorting to manual marketing task? I hope not. If yes, then it’s probably time for you to start using marketing automation. Essentially, marketing automation is designed to automate marketing actions, cut down on repetitive tasks, better lead nurture process and to close more sales.

The benefits are:
- Improves productivity
- Automates manual workflow
- A centralised hub for actions
- Improves customer retention
- Tracks and monitors all campaigns

Still not convinced? According to CMO.com, 91% of successful users agree that it is vital. But how do you recognise your marketing needs one? Continue below for four ways to tell if your marketing requires automation

1. You Spend your day on Manual Task

If you’re spending too much time on manual tasks, it’s likely time for you to adopt a marketing automation solution.

With marketing automation, you can automate the following:

- Social media management: Schedule shares across multiple channels to reduce time spent to publish across each channel manually
- Publishing: Much like above, marketing automation lets you schedule your blog post. All you need to do is load the content.
- Emails: You can build up an email template and clone multiples of it to keep the brand message consistent. It also enables you to automate email follow-ups to engage your leads and prospects better. Furthermore, it provides insights such as data on email opens, bounces, unsubscribes or clicks.
- Workflows: Perhaps one of the most important. It allows you to set up a series of automated actions based on predetermined rules. For HubSpot, it will enable you to send an automated nurturing email which is determinant on the contact’s actions.

2. Different platform for different tasks

Are your content management system (CMS), email marketing solution, customer relationship management solution (CRM) and social media channels are under one umbrella? If yes, you need marketing automation.

With HubSpot, you have access to all marketing software needs, including:

- CMS
- CRM
- Email Marketing
- Workflows
- Social Media
- Landing Pages
- Calls-To-Action (CTA)
- Ads
- Reporting

3. Lack of Dynamic Database

A customer database is important but how you manage it is even more crucial. If you’re manually adding or removing contacts, not segmenting contacts or have a lack of insight into individual contact records, its time probably time for you to adopt marketing automation.

With marketing automation, it helps you turn your static contact database into a more dynamic one by:

- Automatically adding or removing contacts to your database. A new contact would be added to your database when a website visitor fills out a form. Likewise, when someone unsubscribes from a mailing list, they get removed via automation.
- Segment contacts into list or groups based on demographic, psychographic information or even recent actions. For example, you can categorise your contacts into buyer personas.
- Through individual records, you will be able to understand the recent actions by user done on the website. For example, which page the user has seen or which content has the user downloaded.

Therefore, with a centralised hub for your marketing, sales and customer support, you will be able to provide a consistent experience for your customer regardless of their stage in the buyer’s journey.

4. Performance Data

For every marketing campaign, there is a goal. However, to achieve that goal, there are individual components that funnel up to your goals. These projects could be blogging, CTAs, social media promotion, landing pages, workflows and even email marketing.

For example, HubSpot marketing automation allows you to tag projects by campaigns.
Data obtained could include:
- Landing page visits
- Bounce rates
- Email opens
- Email click through
- CTA submissions and so on

With marketing automation, it enables you to track each project’s performance, thereby enabling you to make changes to them with the aim of ultimately hitting your campaign goal.

After all, the only way to prove marketing success is to have numbers to back them up. While you may have tracked data, you want something that pieces all your data in a single platform. Moreover, some platforms categorise common metrics such as sessions and impressions differently, leading to skewed data.

To sum it up, marketing automation helps you gain a holistic view of all marketing performance. And with HubSpot reporting function, you can customise your view of these data with a dashboard. And there you have it, four ways for you to tell if your marketing requires automation. If you have not done so, get started today!

But, how do we know when leads are cold? Answer: Due to their behaviour.

Sure, sometimes your leads may require some time and nurture before coming back to you. These include visiting your website, checking out your content offer or even looking at your social media. However, time spent off your radar could be spent with your competitors.

Therefore, it is important to re-engage with them and provide them with the value they need and get your leads back on track. There are 2 things you should consider.

Is there enough data to inform you when your leads go cold? 

The B2B sales process is generally long. Before thinking that your leads are already lost, ensure that have analytics in place to help you understand leads behaviour. Implement a lead scoring system that helps you qualify as your leads progress towards the next stage in the buyer’s journey. This should work hand in hand with your CRM which sends a notification to your marketing or sales team for follow-up of your leads.

It is OKAY to ask

Based on your gut feel, you are confident that your lead is interested in your offer. However, it seems that they have gone cold after 2 weeks.

Don’t assume right away that it is your fault. It is fine to ask your leads directly what’s going on.
They might be interested but stalled their project due to handling multiple projects at once. You may have misread them or your lead where never really interested in the first place. They could also be tempted by your competitors.

Doing this, you can learn and take precautions that will keep more of your leads from cooling in their first place. This helps you improve on your sales cycle by focusing on “best fit” leads.

While taking note of the above considerations, here are 4 things you can do to get your leads back on track.

1. Send Out a Customised Email

Your lead may have joined your email list but hasn’t opened your messages. These days, people are overwhelmed and do not have the time to derive the full value of your content. Your customised email could something like a guide or a checklist that may spark their further exploration into the rest of your website offerings.

2. Offer Something Relevant

Your leads may have been checking your emails but are not clicking through to your site. Re-ignite your relationship with your lead by offering something up front. Even if they might not show interest in the initial stage, they may be excited to accept something like a free assessment or a free 15-minute consultation. Of course, you should customise your approach to different prospects. Put an intriguing subject line as compared to previous emails to pique their curiosity.

3. Other Ways to Re-Engage

You could make use of re-targeting ads to get your cool leads back onto your website. Direct conversation through social media could also work out. As for leads who poke around your website, make use of custom pop-ups and lead magnets to drive them back.

4. Approach Another Prospect Within a Company

This happens way too often. You are absolutely sure a particular company is the best fit, but somehow can’t get them on board. Don’t be afraid to have another go at it. Double check your assumptions and ensure you’re really addressing your content to the right person.

Use these 4 methods to re-engage your cold leads and bring them back. Be diligent and follow-up with them even if it takes months. However, don't waste any more time and energy than necessary. It is important to be relentless as well as learning to let go.

A good content strategy is fundamental to understanding your customer’s pain points.

All web content should be useful to someone, and it can’t be useful unless it addresses a genuine need for a specific audience. In the context of B2B, it is sort of business problem, a customer pain point.

However, prospective buyers express their pain points in terms of search queries by typing into search engines. They are usually open to the possibility of utilising a new solution to help them achieve better results.

So, you want to solve for your customer pain points. But how do you know their pain points in advance??
Here are 5 ways to track, monitor and learn about customer pain points.

1. Stick With What You Know 

To understand a customer’s pain points, marketing teams should always start with what they already know. Typically, we group customers in different buyer personas. Buyer personas refer to the representation of your ideal customer. They help you to understand and prospect your customers better.

A buyer persona needs three key information such as:
-    Demographics (job title, industry, location, interest)
-    Problems that your prospective customer might be facing
-    How your buyer will use your products to solve their problems

While a buyer persona may not help you find new customer pain points, it enables you to validate assumptions guide your market research over time.

2. Ask Your Customers 

Most marketers would tend to put this at the end and you need paying customers before you can ask them what they need. So don’t forget the power of asking.

You can’t really get what you want from people unless you make your needs clear. Create a simple and clear CTA to get your prospects to make the desired action.

Use surveys and interviews. While it is not easy to get a response, the better you understand them, the easier it is to incentivise them to give you answers. The more people feel that you’re actually out to help them, the more likely they are to engage with you.

3. Ask Your Sales Team

Your sales team probably has more in-depth knowledge about customer pain points than anyone else in your organization. Being in the front lines every day, they are the first to get to experience and deal with new situations every day. 

Therefore, it is all the more important to keep an open channel of communication with sales. Schedule regular meetings to discuss new observations in customer behaviours toward certain problems or issues.

4. Social Media and Groups

Try connecting with a lead with an open platform like Twitter to find out about their needs or even Facebook to find out about their interest. This is a step in warm prospecting. People love it when others pay attention to them. And the best place to meet your prospect?

LinkedIn of course.

LinkedIn Groups lets you learn how prospective buyers for your offerings think:
-    Allows you to pre-determine if someone is an ideal buyer based on their profile information
-    Take a look at comment threads for valuable insights
-    Group memberships give you clues about users’ interests and product research methods 

Most importantly, in LinkedIn, you can simply ask people what the biggest problems are or how they deal with the current businesses issues. This enables you to brush up on the latest customer perspectives and keep those buyer personas up to date.

5. Attend Industry Conferences

Attend not just your industry’s conferences, but for your customer’s industry as well. It also gives you an opportunity to prospect to thousands of eager buyers at the convention floor. Professionals who attend usually know best about the pain points they are facing. Deep dive for information without coming across as someone who is looking to sell. Seek to understand their "pain". 

Your content should be tailored to resolve your customer pain points. Some of these have to do with technology. Show how you can help them. Be one step ahead and always keep an eye out to identify new pain points your customer may have. These serve as opportunities to better solidify your content strategy, which helps to improve your SEO ranking too.

As technology improve and change, so do buying behaviour. Most people today will use a search engine to find out more about a product, rather than to ring up a salesperson. Unlike before, the purchasing power now lies in the hands of the consumer.

When someone keys in a search online, they almost expect to find the information they require immediately. As a result, in order to appeal to change in consumer behaviour as well as buying trends, it is increasingly important for businesses to send their best salesperson.

Who is this you ask? Your website of course!

People prefer educating themselves through their own research and search engine allows them to achieve that. By optimising your website and ranking well on Google, your prospects will be directed to you.

This is part of the inbound methodology (ATTRACT) where customers find you through keywords and blogs, where their answers may lie. However, it doesn’t stop there.

You risk losing a customer to your biggest competitor if there is missing information on your website. A well-designed and information website will allow your prospects to learn more about you and your business at a comfortable pace for them.

Your website guides your prospects throughout the buyer’s journey

Much like a salesperson, your website should be optimised to guide your prospects throughout the buyer’s journey. Information should be fed throughout the Awareness, Consideration and Decision stage. Optimise your website with a good content strategy as well as SEO.


Awareness stage: Content that focuses on the problem your buyer persona is experiencing
Consideration stage: Content that is more about the solution to a problem
Decision stage: Content that answers questions about your product or service.

To make the process more human, every stage should be personalised and tailored to each prospect. This largely depends on the amount of interaction they’ve had with your website and information exchange to access premium gated content. 

Mirror Your Company’s Sales Process

Map out the key stages and reflect it on your website design. Think of questions like:

-    What is the value proposition of each page?
-    How would you like your visitor to proceed on their journey?
-    Are there analytics tool in place to check if your paths are effective?

Answer 90% of Your Prospects’ Questions

Your website should answer all common questions a prospect or a customer would have. By providing valuable information for your prospects, you save them the trouble of having to talk to a salesperson for a relatively simple answer. Moreover, it allows your sales team to focus their time and effort on truly qualified leads.

A highly-structured FAQ will help you achieve this, giving your users easy access to all the answers they’re most commonly seeking about your brand, services, industry.

This could also be achieved by installing a chatbot or live chat on your page. This caters to modern users who also prefer not to interact on the phone at their stage of their buyer’s journey.

Strong Value Proposition

Every business should have a strong statement as to why someone should use your service or buy your product. 

On a sales call, this may lead to a discussion on how your business differs and stand out from your competitors. From your website point of view, you need to strategically convey this message. Convince your prospects or leads that your company is the right fit for them while being humble. This way, you are more likely to develop a new relationship and gain a new customer.

In a nutshell, your website is your most hardworking salesmen, working 24/7. Cheap and efficient. Design your website with your persona’s in mind and not what your company desire. Top it up with analytics to ensure you are constantly improving as buyer behaviour continues to change.

After all, business is about establishing trust. With the right tools and design, your website can bring in new qualified leads to your sales pipeline and increase the number of lead-to-customer conversions, helping your business grow.

Lead nurturing refers to the practice of developing a flow of communications (through emails, social media messages, etc.) that seek to qualify a lead, keep them engaged and gradually guide them down the sales funnel. In this post, I will just discuss lead nurturing campaigns for email.

Lead nurturing email campaigns provide you with an engagement safety net which ensures that your leads are engaged during each stage of the buyer’s journey, increasing value, brand recognition and trust.

Before you jump right into lead nurturing email campaign, remember to follow these lead nurturing email best practices.

1. Define Your Goal

As always, you must first define the goal of your lead nurturing campaign. Your purpose may be centred around guiding your leads along the buyer’s journey and earning their business when they are ready. An example would be moving them from an MQL to an SQL.

However, knowing your goal not only applies to your overall lead nurturing campaign but each and every individual as well. The purpose of your email is to add value to them and drive them to take the desired action.

2. Segment Your Contacts

Ever receive an email that was completely unrelated to your interests or something you never signed up for? Yes? You would probably unsubscribe or mark it as spam. This applies to your leads. Therefore, it is important to segment your contacts by classifying them into groups based on particular actions or similarities. An example would be buyer personas, grouped according to particular demographics and psychographics.

With this, you can tailor your lead nurturing emails to the relevant buyer personas. It is also important to consider at what stage of the buyer’s journey is your lead at, and then to deliver the right content at the right time.

3. Targeted Education Content

While you segment your leads, you will also need to ensure that you write targeted content for your lead nurturing emails. Remember to keep your goals in mind so it’s clear what action you want your readers to take in each email. This means that your call-to-action (CTA) should be simple, clear and easily visible. Build trust with your leads and position yourself as an industry leader by including resources such as:

• Blog articles
• Webinars
• Case studies
• Whitepapers

4. Short & Sweet 

Ask yourself. Do you have a long attention span when you are reading a marketing or promotional email? I guess not. So, keep your lead nurturing emails educational and brief. This will encourage people to read the emails all the way through and further your chances of more engagement.

5. Use Personalisation

Personalisation is a great and simple way to make your leads feel more human, like you are conversing with them one-to-one. Personalisation tokens such as name, company, location, industry allows you to make your email feel more personalized. Up your game by using personalization even in the subject line or preview text. They can help to increases the overall open rate for your lead nurturing emails as well.

6. Space Out Your Emails 

An unspoken rule: Don’t set up your lead nurturing campaign to emailing your leads every single day. However, there is also no standard number of days for which you should run your lead nurturing campaign for. It depends on the length of your sales cycle. The longer the buying process, the longer your lead nurturing email campaigns will last.

7. Use Analytics 

Once your lead nurturing campaign is underway, constantly review your analytics to see how it’s performing. Be sure to look at things like open rates, click rates, number of unsubscribes, time spent reading the emails. These types of analytics can provide insights as to which of your lead nurturing emails need refining. If your open rate is low for a particular email, take another look at the subject line and preview text to see how you can make improvements.

As do many other aspects of inbound marketing, lead nurturing requires time and patience as well. Keep making changes and try new things. Simply put, it is the building of relationships with individuals who are currently not ready to buy. So, build that trust and adhere to these best practices for a better lead nurturing email campaign.

Deciding on the SEO metric to focus is essential to marketing success. After all, the point of understanding SEO metrics is to gather insights from the performance data. With these insights, you can understand what’s working and what’s not. Here are 6 SEO metrics you should pay attention to in any digital marketing campaign.

1) Organic Traffic 

Organic traffic has to be one of the most important metrics to monitor. As your traffic continues to grow, you will naturally become more interested in quality traffic over quantity.

Organic traffic comes from search queries through search engines. Amongst the different types of traffic, organic is the most indicative of your website’s overall health. In other words, it represents how well your site ranks for the targeted keywords.

As you introduce more keywords into your content strategy, your ranking increases on the Search Engine Results Page, thereby increasing your organic traffic as well. By posting relevant and optimised content, your organic traffic will also improve.

There are several other types of traffic such as Direct, Social, Paid and more. You should have a data analytics tool in place to help you monitor these figures over time. As organic traffic improves, so will your other traffic sources.

2) Bounce Rate 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who arrived at your site and left without taking further action. With Google Ads, it can often lead to expensive ads that do not provide value for the campaign.

There are mainly 3 types of bounce rate:

1. Users who visit your site and didn’t like it or need it; clicked on the wrong thing
2. Users who visit your site but didn’t see what they wanted; clicked on the wrong page
3. Users who visit your site but could not interact with the page.

For (i), there is nothing much we can do. However, for (ii) and (iii), we can develop keyword-focused landing page, helping visitors to the relevant answers they might be seeking.

3) Conversion Rate 

To see how traffic adds value to your marketing efforts, we look at the conversion rate. It refers to the percentage of visitors that took a defined action to move toward a sale.

Throughout the buyer’s journey, we have several types of conversions, such as:

• Subscribing to an email newsletter
• Registering for product demo or consultation
• Making a purchase

You may break down your conversion optimisation along the different events to see where conversions fall off throughout your entire marketing funnel.

4) Dwell Time

Dwell time refers to the average amount of time a user spends on your page within a session. It is different from bounce rate since the latter also includes zero-second sessions into your total.

You should be aiming for a higher dwell time.
High dwell time could mean:

• Visitors are finding your content relevant and informative. In other words, they are actually reading it.
• Visitors are consuming important content as they near a buying decision

5) Page Exits

Page exits are useful as they tell us where we ‘lost’ the person. While any user can exit on any page, do keep a look out for a clear pattern.

If there is one page which is driving many visitors to exit, then there is definitely a problem:

• Visitors could not find what they had hoped to
• A poorly designed page which did not make for a good user experience

6) Return Traffic 

Return traffic indicates interest in your content and a growing awareness of your brand. Initially, traffic might not be high. By implementing a content strategy, graphics and video, thought leadership as well as social media, you will encourage return traffic. Moreover, returning traffic might choose to share your content on social media, allowing you to future expand your reach.

There you have, 6 SEO metrics to consider when implementing your digital marketing campaign. However, SEO in itself is not enough to rank well. Remember that SEO works best with a strong content strategy. But don’t just do content for the sake of it, build a connection with the people you want to reach. Unsure how? Start with blogging.

Nearly every business relies on digital marketing, be it to promote their products or services or to reach out to their target audiences. As most marketers know it, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to digital marketing strategies or tools. Every company adopts their own methodology to outdo the competition and stand out.

Good digital marketing relies a lot on good planning and research. By understanding your market and audience (or should I say buyer personas), you can position yourself better in the industry. Else, you are just building up towards a failure, financially and even business-wise. So here are 4 digital marketing mistakes you must definitely avoid.

1) Lack of market research

Market research is a critical element of every digital marketing campaign. Regardless of whether you are a start-up or even an MNC, it should be a part of your on-going strategy in helping you make marketing decisions. Research helps you gather valuable data and reliable information to create effective marketing campaigns.

Moreover, it allows you to identify and understand your buyer personas. Through this, you can determine your product/market fit and even run a competitive analysis. For example, you could discover that you have made a mistake in identifying one of your buyer personas. You could even implement upcoming technologies or even adopt ideas from other marketers, giving you a better edge in the market. By constantly researching, it keeps you aware of your surroundings, helping you make more strategic decisions and this is something you cannot afford to skip on.

2) Not investing enough 

Yes, we all have budgets. And yes, there are plenty of ways to cut cost on digital marketing and still run an effective campaign. But there comes a point where you need to make a significant investment to achieve more out of your marketing campaign. Marketing is an investment and it requires before you can see any considerable ROI from it.

But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a fortune on it (your boss will definitely say no). This brings back to my first point, back your claims for a higher budget with a detailed market research and plans. Explain briefly the strategies and metrics you plan to adopt for your campaigns, such as email, social media, SEO/SEM and so on. Get your boss to buy into your plans.

3) Neglecting your website 

Your website is the main point of contact for your buyer personas. It builds awareness about your business, informing audiences about your product or services. Most importantly, it guides your leads back to your website and hopefully, convert them. This can be done by getting them to complete a form, download an e-book, subscribing to a webinar or blogs. An effective marketing campaign works hand in hand with a good website.

Furthermore, people are generally savvier these days. This means they have expectations, needs and demands when visiting your company website. If you are unable to meet their expectations, they might bounce before even visiting the rest of it. Moreover, a good website helps with your SEO ranking as well, thereby increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

4) Not socialising

There is an abundance of social media platforms online. Many use it to interact with others, consume content and even engage with their favourite brands. Most businesses also utilise social media to build their online presence. However, you can’t expect people to buy from you just because they’ve seen your ad or promotion. It is now more than that. You have to engage with your buyer personas and establish a relationship with them.

How to do it?

You can promote your products or services on social media. On top of that, you can create a community with your audience where you can engage in conversations and improve your relations with them. Remember to regularly share relevant content to ensure engagement with your audience. The better the relationship with your audience, the more effective and receptive your other marketing efforts will be. 

Of course, digital marketing provides opportunities for your business to grow. But it also requires a good approach. Remember to plan ahead and consider your options carefully. And most importantly, ensure you are not making these 4 mistakes!

The first thing that comes to your mind when people discuss ongoing SEO content? 

That’s right. Blogs.

Blogging is such an important part of inbound marketing best practice that hardly any Inbound Marketers disagree on this. Google loves websites that regularly update their content and the best way to do this is through blogging. But if your entire SEO strategy is only based on blogs, you’re missing out a lot.

Beyond blogging, there are also other ways to generate content that benefits not only your SEO but also offer value to your readers.

Here are 4 other forms of content you might want to consider.

1. Long form articles

Best practices for content such as blog post used to indicate that condensed information; less than 500 words is the best. In other words, the quicker to digest, the better.

However, it turns out that the attention span of readers isn’t as profound as once thought. Long form content actually ranks well in terms of SEO and people do want to read it. Of course, more words mean more chances for keywords. In fact, Google ranks long form content higher as the article is more likely to provide more insight and value for readers.

Content which is written with more thought and well-researched are also likelier to provide answers and solutions readers are looking for than a more general 500-word article. Readers are also beginning to appreciate more detailed content.

2. Beginner’s Guide

In terms for keeping your website updated, blogs do a fantastic job of generating a series of content regularly. Blog post focuses on a small, specific part of the industry, a particular subject or topic.

You can go big and talk about the most fundamental aspects of the subject you deal with. You can create a “how-to guide” in the form of a 10x pillar content page, demonstrating your expertise in the subject. For example, those working in digital marketing, might be tempted to write “How to Start with Digital Marketing”. Such content gives you the opportunity to include a large number of targeted keywords to boost your SEO ranking.

Moreover, you’ll be able to generate a high number of internal links back to the guide in future – another factor that helps in your SEO ranking.

3. Glossary of terms

Does your industry utilise a lot of jargons? Or do you find yourself using words to that you and your colleagues understand? Jargons should be avoided whenever possible. However, businesses should take advantage of this especially for those working in a particular niche industry.

Everyone loves a glossary, one is that quick to scroll through, quick to read. So, if your industry uses a lot of terminologies, create a page where people can understand it. A glossary enables you to put together a range of keywords more than a blog topic could achieve. It creates great opportunities for further internal linking as well. So, the next time you use a piece of jargon, you can simply link to the relevant glossary entry.

These are great for your SEO and spares you the effort of redefining words and concepts every time you write about them in future.

4. Landing Page

Landing pages act as entry-points into your website. Users usually “land on” the page from search engines before they visit the rest of your website.

They are beneficial for your SEO as they allow you to dedicate an entire page to one specific search term, which increases the chances of it ranking. However, this also means you can control how and where the readers enter your website.

As most readers don’t tend to spend too long time on landing pages, it would be best to keep the copy short and make it very clear where your CTAs to drive the user to complete the desired action.

Stay Fresh

So, remember to keep your content updated and relevant as it is fundamental to any decent inbound marketing strategy. Also, regular blogging is the foundation of your content strategy which is key for your SEO. However, there is an abundance of other types of content available to enhance your SEO, there is no one best way. So, continue to discover and exploit the gap to give you an edge over your competitors.