This page provides content and information on Email marketing systems and strategies.
- Understanding the basics of E-mail Marketing
- Making E-mail and Social Media Marketing work together
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Content Marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute, is defined as:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Dissecting this definition leads us to the following:
- A strategic approach means that an organization needs to have a long term plan in place to incorporate various aspects of content marketing in its digital marketing, and sales process.
- There must be a process related to the creation and distribution of content. This process must be tightly integrated with the product management group as well to ensure that the right content related to the organization’s products and services can be created and distributed to the right online audiences.
- With all types of content being created nowadays and competitors vying for user attention, the organization must constantly create fresh and innovative content. This requires that an organization must have an appropriate ideation process in place that encourages all organization members to provide ideas related to all types of content.
- As various parts of the organization gets busy in creating content, it’s important to ensure that the central theme and message of the content related to the organization is consistent with organization’s branding and messaging guidelines. This will ensure that the various quarters creating content stay focused on the key message of the organization.
- Creation of content requires an understanding of the target audience. This is essential to ensure that the right content can be created for the audience that in turn can be receptive to that content and causes them to take the desired actions. Definition of an organization’s audience, therefore, is an essential step before the creation of content.
- Each piece of content that is created must have a specific objective to ensure that all content creation processes are aligned to the organization’s overall digital marketing goals.
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Content Marketing refers to the use of content to market ones products and services and establish ones brand. This page provides various topics on content marketing.
Content Marketing Topics
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SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages and SEO is the art and science of improving a site’s positioning within SERPs. SERPs are results that a user sees when they type in a query in a search engine like Google or Bing. The resulting page with results are called SERPs. An illustration of a Google SERP is provided below for illustrative purposes.
By looking at a sample SERP, one can see that it has two parts. The top part (parts of which sometimes appear on the sides as well) are the paid results, while the bottom part holds the organic search results. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about improving the organic search part and to have ones website rank higher in SERPs to enable a website to get more online traffic (organic or free traffic).
Although SEO is about ensuring a site’s higher placement in organic search results within the SERP, some of the guidelines help in a better placement in the paid results as well. With a lot of competition from advertisers to be shown on top of the paid results at the least possible cost, some of the SEO techniques (e.g. improving page quality, page speed, and so on) are used by Google to rank the paid results’ pages’ quality and uses that information accordingly to rank a site within the paid results.
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Placements refer to placing online ads on specific websites and their pages. Within Google Adwords, this refers to placing ads on websites that are part of Google’s Display Network. Google Adwords allows placements based on keywords that you choose or the specific websites that you specify and that you know are frequented by your potential customers. The later types of placements are referred to as Managed Placements.
Although the first type of placements are not very popular among marketers as it results in a lot of untargeted traffic, managed placements are quite popular as they allow you to target customers of your choice. However, because of this those bids can also be expensive. For example, if you have a restaurant and would like your ad to appear in the New York Times’ Food section, you can assume that due to the high competition, your placement bids are mostly likely to be higher.
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One of the pre-requisites to embarking on a marketing initiative is to understand ones audience. The more targeted your market and the audience in that market, the better you can tailor your organization’s branding and other messages related to your products and services.
Once you have a good idea on your target audience, you can then proceed to design your organization’s customer journey, provide the right pathways to address the pain points of those audiences along the way, and to convert them into loyal customers.
Some of the key areas that are important in understanding an audience include the following:
- Understand your organization and its products and services – Although this may seem to be a straightforward point but knowing this information is vital before you can proceed to building an audience for your organization. You must be clear of the pain points that your products and services address and then use that information to build the right audience. As you analyse your organization’s products and services, ensure to also gain insights into relevant competitive intelligence.
- Build the right audience personas – Doing so helps better understand the audience’s needs, requirements, and desires. As you define your audience’s personas, you should consider both their demographics as well as psychographics information. An audience’s demographics information includes age, gender, location, education level, ethnic background, etc. Psychographics information, on the other hand, pertains to an audience’s behavior and includes traits related to personality, behavior, attitudes, interests and personal preferences. Consideration of these factors will help you build the right audiences.
- Document their pain points – Your business offer must be able to address the painpoints of your potential customers. Identifying and documenting that helps you take that under control.
- Identify the Internet sites and places where your audience may be likely to be found – This will help you enable the right digital and marketing automation to start capturing those audiences as leads and prospects.
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For the past few years, page speed and load times have become a major factor in SEO rankings. And that’s for a good reason because slow page speed and load times seriously hamper a good user experience and can thus be an obstacle in a customer’s online journey. Google, therefore, uses this as one of the factors to determine site ranking.
Many studies available on this topic clearly show that a one second increase in page load times can have a major imapct for some online retailers. As reported on the Fastcompany.com’s website, Amazon estimates that a one page increase in page load times can cost it a whopping $1.6 Billion in sales each year. This loss is due to the users frustrations that in turn leads to cart and site abandonment.
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To compete effectively in any market, you need a set of competitive intelligence data to help you gauge your position in the marketplace and to take steps to make the right adjustments. There are a lot of tools and sites available that can provide you a lot of useful data that can improve your competitive standing in the digital market where you compete or plan to compete. Here is some of the data that you can use.
- Ranking – Alexa.com provides a global rank of a website. This can help you gauge your overall positioning in the marketplace.
- Regional Traffic Breakdown – This gives you an overall indication of your inbound traffic by various regions and countries. Tools like Google Analytics, Similarweb, as well as Alexa can provide you with this information.
- Online Traffic Sources – This gives you a breakdown of information that your site or other digital property gets from various online sources. The various online sources include organic search traffic, social media traffic, referrals, etc.
- Organic Search Analysis – This information can help you to drill down and analyze various aspects of your organic traffic and underlying trends. Tools that can help you with this include Google Analytics, Spyfu, and SEMRush.
- Traffic volume and rank per region – The above mentioned tools can also provide a site’s traffic volume and ranking per region. This data is especially useful to have when a business is competing in specific regions, e.g. a retail site selling services within a country.
- Private Research – A business can do their own private research and get a lot of useful cues about a site. For example, if you are researching a blog, the number of comments on the website can provide you an indicator of a website’s popularity. Similarly, the number of Facebook or Twitter fans for a site can provide an indication on the popularity of a site. (Click to take online courses on starting a business)
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This section discusses the many ways available to digital marketers and entrepreneurs to bring traffic to their sites. Each method is suited for specific situations and marketers choose one or more methods depending on their overall online marketing goals.
- Managed placements on websites
- Remarketing
- Organic traffic
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