How do I do digital marketing?

Online marketing, or promotion of your content, is a comprehensive process that spans the multiple platforms where you hope to reach your target audience. The right distribution plan will increase exposure to your content, increasing traffic and audience engagement rates. This introduces more prospects into your sales funnel and potentially increases your customers.

Selecting the best promotional platforms will depend on the types of content you are promoting and the audiences you are targeting. For example, if you are using social media to promote website content to the younger millennial generation, then platforms such as Twitter will be more in line with this demographic. On the other hand, if you are trying to reach experienced professionals, you will bring in more interested readers through LinkedIn.

How do I attract customers to my website?

To develop an effective digital marketing promotion plan through content marketing, you must first identify your audience. You should know exactly who you are targeting and where they will be on their buyer's journey. This information should inform the content you produce as well as help you identify the best channels for your content distribution plan.

To maximize exposure, your plan should include a variety of platforms. Consider the audiences that you can target through:

• Major social media platforms (particularly Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+)
• Your email lists
• Paid advertising

Once you have identified your audience and the distribution channels, determine a schedule to promote website content that will get your message in front of the right people at the right time. Blasting irrelevant or uninteresting content on various platforms will likely lead to audiences tuning you out. Thoughtfully creating and distributing content will help you develop trust and credibility, and cultivate a stronger and more loyal following.

How do I know if my digital marketing strategy is working?

As you promote website content across multiple channels, you should continually monitor the impact, using dashboards such BrightEdge Storybuilder to view and compare metrics. You can understand how your target audience is engaging with the piece, compare the traffic rate with other pieces, and understand what they did after reading it. These insights help you judge the effectiveness of your distribution plan.

If your content distribution plan is not working, you will need to evaluate if this is due to improper targeting, content that is unappealing to your target audience, or a writing style or voice that is just not engaging. You can run an A/B test, making small changes and noting the impact on engagement and conversion rates, in order to gradually build towards creating effective content.

When properly employed, your online marketing and digital distribution plan will help you bring in interested readers to explore your content, building your brand and increasing your likelihood of conversion. Taking the time to think about where you to distribute your content and then measuring your success will help you maximize your resources and improve your success rates.

How do you develop content?

Your content is an instrumental part of the online relationship you build with prospects. You want to demonstrate to them that you are the competent professional who can answer their questions and provide the products and services they need.

Successful content should educate, entice, and challenge the prospect, guiding them further down the path towards conversion. You can measure the impact of your content quantitatively as well as qualitatively. You can measure the impact by the number of conversions and the amount of time it takes for prospects to move through different phases of the buyer’s journey. You can also assess whether or not you've created successful content through the conversations you have with prospects, including the perception of your brand and solutions.

What is the purpose of content writing?

When you've created successful content, it will seamlessly lead prospects through the sales funnel. The content will establish trust and competence and then guide prospects to further explore the website. Ideally, successful content will effectively drive interest, leading the prospect to engage with your company by requesting a white paper, downloading a case study, or subscribing to the email list.

You will then be able to use this information to contact the prospect, learn more about their needs, and provide them with content designed for those getting closer to the decision and purchase stage of the process. Successful content will keep consumers returning to your site for more materials. This can help to not only develop a relationship with your loyal consumers, but it could also help to promote you and your business as a thought leader.

Why do you need a content strategy?

A content strategy guides you in the process of considering which content is most relevant and beneficial for your audience. You'll need a content strategy to determine the array of content you're going to product including written, video, images, infographics, and more. Your content success is determined by an effective content strategy. If your content is not working for your consumers, otherwise unsuccessful, then you'll need to reconsider your content strategy as it likely has a breakdown in one of the following areas:

• The audience you're targeting
• Your optimization and promotion
• The content itself

1. Your audience. If you do not understand the audience you are targeting, then you will be producing unsuccessful content that fails to engage your prospects. This can result in high bounce rates and few people moving from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.

2. Proper optimization. Similarly, if your content is not optimized for the right words or is not properly promoted, you will also fail to reach the audience that you are seeking. This can result in low traffic rates. You'll want to follow SEO best practices to maintain your optimization efforts. You'll also want to stay up-to-date with search engines and their algorithm changes. For example, Google is evolving and is now able to understand natural language. Therefore, you'll need to stop optimizing for robots and start optimizing for your consumers. Optimizing for spiders is seen as trying to trick search engines and could end in penalization of your landing pages.

3. Your content. You should also consider the quality of the content itself. Make sure that your material is engaging and has a catchy title that encourages people to open it. Your text should be easy to scan, including features such as bullet points and lists to further engagement. The reader should immediately understand the value of more fully reading the material from the moment they scan your opening paragraph.

What does it mean to repurpose content?

Once you have successfully written a piece of material that fits well with your target audience, you can choose to repurpose content or reuse some of the same ideas in a fresh piece that further nurtures the relationship. For example, if you have a highly successful blog post, you might elect to dive deeper into the material by producing a white paper that will give your audience something more to explore. You can also reuse content as a webinar, infographic, or video, to name a few options.

What does it mean to republish content?

Sometimes people find that a successful piece remains valuable even a year or two after they had initially published it. They might want to draw the attention of their target audience back to this material so that it can gain some fresh eyes. This is known as republishing content.

Generally, when you republish content, you want to be completely upfront with your audience that you are republishing an old piece. If you have dedicated readers, they may remember it from before and wonder why they're reading the same thing twice on your page. Including a disclaimer can also encourage newer readers to dig into the rest of your archive to see what other materials you have to offer them.

How do I repurpose content?

You can repurpose content if you know that it still has value for your readers. To identify the best topics to repurpose or republish, you should use a dashboard, like Brightedge, to uncover which pages received the strongest traffic and the best engagement numbers. The content that was the most useful for users in the past, if it is still relevant and helpful, is also likely to be popular now. Be sure to only repurpose content that is relevant. Promoting old content that doesn't interest or pertain to users any longer can make your company look out-of-date and behind in the industry.

If you run an SEO firm and you notice that your recent posts related to local SEO are attracting a considerable amount of attention, you might consider expanding on this core idea and developing additional blog posts, articles, or related materials around this topic. When you repurpose content that has already had success, you spend less time coming up with new topics and you also lessen the risk of selecting a topic that doesn’t interest readers. You increase the chances that the additional content you provide will optimally serve the interests of readers.

If there is a blog post that continues to provide value, but it has gotten lost in your archives and no longer attracts the attention it once did, you might choose to promote it as a featured blog or republish it. You can offer some basic updates to the piece if they are needed but you are largely just reintroducing the content to audiences by making it accessible.

Content can also sometimes be republished on other sites in a process known as syndication. With this marketing tactic, you publish a portion of a piece on another, reputable site to encourage people to click through to your site. This can help increase brand reach. Although content syndication can be done well and successfully, it also has to be done carefully to let Google know that the syndication was on purpose and to avoid duplicate content penalties.

Republishing and repurposing content are two successful ways you can grow your brand by introducing your followers to the wealth of information you offer. When you repurpose content, it lets people take a fresh look at an older piece of value while also encouraging people to dig through and discover the insights housed in your past entries.

What is the value of a customer review?

According to Nielsen, word-of-mouth recommendations and business reviews are the most trusted forms of advertising among consumers. People are more likely to believe the recommendations that they receive from friends or family than they are the ones they receive directly from brands.

Online consumer reviews and recommendations might not be as personal as recommendations from loved ones, but they do offer third-party validation for the brand. They allow prospects to hear from past customers and gain greater insight into the reliability of the brand’s claims and the degree of authority that brand holds within the field. As many as 90 percent of customers are influenced by online reviews when preparing to make a purchase.

It is also important to remember that business reviews are featured prominently on the business display for Google Local. Cultivating positive consumer reviews on Google+ can help make your businesses seem more reputable when people search for local businesses in your industry.

Score Positive Consumer Reviews Today!

How do product reviews work?

As people look for solutions to their problems, they come across a wide variety brands and companies. Before most people make a purchase, they want to see what other people had to say about the brand. They want to consider others’ opinions in order to make an informed choice. Review sites make it possible for customers to get third party opinions on the offerings of different companies. Cultivating multiple positive reviews can help you keep customers moving through your pipeline.

How do I encourage people to leave good reviews?

Although consumer reviews help to validate your brand and entice prospects to learn more, it can sometimes be a challenge to get people to leave these important reviews for your company. Review sites and prospects are highly sensitive to brands falsifying reviews. However, there are a few ways that you can encourage people to leave you product reviews:

• Make it convenient for them. People are more likely to do something if it does not require a lot of effort on their part. Including links on your page to major review sites or forms for leaving a review in your post-purchase email, for example, can be very helpful.
• Let people know that you value their opinion and appreciate reviews. When you complete a transaction with a customer, let them know that you love hearing back from customers and do appreciate it when people take the time to leave a review.
• Provide outstanding customer service. When you demonstrate that your primary concern is their satisfaction, it helps to build an strong bond between your brand and the customer. Including links to review sites and asking to hear their opinion will be more successful when the customers feel as though they have a strong relationship with you. Further you can send an automated request for review email to people who give you a high NPS or Net Promoter Score.

Consumer reviews are valuable forms of content that help to demonstrate how well you served your past customers and what your prospects can reasonably expect. By leveraging this form of communication, you can tap into the power of third party recommendations and increase your brand reach and reputation.

Why is bounce rate important?

Bounce rate is important because you want to keep consumers engaging with your site from landing page to landing page as much as possible. Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who viewed a single page without progressing to additional pages on the site. If you have a high bounce rate, chances are your content isn't appealing or your site isn't responsive and you need to make some changes to your content strategy. Search engine optimization works best when the focus is less about optimizing content exclusively for the benefit of the search engines and more about writing rich, engaging content.

Search engines are learning how to evaluate content and will rank content of the highest quality that matches user search intent first. But even with artificial intelligence, search engines can’t pass qualitative judgments on how well something is written—yet. Instead, they use quantitative surrogates to evaluate content quality. One measure of a page's content quality is bounce rate. 

What is time on site?

Another measure of the quality of a page and the content within is time on site. Time on site is the amount of time between a user clicking on a search result and when they return to the search page.

Longer written materials can keep a person on your site longer. That doesn't mean write irrelevant content to keep someone reading. Create plenty of unique content to keep a reader interested. Informative articles are a great way to increase your time on site. Collect data, important information, and create key points you want your readers to consume. Then, encourage low bounce rate by incorporating a CTA to lead your reader to the next place you want them to go.

Understanding the results with BrightEdge

The BrightEdge platform is designed to identify topics that are popular with searchers. But to improve site engagement, content can’t just be relevant—it must also be interesting, well-written, and guide the reader on a click path into other areas of the site. 

Let’s look at an example of an ecommerce business that sells specialty foods. Within three months of deploying content using the BrightEdge platform, the company saw their bounce rate drop 13%, from 80% to 67%. Since content for this account is intended as a top-of-funnel strategy, the improvement in the bounce rate equaled a full third of organic visitors continuing their journey into the site.

Discover other measures that benefit your SEO efforts with BrighteEdge!

What is a site migration?

A site migration is the process of bringing the content of your website from one domain to another. There are a variety of reasons that require this type of move. For example, Google has indicated that HTTPS is viewed as a slight ranking signal. Brands that wanted to take advantage of this feature would have to migrate their sites from the HTTP version to the HTTPS one. Other organizations might have a site migration when they rebrand or change their business name.

Why is it important to protect my content during a site migration?

When done correctly, your site migration will allow you make necessary site changes while continuing to build upon the success of your old site. In other words, you do not have to lose the reputation your old site earned, such as the backlinks and engagement reports. By protecting this information and data, you will be able to start your new site with a high-rank, preventing potential drops in traffic and revenue for the business.

How much should I budget for marketing?

The perfect digital marketing budget is never finalized. Rather, it’s a frequently updated amalgamation of allocations that is regularly analyzed and optimized to produce the greatest returns. As marketing technology tools and trends change and evolve, so, too, do marketing budget priorities shift.

Savvy marketers are betting more heavily on the software, people, services, and ads that take advantage of digital’s potential. Companies are increasing their marketing budgets for digital marketing quarter-over-quarter at a rate unseen in nearly a decade.

Here’s how top marketers define, track, and optimize their digital marketing budgets.

How do you create a marketing budget?

A marketing budget typically range from 5 to 25 percent of a company’s revenue or revenue targets, depending on company size, stage of growth, and the importance of marketing on sales within the company’s industry, among other factors. Your company’s growth stage is the most important factor in deciding the size of your marketing budget: companies seeking to maintain their market positions budget 2-10% of revenue goals towards marketing; companies with growth targets of more than 50% (fast-growth stage) marketing budget 15-30% of projected revenue.

Once a baseline figure has been established, set aside a small portion as a just-in-case measure. Eugene Feygin, SEO Program Manager at Quill.com, who increased SEO revenue by more than $20 million year-over-year, suggests allocating 10-15% of initial marketing budget towards emergency funding. “We always have an ad hoc budget for an emergency scenario,” Feygin says. “When something out of the ordinary happens—like a module breaking or indexing issues—we can always hire an agency or a contractor to fix it quickly using the rainy-day fund without worrying about budgeting.”

Next, make allocations based on your company’s objectives and the programs that can best help you achieve them. Determine whom you are trying to reach and focus on the channels that deliver proven return-on-investment (ROI) by connecting you to your target audiences.

Luckily, search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising are high-performing strategies with relatively low costs, so even digital marketers with a limited marketing budget can be successful.

Since joining customer engagement software company Astute Solutions in March 2016, Assistant Manager of Digital Marketing Natalie Skarzynski improved organic traffic from 5% of all traffic to 30% (a six-fold increase) and grew lead generation by 173%.

“We’re heavily focused on adding names to our database of quality leads,” Skarzynski says. “Our expenditures are for SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) ad bids. 75% of the budget goes towards PPC with the other 25% to SEO software.”

Marketing agencies also tell their clients to spend on PPC and SEO.

Jeff Selig is Vice President of Search, Social, and Analytics at Overdrive Interactive, the digital agency that helped GE grow their organic search traffic by 286% and increase lead flow by 500% for its Centricity Advance Product line. Selig advises clients to invest in SEO and paid search for the best ROIs. “Organic traffic is number one in terms of marketing value,” Selig says.

A combination of SEO and paid search has potential beyond the sum of its parts. “A search engine results page (SERP) is like beachfront property,” Selig says. “The more of it you control, the more valuable it is for your brand. If you hold two of 14 positions on the first SERP—one paid and one organic—you control a significant percentage of that page.”

Diversification is also a consideration when planning a marketing budget for your marketing mix. High-performing marketing teams employ an average of 14 marketing tools. Adopting new tools as they arrive can prove fruitful, but be judicious in which channels you go after. “You can’t boil the ocean, Selig says. “Pick and choose based on what creates return, then distribute the budget to cover,” Selig says.

Regardless of your initial allocations, prepare to pivot quickly. For Quill.com’s SEO program, Feygin creates an aggressive marketing budget but spends conservatively to ensure strategies perform as expected. “We use a circulating budget model,” Feygin says. “We stagger services or software for a few months to see if they do what they’re supposed to do. When we invest, we expect to see returns within six months. If a solution doesn’t work, we get out of it. If it performs and you can prove it to management, you’ll get additional funds to double-down.”

How do you track a marketing budget?

Optimization requires tracking and testing, both of which are easier to accomplish with digital marketing strategies than with traditional offline means. Follow the performance of your digital marketing efforts closely, tracking how users find you and how they interact with your company channels.

“Digital marketing is all about researching and testing,” Selig says. “If you’re not aligned with testing, you’re never going to know what works and what doesn’t.”

For tracking, set goals in Google Analytics or use other measurement platforms to determine the sources and quantity of sales and leads on your sites. Compare how effective your paid search efforts are in driving conversions with how well your organic search traffic converts.

When beginning a new campaign, start small with narrow targeting. Once the tactic has proven successful—i.e., that the amount spent on a typical conversion is less than what the conversion is worth—scale up, either by increasing marketing budget spend on the proven strategy or by adding a new tool.

“We use analytics to find out how many qualified leads our campaigns generate,” Skarzynski says. “As a customer moves through the sales process, we tie actions back to the referring source and what we spent to get it.”

Tracking can provide actionable data beyond campaign effectiveness. “It’s not just numbers,” Skarzynski says. “We dig into trends.”

More sophisticated tracking such as cookies enable insight into how well marketing efforts are working overall. “Organic search is the beginning of the buyer’s journey,” Selig says. “But once a user has been cookied, he or she can be targeted with ads. And we can see how many times the user comes back to our site through organic, paid search, and directly. Then we add up how much it cost to drive the user to convert to determine the ROI value of the eventual transaction.”

“Every dollar spent is a dollar towards a case study,” Feygin says. “Each campaign is an experiment to test out what will happen when you invest in a certain strategy. Even if it fails, you learn.”

How do you optimize a marketing budget?

With data from tracking in hand, identify which campaigns are successful and which aren’t. At a minimum, the value of the returns should equal costs. Ideally, campaigns will pay for themselves and then some.

“Create a value set proposition,” Feygin says. “For every dollar that goes in, you want five dollars coming out. Continue the campaign so long as the analytics work out.”

Even SEO, the cornerstone of a successful long-term digital marketing strategy, should prove its worth quickly. “When we hire an agency or service provider for SEO, we expect to see trends in the goals we’re going after as soon as three months into the campaign,” Feygin says. “It’s aggressive for SEO, but we want to feel confident moving forward. If we hire an agency to do link-building, for example, but the quality of the links isn’t what we were promised, we’ll get out of it.”

Focus on what works best for your business. Your analytics data allows you to discard the programs that aren’t performing and to fine-tune the ones that are. It should also garner attention and gain you resources to pursue winning strategies more aggressively.

“The data is what you show to management to prove your case and get additional funds to go further,” Feygin says. This is crucial when seeking year-end marketing budget.

A digital marketing budget is an ongoing process. “Budget should be shifting and evolving based on campaign initiatives,” Selig says.

Optimizing for the greatest ROI means concentrating on what works while simultaneously experimenting with emerging technologies. Connecting content marketing efforts to ROI and capturing funding for SEO success both require frequent assessments and adjustments.

“You must continually analyze what's achieving results, and why," Skarzynski says. "You can’t set a campaign and then forget it and assume it’s working."

See how expanding your marketing budget to include SEO efforts can increase organic traffic!

What are Google AMPs?

Google AMPs (Accelerate Mobile Pages) are ultra-light pages that can be delivered faster and can serve a page 15% to 85% more quickly. Mobile is huge. Google has known this for some time and they effectively threatened to delist anyone that wasn’t prepared to serve up mobile and tablet optimized pages. The industry quickly adopted a responsive web design which looked great on a mobile device, but did little to address the lack of patience that mobile searchers exhibit.

While AMP has been around a while, it’s adoption is extremely low. This has created a bit of a “land grab” atmosphere where top rankings are there to the first site that, all things being equal, can deliver the fastest load page experience. At BrightEdge, where Google AMPs pages are automatically built for all pages published on the platform, the results for customers have been strong. We’ve seen numerous clients rise to the number one ranking in an otherwise competitive space largely because, we believe, they were the first for a given keyword to publish to the AMP standard.

We’ve been aggregating data for customers publishing at least 50 pages on the platform and see a couple of clear trends. Customers that optimize with AMP are certainly seeing improvements in mobile organic searches, but more interestingly they are seeing significant improvements in conversion rate, time on page, and pages per session. At first we thought these general improvements were just because AMP performed so well on mobile searches, but a deeper analysis of the data concluded that all these numbers improved on the desktop side as well.

Does Google Reward Desktop Results for Google AMPs?

Yes, Google defined AMP and it greatly increases speed and is preferred and required for some universal search elements, like news.

Automatically build Google AMPs into your pages with BrightEdge!

What is AMP?

Google supported the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, known as AMP, in response to the growing demand by customers for fast-loading, efficient websites. These pages are stripped-down versions of the regular web pages that contain only the bare necessities so that the page loads faster. In 2015, Google claimed that making webpages AMP-compliant can lead to 15 to 85 percent decreases in load times.

Page load speed is a factor you need to focus on because customers often do not want to bother with sites that take a long time to load. An estimated 40 percent of users will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. For retail websites, you could use a lot of annual sales by having poor loading speeds. With the introduction of Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google can assure users that certain websites are going to load quickly and meet their standards. This helps to improve the user experience and also works to decrease bounce rates on websites.

How is AMP used?

Sites that are designed to load on AMP will have to make a few adjustments to their design. These adjustments include:

• The HTML will offer a limited number of styles and tags
• .JS, and external resources will be loaded asynchronously and any external scripts that are preventing page renderings will be stopped.
• CDN will be available as an optional content delivering network that will cache any compliant pages so that they can be instantly accessible on mobile.

Is AMP important for SEO?

Mobile is huge and simply put, AMP is very important. Pages that are AMP-compliant rank better in the SERPs. With the introduction of AMP, there have been shifts in how mobile sites should be optimized for mobile search. Websites that are not compliant risk being pushed further down the organic search results. And with the decreased visibility, these websites will now have to try even harder to qualify for top positions. For this reason, brands that want to remain relevant on mobile should consider making AMP adjustments a part of their content strategy.