Like healthy eating, a strong online marketing campaign requires balance and high-quality ingredients.
With Halloween in the rearview and Thanksgiving just around the corner, diets are a hot topic. What should I eat? What should I pass up? What should I save for a sugar-fueled holiday binge that leaves me quaking on the living room floor, rocking back and forth in excessive caloric regret?
Important questions, to be sure.
In many ways, online marketing is like a good diet. You don’t want to starve yourself, but you don’t want to embrace total gluttony either. Ideally, you want to find the right balance of different elements to deliver healthy growth without busting the company waistline.
Online marketing for small businesses can be broken down into several elements, and a good marketing strategy will include a portion of all of them, served in just the right amounts to please your target market and make sure your diet stays on track.
Power protein: A high-functioning website
Your website is the main course and the central part of your diet. It’s the surf ‘n’ turf in your feast, the beef in your burger, the Spam in your casserole (hey, we don’t know what you’re into). Most of what you do online revolves around your website; all your efforts on other marketing platforms direct consumers to it. So your website better be worthy of all that attention. If you cooked an amazing meal with an exotic tropical fruit salad, a truffle soufflé and a side of garlic-roasted artichoke hearts, and then slapped down some limp bologna for the main course, well, let’s just say that would be an incongruous meal arrangement. Don’t let your website be the limp bologna in your diet. Pack it full of smart calls to action, lead-generating forms, high-quality content and clear directives on what you want your prospects to do. If your website is doing it’s job, it will work as the central piece of your marketing diet, the focal point that helps your turn all those prospects into something useful for your business.
Hearty whole grains: Content marketing
Content marketing is the practice of creating quality content to increase your brand exposure and draw in prospective customers with useful information. Content marketing is like the grains in your diet, those energy-giving carbohydrates that power your body for action. And like carbs, content marketing should be applied with the right combination of quality and quantity. Don’t load up on empty calories from processed chips and white bread, give your audience the healthy whole grains from your marketing pantry: High-quality articles, videos, e-book giveaways, guides, online tools and other content that is both useful and entertaining. Share something of real value, not a bunch of sales fluff that will cause them to tune out. When you do this, you are working in the “attract” state of online marketing, which is that critical top of the sales funnel in which you start developing leads that you will later nurture into sales.
Here’s what a Forbes article says about the rise of content marketing:
“As marketers continue to see the benefits of their content strategies, money previously earmarked for search engine PPC, SEO and social media will be re-allocated to content marketing efforts. A major struggle, however, will be finding ways to stand out amidst the throngs of other content vying for attention. Case studies, video content, research-intensive content, and content that abides by the 12 quality metrics will be what gives businesses an advantage over their competitors.”
One of the easiest ways to deliver good content is through a company blog. Blogging, like those hearty whole grains, is meant for regular consumption to keep your marketing campaign going. If you’re not blogging right now, start at a manageable pace – maybe one new post every two weeks. Then ramp it up to weekly and then semi-weekly. The most active content marketers out there post multiple times per week and see 7.8 times more unique website traffic than their peers. Companies that blog 15 times or more per month average about 1,200 new leads per month when they integrate those blog posts into a comprehensive online marketing campaign.
Essential fruits and vegetables: Social media
Social media is the fruit and vegetables group of your online marketing strategy. The more you get out of social media, the better. Your goal is to be as active as possible, but not in an aggressive, salesy way. Social media is a tool for you to build a community, expand your brand and create longstanding relationships with your prospects. It’s also a vehicle for getting the word out about exciting developments at your company, as well as a tool for disseminating your content.
Social media shouldn’t be thought of as “new media” anymore. It is today’s mass media. As such, it’s not a supplement or add-on to your online marketing diet; it is a core part of your nutritional balance. For a healthy marketing campaign in today’s marketplace, you need a big serving of social media.
Social media marketing is an entire topic within itself, so we won’t go into too many details on this large and multi-faceted topic. However, in general terms, you want to be consistent, you want to be responsive and you want to be active on social media. You don’t need to go crazy on every network out there. Instead, choose 2-4 networks that best represent your target market and really focus on those. As you grow, you can expand those efforts, but it’s best to start out with a narrow focus and broaden from there.
Smooth, creamy dairy: Email
Finally, there’s email marketing. People have been heralding the demise of email marketing for years, but it remains one of the most effective ways of reaching a broad audience, and also one of the most efficient ways to convert prospects into customers. In fact, conversion rates for email marketing campaigns are consistently higher than any other online marketing tool. Email is both a content delivery tool and a sales conversion tool. For these reasons, email marketing is like the dairy in your diet. It’s good for building strong bones, but you don’t want to consume too much or, to put it mildly, you could end up with some digestive problems. Similarly, a strong email marketing campaign can help you develop a solid framework for your marketing, but over-indulging in email can be hard for your audience to stomach.
In today’s sophisticated online marketing campaigns, emails are an essential part of marketing automation–automated follow-ups with your prospects that are triggered by specific actions. An investment in marketing automation software like Hubspot or Marketo can make this process much easier and more effective, but you can also cobble together some free and low-cost tools to create your own marketing automation system that works through one of the email service providers out there, like MailChimp, Constant Contact or Emma.
Maintaining a healthy diet is tough. There’s a lot of delicious junk food out there, as well as plenty of quick-and-easy options that lack proper nutrients. It’s hard to stay balanced in online marketing as well. But if you stick to the fundamentals, build strong campaigns with a good mix of the right elements, and target results over the long term, then your business will be healthier. Just remember: You get out what you put in!
Now get out there and feast!
Want to learn more about our integrated online marketing solutions, or how we can help your business get more out of its efforts, schedule a consultation with one of our experts and get your online marketing diet back on track!