Over the last decade, business marketing has become a complex industry with many new tools for professionals to use. Unfortunately, not everyone has kept up with the industry’s evolution. Take a closer look at your business’s marketing strategy to make sure you aren’t missing the essential ingredients.
Podcasts
Marketing projects should do more than make your brand and products familiar to consumers and other businesses. Marketing should prove your brand as a leader in your business’s industry.
Making a podcast series gives you an opportunity to show off your knowledge and grow a base of loyal listeners. The percentage of adults ages 12 and older who have listened to at least one podcast in the past month has
Like videos, you can’t expect podcasts to work well unless you put in the right effort. To make a successful podcast, you’ll need the following:
- Microphones that make clear recordings
- A theme song that establishes your podcast as an ongoing project
- Scripts that include good information, interesting observations, and (maybe) a few jokes
- Metadata that tells search engines about the podcast’s content
Online Videos
After the internet and social media revolutionized the way businesses market themselves, many companies stopped producing videos. After all, videos didn’t help websites reach higher rankings on SERPs (search engine results pages) because they didn’t have text for search engines to crawl. Plus, making videos was dramatically more expensive than writing keyword-optimized blog posts and landing pages.
It’s time to make video content a part of your marketing strategy.
Research shows that online video will account for 74 percent of online traffic by the end of 2017. People are consuming online videos, and they expect to find videos on websites.
However, putting a video on your website isn’t going to make your marketing strategy more effective. If you do the job properly, however, you can reach thousands of viewers. Follow the tips below when making videos for your next marketing project:
- Include closed captioning so that viewers don’t have to turn on the sound on their devices.
- Provide entertaining, informative content that encourages people to share your videos.
- Post videos to social media accounts.
- Include metadata so that search engines can find and evaluate your videos.
Link Portfolios
Link building earned a bad reputation years ago because some marketers used it improperly. If you’re going to build a good link portfolio, you need to understand that poor quality links and duplicate content will have negative effects on your marketing strategy. When done correctly, though, a link portfolio can boost your website’s position on SERPs.
When building a link portfolio, you need to make sure that quality websites point to your site. The better reputation your links have, the more they will affect your SERP position.
You also need to make sure that you check for incoming links. Broken links won’t improve your marketing success. In fact, they could hurt your attempts to improve brand visibility. Luckily, you’ll find plenty of tools that can help you monitor broken and problematic links.
Since link building can be a complex concept to understand, you may need to read the about the most strategic ways to build an effective link profile. CopyPress, a content marketing agency, recently published a link-building white paper that will give you the latest information about tactics for increasing links and choosing monitoring tools that will work for you.
Account-Based Marketing
The effectiveness of social media marketing has forced many marketing professionals to focus on interacting with consumers. During the rise of social media, plenty of marketers have forgotten about how well account-based marketing can work.
Account-based marketing reviews organizations that have done business with your company. By looking at the client’s needs and past orders, you can customize the content to encourage more interactions with your brand.
Unlike PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, where you focus on a specific product or service, you want your account-based marketing to cast a wide net so that you can use similar content to get more clients interested.
Finally, you need to do some more research to discover what social media platforms people within businesses use. This research often requires little more than searching for people you have already communicated with to see whether they post more announcements on Twitter or Instagram. With this knowledge, you can place your content in a channel that targets the client. In this way, you revert somewhat to social media marketing, but you intend to attract business from organizations instead of people.
Your Business Website
Believe it or not, nearly half of the small businesses in the United States don’t have websites. As a marketing professional, you should encourage all of your clients to start websites that will help potential customers learn more about them. Without a presence on the web, some shoppers will assume that the company has gone out of business.
An online website can be particularly helpful if your client sells products. Building an e-commerce store is easier than ever and the ability to grow your customer base tenfold makes it a lucrative avenue for many businesses.
You will need to do more than make a website, though. You need a website developed with marketing in mind. When building a website, make sure that you perform the following:
- Include metadata on every page to help search engines rank the content.
- Publish a blog post at least once every two weeks to keep content fresh.
- Include a call to action on every page.
- Use local keywords that will help nearby consumers find the site.
- Create a sitemap to make crawling easier for search engines.
- Make URLs that include keywords.
Many businesses make great websites, but then they get tired of maintaining them. Over time, the sites lose influence.
A successful marketing strategy needs a range of ingredients that reach different people in different ways. Your project may not need every ingredient listed above, but you should research the options so that you can decide which ones sound useful. You may want to make a few podcasts and videos to see how your audience responds to audio-visual content. The results will tell you which path to pursue.
