Become the Pied Piper of Your Industry!
Traditionally marketing has been all about pushing messages out, actively shoving your materials under the nose of your target market and (hopefully) forcing them to notice you. That’s absolutely fine and marketing will continue to operate in this way but trends are changing. Savvy businesses are starting to recognise that success lies not in forcing their messages onto people but in allowing themselves to be easily found by people who have a genuine need for their products and services. In other words ‘find me’ rather than ‘look at me’!
There is a lot you can do to make your marketing campaigns very targeted, demographics, research, segmentation criteria etc, but at the end of the day there is always a certain amount of guess work and ‘finger crossing’ involved, particularly when marketing to cold prospects. Even if your target market may potentially have a use for your services, if your campaign isn’t timed to land when they actually have a requirement it may be wasted. Consider then how valuable it is for your target market, who has a genuine need for your products and services at that precise time, to actively come and find you. That’s pretty powerful stuff is it not and that is the premise for search marketing.
Search Marketing Online
As you would imagine, the biggest arena for enabling search based marketing is the internet. Search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies are designed to bring traffic to your site but it’s not about the quantity; it’s all about the quality. Forget SEO campaigns that aim to bring in vast volumes of visitors to your site. If they aren’t relevant or you don’t engage them when they get there it’s all wasted effort. The key is attracting smaller numbers of RELEVANT visitors and you do this by being clever with your keywords.
There are lots of really clever ways of doing this and I’m not an SEO specialist so won’t attempt to explain them here. What I am however is a marketer and copy writer with a specialist interest in web content writing. All my research and experience (and talking to really smart, techno-geeky people!) points to one activity that can make a big impact on enabling relevant people with an immediate interest in what you offer to find their way to your site and that is consistently populating it with good quality, keyword rich content.
Back in February this year Google changed its algorithm to actively reward sites in the search engine rankings that feature high value content: original, non copied content, analysis, research, reports etc. (See Google’s blog for more information). Conversely that also means it penalises sites that don’t so how does your site stack up?
Capitalise on SEO Opportunities via your Blog
The best opportunity you have for taking advantage of this is by keeping your blog up to date and ensuring that the content is of high quality and is original. This of course requires a time commitment, copy writing skills and a good understanding of the use of keywords and other SEO techniques. If you have that resource in house, fantastic – use it! If you don’t, you might want to consider outsourcing this, as you would any other element of your marketing mix. A professional blogger will work with you to generate ideas for topics, create posts, add content and use the medium to its maximum effect. It will also ensure that the blog remains up to date long after the ‘best intentions’ have died a death!
Not only will your blog help boost your search engine rankings and bring in high quality traffic, it will engage them when they get there and drive them towards your desired actions: sales, contacts, referrals etc. So before your commit your budgets to PPC or even traditional ‘interruptive’ marketing campaigns, consider the power of your blog and the professional help you can access to maximise the opportunity.
For more information on the blogging packages that I offer see my Blogging Services page.
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