Digital Marketing 101: Optimizing Content and Building a Following

by Nicole Speciale

Digital marketing involves promoting an enterprise’s products or services through digital platforms and media. As consumers have shifted their means of obtaining information and interacting with others to online spaces and social media, marketing has evolved to reflect these changes.

This blog overviews three key tactics that both marketing leaders and newcomers alike can add to their digital marketing strategy.

Consider Expanding Your Marketing Assets

Today’s consumers tend to respond well to visual content. Videos are a great way to communicate important information that is more likely to be retained. Images, infographics, and even GIFs are other forms of digital marketing assets that have become more prevalent, especially on social media platforms.

Interactive content is another key asset that enables brands to interact with consumers and start to build up that buyer loyalty. This type of content can include structured polls or other questions, giveaways, and more—this is a great way for consumers to start to develop a personal connection with your brand. Interactive content is also a great way to get others to see content as it is often shared via “tagging” of other users who then will come into contact with your brand. Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram are very popular for this due to “re-tweeting,” “re-posting,” and “tagging” functions.

Diversifying your marketing assets will help you begin to assess which content types connect with your audience best, and will keep your audience engaged.

Know Your Strategy

Digital marketing strategies can be segmented into the many different areas of marketing, including content, social media, email, mobile, and marketing automation. Let’s take a look at each of these areas:

Content marketing is a great opportunity to develop and promote interesting and eye-catching content that will either prompt a person to learn more about your brand, or inspire them to become a buyer. Email marketing sounds self-explanatory, but it is important to note that this is the opportunity to make sure that consumers are only receiving strategic and relevant content to prevent them from hitting that dreaded “unsubscribe” button. Mobile marketing involves promoting content through messaging and within applications and social media marketing is a great way to take advantage of the “word of mouth” ways in which information spreads throughout social media. This can be for better or worse, so it is also a good idea to have a strong action plan in case negative content relative to your enterprise begins to circulate.

Marketing automation encapsulates all pieces of digital marketing and offers other important components like management tools that help enterprises stay on top of their marketing game. It is a best practice to set goals for each area of your marketing strategy, and prioritize the goals that you believe will be most beneficial to your brand.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It is hard to understate the importance of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. If your brand takes time to develop high-quality and informative content, but does not have a SEO strategy in place, then there’s a good chance that this content will not gain much visibility.

SEO ratings reflect how a page will rank on a Google search, and it involves many components ranging from strategic keyword selection to embedded image descriptions. Many site builders are compatible with SEO plug-ins that can help optimize content and take the guesswork out of how much traffic a page will receive. Considering that many users searching on Google won’t click past the second page of listed content, it is crucial to leverage SEO so that the hard work of content development can reap the benefits.

Bottom Line

Whether these marketing tactics are new to your strategy or serve as a quick refresher, focusing on creating engaging content that can start to educate potential leads, and then making sure your potential leads are seeing your content is key to building your marketing pipeline.