The 4 Point Perfect Digital Marketing Model
I want to be personal now and share some strategic insights. Despite
what you may have heard, investors don’t want to see a startup’s
business plan, they want to see a
business model. Models offer
more flexibility and creativity, whereas a plan can paralyze it.
Strategic models help establish patterns that lead to the desired goal.
Patterns help develop consistency. Consistency leads to success. The
perfect digital marketing strategy needs a consistent pattern mingled
with creativity.
The digital marketing model for organic search should be built around
four points of focus. Over time, each section of this model will build
the brand name of the website or organization, which in turn will
produce trust, popularity, and, ultimately, conversions.
Focal Point One
High Sustainable Link Building – “Link building” is a phrase some people hate and some people love. In truth, it should be
considered more like ‘link earning’
these days. The old traditional way of gaining links was a manual
process, accomplished by placing simple links that are not valued by
Google anymore. Your link building efforts should be focused building
content that people want to link to because of its value.
Promoting that valuable content is the next step to sustainable link
building. One effective way to do so is to communicate with webmasters
and show them why they should reference your content on their site. They
should not be paid for it at all, and the link to your valuable
resource should be relevant and not on a spammy website.
Link building is not dead. It just requires real promoting and marketing of content that represents your brand.
The focus should be on higher quality sites that don’t just give
links to everyone. They link to the best resources, post new content
frequently, and have a modern, clean design.
Great content promoted through the right channels will naturally
build links and social shares to the website while you sleep. The best
content on the web will have the best and most natural links pointing to
it. Stay away from what you can manually create and focus on
communicating with others that can create links for you.
Links should compliment your branding efforts. They should send
high-quality referral visitors to your site with an understanding that
over time it will complement your organic search marketing efforts along
with your direct traffic.
Focal Point Two
On-Page Optimization – Every page on your website
represents your brand. Your on-page optimization efforts shouldn’t just
be focused on quality but on clarity as well. Images should have an
impressive resolution and a description as an alt attribute. Text that
is unclear should be linked to a page that can offer a better
description (even if it’s not linking to your website). Meta
descriptions, headers, titles and, yes, even micro data should be
present on each page too.
The on-page efforts of a campaign should be the foundation of all
your other marketing efforts. Meaning, you can get all the traffic
coming to your site, but if your page doesn’t offer value or clarity in
one way or the other, visitors will leave without converting.
There’s always something to do with on-page optimization, even if
it’s just refreshing or lengthening content to build more value. Every
page should offer some kind of value, and these efforts will help you
communicate that value to the search engines and visitors.
Focal Point Three
Strategic Content Marketing – Content that’s not
strategically placed will often never be seen. Every brand has a target
audience, which may be as big as the entire population or just a small
group of people. Strategic content marketing is
all about getting your content in the right place at that right time.
Your target are the ones who will be the most engaged with your
content, so they will naturally share and promote it if they’re
impressed.
The strategic side of marketing consists of promoting through the
right channels. For larger brands the best channel may be their website
and social networks. For smaller brands, pushing content out through
emails, social media, and even paid advertising can help make a big
splash.
Consider this 6-point model to help you in your content marketing efforts:
- Research – High-quality content should be researched thoroughly so you can offer a great resource to the world.
- Creation – Bring all of the thoughts, opinions, research, and conclusions together to make one great, valuable resource.
- Placement – Placing the content on the right
marketing channel at the right time. It will most likely be your website
or wherever you can easily communicate with your audience.
- Promotion – The best content should be promoted
through social media marketing, email marketing, newsletter marketing,
or any area you use to communicate with the public.
- Relationship Management – Content can create and
develop relationships. When users comment on, or share, your content,
it’s important to engage with them and establish a relationship and
connection. The cycle doesn’t stop after you promote the content.
Engagement is where brand loyalty starts to happen, which leads to
lifetime conversions.
- Repurposing – This complements placement and
promotion, and gets your content seen on sites like PowerPoint,
SlideShare, YouTube or any other outlet. Creating new content based on
your old stuff makes it easier to keep generating fresh opportunities to
interact with your audience.
Focal Point Four – Social Media Development
People are so hooked into social media that a majority of their time
is often spent browsing their friends instead of browsing websites.
Google + and YouTube are the main social platforms that can really
influence search engine rankings on Google, while Facebook and Twitter
will
impact rankings on Bing. YouTube is
right behind Google for search queries, and since Google delivers video results with the searches, this is an important platform to be on.
Social media development should mainly be used to launch content and
the brand. Brands that have larger audiences following them on social
channels have the SEO advantage because they have better odds for making
content go viral. For this reason alone, it’s worth spending time and
money on building out and developing the social profiles for a brand.
You can look at social media sites like internets within the
internet. The big social websites all have search bars and people are
searching on them millions of times a day.