Finding the right marketing mix across paid, owned and earned media channels better reflects the way in which people buy today. This allows us to ensure budget is allocated across the whole customer journey. To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing, you need to be easily found when and where prospects want to engage with your brand.
In order to create a healthy dialogue it is essential to clearly and honestly communicate brand values and make sure that advertising campaigns reflect and demonstrate them. The objective is to develop credibility with your target audience. This not only means inviting the audience to talk about the good aspects of your company but also being bold enough to accept the less positive and open it up for discussion. It is now impossible for most companies to hide from consumers’ feedback. The best approach is to be transparent. Embracing your mistakes as well as triumphs will help improve your image in the long run.
You should be differing your messages to target your various audience segments (personas) effectively at each stage of the buying cycle and focus on creative approaches to deliver engaging messaging that drives action. Get the content right and you will acquire a greater volume of new customers with a better return on investment.
The best content, personalized and highly targeted though it may be, will fail to generate leads if your website is too slow, lacking useful functionality or if it is not easy to use your site across different screen sizes. Test, track, learn and improve website performance with a focus on increasing user engagement and generating leads for your sales team. While actively promoting your brand across online channels, organic SEO will happen naturally - as long as your website uses the appropriate technical SEO and on-page techniques.
Follow competitors on social media; subscribe to their blogs; sign up for their newsletters and set up appropriate Google Alerts. Review their content and strategy to see who they have identified as their target audience. Get a good understanding of their strategies and positioning. Research the keywords your competitors are targeting, their rankings and backlinks, their display and paid search spend and creative, their traffic and top referrers.
Social Media
You’re going to need a strong
social media presence.
If you’re having a hard time starting a conversation on social media, try participating in existing conversations. Social media offers three key advantages. First, it gives an option to enhance customer acquisition by expanding your reach and boost conversion through recommendations. Secondly, it can help form deeper relationships and advocacy through improving customer service, brand reputation and even product and service quality. It also provides the opportunity to access a huge market to test, trial and crowd source new ideas about your products and services.