Building an effective marketing strategy should be a priority for all business owners. Whether you’re launching a startup or managing an established SME doesn’t matter. A winning strategy is key for winning new clients and retaining loyal ones alike.

Given its importance on the future of your business, it is very easy to overcomplicate your marketing efforts. In reality, you can achieve greatness simply by focusing on three key steps. Remember your ABCs and you won’t go wrong.

Awareness

First and foremost, it is impossible to generate leads and conversions if nobody knows of your existence. Even if you offer the perfect product for a client, they can’t buy it if they never see it. So, ensuring that your brand gains online visibility should always sit at the top of your agenda.

Search engines remain the most popular choice for consumers to find products. Roughly 85% of people run online searches before making purchases. Working with a professional SEO company to get your business on the first page of the SERPs will bring a huge increase in traffic. The best strategy will extend to cover mobile optimization and voice search optimization too. This reflects the new landscape.

Organic search results can be supplemented by PPC and other paid advertising. Display ads shown on websites and video ads that play before YouTube clips can work wonders. One of the great things about paid advertising is that you can limit your reach. This means that ads are only shown to members of your target market (age, city, hobbies, salary) and should remove wasted clicks.

Social media is another crucial tool for building awareness. Regular interactions with customers will ensure that your brand is seen on their feeds, as well as the feeds of their followers. Given that it is free to set up accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et al. it would be crazy to ignore it.

It is suggested that consumers must interact with a business at least seven times before following up on their interest. Through a combination of search engine, social media, and display ad marketing, your brand will get seen. While it’s not the only key step for success, it will give you a solid platform to build upon.

Branding

Visibility is one thing, but it counts for very little if it doesn’t engage the consumer and make them want to complete a purchase. While the eCommerce arena has scaled new heights in recent times, it should be noted that the competition is greater too. In short, you must ensure that your company stands out from the crowd.

Understanding how consumer minds work is vital. They are shown to remember visual and audio content far more than anything they read. You can still remember commercials and radio jingles from several years ago. It’s never a bad idea to utilize these concepts to your full advantage. Once you have planted the seed, your brand will stay fresh in their minds whenever considering the products and services you sell.

Consumers are increasingly determined to work with businesses that they can relate to. Therefore, joining corporate social responsibility situations is highly advised. Aside from impressing customers with your commitment to creating a better world, it can influence employees. Above all else, focusing on issues that you actively care about will deliver a sense of self-satisfaction.

As mentioned, visual and audio elements can work well. And that’s because content is king. With this in mind, creating a blog or using social media live videos to provide insight into the people behind the brand can work wonders. This allows you to market the business with ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily use with traditional channels.

While you can embrace a host of marketing traditions and trends, it’s important to show a unique element too. Doing things your way is what will ultimately grab the attention of your target market. And build the sense of excitement that will make them seek more info about your products and services.

Care

Consumers have greater demands than ever before. So, simply getting your brand noticed isn’t enough. You need to show that they can trust the company and will be treated as more than just a number. In fact, studies show that up to 88% of people would pay more for a better customer experience. Embrace it.

The client support features should be a key component of your business model. Returns policies, live chat, call redirection and showing consistent fairness are the key issues to consider. When clients are treated correctly, they will come back for more.

Most people will read reviews, and they are a great way to establish trust from new leads. If they can see that you’ve done a good job for other customers, they will be inclined to trust you. The power of recommendation is as strong as ever, people just now look online for the referrals. You can capitalize on this further with social media influencers and affiliate marketing schemes. Positive words from other people will have a huge impact on client decisions.

Customers want to feel valued and need to see that you are responsive. Investing in an email marketing strategy that sends automated messages as soon as they have provided their details is key. This quick response sets a winning tone while it also promotes products while they are still fresh in the user’s mind. Sending an email on their birthday is another way to show a sense of genuine care for the customer too.

As a business, you can no longer focus solely on the short-term goal of getting a sale. You need to think about long-term aspirations and building a fanbase of loyal customers. It’s always easier to gain repeat sales than target new customers, which will make your life a lot easier in the long run.

The Final Word

Marketing is a complex matter, but building a solid strategy needn’t be too taxing. And once you find a strategy that works, stay consistent while ensuring it also evolves with the latest consumer demands. Strike a winning balance and your success will last for years to come.

SEO and PPC are two of the most popular and widely used digital marketing channels. While there is a lot of instruction and discussion out there when it comes to individual optimisation strategies for these respective channels, there is perhaps a lot less said about how these two channels can actually work well together.

In this article, we want to explore two specific ways in which your business can benefit by having your SEO and PPC processes aligned.

This is equally applicable whether you have an in-house team or if you’re working with a specialist SEO agency or a specialist PPC agency.

Keyword Research

One of the first and most obvious ways in which PPC and SEO can be aligned is when it comes to keyword research. Both channels require keyword research which is the process of finding out what exact words prospective customers for a business are using to find what they’re looking for online.

You then look for how much search volume there is against each individual keyword, as well as other metrics when it comes to PPC such as the average cost per click and how much competition there is to appear for a particular keyword.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of areas in which SEO insights can help PPC and vice versa.

PPC is usually much more directed at the lower end of the funnel, which means the PPC team will usually only be spending ad budget on keywords that convert or have a very high likelihood of converting or assisting a conversion.

Therefore PPC is actually a really good way to test whether or not a keyword is relevant and will ultimately help business objectives before investing a lot of resources into it to help it rank at the top of organic search results.

On the other hand, the SEO team may be able to provide some useful insights to the PPC team when it comes to keyword research as well. Usually, the SEO team will also look at what other websites are ranking for a particular keyword and that will give them a hint as to the intent behind the search query because that is what Google takes into consideration when choosing which websites to rank for a particular term.

In that research, the SEO team will usually also look at the landing pages and on-page copy of competing websites that are appearing for a particular search term.

This usually provides a lot of insights into what types of customer fears, motivations, and values appear to be important, which competitors are trying to target with their own page copy.

All of this can be particularly useful insights for the PPC team, especially if they choose to target a keyword and then produce a landing page specifically for that keyword.

User Behaviour Insights

One of the other ways in which both the SEO and PPC teams can work well together is by looking at the behaviour of users once they arrive on the website, whether that is through paid search or through SEO.

With SEO, you will tend to have a broader spectrum of keywords driving traffic to the website, because with PPC, you will tend to only spend money with a very specific objective of driving a very specific action through your ads.

With SEO, you have a little bit less control over what keywords drive traffic to your website, but of course, you can shape this somewhat.

One of the best ways of understanding how effective and relevant a particular keyword is by analysing the behaviour of users that use that keyword to arrive on your website and seeing what they do next.

You will be looking at which pages they tend to engage the most with and which sections of those pages they tend to engage the most with. Of course, you’re able to do this through tools such as Google Analytics.

You want to see: are there any particular pages that have very high bounce rates? i.e. are people leaving the website right after visiting that particular page? Now, of course, this doesn’t automatically mean that there’s something wrong.

They may have simply received the information that they were looking for and then chosen to leave. However, sometimes high bounce rates can be indicative of a problem with the user experience that you can then go and fix and hopefully improve your conversion rates.

Similarly, the paid search team can provide insights into what types of copy and message are working better because they’re able to produce specific landing pages for particular keywords and campaigns.

They’re able to test a lot more than perhaps the SEO team can, therefore they’ll have a much richer data set of what types of keywords and messages tend to convert better, which can then be utilised on the SEO ranking landing page.

Closing Thoughts

These were just a couple of ways in which having SEO and PPC processes a lot more integrated can benefit your business. There are many other benefits of having SEO and PPC working in tandem, such as capturing more SERP real estate and optimising ad spend, which perhaps we can get into in a future article.