Formula for Digital Success

 About Me

I joined Search and Social Media Marketing as I wanted to learn how to enhance the online presence for our company. After a truly fascinating 9 weeks I am leaving the course with a great range of  new knowledge and ideas. I also appreciate now more than ever that the task ahead is going to take a great deal of hard work and dedication to get the online presence to where we want to be, which  leads me to my first major question- where exactly is it we want to be??

 1 Strategy

To generate an excellent online presence I first need to complete a review of activities undertaken so far and identify the key areas of interest. Without an online digital strategy I have no way to  review if we are achieving our aims. As a result a key task will be to generate a series of SMART objectives, ensuring that we have clear targets to guide us through the process of digital  improvement.

With a better understanding of Google analytics, webmaster tools, open site explorer and Semrush to name just a few I can really start to understand the existing company website and how we can move forward.

After many weeks of learning about producing engaging content it is now time to review the content available from Rowe Hankins and Cudis and consider the ways in which we can improve these to make the websites more useful to the customer.

2 On-Site Optimisation

Developing an on-site strategy is important to optimise a website and ensure it appears within the first page on the Search Engine Ranking Page. However the main objective for great content is to make the website useful for your target user.

Generating content stuffed full of keywords for the sake of it is not going to be helpful to the user thus is not going to make them want to read on and potentially follow a call to action. Instead the content needs to be natural, informative and useful to attract the customers attention, encourage them to develop an interest in the product, nurture the interest into desire and ultimately prompt them to take a desired action.

By conducting keyword research using online marketing tools such as Google Adwords we can ensure that the content included on the website is relevant for the website user.

In light of Google’s new ‘mobile friendly’ label it is clear that a website needs to be optimised for use on a mobile device, conversely BMON highlighted in a recent article that between 5% and 15% of their B2B clients’ website visits currently originate from mobile devices. With Google now showing the label at the side of search engine results identifying if a website is ‘mobile friendly’ this highlights that it is becoming more and more important to ensure a website is optimised for mobile and needs to be a key part of any B2B website developments.

3 Off-Site Optimisation

Link Building

Research will need to include reviewing the industry thought leaders and assessing if our company would be of interest to them to share. Gaining ‘link juice’ from building relationships with key industry influencers will greatly improve the credibility of a website, thus helping to improve visibility within the SERPs.

To attract the influential thought leaders of the target industry a great deal of thought and effort will need to go into producing an appealing content strategy discussed above, no easy task. One clear opportunity is to develop useful content that key competitors are not currently producing, enabling the website to get one step ahead in the process.

4 Social Media for B2B Websites

After discussions with the SSMM group it has become clear that the most important social media websites for B2B companies are primarily Linkedin, Twitter and Google+. It is also clear that the social media pages need to include a good mix of company information and useful content for followers to use and interact with.

If content shared is all just company posts then followers and connections could get bored and ignore the information provided. Alternatively, if content is just focused on sharing news and information the social media websites will not generate awareness of the company’s products or websites, thus we need to strike a balance sharing relevant useful content whilst raising awareness and driving traffic back to your website.

Planning ahead will also help to organise the social media presence of a company, by offline creating a plan or chart to provide structure to the content you want to use and online using platforms such as Hootsuite social media communications can be scheduled across multiple platforms days or weeks in advance.

5 Review

With excellent tools available for reviewing how the online activites are progressing there is every opportunity to review and update the digital marketing strategy, Adding google analytics to the company website and testing the new content we can see if the strategy is working. It also gives us the opportunity to review what is not working and we can update and review our strategies accordingly.

Also by understanding how a user arrives at our website, where they are from and what key pages they land on we can continuously develop the online marketing strategy to suite user needs thus continuously completing the SSMM digital marketing circle.