Here are a few tips on how to best leverage those principles and enhance the interaction points that comprise your company’s online brand.
1. Make Your Copy Engaging
If there’s one thing to keep in mind when creating your content strategy, it’s this: The needs of your business should ultimately overlap with the needs of your target audience. By creating a website, social-media profile or other digital presence with your audience in mind, you create content that provides value to customers and brand influencers.
Develop a content strategy that leverages all of your online channels so that you not only entice customers to repeatedly return to your main website, but also reinforce your brand image and messaging.
Moreover, keep these points in mind when developing your online content:
If you don’t already have one, start with a content marketing strategy or content plan that identifies your core audience, sets goals and defines success metrics.
Share your content across social media. This will help in social search and get your target audience talking about your content and brand.
Create at least one to two articles per week, either on a professional blog or designated area of your website that provides insightful and authoritative information for your target audience. WordPress, Medium and Tumblr are just a few of the dozens of blogging platforms available to small business owners.
Make sure you have engaging landing pages for any marketing campaigns drawing customers and prospects back to your site.
Monitor customer comments and feedback for future article, blog-post and white-paper ideas. For instance, you can write a series of blog posts that answer customers’ most pressing questions as they relate to your product or service.
However, if content is “king,” then some SEO experts would argue that the taxonomy of your site is “queen.” Taxonomy is the methodology guiding how your content is categorized and organized throughout your site. These are not just the broad categories, subcategories and tags that structure the content and navigation of your site; taxonomy also includes your site’s URL structure, breadcrumbs and navigation bars.
Ensure your web content is supported by a user-friendly and simple design that users can easily navigate. Furthermore, your website design should be mobile-friendly (more on this below) and render correctly on multiple user interfaces.
2. Increase Your Website’s Visibility in Search
You’ve probably heard that, when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), content is still king. And one of the best ways to keep your site relevant for search engines is to consistently and frequently publish high-quality web content. In other words, keyword stuffing is out, and creating compelling content that people are eager to promote is in.
Since your website’s ranking on Bing, Google, Yahoo and other search engine results pages (SERPs) will be one of the primary ways customers and prospects find your site, you need to increase the importance and relevancy of your online content to improve your chances of ranking well on SERPs.
In short, this means:
Raising the visibility of the most important and relevant content to the top level of your website pages. This helps search-engine crawlers easily find your best content, rather than having to search for it deep in your site.
Assigning names and adding alt-tag descriptions to your website’s images.
Using descriptive anchor text for hyperlinks that lead visitors to other sections and pages of your website. The microcopy you use for these clickable links should also focus on increasing conversion rates.
Giving each of your webpages unique meta descriptions that briefly describe what visitors should expect once they click from a search page.
Creating a Local Google+ page so your business appears on Google Maps and gains additional exposure to customers in local search results. This is especially important if you’re a brick-and-mortar business that relies on a local customer base.
3. Listen to and Engage With Customers on Social Media
With the rise of social-media titans like Facebook over the past decade, social media is now an integral part of the online marketing plan. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 52% of adult internet users are now active on at least two or more social platforms.
Social media gives you yet another opportunity to share and promote the web content you’ve worked so hard to put together. That means identifying and participating on the social channels where your customers and prospects will be, rather than spending time and energy on social sites that fail to align with your target market.
For example, if your business focuses on the business-to-business (B2B) segment, then using LinkedIn instead of Instagram will likely be the more appropriate social channel to include in your online marketing strategy.
1. Make Your Copy Engaging
If there’s one thing to keep in mind when creating your content strategy, it’s this: The needs of your business should ultimately overlap with the needs of your target audience. By creating a website, social-media profile or other digital presence with your audience in mind, you create content that provides value to customers and brand influencers.
Develop a content strategy that leverages all of your online channels so that you not only entice customers to repeatedly return to your main website, but also reinforce your brand image and messaging.
Moreover, keep these points in mind when developing your online content:
If you don’t already have one, start with a content marketing strategy or content plan that identifies your core audience, sets goals and defines success metrics.
Share your content across social media. This will help in social search and get your target audience talking about your content and brand.
Create at least one to two articles per week, either on a professional blog or designated area of your website that provides insightful and authoritative information for your target audience. WordPress, Medium and Tumblr are just a few of the dozens of blogging platforms available to small business owners.
Make sure you have engaging landing pages for any marketing campaigns drawing customers and prospects back to your site.
Monitor customer comments and feedback for future article, blog-post and white-paper ideas. For instance, you can write a series of blog posts that answer customers’ most pressing questions as they relate to your product or service.
However, if content is “king,” then some SEO experts would argue that the taxonomy of your site is “queen.” Taxonomy is the methodology guiding how your content is categorized and organized throughout your site. These are not just the broad categories, subcategories and tags that structure the content and navigation of your site; taxonomy also includes your site’s URL structure, breadcrumbs and navigation bars.
Ensure your web content is supported by a user-friendly and simple design that users can easily navigate. Furthermore, your website design should be mobile-friendly (more on this below) and render correctly on multiple user interfaces.
2. Increase Your Website’s Visibility in Search
You’ve probably heard that, when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), content is still king. And one of the best ways to keep your site relevant for search engines is to consistently and frequently publish high-quality web content. In other words, keyword stuffing is out, and creating compelling content that people are eager to promote is in.
Since your website’s ranking on Bing, Google, Yahoo and other search engine results pages (SERPs) will be one of the primary ways customers and prospects find your site, you need to increase the importance and relevancy of your online content to improve your chances of ranking well on SERPs.
In short, this means:
Raising the visibility of the most important and relevant content to the top level of your website pages. This helps search-engine crawlers easily find your best content, rather than having to search for it deep in your site.
Assigning names and adding alt-tag descriptions to your website’s images.
Using descriptive anchor text for hyperlinks that lead visitors to other sections and pages of your website. The microcopy you use for these clickable links should also focus on increasing conversion rates.
Giving each of your webpages unique meta descriptions that briefly describe what visitors should expect once they click from a search page.
Creating a Local Google+ page so your business appears on Google Maps and gains additional exposure to customers in local search results. This is especially important if you’re a brick-and-mortar business that relies on a local customer base.
3. Listen to and Engage With Customers on Social Media
With the rise of social-media titans like Facebook over the past decade, social media is now an integral part of the online marketing plan. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 52% of adult internet users are now active on at least two or more social platforms.
Social media gives you yet another opportunity to share and promote the web content you’ve worked so hard to put together. That means identifying and participating on the social channels where your customers and prospects will be, rather than spending time and energy on social sites that fail to align with your target market.
For example, if your business focuses on the business-to-business (B2B) segment, then using LinkedIn instead of Instagram will likely be the more appropriate social channel to include in your online marketing strategy.
