Internet Marketing Process

As an Internet Marketing Consultant often I have heard a business owner say:


With Google’s dominance in search,
    their rules for how pages display,
        the increasing importance of directories and the growth of social media,
            the complexity of online marketing channels and
                building a web presence has increased.

A content strategy and site architecture that relies on competitor and keyword research will increase site rankings, on page SEO should always be part of the website design process… 

And this is just the beginning. Showing up when people search for you, or your products, is the “traffic” part of the SEO equation. There is more to using Internet Marketing to help improve a business:

So what is an Optimized Content Strategy?

An Optimized Content Strategy is the art of deliberately producing content, based on keyword phrases that are driving organic search traffic and conversions, that demonstrates an understanding of your target customer’s knowledge acquisition at various stages in their buying cycle. Then delivering that "optimized" content to them in a relevant and compelling way to grow your business by socializing the content through your organization’s social networks. In this context, content can consist of: website content, blogs, press releases, case studies, white papers, how-to guides, emails, news and events, videos – whatever it is your prospects and customers want to consume, in the format they will best be able to consume it, and on the various platforms on the web they may be receptive to consuming the content.

Search Rankings: Optimized Content Strategy

Here are a few reasons why producing and distributing fresh, relevant, optimized content must be part of your marketing strategy, if you want to rank in organic search and be relevant in the social networks.

1. Social Signals
December 2010: both Google and Bing announced that they factor social signals into their organic search algorithms. According to Google, social media and social networking are about relationships and relationships prove relevance and relevance is at the core of organic search. Social signals are the new back links. It is becoming apparent that social signals will continue to rise in importance as the lines between social media and search continue to thin.

Optimized Content Strategy Approach: Distribute your optimized content strategy to your social networks and give your website visitors and content consumers every opportunity to socialize your content including: tweets, re-tweets, Google +1’s, Facebook Likes and Shares, YouTube views and LinkedIn Shares. Of course, you need to build out your social networks too – not just more followers, but each platform offers different content formats and offers an opportunity to spin your message.

2. Google's Panda
March 2011: Google starts penalizing sites for manufactured back links.

Optimized Content Strategy Approach: For long-term success with your SEO and social media strategies build out your back links by producing and distributing relevant fresh content such as optimized press releases and blog posts. Optimize your content for the keywords you know your prospects are using to find you and that they are converting on. Point back links in the press release, blog post or case study to your website, or better yet, a conversion page. Then socialize the content through your social networks including: Google+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

3. The Freshness Updates
November 2011: Google launched an algorithm change called the Freshness Update that gives priority to fresh, timely content such as press releases, blogs, news and events.

Optimized Content Strategy Approach: Give Google, and your customers, fresh, relevant, timely optimized content.

Conclusion

So while the fundamentals of organic SEO remain important – such as ensuring you have a strong technical website with keyword optimized pages, good site architecture, and building local search and industry-specific directories for back linking purposes – a real shift is taking place in the on-going approach to traditional SEO. That shift is the creation, publishing and distribution of an optimized content marketing strategy. This is only possible after the base is built - your website - but the conceptual aspects of a content strategy are actually the foundation for your entire Internet Marketing Strategy. And developing the conversations with customers is an ongoing process....

Recently, the head of Google’s team that fights against web spam announced that they will be changing their search engine algorithm to “reduce low-quality ‘exact match’ domains” so that they don’t show up as highly in the results.

What does this mean? That search engine optimization is changing. Even if you sell books and own www.books.com (i.e. an exact match domain), your site will find itself tumbling down the Google search results if the content on the site is poor.

And this isn’t the first time that search engines have made crackdowns on sites that have low quality content. Just in the past two years, Google’s Panda started punishing sites that manufacture back links, Bing and Google acknowledged that they incorporate social media recommendations into their algorithms, and Google began preferencing content that is fresh and regularly updated.

It’s more important than ever before in local internet marketing to create unique, high-quality SEO content in order to ensure that your site stays near the top of the search rankings. If people don’t like it and recommend it, search engines will quickly let you drop from page one to page two – or worse.

Say Goodbye to Stuffing and Spinners
What this translates to is a long overdue goodbye to those websites who employ less-than-savory internet marketing tactics to keep their pages near the top of the rankings. Sites that simply stuff their pages with high-ranking SEO words and provide little in the way of valuable content are falling by the wayside. So, too, is the use of “spun” articles – writing content in such a way so that it passes things like Copyscape to make it “unique,” but really just uses slightly different words to say the exact same thing.

Instead, site owners need truly unique content created by people who know how to write, and that content needs to find social approval in the form of Likes, +1s, and so on in order to be seen as relevant. Not something that typically would happen for those sites that employed “cheats” to attain their high ranks.

Strategies for Optimizing Your Content
First and foremost, what this new world order means is that you need good content, so your initial job is to locate an expert in internet marketing consulting who can produce that. Once you feel that you’ve got that person, you have to make sure that you are sharing your content in as many ways as possible – that means getting Likes and shares from Facebook, tweets and retweets from Twitter, repins on Pinterest, and any other social media services that you find valuable.

In order to stay relevant and fresh, you need to create new blog posts, press releases, case studies, and more on a regular basis. On top of that, you have to make sure to include backlinks that point to your site or a conversion page while continuing to promote the content via social media.

All of this, as you might imagine, can be a little time consuming. Worse, it’s something that is constantly in flux as Google and others continue to refine their approach. That’s why it is so valuable to work with an expert in internet marketing consulting as you try to grow your brand.

As a business owner, your goal is to sell your product so that you can make money and keep the company growing. But in order to do that, you need to let people know that you exist and convince them to buy. In short – marketing.

Using social media to advertise your products is a strategy that many businesses have found to be both incredibly effective and surprisingly affordable, but there’s a problem. Too many people just don’t seem to understand how the social media marketing model works. They want to see immediate sales when they put up a blog or get a bunch of Likes, but that’s just not how it works.

Social Digital Marketing: You Have to Understand the Stages in Building Growth

We’re used to ads exhorting everyone who sees them to go out and buy a specific product right then and there (the model most of us are familiar with from far more expensive TV, radio, and print campaigns), but if you do that in social marketing, people tend to ignore you if you’re lucky and get angry if you’re not. So if you simply didn’t start your social marketing for the holiday season until November or December and then put out ads promoting specific products, it’s likely you didn’t have a whole lot of luck.

Instead of immediately focusing on the sale, you need to understand that you are creating a Marketing Pyramid where the initial stage (the large base of the pyramid) is about making people aware of your business and positioning yourself as a trusted source. After you convince people to check out your content, you want to focus on moving them up through the pyramid, which should reflect the stages of your sales cycle:

Lead -> Qualified Lead -> Customer -> Retention

Your website serves as your hub in that it automates lead capture and helps to funnel people to the top of that pyramid where they become ongoing paying customers.

Let’s take a look at the stages:

 

Search or Lead Stage. This first stage or base of the pyramid is where potential customers are just in an exploratory mind-frame. They have discovered that they have a problem that they want to solve and are interested in learning things that can help them to do that. This interest makes them potential leads, because you know that they are looking for something that you can provide. But your goal at this point isn’t to try to sell directly to them, it’s to create content that positions your product as the solution they want.

What does that mean? That your content should focus on things like best practices, how others have solved similar problems, and who are the solution providers that are best qualified to help them. Act as an information provider rather than a businessperson marketing a product and you’re far more likely to have your content spread through social channels, blogs, and in the press.

Conversion or Qualified Lead Stage. Once people come to your site to read that content, then you can concentrate on “conversions” – things like getting those people to Like/Follow/+1, sign up for your newsletter, download a white paper, or contact you directly. Those who do this then become qualified leads who have shown that they are willing to interact with you, and your goal should be to nurture this relationship while working to convince them to become a paying customer. This means focusing more on how your specific product can help them and incorporating Calls-to-Action in your correspondence with them.

Customer Stage. At this point, you’ve convinced some of those qualified leads to purchase your product. The question, though, is what percentage actually did it and why… or why not? You’ll need to continually tinker with your formula to figure out which particular parts of your sales pitch are working and which are falling flat. It could literally be where you position words on your pages or what colors you’re using, so testing out different things to see how they affect your results is important.

This is also the place where you’ll make your pitch to get people to buy related products, so how successful you are there is something else to watch for and play around with.

Retention Stage. It’s great that you got some attention and even convinced people to buy from you, but that doesn’t mean your job is over with those customers. Your goal is to grow, so you need to get those people to come back and buy more even while you generate new leads and prospects. You do this by continuing to provide high-quality content through emails and social media to keep customers aware of product updates, promotions, and other information you think would interest them, as well as incorporating methods such as allowing active users to refer new users through product features and incentives.

It takes time to get enough people to move up through this pyramid, so if you’re hoping to make your next holiday season more successful, start working on creating qualified leads now. The earlier you start, the larger and more engaged your audience will be when you really need them to convert to actual paying customers.

 

Every business has a specific audience that they want to reach because they believe that those people are far more likely to become good, long-term paying customers than the general population – your demographic.

For years, real world marketers have sought out ways to help businesses pinpoint their individual demographic using a variety of methods to research and study consumers, but even their best efforts ended up causing companies to cast a wider net and hit lots of people who only partially fit the profile.

Online marketing has changed all that by offering clearer and more detailed profiles than ever before, while creating a number of new kinds of targeted advertising that help businesses to reach people who are already searching for services like the ones they offer, as well as people likely to seek out their help in the future.

How exactly can online marketing do this for you?

Niche sites. On the surface, advertising your company on niche site doesn’t seem much different than picking a particular newspaper or indie radio station to run an ad. There are a few big differences though. The first is that even the least expensive of “broadcast” mediums tend to cost a lot more than anything on the web. The second is that the internet is so vast that you can almost guarantee that there is a specific audience for what you’re selling, no matter how specific it is. Third, on a niche site you have the ability to create a brand image at a fraction of the cost of traditional media.

Lists and sign-ups. This isn’t a new idea, but rather an old one in a new form. Whereas many companies used to (and still do) ask customers to sign up for catalogues and newsletters and mailing lists, lots of people are getting fed up with all the paper junk mail they receive. Most studies show that we aren’t as annoyed by email advertisements that we sign up for, though, so hitting people up in their inboxes can be a great way to go. And once people have agreed to let you advertise to them, you know they are much more likely to be convinced to buy something.

Content Marketing. Wikipedia describes content strategy as “…the practice of planning the content creation, delivery, and governance. A repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process…”

When we think of Content Marketing we think of the customer, where they are at in the sales process, and delivering them the information they need, in all the places they are searching for it, across each stage of the buying process. This requires creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

SEO. Search engine optimization is a way to bring people to your website who are already searching for the specific types of services that you offer. With well-executed SEO, when people type “buy power tools” into a Google search, your power tool company will appear at the top of their results and they will be more likely to come to you. Obviously it’s not quite as simple as that, but with the right keyword strategy for your web pages and blogs, and utilizing other SEO methods like building backlinks, you can very successfully target the market that’s actively looking to purchase your services.

Location-based marketing. If you run a business that’s mostly local, or you’re primarily interested in getting more customers close to home, local internet marketing is an offshoot of SEO that can help you corner your local market with just a few words. Let’s say your power tool business is in Bloomington, Indiana. Instead of “buy power tools,” you might want to use search terms like “buy power tools in Bloomington” or “Indiana power tools.”

By making your search terms more specific, you’re likely to find that fewer people are entering those searches, but you’ll also decrease the competition you face.  This audience is far more likely to choose your business because you’re even closer to what they’re looking for. It can also greatly help with brick and mortar foot traffic, because research has shown that the vast majority of people try an internet search first when looking for businesses close to home.

PPC. Pay-per-click marketing uses advertisements that can either appear on specific niche sites that you believe your target audience frequents or show up when people search for particular terms. The upside of this kind of marketing is in the name itself – you only pay the company creating the ads when people actually click on them and come to your site. After that, it’s up to you to finalize the sale.

These are just some of the methods to pinpoint your audience online and use your advertising dollars smarter so that you increase your return on investment. The best online marketing gurus know that the landscape is constantly changing, so you always have to know what’s over the horizon and be ready for it.