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Written by Cat Leaver
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Wednesday, 10 August 2011 14:42 |
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There’s endless amounts of information surrounding the best practice in online marketing, but here’s my top 10 simple rules, which will help stand your business in good stead for future success. For now I’ve kept them short and sweet as, let’s face it, that’s always the best kind of advice, but feel free to start a discussion underneath or contact me for further digital marketing information. 
- Integrate online and offline efforts – all your marketing communications, whether it’s your twitter feed, display advertising or your print brochure, should speak with one voice. Ensure that you create consistency with your brand values and develop a strong brand image accordingly.
- Analyse value of content – ensure all content is rich and meaningful from the offset, and then support this by properly optimising keywords and phrases within. This will ensure greater success in search engine optimisation (SEO).
- Build in measurability – make sure measurability is built into digital marketing from the start, as this makes performance review considerably simpler. Also ensure that all staff involved continuously monitor and record performance, instead of letting this lapse and having to retrace your steps at a later date. Ten minutes a day keeps the headaches away, and measurable marketing is the way forward!
- Consider meaning and value – analyse what your performance results mean to you and why they are important. Set measurable and attainable online marketing goals, which reflect your company’s aspirations. Also try to look below the surface – if trends are occurring, even if they are not what you are trying to achieve, what can you do to translate these into results?
- Link up – work to create valuable links from sites with high page and domain authority. It’s like hanging out with the popular kids – the more people who like their site, the better reputation you’ll get for being associated with them.
- Update content – keep your website content ticking over by creating a blog and a news feed. Fresh content encourages visitors to return to your website and can be invaluable to search engine optimisation (don’t forget to optimise your news articles just like your core website content). Remember that because your news stories can be archived on your site they create a rich bank of keywords and phrases.
- Take a subjective look – it is vital to look at your communications from a user’s perspective and to recognise changing user trends, such as increasing user sophistication. Such trends mean that user queries are becoming increasingly advanced, thus keywords are becoming less relevant and keyphrases are much more pivotal to search engine efficiency.
- Don’t get too big for your shoes – compete at a level that is achievable for you. Use keyphrases that are specific to your business, more niche than general terms and, therefore, are less competitive.
- Don’t paint everyone with the same brush – segment your target users/visitors. It is crucial to recognise that all users are different and so they will search and react differently. Analyse your user groups, create personas by which to identify each group’s typical characteristics, and develop content and online marketing efforts that specifically target each individual group.
- Be open to criticism – creating an open environment in which employees feel they can tell you honestly what they think of your online marketing efforts is key. Each individual within your organisation represents another type of user and a new perspective, one which is usually more subjective than those at the core of the activity. In addition, customer and user feedback can be at the heart of generating more meaningful and relevant online content, i.e. “we came to Company X because it offered quality products with quick results”.
This is just a brief overview of online marketing and how to enhance your SEO in a few simple steps. Future blogs will go into more detail on individual points to help build a database of digital marketing knowledge to help you on your way. In the meantime - good luck!
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