The landscape of online content marketing has become much more populated in recent years, but is still relatively wild and open.
The earliest prospectors in the digital marketing arena learned the tricks of the trade through trial and error and many of them have the profits to show for it, while others just have advice about what not to do.
A number of these tried and true tips are listed below from both sides: those who struck gold in the pioneer days of digital campaign management and those who didn’t, yet still know the landscape better than most.
There is one consistent theme here—spend time and money on your content
and you will be rewarded.
- Content drives the marketing machine
Content should always be the focus of the site, at first. If there is no content worth reading or seeing on the site, than people won’t go. Sure, the “if you build it, they will come” saying works to a point, but people still have to play a game on the field. Always make sure content is never undercut in favor of other aspects of the digital campaign. As the more popular saying goes these days, content is king.
- Include SEO from the very beginning
SEO, better known as search engine optimization, is integral to the success and failure of website. It is almost as important as content in many ways as it is necessary for future marketing strategies and drawing users to your site. However, the trick to good SEO execution is to seamlessly integrate it into the content on the site itself so that it doesn’t stand out. Top-tier digital marketers are skillful enough to bake this element into the recipe of the website when it is first being designed.
- It's not just content, but relevant content
In truth, the hard part of successful digital marketing isn’t drawing an initial amount of attention to a website, but to keep people coming back. This means you will need a regular stream of relevant content, not just good content every so often. The content should be directed at a targeted audience, as modern-day marketers should focus on trying to understand their customers, rather than just tell them what they should be paying attention to. This will change regularly, as the target audience’s interests will change with time. But the more consistently a website’s content is to their target audience’s interests, the more relevant and, in turn, successful it will be.
- Pay attention to title tags
While coming up with new articles or videos or photos is a tall order on a regular basis and often requires an editorial staff to do it successfully, changing title tags is an easy way for a single savvy marketer to up click through rates and draw more traffic to the website. These are just a couple of words and can be tweaked on a daily basis so your website links come up in more searches or appeal to more people, helping your rankings and overall traffic to the website itself.
Above all, focus on having a style, tone and brand. There is a reason magazines and television networks focus on a specific group of people or try to cater to their interests and needs. Websites are an amalgam of all of these things and should be focused in the exact same way. Content should be tailored to this theme so users know what they are getting when they come to the website. Start with a clear strategy when developing content for your site and appeal to the visitors who search for you.
(Today in a guest post from the wonderful Joseph Baker, who works at Professional Intern)
