Way back in the day, Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. Today, the stage has changed, and we mere players are making our mark on a new digital platform with ever growing ease and enthusiasm.
From consumers to corporates, nations to NGO’s, everyday Australians are posting, connecting and conversing online. But with so much chatter online, how can brands cut through the noise and make a real, lasting impression?
Digital marketing is a broad practice encompassing many disciplines which enable organisations to build brand awareness and encourage a targeted audience to make a decision online.
Here are three ways that brands can leverage the power of digital marketing to help build awareness;
SEO what?
Search Engine OpOptiPayisation is the cheapest yet most challenging technique for a brand to cut through the digital white noise. In its simplest form, SEO focuses on ensuring that your business ranks higher in search engine results, thereby directing more traffic to your site.
Relevance is key with SEO, and brands need to ensure they are communicating in an engaging, and alluring manger in order to drive engagement. To be successful, a brand must have an understanding of key ranking factors, as well as deep knowledge of what its target audience is searching for and how they are doing so. The goal for brands is to ensure the content on your web page answers the exact question your audience is asking of Google. If they can achieve this, the sense of trust and relevance for the customer is heightened and the company’s ranking is improved.
Bring it in
Once you’ve directed customers to your site, inbound marketing is your (subtle) digital sales pitch. With inbound marketing, a business can use various online strategies to broadcast its story, draw people to them, captivate their attention and drive both leads and conversions.
Blogs, social media, research papers and case studies are just a few examples of content which can form part of an overall inbound marketing strategy. Essentially, these platforms offer a way for a brand to share its story, in its own tone and style, with a customer on its own channels. Not only does this process build trust with the consumer, it also provides a brand with the opportunity to educate them on new products and services, and deliver a direct call to action inciting an engaged response.
Long way to the top
When it comes to search engines, it’s a long way to the top. Where your business ranks in Google’s search results has a huge impact on customers online, as they are more likely to click on the first few links. AdWords is a paid advertising service offered by Google to help businesses bump up their rankings.
Businesses can place bids on “Adwords” which are keywords relating to the terms users search for in Google. Companies which successfully bid on keywords and direct searchers to content on their website appear at the top of the GoogleAd ranking. Businesses can play with and craft their content so as to include as many keywords as possible, and then bid on words that match their content.
If a brand understands its audience, its content will be more relevant with its customer’s searches and these ads will ensure the website shows up somewhere near the top of the search results.
