How Digital Direct Marketing & Branding Work Together to Grow Your Business

Posted by Craig Maloney | September 18, 2020 | Filed under: Marketing

Our approach to search marketing has always been to dominate all of the top real estate entries that come up on search result pages. The more places you occupy, the higher the likeliness that you generate a lead, convert, make a sale, grab market share, and grow your business. As such, we’ve always found that combining, not separating, your paid search and organic branding is the real key to success.

If you think about it, it hasn’t always been like this when it comes to Digital Marketing. It took some time to figure out the true definition of “real” digital marketing.  Success for Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) were measured differently because there was only really Google as the benchmark of internet success. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. 

Here are some of the reasons integration has become the only path for successful digital marketing.

SEO & Earned Traffic

SEO Has Changed: SEO has evolved over the years. It has now become a more holistic approach to make and promote phenomenal content that computers and people love.

SEO is both art and science:  It is an art because good content needs to connect with the audience. It is a science because a successful SEO campaign relies on studying data and trends and has a data oriented approach.

One size fits all SEO is no longer relevant: Google has become very advanced over the years and with their Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, it is very important to look at your carefully study your site case by case.

Create value: You can’t hack Google any more. They have advanced algorithms,  tons of data and are staffed with really smart people, the black hat and gray hat ways don’t work as well anymore and will not have any long term effect. Best is to create value. This means creating content, informative blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.

User Experience is very important: Google wants to deliver quality content and excellent user experience to its users so it is important to consider that in every step. From design to content creation and promotion.

Build relationships online and offline: It is very important that people know about business and your website.

Have an integrated marketing approach:  This means Promote your business and content via social media, PPC, retargeting and other marketing channels. This improves website mentions and backlinks which will help improve SEO.

Reviews and ratings are very important:  Make sure you have satisfied customers and make reputation management part of your SEO and marketing campaigns.

Enterprise Level SEO with small business execution: Think big, but take baby steps. This ensures you cover everything and don’t miss anything or go too fast.

Select to work with a reliable partner: A good SEO vendor doesn’t just offer SEO, it provides solutions with an integrated marketing approach.

Pay Per Click & Paid Media

More Ad Networks: Throughout the years SEM has been primarily known as Pay Per Click (PPC) and ran through one major media platform, Google AdWords. Today, with more media platforms being used by individuals, traffic platforms go beyond Adwords and this trend will only continue to grow.

Facebook Ads come into the scene quite dominantly, as of late. Facebook Advertising opportunities have been available since 2004 but in the past few years and the advent of News Feed advertising has skyrocketed the platform.

Not just for last click conversion anymore: The strategies used for driving paid media today is wide and vast. PPC ads on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Yelp can build trust when consumers are in exploration mode. Then market to these consumers through retargeting.

Mobile Ads on Google Search: The 800lb. Gorilla that Google AdWords is has been adding an incredible amount of new features to improve one-touch conversion from mobile devices to increase the speed to conversion. Testing, optimizing, and reviewing quality on mobile ad search is imperative in itself.

Integrated Campaigns Increase Brand Search: Promoting messages to new market segments expands your voice and your brand recognition – your brand name is the highest converting organic search term and the lowest cost per click you can get. With the above said, there hasn’t been a better time to have a holistic SEO & SEM search marketing approach to not only efficiently utilize resources but to save on cost and provide a bigger impact by benefiting both disciplines.

Attribution Modeling: will become easier to measure. Inexpensive analytics platforms will be more readily available to more individuals to determine where and how multiple touch points affect one another in the marketing sales funnel. When we have better insights to this, it will reveal where to focus efforts because it contributes to attribution where before, it may have seemed like wasted effort.

Landing Page Testing: User behavior has changed and is continuing to change rapidly. SEM needs to continually adjust landing pages to focus more on creating conversion driven mobile page experience. Moving towards a more custom mobile page as opposed to the typical responsive pages we see today.

Helping People Buy instead of Sell Them: We also need to look at how individuals engage online. The typical direct response approach of asking a user to immediately call or fill out a form is less effective (This strategy is like going on a first date and asking your date their hand in marriage… they will almost always say NO). We need to focus more on establishing a relationship, e.g. asking for their email in exchange for a GREAT piece of information or other form of lead magnet or tripwire. Establish multiple communication touch points to establish familiarity and credibility. Once this is established, introduce some sales related promotion.

As SEO, PPC and everything in between has evolved into true digital marketing where we’ve moved from keyword hawks to thoughtful brand builders that deliver promises through trust and efficiency. This is how we see integrated search. Let’s discuss how you see success and build a plan together today. Contact us today!