Digital marketing has proven not only to be the game changer in strengthening brands and reaching potential markets; but as technology keeps developing - new innovations are positioning digital marketing as the best game in town. Two pillars that support a Digital Marketing strategy are - an individual presence in the World Wide Web through a website and Social Media. A website allows you to showcase your products, internal processes, run campaigns and social proofing through testimonials. You could also offer online sales. Social Media allows you to do the same but the major difference is that all your activities are happening on a rented space. How you link and communicate with your customers is dictated by the owners of the Social Media networks and some of their conditions might be restrictive and frustrate your efforts. Both strategies need a robust plan to drive traffic, identify leads and sales conversion. For our website we need a strategy for Search Engine Optimization, which helps search engines recognize our website and position it ahead of competitors. For our Social Media we our posts have to reach our target audience.
A lot has been said about search engine optimization, a phenomenon that has actually become a profession for some. When we search for anything on the web, we use search engines and the big players are Google, Yahoo and Bing. Search engines use Web Crawlers to read web pages and create entries for search engine index. Our websites need to have proper web addresses or URL, pages have to be titled properly, the structure of our site must allow easy navigation. Where we have used images, they must give them titles using keywords. Our sight should have excellent content and we have to use keywords repeatedly. A few links pointing to our website are cardinal as part of our optimization strategy. As our content is discovered and becomes popular, others will link to our website, this is called backlinking. However linking has been wrongly ascribed to as the most important part of Search Engine Optimization, leading to link spamming (Artificial SEO). Search engines will penalize for links that are deemed spam-my. Ad words can also be misrepresented as a short cut to optimizing. Having a well structured website with excellent content, and tactical use of keywords is the best way to optimize your for search engines. This is optimizing your site organically. Another great way of promoting your website is announcing changes and new developments through blogging and posts in Social Media networks, and direct them to your website through landing pages.
The advantage with Social Media networks is that all engagement has an exponential or multiplier effect. If we engage with our target audience, those that they are are connected with will be able to see our engagement, making us reach potential customers that we were not initially connected to. Our target audience could be current clients, potential clients, past clients or even those who my never use our products/services but have an interest or are somehow affected by what we are offering. Through Social Media we are able to run various types of campaigns and lead our prospects to our website where we offer a complete online service.With so many Social Media networks, a mere presence in one of them will not assure success. It is critical to choose an appropriate network that will make us meet our objectives and satisfy our customers' needs. We need to have followers who will view our posts and engage with us. Many have been misled into believing that if they buy followers it will lead to the success of their Social Media Marketing efforts. Nothing can be further from the truth. Followers that we gain organically naturally become our community of advocates. Our posts should propel them to engage and our interactions will expose us to those that follow them. Success of our marketing efforts is depended on the quality of those following us, and it gets contentiously multiplied if they also have organic followers.
There has been a misconception that Social Media activities directly affect Search Engine Optimization. This is not quite true. Engagement in Social Media is regarded as nonfollow links. This actually protects us as some comments might direct search engines to places that do not reflect our beliefs and some could even harm our reputation. Our conclusion therefore is that just like Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing will only succeed through organic reach. Both strategies need excellent content that addresses the needs of our customers. Do we know what information to we should share in order to attract followers? Is our website organically optimized for search engines? This is what we do, get in touch and we will gladly assist you.
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