December 5, 2013

Week 10 – Digital Marketing – What you need to know.

In our last class and final week of our digital marketing course we are revising all the great learning the students have done over the past couple of months. There are a number of key areas to focus on in getting to grips with Digital Marketing. The modules we looked at were Customer Analysis, Social Media, Mobile Marketing, SEO, Google Analytics and Email Marketing. Here we’re going to look back at some of these and explain their uses and why they are important.

To begin with it is useful to provide a framework which allows companies make decisions and manage their digital marketing activity. We looked at the SOSTAC planning model. This process goes through 4 basic questions that businesses need to ask themselves – Where are we now? or Situational Analysis. Where do we want to be in the future? Goal setting. How do we get there? Develop strategies. How can we be sure we arrive? Implementation, measurement and control.

For Digital marketing this means a major focus on your customers, their online activity, their media consumption and buying habits, their use of digital technology and creating an in-depth profile of your customer or a persona analysis.

The explosion and adoption by consumers of social media platforms has led to a whole new media channel for business to engage and communicate with their customers. Understanding the way these platforms are used is critical to achieving successful outcomes. Your brand needs to become part of the conversation with messages that encourage interaction and are useful to your customer. Social media is not a sales platform but rather a place where you can listen and add value to your customer’s experience with your brand.

73% of consumers use their smartphones while shopping. This has led to a whole new purchasing pattern for your customer and one where the store has become more about experience and less about price and product benefits. This is because customers will shop around online while they are in your store. Geo location, QR codes, SMS, augmented reality and apps are just some of the technological aids that businesses can use to enhance their customer experience.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation ensures that your website is visible to your customers. Keywords, Link building and content are basic elements to pay attention to. Visual elements such as photos and videos and geo location are important to both PC and mobile search.

The digital space is interactive and always on. Measurement tools such as Google Analytics allows you to calculate your ROI and make amendments to your campaigns on an ongoing basis. Site traffic, conversions, referrals and sources of traffic are all measurable through these reports. Ensure that you have well-defined, measurable objectives and defined action outcomes from this valuable information.

Email marketing is probably the oldest of the digital tools but one that remains a core part of most businesses’ digital campaigns. Its ability to deliver personalised messaging and use as a retargeting tool will ensure that email stays in the digital mix. Combining Social Media and email strategies has proven to be a powerful mix in engaging and converting customers.

With all this focus on online activity it is important to remember that we live in a real world. While the digital space is exciting, innovating and offers many opportunities remember to begin with your customer and match their needs with the benefits and value of your products and services in the places where they consume their media.

Thank you for following the students and me over this 10 week course. I’ll be back in January with a whole new class and course. See you then!

November 14, 2013

Week 7 – How to Build Links to your Website to Improve your SEO

Last week while studying SEO we looked at Keyword Research. This week we will look at three steps you can use to build links to your website that will improve your ranking on Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

1. High Quality Content

Whether it is a blog post, a news item or curated content from another source you should always have the mind frame of your reader as your focus. Ask yourself what is of interest to your customers? Can the content address or solve a problem? Organise the information so that it can be digested easily and scanned for top line news with more detail further on. Look for topical and relevant content.

2. Build a Reputation with Your Influencers

Do a search for experts in your industry. Use Twitter advanced search option to find people and companies who have built large audiences on Social Media. Use sites that rank the top blogs in your sector. Establish a relationship with them through commenting and sharing their content. Connect with them on social media by following them and posting valuable commentary.

3. Make Content Sharable and Distribute

Before you publish content make sure you add social network widgets and make them visible at the top and the bottom of the post. Consider adding Social Network ‘counters’. These are social network icons that tabulate the number of shares. Your content should encourage your readers to share with their networks. So when tweeting a link make sure you have left enough characters for your audience to retweet. Post a link of your content on relevant social media platforms such as Linkedin Groups, Facebook pages and Twitter. Create categories and hashtags so your content will show up on searches. Produce the content in different formats like posting images on Pinterest and instagram, slide shows on Slideshare and videos on Youtube including a link back to the landing page.

Check in next week when we will be learning about Google Analytics and finding the data that counts.

November 7, 2013

Week 6: What do I need to know about Search Engine Optimisation?

We’re Back!! After a well deserved mid-term break we’re back in the class room and ready to go. This week we look at SEO and what practical tips we can use to improve the traffic to our website. SEO deals with the factors that make your website more visible to your audience. It starts with Google and the search engine results page (SERP). Your goal is to rank high up on a results page when a user enters a search term that relates to your business. SEO is a wide and complex subject that covers technical coding to easily managed changes you can make to your website. Over the next two weeks we are going to cover two key areas that are practical, ‘can do’ elements. This week we’ll look at:

Keyword Research.

Google presents the most relevant and current pages to a search result so it is important that you know the words that your audience are entering when looking for information about your product or service. There are five basic steps to carrying out keyword research.

1. Create a list of words.

Brainstorm all the words your customers would use. Look at single words and multi-word phrases that they would use when researching and buying products. Cover all the services your site offers and avoid generic terms. Look at your competitors’ sites and check what words and phrases they are using. You should now have a list of at least a hundred words.

2. Refine your list through the Google Keyword Planner Tool.

You will need a Google Adwords Account to access this very useful Google tool. It is easy to set up and you do not need to have an ad campaign running. The Keyword Planner allows you to upload your list of words, target the area your customers are in – e.g. Ireland, Leinster, Dublin and gives you a report on the average number of monthly searches for all your terms. Look at the variations of searches throughout the year. For example the words ‘fitness’ and ‘diet’ have high volume of searches in January.

3. Finalise your list

Create a spreadsheet to see each word’s search volume, discard the words that are not relevant to the site and have low volume. Aim for 10 – 20 keywords for each service. Your list should have a mix of targeted and broad keywords. For example a broad term would be ‘boots’ or ‘red boots’. A targeted term would be ‘Ladies red boots’ or women’s suede red boots’.

4. Plan your on-page content.

With your refined word list, build your words into the content of your website. Use three or four related keywords per page and make sure they are in the Title Tag, Meta Description Tags, Meta Keywords Tags, Headings, Alt Text and images. Do this for all new content like blogs, releases and social media posts.

5.Monitor and adjust your Keyword list.

As you post fresh content and measure the traffic/click-through rate you will build a picture of the content that is popular with your audience. Be sure to monitor your keywords in your analytics report and adjust your keyword list and content on an ongoing basis.

Next week we will look at Link Building for SEO with practical actions you can take.

Maeve Nunan

Digital Marketing Educator

SEO