Practical Takeaways
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the most crucial method of digital marketing and one of SEO’s best practices.
It’s the process of planning, crafting, and delivering meaningful, relevant, and customized content through various channels, including your website, marketing emails, social media platforms, and more.
To make the most of each piece of content you create or commission, try repurposing it and splitting it between owned, earned, and paid media.
Eliminate technical bottlenecks to make your content more agile so you can deliver content at speed and scale across multiple channels.
Whether you are an independent marketing expert or a marketing team at a firm, the content creation framework will help you build and disseminate good quality content regularly.
When you design a page for your content, remember the “blink test.” Make your visitors want to continue investigating the page after they scan it for three to five seconds.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex undertaking that includes the discovery of your pages by search engine crawlers, indexing according to relevance (determined by keywords and phrases), and ranking based on authority.
Backlinks are the best way to build authority. Just make sure the sites that link back to you rank well themselves, or Google might actually punish you for those links.
On-page SEO includes:
- Keywords in your URL, on the page, and in the meta description
- Speed
- Images
- Google fonts
- Only one H1 heading
- Inbound and outbound links
- Moderate keyword usage
Blogging
Indicate the value of the content in the title. Put the focus word upfront and use brackets for clarification if needed. Be specific and concise (fewer than 12 words).
Ensure the reader’s positive experience by adequately formatting the blog post so that it’s easier to read. Don’t be shy to use white space. No one wants to read a wall of text where the sentences are crammed together in one long paragraph.
Minimize bolding, so you can use it to highlight specific points, words, or phrases. Don’t overdo it, or no one will pay attention to the bold sections.
Use synonyms to avoid overoptimizing text with the same keywords. This will also improve the content and the reader’s experience.
Break up the content for multi-channel use. Snip a couple of sentences for social media and turn a portion of your blog into a video, for example.
Be sure your blog posts are responsive, meaning they adapt to mobile screens regardless of size.
Video
YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google. Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.
Use videos to share member or customer testimonials, product demonstrations, service descriptions, or corporate promotions.
Limit each video to one or two minutes to keep viewers engaged.
Add appropriate music and appealing images.
Follow SEO best practices (above) to optimize your videos.
Social Media
Start by figuring out which social media platform is best for your organization, which will depend on where your audience spends the most time and what kind of message you’re trying to send. You may be present across all platforms, but it’s probably best to focus your resources on two or three platforms to get the best returns.
- LinkedIn: best B2B outreach platform
- Facebook: the largest regathering platform
- Twitter: short and timely posts
Post meaningful content frequently. Engage your audience by asking them a question or requesting a testimonial. Be quick to respond to both positive and negative comments, and never argue or become nasty when addressing a complaint.
Don’t get discouraged if your limited social media budget doesn’t allow you to implement paid advertising. Organic strategy can be successful if your content is timely, relevant, and engaging.
Your subject lines should not be longer than 40 to 50 characters. This length will be easily readable on the phone, and we know that the majority of emails are being read on the phone, not on a desktop computer.
Avoid cramming images into your email. If the images don’t load, your message might not come across the same or at all.
Avoid words that may trigger your email to go to a spam folder. It won’t hurt your deliverability rate, but it will sink your open rate because no one will see your emails.
Instead of using the organization’s name, add the name of an actual person within your organization. Readers are more likely to open an email if it came from someone they trust.
Digital Marketing in a Nutshell
In today’s world, incorporating digital marketing is absolutely essential for your organization’s success. Certified experts at CAM deliver content marketing, SEO, blogging, video, and social media services to client partners using only the most up to date industry best practices and techniques. Contact CAM today to see how our in-depth understanding of digital marketing can help your organization reach it’s highest potential.
