Content Marketing 2.0 – How to Plan and Execute an Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign
Integrated
Digital Marketing is the art and craft of using all the digital
marketing methods available today in such a way that each digital
marketing channel complements the other by playing it’s strengths rather
than trying to reach the goal of increasing revenues and customer base
on its own. Investment of time, energy and money in building an
integrated digital marketing process for your business is like investing
in a machinery which will magically multiply the effectiveness of each
component in it.
Challenges with ‘Traditional’ Digital Marketing
Before
we dive into the Integrated Digital Marketing process and learn about
its immense benefits, let us have a look at the evolution of digital
marketing and why it is no longer effective.
We all have heard the
quote “I Know Half My Marketing Works, I Just Don’t Know Which Half”.
Digital Marketing is so powerful because with digital, you can track the
performance of each advertising campaign and actually find out which
half of your marketing works.
Some of the common digital marketing methods are:
- Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
- Search Engine Optimization (Organic Traffic)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Digital Display Marketing
- Content Marketing
Search Engine Marketing:
Out of the above digital marketing methods, SEO and SEM caught the
limelight in the early days of digital marketing. SEM (PPC ads) was so
powerful because it helped marketers connect with prospects who are
already looking for them. For example, if someone is searching for an
acne cream, the ads will be only be shown to them and charged only when
they click on it. This helped marketers save a ton of money because no
money was wasted in untargeted ads. The reason why search engine
marketing was so powerful was that it was
measurable, targeted and active
in real time. Due to heavy competition for high value keywords, the
prices have shot up – sometimes as high as $30 – $40 per click for
certain keywords such as insurance loans, mortgages and attorneys. While
SEM is still effective for many marketers, a large percentage of the
marketers – especially the ones in the start-up scene find SEM not
longer a viable means of marketing online. When Dropbox was launched,
they were spending $228 to acquire a customer who paid $99. They had to
abandon SEM.
Search Engine Optimization: When the
cost of the ads got higher because of the competition and higher
bidding of keywords, marketers focused more on search engine organic
traffic (SEO) because investing in SEO produced long-term returns. If
you rank in the top 5 for a highly paid keyword, you would get more
traffic than the advertiser who is paying so much for every click on the
ad. But today “investing in SEO” has become obsolete because of the
various algorithm updates by the search engines. Old school SEO methods
are actually back-firing now because the search engines do not like to
be manipulated.
Email Marketing: Email marketing
was (and is) a separate wing in itself without much connection to the
other digital marketing methods. The goal of email marketers was to
collect leads and subscribers and send marketing messages to them. While
some of the marketers still do content marketing within the emails,
most of them just used email to “
blast” the marketing messages.
It worked for a while – until the people started getting too many
emails and started unsubscribing to all the marketer’s messages which
added no value to their life.
Social Media Marketing:
As social media became famous and websites like Facebook started
posting record traffic numbers, marketers flocked to the social websites
for ads. But soon marketers realized that social media advertising
gives a very low conversion ratio and can never be the next ‘Search’.
That’s because people ‘
hang out’ in social networks like they
hang out in a bar and they are there to connect with their friends and
to have some fun. Interrupting them with a marketing message is not
effective when they are not proactively looking for a product or service
like they do while searching in the search engines. But Marketers need
not completely abandon social media and treat it as a 3rd class
advertising option. Social media, when used in a proper manner can bring
intangible benefits to the table that other channels never can.
Digital Display Marketing: Display
ads are like ads on newspaper. They find their place between useful
pieces of content and interrupt the user with a marketing message. With
magazines and newspapers, the ads cannot animate and sometimes readers
may even take some interest in it. But online ads are despised at best.
Those animated and interactive banners distract the readers – and the
very nature of internet with so many distractions built in make it a
very poor branding channel. Ad blocker plugins for browsers are hitting
record numbers in download volume and as people spend more time online,
they develop ad-blindness. Forbes recently published an article about
how display ads causes a
brand awareness black hole. It should be an interesting read if you feel the same about display ads.
Content Marketing: Content
marketing is basically an inbound marketing tactic where you attract
visitors, readers and potential customers by creating good quality
content. This is one of the best ways to do online marketing and it
hasn’t failed anyone who has tried it. Forbes had mentioned “The bottom
line is that there is only one true branding mechanism online and
that’s content marketing.”
I am a huge fan of content marketing and I believe that even though the
world’s information is exploding, content marketing can still find its
way in several markets. But content marketing won’t be effective if the
other digital marketing methods are not used in conjunction with it.
That’s what integrated marketing is all about. Integrated Digital
Marketing is content marketing on steroids.
The Integrated Digital Marketing Process
Integrated Digital Marketing is like a team with
content as the leader
and the various other digital marketing methods are like its team
members. Instead of asking each member to achieve the goal of increasing
the company’s customer base on it’s own, Integrated Digital
Marketing will make use of each member’s strengths and produce a result
which are more than the sum of the individual achievements of each
member.
The above flowchart describes the process of integrated digital marketing. Each one serves a unique function:
- Content:
Quality and relevant content helps establish authority, build trust,
engage the audience with the brand, build a tribe and spread the word
with your own customers as brand evangelists. Also helps in educating
the customers about the industry and your product or service.
- Email: The
best communication tool available to online marketers today. Works best
when used with permission (opt-in subscribers). Helps send out
information about new content and follow up with the prospects to remind
them about the product or service they want to buy.
- Social Media:
If email is like meeting with a prospect at his home, social media is
like meeting with a focus group. People are more authentic and honest
with feedback and suggestions in a social atmosphere. People may not be
in a mood to transact in a social environment, but it helps get honest
feedback about a product or service and listen to the needs of the
customers.
- Search: Helps potential customers to
find your content and your offering by directly searching for it. One
of the most powerful tools in online marketing and works best when you do not try
to manipulate it. Doing basic on page SEO and then doing all the other
things right should be enough to get truck loads of targeted traffic
from the search engines.
- Ads: Paid ads in its
various formats can help speed up the entire process. The integrated
digital marketing process is like a catalyst for ads which maximizes the
return on investment on the dollars spent.
Let’s have a deeper look at each process…
Quality Content
At the heart of integrated digital marketing is the
quality content which
drives the entire process. People use the internet to find information,
exchange information and do transactions. Finding information is a
major part of it.
When consumers want to buy something, they no
longer blindly trust an ad and buy. How many times have you done that?
We have burnt our fingers more than once and everyone including me do
some research before buying.
The internet has just made the
process easy – we can go and find reviews of products online and ask our
friends in Facebook or Twitter. The most important point to note here
is that before making a buying decision
consumers collect data and information to help them make a buying decision.
Information
comes before transaction. So instead of blindly investing money in
display ads for branding and taking people to sales pages, it is much
better to educate the customer about their needs, ignite their desires
and then present the product or service in front of them when they
naturally feel ready to buy and are convinced that you are the best one
in the market.
Such information can be given to the potential customers through
content marketing. Content
marketing can be done via a corporate blog, a separate stand alone blog
which is a publication of its own or through the various Web 2.0
properties like YouTube, HubPages, Social Networks etc. Every brand can
afford to become a publisher today because the barriers of entry has
been lowered and the flood gates have been opened.
Creating
quality content is neither easy not free. Compared to paid advertising,
content marketing may look like a free model because you are not paying
for the traffic – but creating quality content costs a lot. Even having a
full time writer in house to publish blog posts will cost a ton of
money. But the investment in content marketing is worth it because it
produces long term returns.
Many bloggers have built great blogs and believed in
Build it and they will come… but the traffic never came. Marketers shouldn’t forget about the
marketing part
in content marketing. Content, without marketing it is of no use and
that’s where all the other digital marketing methods can help.
Tips to do Content Marketing Right
- Start
with keyword research and publish posts that people want to read. Give
what the fish wants (worms) and not what you like (bread)!
- Do not stop with keywords. Think about other forms on content that people in your tribe may like and want to share.
- Embrace
other forms of content than plain text. Videos, Infographics,
Infomovies, MEMEs, Podcasts, Whitepapers, Ebooks, Kindle Books etc. can
also help in content marketing.
- Make the content useful but
incomplete when you want the user to take some action such as
subscribing for more information. Have the hook in place. If you give
away everything, there is no reason for people to connect with you. You
put the worm in the hook of the finshing rod, you just don’t throw the
worm into the water.
Social Media
Social media can
be one of the most straight forward ways to share content and spread the
word. The whole social media world is built on the concept of discovery
and sharing.
If you have like minded people in your tribe in any
of the social networks, sharing the links to that content on those
networks will help it go viral. When people discover good quality
content which can improve their personal or professional lives, they are
compelled to share it again with their network so that their friends
will thank them for it.
People gain good karma points when they
share good quality content with their peers. Poor content or even just
mediocre content will not be shared by people and that why I emphasize
the word
quality when talking about content.
If
you are reading this right now and if you have a friend who may find
the concept of integrated digital marketing useful, you are more likely
to share it with her. If I post content just for the sake of it, it will
just stay in the blog and nothing will happen. As content is shared in
the social media, new followers or tribe members can be gathered through
the spread of information and those new members will come back to the
blog when some fresh content is published. As shown in the above figure,
content and social media can have a symbiotic relationship.
Social media can be an uphill or or a downhill ride depending on the quality of the content.
Really good content is key to an effective social media strategy. A good piece of content when shared in social media will have a snowball effect
. You can use your social profile just to kick start the discovery and sharing process.
Some tips to use Social Media effectively
- Integrate
social sharing buttons into the content seamlessly. People will not
hunt for the sharing buttons in most of the cases, but when it is right
in front of their eyes, they are more likely to share it. Have sharing
buttons in the side of the blog posts and also at the bottom of the
posts.
- Be active on social media profiles. Engage with
the users. Social media is a big listening tool than a broadcasting
tool. Ask for suggestions for new posts and respond to questions in
social media. If you are more active in Facebook, for example, your edge
rank will be higher and it will help reach more people from your fan
page.
- Have a well designed social media profile. YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter and almost all the other social networks give options
for customization and it doesn’t cost more than a $100 to get a good
designer decorate your profile. People can instantly differentiate
between channels which care about their followers and those who don’t.
- Use
paid advertising inside the social media websites to increase followers
and engagement in those websites. For example, using Facebook you can
increase the fans to a fan page using Facebook ads which usually gives a
very high conversion rate than using Facebook to drive traffic out to
your website.
Search
For many businesses, traffic
from the search engines contribute to a large percentage of their
revenues. Before the search engines became smart, people used to
“invest” money in SEO by hiring an SEO agency and have them do
back-linking and other optimization activity on their website. Such
practices no longer work because Google is very smart in determining the
low quality and manipulative link building activities and there are
virtually no SEO agencies who can do SEO the way it has to be done – it
can be done in the
right way only by the owner of the website. The
right way
is link earning and not link building. When good content is published
and shared on social media it has the potential to attract natural links
and that’s off page SEO at its best.
Search
engines rank websites according to their quality and relevancy. The
quality and relevancy of a certain web page for a certain keyword is
determined by two factors.
- One factor is the on-page SEO where the webmaster communicates to the search engines about the quality and relevancy of a website.
- The other factor is off-page SEO where the users of a website communicate to the search engines about the quality and relevancy of a website.
Though
on-page SEO is an important factor in SEO, there is only so much you
can do in on-page optimization. You can have your web page elements in
such a way that the search engines can understand what your content is
about. But since webmasters have a bad history of communicating with the
search engines about what content they have, on-page SEO has a limited
potential to convince the search engines that your content is quality
and relevant to certain keywords.
In Off-page SEO – the users of a
website communicate to the search engines about the quality and
relevancy of a website – not directly but through their behavior. In the
above figure you can see that the search engines send some traffic to
the content but at the same time the content sends back signals to the
search engines about the quality –
through user behavior. Some
typical examples of user behaviors communicated are time spent on the
site after a search result is clicked. If a user immediate clicks the
back button after clicking on a search result then it is obvious that
the content on the website is either of low quality or not relevant.
Apart
from the signals picked up by the user behavior, search engines also
pickup signals from the social media. Quality content when shared on
social media is public information and open for the search engines to
pickup. It is an obvious signal that the content quality should be good.
Off page optimization takes care of itself when the basic necessary
on-page optimization is done, quality content is published and a social
strategy is executed properly.
Tips for Search Engine Optimization:
- Do
on-page optimization for your website according to the guidelines set
by the search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo have their web master
tools which can help you in on-page optimization. Tools like SEOMoz can
be a life saver when you need suggestions to improve your on-page
optimization. Content management systems like WordPress are optimized
right out of the box.
- Off-Page SEO optimization is a mis-nomer. You cannot off-page-optimize
a website. There are only off-page signals and those signals have to be
sent by your users and not you. If you try to send fake signals on
behalf of your users, then you will be caught by the search engines
sooner or later and penalized. Publish good content and share it. Have a
good out-reach strategy so that your website / brand gains value in the
market place.
Email
Email marketing is one of the
most powerful tools available to an online marketer today. Emails are
around since the beginning of the internet and people will always use
emails till the world ends. An email inbox is a personal space and
unlike social networks it is not easy to interrupt an Internet user with
a marketing message. But with a
permission based email list
where people have opted-in to receive communication from the sender, the
email subscriber will open an email and pay her attention to the
message.
Email marketing is effective only when a mix of useful
content and marketing messages are sent alternatively. If you bombard
the subscriber with too many marketing messages, the user will
unsubscribe. If you send no marketing messages at all, you can’t make
any profits.
So
how can we fit email marketing into the integrated marketing strategy?
What do you need to do email marketing effectively? You need qualified
leads/subscribers. These subscribers when engaged in a proper manner can
turn into long term
paying customers. Usually email marketers
gather leads by advertising in other channels. But when you have your
own content channel, you can use it to gather subscribers. A lot of
niche bloggers have been doing this effectively by using tools such as
subscription boxes, popup forms on the webpage and co-subscription with
comments section of the blog.
Instead of sending out useful
content to the email subscribers, you can publish that content on the
blog and email your subscribers a link to that page. When subscribers
visit that blog post article, they are very likely to share it on social
media and check out your products/services again. Also this piece of
content on the blog has the potential to attract new visitors from
search and social media and those visitors may become subscribers as
well.
A large percentage of subscribers can come via the search
engines when the strategy is optimized and refined. This can reduce the
cost per acquisition of a customer drastically thus helping you
make more profits in your business.
Email Marketing Tips
- Optimize
lead generation on your content delivery channels. A lot of tools are
available in the market place which helps you collect leads through
blogs, videos and so on.
- Use email marketing tools such
as Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse to automate your email marketing
process. Amazon SES and SendGrid are good email sending servers for the
technically inclined.
- Send a mix of marketing messages and
valuable content. A good balance depends on the tolerance level of your
market. Test, test, test.
Paid Ads
Paid
advertisements, whether it is digital display ads, social network ads,
co-sponsored email ads or PPC ads on search engines – all have a good
potential to ignite and speed up the entire integrated digital marketing
process. Instead of using paid ads to directly jump to sales, the
traffic from the ads can be channeled into content which will help build
trust and educate the prospective customers and in turn increase social
media activity, search traffic and email subscriber list.
The
Search-Social-Email trio along with powerful content is like a magic
machine for the paid ads which increases the ROI on ad-dollars spent and
also gives intangible benefits like building a tribe or community. A
tribe helps in improving the product offering, generate ideas for new
products and sometimes can even double as a free support group and a
team of evangelists.
Driving the Sales
No one buys a
product on the first look. Impulsive buying for many products is far and
in between. The general consensus is that it takes an average of 7
points of contact with a prospect to turn her into a customer. With
Digital marketing, the best way to turn a prospect into a customer is to
followup with the lead. The lead data can be an email, a phone number
or both.
Email
marketing is the most cost effective tool available to marketers today
and with automated marketing tools like MailChimp and GetResponse, it is
easy to setup a sequence of automated messages to be sent to a prospect
once she subscribes to the email Newsletter.
A subscriber will
open the emails and visit the blog only when there is some useful
content and a sale can happen directly by clicking on an email link or a
link from the blog. The email newsletter and the blog are the primary
value delivery platforms and the conversion is more likely to happen in
this case.
Conclusion
The above integrated digital
marketing process effectively utilizes all the digital marketing
technologies available today and in such a way that the strengths of
each method is used in the most effective manner. Content marketing
always has been and always will be one of the most effective lead
generation, branding and sales channel and this process is simply
enhancing/upgrading the content marketing to the next level. And that’s
why I call this integrated digital marketing process as Content
Marketing 2.0 !
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