In the course of any successful online marketing campaign, there are going to be times when you feel like you’re banging your head against a wall. The more you put in, the less you seem to get back, but you keep plugging away because you know there’s a better way and you want to make sure you find it before the end of the month.
The problem is that when you’re creating content and campaigns for different platforms, especially if you’re a small business owner who is just getting started, there will be times when you are going to want to promote one thing on one site and another thing on another site. You don’t want to create content that is only going to appeal to a small percentage of your audience, but for the sake of being complete, you feel like you have to.
That’s where consistency comes in. You want to make sure that when your customers are searching for you online, they find the same experience they had before they came to your site. Not only does consistency make your customers feel like they’re coming back to an old friend, it also means you’re not wasting your time creating content for platforms that may never return value.
Consider these examples below.
What If I Told You That This Is How To Create Consistency In Your Online Marketing Efforts?
There’s no question that when it comes to online marketing, things have changed dramatically in the past two years. Once upon a time, you might have considered getting traffic through free blogs, article directories, and social media channels, which were abundant and easily accessible. Nowadays, with content curation and automation being at the forefront of every marketer’s mind, it’s important to determine the best ways to build and grow your audience, not just for the sake of having a large audience, but because you want to make sure each platform you use is going to get the best results for your marketing efforts.
Let’s take a quick look at the three big platforms that every marketer should be using and why.
Bloggers
Starting a blog is one of the simplest and most effective ways to build an audience and grow your business online. Provided you can write well and have some basic graphic design skills, all you need is a good platform like WordPress to build a blog. Why? Well, for one thing, WordPress is incredibly popular and gets billions of visits per month. Not only that, but you can use the popular ‘Blogging for profit’ niche to grow your blog into a money-making machine.
Blogging is a fantastic solution for a number of reasons:
- It’s simple
- It’s free
- It’s easy to set up
- It’s accessible to anyone
- It’s highly flexible
- It’s highly engaging
If you’ve never tried blogging, now is a perfect opportunity to give it a go. You can use the blog as a way to establish yourself as an expert in your industry, which can then be leveraged to attract and retain customers. In fact, according to HubSpot Blogs, businesses that blogged about personal productivity saw an increase in sales by 58%.
Social Media Channels
If you’ve spent any time on Twitter at all, you’ll know that it’s a very different platform from blogging. First off, it’s very text-based and requires a different kind of engagement. When it comes to actively engaging with users on social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn, you have an opportunity to talk to hundreds or thousands of people who might be interested in your product or service.
Because these platforms are so flexible and allow for a wide range of engagement, you have a great deal of control over what sorts of content you want to share with your audience. While the advantage of this is that you can be very selective about the content you share and promote, the disadvantage is that it’s very easy to lose track of all the different platforms your business is operating on.
If you’ve never used Twitter or other social media platforms, it might be a good idea to try out a few different channels and see which ones work best for your business. Once you’ve determined this, you can start to focus your efforts on these platforms and stop wasting time on smaller platforms that don’t provide the value you’re looking for.
Content Curation And Distribution Channels
As a marketer, you’re always looking for new ways to engage with and grow your audience. When it comes to making money online, many businesses will do anything to get the eyeballs of potential customers.
Creating and curating content for various platforms is a great way to engage with and bring value to your audience. Not only that, but you can also use content curation as a way to build and expand relationships with influencers in your industry. Essentially, you’re bringing value to your audience by demonstrating your expertise in your industry and establishing yourself as a thought leader.
While getting people’s attention is important, it’s also important to create and curate high-quality content that is useful and relevant to your audience. When done right, curating and distributing useful, engaging content can be a great way to build credibility and authority in your industry. The key is to make sure you have something new and valuable to contribute to the conversation.
If you’re just getting started, it’s a good idea to focus on building a profile on established platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn first, then move onto YouTube, which is more of a hybrid between journalism and advertising. As you get more experienced and want to grow your business, you can expand into blogging and other content distribution platforms like Medium and Squarespace.
If you’ve determined that blogging is the right move for your business, then you should look into incorporating elements of the other platforms into your blog. For instance, you can use specific hashtags on Twitter to find relevant content that you can then repurpose and apply to your blog.
How Can You Create Consistency In Your Online Marketing Efforts?
With so much change in the way we do business online, marketing as a discipline is evolving to keep up with the times. While there are still some absolute basics that never go out of style (i.e. SEO, paid media, and content curation), the way we engage with customers and distribute content has changed. More and more businesses are learning to operate multichannel campaigns and create consistency across all the platforms they use to get the word out there about their product or service.
As a marketer, you have the opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your industry, which can then be leveraged to attract and retain customers. The more you put in, the less you seem to get back, but you keep plugging away because you know there’s a better way and you want to make sure you find it before the end of the month.