The role of marketing changed a decade ago. Thanks to the invention of the internet, marketing moved from a local to a global level. In fact, according to HubSpot Blogs research, 77% of marketing activity takes place outside of a company’s physical location.

Marketing activities can include everything from online marketing to social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, and much more. With so much activity taking place online, marketers need to adapt their strategy to ensure their business’ digital presence is working hard to generate leads and sales. If your company’s website isn’t generating the desired results, it might be time to consider an online marketing strategy overhaul.

Prioritise Organic Growth

With the vast majority of internet users now relying on search engines to discover content, it’s crucial for marketers to get their content ranked highly in search results. One of the simplest yet most effective ways of doing this is through SEO. Essentially, SEO helps find words and phrases that human beings use to find content when looking for specific products or services.

SEO is all about creating content that will attract, engage, and convert your target audience to customers. When carried out ethically and consistently, SEO can be very effective in terms of driving organic traffic to a website.

The trouble is, an estimated 92% of SEO activity is currently black-hat in nature. As the name suggests, black-hat SEO refers to techniques that are completely unethical and usually involve the use of sneaky tactics to artificially increase a website’s search rankings. These techniques can cause significant damage to a website and its reputation.

If you’re carrying out SEO on your own website, you can consider implementing a no-black-hat policy. Doing this will hopefully prevent any damage to your website and its reputation. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to throw away the good results that came from black-hat SEO. You can simply continue using recognised SEO techniques while also putting your company’s brand at the forefront of your content.

Make A Consistent Effort

Sixty-three percent of people who search for businesses or brands online aren’t looking for a specific product or service, but instead are just seeking information about the company or brand. This group of people is known as ‘dark consumers’ and represent the target audience for businesses and marketers looking to enter the market online.

To engage with this group of people, you need to establish yourself as an authoritative source that can provide unique information about your niche. The easiest way of doing this is through a blog. Once you’ve got a blog set up, you can use it to promote your business and encourage people to discover more about you and your company. Create high-quality content that provides value and answers questions. If people are searching for information about your niche, but can’t find what they’re looking for, they might choose to leave your site and never come back. Ensure that each blog post, video, or other piece of content provides value to its audience. This will make them more likely to return for future content.

Use Digital Marketing To Create Awareness

The good news for businesses is the internet. In 2017, people were searching for products or services online more than ever before. In fact, according to Statista, as of April 2017, there were 45.43 billion global searches, 14.7 million searches per day on average.

This is a massive increase from the 15.9 million searches per day on average in 2016. What’s more is, according to MarketingCharts, 82% of adults use the internet to learn about products and services, while 66% use it to research brands.

If your business doesn’t have a digital marketing strategy in place, it’s time to develop one. This strategy should include all of the methods of marketing listed above, but should also extend into offline marketing activities such as radio and TV advertising, billboards, and magazine and newspaper publishing. It should also extend into developing and maintaining a solid social media following.

Measure The Success Of Your Strategy

A marketing strategy that doesn’t include measuring and analysing its success isn’t really a strategy at all. According to HubSpot Blogs research, 89% of businesses that implemented an online marketing strategy claimed that it was either moderately or considerably effective. In terms of ROI, 53% of businesses saw an increase in return on investment and 36% saw a decrease. This suggests that companies can successfully measure the effectiveness of their strategy and use this to improve their performance in the future.

The main problem is that these strategies are often developed without consideration of the fact that the success of an online marketing strategy depends on many external factors. These external factors can include the effectiveness of other marketing methods, the quality of your product or service, and the ability of your target audience to find you. The success of your strategy also depends on the platforms you use and how you use them. If you’re using the right platforms at the right times, with the right content, you’re guaranteed to reach your target audience and engage with them.

Consider the factors that you can control and alter in order to improve the success of your strategy. For example, if you’re looking to gain more traction on social media, consider increasing your social media visibility by engaging with followers, liking posts, and sharing content frequently. You might also find that increasing your web content’s quality and making it more engaging can help generate more leads and sales. If you’re looking to increase your brand’s awareness, consider creating videos to share on social media or hosting seminars or webinars to engage with prospective customers.

Avoiding SEO Black Holes

SEO is an increasingly competitive space, and there are a number of ‘black hole’ SEO techniques that businesses fall into, which cause them to disappear from the search rankings. Avoiding these black holes is easier said than done. The good news is that there are simple guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your SEO efforts aren’t sabotaged by ‘bad SEO’.

The simplest way of doing this is by using ‘white hat’ SEO techniques. These are SEO techniques that are recognised as being beneficial to the customer and don’t involve engaging in dubious practices to achieve higher search rankings. You can learn more about white hat SEO here. Once you’ve identified these techniques, you can use them to improve your search rankings and ensure that your business continues to appear when customers are searching for products relevant to your niche.

Bringing It All Together

As an SEO marketer, you’ll need to look at all of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of your strategy. For the sake of brevity, I won’t cover them all here, but you should consider looking at the following KPIs:

• organic clicks
• conversions
• leads
• traffic
• sales

Each KPI should be measured and presented in a clear manner, so you can easily identify areas for improvement. If you’re finding it difficult to measure the success of your strategy, implement a business review platform like Zoho Review to keep track of all of this data. A marketing automation platform like HubSpot, or a project management tool like Asana, can also help you collate all of the data and present it in a clear and concise manner. This makes it much easier for you to identify areas for improvement and change. Ultimately, this is what drives growth.

If you found this article valuable, feel free to download the zipped file containing the full report. It’s completely free and gives you access to all of the data from MarketingCharts. Keep in mind, though, that due to the nature of the file, this report will only open in read mode in Microsoft Word.