In a time where new marketing platforms emerge every day, it’s important to take a step back and remember what made your business successful in the first place.
What was your strategy, and how did you execute against it? What were your goals and priorities, and how did you measure the success of your strategy? These are the types of questions you need to be asking yourself, and answering clearly will help you find the right way forward for your business.
Traditional marketing is considered to be the process of gaining a potential customer’s attention through various forms of marketing, including but not limited to; advertising, PR, social media marketing, and content marketing. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have virtual marketing, which includes all online marketing activities, such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.
This is important to consider as you develop your marketing strategy, because while some industries might prefer to stay within their comfort zone and rely solely on traditional marketing, others might see value in exploring new platforms and experimenting with new tactics.
Why Should You Experiment With Online Marketing?
To begin with, let’s consider the changes that have occurred in online marketing in the last few years.
At one point in time, SEO (search engine optimization) was considered to be ancillary or supplemental to marketing, but with the advent of digital marketing, SEO has become more important than ever.
Inbound marketing combines marketing and sales, focusing on customers, and ensuring that they have the information they need, in the way they want, when they want it. Marketing is about creating awareness, and inbound marketing focuses on getting those desired outcomes through effective marketing channels and measures.
In addition to SEO, which is still considered essential for digital marketing, content marketing has risen in prominence as well. Content marketing creates and shares content to attract, engage, and convert potential customers to leads, and eventually, to customers.
If you’re looking for ways to expand your reach, gain credibility, and establish yourself as an expert in your industry, then online marketing, and digital marketing in particular, is where you should focus your efforts.
The Rise In Importance Of SEO
Even those outside of the digital marketing sphere can still consider SEO to be important.
SEO isn’t going anywhere, and it’s still considered important for a variety of reasons. Not only does it allow you to test the effectiveness of different marketing tactics and strategies, but it can also provide you with valuable insights into your target audience and the types of content they’re interested in.
If you take a look at the search results for any major city, you’ll see that a large portion of the results are for small businesses, and even some large businesses rely heavily on SEO to gain traction. There’s a reason why SEO is referred to as win-win marketing.
An Opportunity To Experiment
The best part of SEO and digital marketing is that it allows you to try out different tactics and strategies, and see which ones work best for your business.
It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out, or if you’ve been around for a while and want to try something new. With SEO, you can constantly be testing and analyzing, and experimenting with various techniques and algorithms, to find the best fit for your business.
If you’re not sure where to begin, then use a tool like Google’s Analytics to get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to identify the pages on your website that are drawing the most traffic, and from there, you can choose the right course of action.
A common pitfall among new businesses is focusing too much on the bottom line and not enough on the process. To prevent this, use metrics and objective measures, such as the ones offered by Google Analytics, to track the results of your experiments and analyze the data accurately and succinctly. This way, you’ll be able to quickly determine whether or not what you’re doing is effective, and if it is, how can you improve it?
The Bottom Line
The best way to stay well-informed is by regularly reading industry journals and keeping up with the latest trends. In this way, you’ll be able to determine what’s next in digital marketing, and you’ll have the information you need to know when it comes down to making critical business decisions. This is why those outside of the digital marketing sphere often consider SEO to be essential for marketing success.