As the challenging times of the Covid-19 pandemic continue, businesses which already had a solid internet marketing strategy in place are the ones which will emerge stronger. If you don’t have one in place, then now is a good time to build one.
Within an organisation, an internet marketing strategy encompasses a number of strands coming together, whether that’s social media and SEO or content creation and email marketing. Often there can be different teams working on these different areas, so it is important that any plan involves all those concerned. Firstly, though, as with any marketing strategy, it’s important to establish your audience and your goals.
At the centre of the strategy should be delivering good content and doing that regularly – and it’s something we’ve written about in a number of blogs recently. You can’t share anything on social media, create email marketing campaigns or built your SEO with Google without great content. It’s important to work closely with your SEO team to find out what your customers are searching for and what challenges they have which you can solve and then provide content which answers those questions.
With everyone supporting each other, your SEO and website team will also be able to work their magic in improving your ranking on Google. This is usually achieved with a mixture of both organic search results and pay-per-click (PPC).
Today, when it comes to search engines, it really is just Google which marketers should concern themselves with. Currently, Google has a 95.65% share of mobile search traffic worldwide, (for desktop searches, it is slightly lower at 87.35%).
Nearly seven billion searches are handled by Google in a day, which averages out as three or four Google searches per internet user a day. While, the internet is truly the ‘worldwide web’, giving us instant access to the whole globe, it is interesting to note that local searches account for 46% of all searches on Google. This means that when it comes to creating an SEO strategy, it’s worth thinking local.
We often hear that being on the first page of a Google search is key but it’s more specific than that. Most people have little patience and are busy, which means that a staggering 95.3% of clicks actually go to the top four search results. If your brand isn’t up there organically, then it’s worth looking at investing in paid for search.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, major brands have been reaching out to their customers increasingly by email. Interestingly, the major supermarket chains have used this method of marketing to send out ‘personal’ emails from their organisation’s CEO. While these haven’t come directly from the email address of that particular CEO, the supermarket chains have cleverly used the subject line to include words such as ‘a message from [supermarket’s name] chief executive’ or similar.
The subject line of the email is vitally important to get right, as the majority of customers will scan that and make the decision whether to open it or not. Crack that and your click through rate (CTR) will rise.
Currently, people are more connected to their emails – as they aren’t out and about as much – and more likely to be looking at their screens. In any case, 99% of us check our emails at least once every day, while most people check their notifications whenever one arrives.
A good internet marketing strategy will obviously also include social media and which channels your organisations uses depends on your consumers and market. Most brands focus on more than one social media channel. For instance, as a rule of thumb, consumer brands might consider Facebook over LinkedIn and mix that up with Twitter and Instagram.
All social media channels are free but offer the opportunity to advertise in some way through, for instance, sponsored posts.
Finally, engaging positively with your customers through whatever channels work for you will help to create positive PR for your company. Gaining some good Google Reviews are one of the best ways of building a brand, plus reviews in other spaces such as Facebook. In addition, encouraging people to like and share posts is another good way to get your name out there, as is working with the influencers who inhabit channels such as Instagram.
A good internet marketing strategy will take into account all of these strands and will work seamlessly to make sure that your brand is recognised.
If you want to find out more about developing an internet marketing strategy, then give our team at Lake Solutions a call.