When you enter the wonderful World Wide Web and type certain keywords on a search engine such as Google, it will immediately yield some results that you can peruse to satisfy your needs. While some of these might be helpful, some very well won’t be. Whatever turns up on your search in this manner is what is called ‘organic results.’ We all desire our research needs to be met with these organic results and this is essentially what marketers strive to do. However, they will also need to pay and post ads to attract the best level of customer interaction.
Now, if you’re wondering how to enhance your brand’s organic results, look no further. Just a few easy steps will get you to the top of the success charts.
Let’s get started.
As a marketer, you are obviously experienced enough to know that your audience must be whetted and mapped for their online preferences, habits and purchasing patterns. When you do this, you will be wiser on how many such customers are actually influencers who can be valuable in pushing your brand further out there. For example, let’s say that you are an automotive company and that recently, a high-profile purchaser provided some excellent feedback in the form of appreciation of your company’s services verbally to a salesperson. Well, there’s your readymade influencer! He ticks all the right boxes that are necessary to sweet-talk your vehicle brand to the top because he is a respected member of society, has practical tried-and-tested feedback and has driven many high-profile vehicles in his time. Offering him his next vehicle service for free and requesting him to talk about his feedback on camera will be a prodigious deed that will get the wheel rolling (so to speak). The Digital Marketing Institute shows that the return for every $1 spent on influencer marketing is $5.78. That’s a phenomenal Return on Investment (ROI). User Generated Content is very important in digital marketing.
Every digital marketer will, no doubt, also work on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when posting content online. This is to make sure that their own content ranks high on search engines. In this, organic or ethical SEO is important in that marketers are expected to be responsible and avoid resorting to underhanded methods to enable SEO. There are a number of ways in which one can practise ‘White Hat’ or good SEO practices such as using title tags of around 55 characters, providing extremely relevant content that would yield itself in keyword searches, adding cross-reference links, and more.
Further to this, organic results can be generated through the use of appropriate hashtags on mediums like Instagram and Facebook. To do this, one must have chosen the appropriate social media platforms where most of one’s audience is to be found. Age and demographic-specific platforms should be the focus, with a special eye on the newer digital trends such as influencer marketing and AI avatar marketing.
Pay-per-click advertising to bolster results
How this works is that advertisers pay each time a customer clicks on the posted ad. These ads crop up based on a concept called ‘Ad Auction’ which will be generated by search engines whenever they are driven by relevance to the keywords used in the search. Companies bid on certain keywords that are linked to their brand or products and when a keyword is typed in by the user, the algorithms that have been designed to produce results will generate the search results. Keyword tools are a superb means of finding out which words you need to bid for. After all, the goal is to spend less and obtain the maximum results from the keywords on which you bid!
If you’re still unsure of what drives PPC Advertising, there are some principles that you should keep in mind to get started. Firstly, do some research into what kind of words your customers are likely to use in their keyword searches. As mentioned before, keyword tools such as Keyword Planner and SEMRush can be used to reach accurate conclusions. You then need to pick the keywords that are used optimally and include them in your online content. Don’t be reticent to keep updating keywords based on their performance. There’s no point spending on PPC ads if your keywords aren’t doing their job!
In addition to this, it goes without saying that you should upload quality content and ads so that customers will be intrigued and then satisfied with the information that is revealed to them. The customer click-through rate (CTR) will tell you how often customers click on your ad/s.
Ultimately, paid advertising will help you reach larger audiences by using shorter processes and increase your brand positioning online and by extension, in customer’s minds.
The perfect alchemy
Experts say that the best digital campaigns consist of a mix of both organic and paid promotion strategies because each offers unique benefits (as explained above). And just like in ancient alchemy when base metals mixed equally would result in the best gold, one must determine how to do the same with digital promotions.
Picking a cross-section of digital platforms has been proven to bear the best results and these include utilising popular social media platforms along with blogs, email marketing and paid ads. Each of these boosts promotions in special ways, so do not underestimate some of these channels in doing their job.
In the end, your final (and probably most important) steps are to monitor, monitor, monitor. You will never know what combinations work best unless you do your digging. Use AI, Google Analytics and the myriad of tools available online to help you decide. Customer clicks, engagement rate and conversions will expose a world of information that you can then use to adjust your strategy.
Now over to you – happy balancing!
(Anouk De Silva)