What Is Marketing Strategy

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Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media are the three pieces of business growth in today’s digital marketing world. While you may know what each one is and how they impact your business, understanding how they work together will help push your business to the next level.

If you’re not quite sure what Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media fully entail, that’s OK, read the post that is linked to each term in this sentence for a more in-depth explanation.

Content Marketing needs to be the core of any digital marketing program. It’s the content that we create for our audience. It addresses their questions and provides value.

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of helping our websites, blogs, and other content be found in the search engines. Traditional SEO focuses on Google but today’s SEO should include YouTube and Pinterest. Yes, you read that right. Google, YouTube, and Pinterest are all search engines. SEO helps us drive new traffic to our content by making it easier to be found within the search engines.

Social Media is how we connect with our audience. It’s where we have conversations with our followers and get to know them and they get to know us. We can learn so much about them through our interactions on social media.

Does my Business Need All Three?  

One channel can’t stand on its own and support your business. You need all three working together to really grow. It’s how we weave the three together with a unified strategy that makes everything work. Having Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media but no strategy doesn’t help your business.

So, how do you use strategy to put the pieces together?

Before you create a piece of content, you should be thinking about your audience and understand their needs, answering their questions. How do you find out what they need to know or want from you? You can ask them on your Social Media channels. If you have fans and followers on Facebook Twitter, or Instagram – channels where you can get that great two-way communication, ask questions. Get to know your audience, learn what they want from you, why do they follow your business or brand? What information are they hoping to learn?

These insights can be used in your Content Marketing and SEO research stages.

• ·      What are the questions your audience has?
• ·      What are they struggling with?
• ·      How can you help answer these questions?
• ·      How do you solve their struggles?

Once you’ve reviewed the data from your Social Media questions then you can start thinking about your content development. Go through the answers to the questions and decide what type content you should create.

·      Are there questions that need answered with a blog post?

·      Is it something that a screen share would explain much better?

·      Are customers struggling with how to do something or put together an item they’ve bought from you? Do you need to create an instructional video?

·      Do your customers have questions that need to be answered before they decide to buy from you?

All of this information helps shape your strategic marketing plan. Once you’ve thought about your customer and what they need then it’s time to think about your business and what it needs to grow. Staying focused on your customer first will help you be more successful because you are focused on giving them what they need.

How do you Grow with SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing?

When we focus on our customers and their needs and create content that’s helpful for them, they’re going to want to read it and hopefully, share it too!

Content Marketing is the foundation, it’s the content strategy that we establish and the content planning and publication we do that helps ensure what we create aligns with what our customers need. We then use Search Engine Optimization to make sure our content can be found by both our current customers and new ones who don’t know about us yet. And finally, we share our content on social media channels via both organic and paid social media marketing to connect with the customers who know us today and meet new ones who don’t know us yet but have the same questions as our current ones. We also can use SEO for our social channels – YouTube and Pinterest in particular because they’re both social media channels AND search engines. We have a big opportunity to meet new customers via these two channels in particular.

This is why the content strategy and planning in advance is required for real growth. When we think about all three parts as one larger process, it’s easier to follow and in the end, grow faster. If you create a great blog post that answers your customers questions and share it on your blog, using targeted keywords so that it ranks in Google’s search results and you create a custom image for that blog post that’s Pinterest friendly and use keywords that are targeted specifically to Pinterest, you have double the chance for people to read your content. Now, it’s not only the people who are coming to your blog who see you post but also people who are searching for that topic in Google AND on Pinterest who might see your post. You can make this work even better by sharing an image that ties to the same post on Instagram and using targeted hashtags that help even more people discover your blog post. And finally, what if you created a video for YouTube that was on the same subject and tied together with the blog post? You could reach even more people.

The opportunity for growth is almost unlimited when you use Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media Marketing together. If you’re interested in working with an agency to craft your marketing strategy please contact us today. We help clients win with Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media every day.

If you’d rather learn how to do it yourself, check out our Marketing Academy page and see more about our online Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media Marketing training classes.

Either way, we’d love to help you grow your business strategically.

Register for our FREE Marketing Training Workshop program and join thousands of other small business owners who have learned how to create their marketing plan with our help! Click here to register today.