Transitioning to or increasing your digital marketing strategy can be a confusing road for business owners. Digital marketing has grown so much in the past couple of years that the same strategies that worked in 2013 are not as effective anymore. We often see business owners segment their strategy per each digital platform their business is present on, but this is a mistake.
Digital is different from print. Each print platform had a different strategy because the delivery and reach were different for each. But everything about digital marketing overlaps. A good example is search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Businesses want to see their business rise in the ranks of search engines, so they create a Google business listing and run Google AdWords. That is all good and fine, but there are additional digital platforms that also greatly improve SEO rank. Having a Google+ page with regular keyword-rich postings does wonders for your SEO as well as a blog that is updated a couple times per month with those keywords. Social media posts are even indexed by search engines that relate to keywords you are using in other places on the internet.
Since the digital platforms overlap so heavily, integrating your digital marketing efforts will help your campaigns see greater success. Here are # tips to integrate your digital marketing strategy.
Choose Your Most Effective Channels
Integration is a gradual process. Trying to start a huge strategy off the bat by integrating every piece of your digital presence may drive you to insanity! Instead, start with the platforms that are giving you the greatest current success. Make one large strategy for the high performing platforms and see how it improves your success rates.
Make Your Content Consistent
Content is what makes digital marketing so effective. Whether you are writing a 500 word blog post, creating an infographic, or starting an AdWords campaign, this content is all indexed under your business name to give your brand a quality score online. The higher your quality, the more your content will be seen by others. This is law for platforms like Google and Facebook.
When you decide on a campaign you want to launch, make sure your content matches on platforms across the board. This does not mean make your content copy exactly the same on each channel. Instead, make the core message the same and use similar keywords, but respect the nuances of each platform. Make sure the content copy is at least 20% different from anything else on the internet so you are not pinged by Google as having duplicate content.
Get Your Team In On Integration
Depending on the size of your business, you may have multiple teams or departments working on the success of your digital marketing. You want all these teams to be on the same page and integrated in their efforts. When your strategy team creates the digital marketing strategy, bring the art department, content marketing, web design team, and sales in on the strategy nuances so they can collaborate on their efforts without experiencing roadblocks. This will streamline your digital marketing efforts to provide a consistent message to your targets for greater effectiveness.
Monitor and Measure
How will you know if these integration efforts were effective? Monitor the response to your integrated digital marketing campaign and measure the results. Analyze the progress weekly and monthly for a period of at least three months. This gives your business enough time to see a reflection in search placement and traffic increase to your website. Once you see an increase in these results, you can start to integrate all of your digital platforms into one cohesive strategy to see success across the board.