Research shows a prospect needs to see your brand seven times for you to be top-of-mind. To accomplish this, marketers worldwide recommend a well-rounded approach comprised of a variety of different strategies to include search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, public relations, email marketing, traditional advertising, affiliate marketing, event marketing, and more. In a perfect world, your brand is utilizing a variety of marketing tactics to maximize your overall marketing strategy.
While each of the above is important and has its own place in the marketing world, today we delve into two of the easier, more budget-friendly digital approaches: search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising. At Threaded Marketing Group, a leading Charlotte Marketing Agency, we have learned through our years of working with clients that consistency and patience are key when planning your SEO and paid advertising campaigns. Many brands make the mistake of throwing their energy and money at these strategies looking for quick fixes, and pulling the plug before enough time has passed to see the fruits of their labor.
Are you familiar with the old adage “slow and steady wins the race?” It’s derived from Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” in which the tortoise is able to beat the hare in a race because the hare, overconfident in his superior speed, decides to take a nap along the way. The moral of the story is simple: hastily jumping into anything can cause problems. Often times, a more consistent style, even if it is slower, can heed better results. This is especially true for digital marketing execution.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. To accomplish this, your brand must work diligently to add keywords within website copy. You need to ensure the right keywords and tags are in the image metadata. You should write articles to help provide valuable keyword rich information to your site visitors. Try to seek-out high-quality back links to other websites to add credibility for the search engine “crawlers.”
These are just few of the basic SEO mechanisms that your brand can easily put into place. Now the hard part comes. You Wait.
Remember, nothing worth having comes easily! It’s around the 90-day mark when the magic starts to happen. We see it time and time again with our clients. It all comes together, and the renowned search engine crawlers begin to take stock. The reward is a slow and steady climb in the search results on organic search sites like Google and Bing. Make no mistake, though, this process (and more) must be revisited with regularity. There is no “set it and forget” mindset when it comes to digital marketing.
Paid Advertising Campaigns
A similar plan must be utilized with paid campaigns on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Paid advertising campaigns are routinely referred to as “pay per click campaigns” in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. You pay for each click to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically like you would with the aforementioned SEO methodology. With paid advertising, it’s important to recognize that a successful campaign, which results in a positive Return On Investment (ROI), is achieved when thoughtful and careful campaign analysis, evaluation, and optimization are applied on a constant basis.
What’s more important to note, though, is that the positive ROI will likely not occur within the first 90 days. This is where Aesop’s adage comes into play, yet again. Patience is a virtue in a paid advertising campaign. The data must be gathered, the ads must be tweaked, the spending must be evaluated, and the overall strategy must be analyzed diligently for the first 90 days. Then, and only then, will the ads become profitable.
And so, the cycle repeats itself. If you consistently repeat the process, it will work. But only if you give it the time and the patience it deserves. Trust us, it will be worth it. When our clients apply the tactics above and combine it with the tortoise’s slow and steady approach, they see positive results.
If you want to learn more about these or any other piece of the digital marketing puzzle, reach out to us today. We’d love to help you win the digital marketing race!
