Marketing is a vital element of any SME’s operation—especially if you’re just starting out.

Marketing is a way to get your name out there, reel in new customers, convert browsers to buyers, and build a core of loyal customers who will sustain your business through thick and thin.

All in all, marketing is worth doing—and it’s worth doing well. But of course, marketing comes with its fair share of challenges, not least the fact that it can be expensive.

Many SME owners are willing to grit their teeth and pay top dollar for great marketing. After all,, marketing campaigns can have fantastic ROI in terms of profit generated. That said, if you’re concerned about cash flow, it’s worth trying to make your marketing as cost-effective as possible.

With the right marketing strategies and the best software to back you up, it’s possible to make your campaigns more efficient without spending too much. You can generate significant campaign results for relatively little outlay through clever, targeted tactics and consistent engagement with your user base.

How? Let’s take a look.

Partner with Influencers & Brand Ambassadors

In terms of marketing efficiency, influencer marketing has a massive advantage over branded posts. Why? Influencers have incredible reach and committed followers who trust their recommendations.

The best influencers are also adept at digital storytelling, enabling them to create compelling, engaging content that resonates with audiences.

That said, it’s essential that you approach the right influencer to be your brand ambassador. Pick someone likely to appeal to your target customers.

To do this, dig into your customer metrics and establish what (and who) your customers will likely find engaging, informative, or simply entertaining. Go through your marketing data, CRM, and customer service records to better understand who your customers are and what they want.

It’s also worth investing in an ERP system, as this can connect all your data repositories, making it significantly easier to collect, collate, and understand your customer’s activity in a meaningful way. You can then use what you’ve learned to pinpoint the perfect influencer for your brand and which products they should focus on. 

Encourage Training & Upskilling

Your staff is your best resource—and a more efficient marketing team means more efficient marketing.

Training and upskilling may seem expensive, but it’s worth the investment. A talented, well-trained marketing team can exponentially boost your marketing ROI. 

Conducting training shouldn’t be a one-off, either. Marketing is constantly evolving. So marketers need to have their fingers firmly pressed on the pulse of industry trends and events. 

Regular retraining and upskilling will keep your marketers up-to-date with current marketing trends. This, in turn, will enable them to work at the cutting edge of their industry.

Focus on SEO 

SEO is a highly efficient, cost-effective way to boost your business’s online presence. You can get to the top of Google’s search rankings with relative ease by using an effective SEO strategy.

It’s a simple equation: as Google is often the first place people turn to when looking for a product or service, the more Googlable your business is, the more leads you will bring in.

To boost your SEO, you need to think about the following:

• Producing high-quality content
• Engaging with online audiences
• Having a solid, reputable online presence
• Keeping your social media updated
• Using keywords in your online content
• Staying on top of algorithm changes and SEO trends

Partner with Complementary Businesses

Building a network is a fantastic way to establish your brand without chewing into your marketing budget. 

If you can find a business that complements your own, partnering with them for content campaigns and other messages could be a win-win situation.

For example, let’s say you’re in the business of selling cookware. A company that produces or sells cooking ingredients could be a fantastic partner. Together, you could produce recipe blog posts, video tutorials, and culinary tips featuring your cookware and their ingredients, all for relatively little cost.

You can then post this content across your brand’s platforms and theirs, doubling your reach in a single stroke.

Again, businesses you partner with must be relevant to your own. For example, if your cookware company partners with an art supplies store, customers will struggle to see the connection between the two. After all, art enthusiasts aren’t heading to a creative blog for cooking tips, nor will your customers expect to find painting tutorials on your social media channels! 

With that in mind, look for businesses with a customer base likely to be interested in your products and vice versa.

Foster User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) can make a big impact. 

A good UGC campaign can simultaneously send engagement levels through the roof, boost brand/customer relationships, and vastly increase your reach.

Let’s take a look at a simple, but very successful, example. 

In 2022, Shakira released a track with the Black Eyed Peas. Having been out of the mainstream eye for a while and wanting to make a huge comeback, Shakira generated a buzz about this new track by calling on fans old and new.

Her #girllikeme challenge invited TikTokkers to recreate the complex dance from the ‘Girl Like Me’ music video. Unable to resist, TikTok exploded with dance videos. In response, Shakira posted compilations of the best, most inventive, most amusing, and most relatable on her Instagram account.

The upshot was that the track gained a huge boost in plays and popularity. In addition, the hashtag had nearly 500 million views, and Shakira was catapulted back into the mainstream media.

You may not be Shakira, but you can still create a memorable, wide-reaching marketing campaign by encouraging UGC challenges, hashtags, and so on. 

Think about how you can challenge customers to get creative with your products and share the results, whether it’s fun ways to reuse packaging or funny photos of pets using your product. 

Contests are also a great way of incentivizing users to create content. The price of awarding a prize is worth the ROI of a successful UGC campaign.

Repurpose or Update Old Campaigns

You don’t want to churn out the same old ideas. But at the same time, there is little point in changing a winning formula just for the sake of it. 

If an ongoing campaign is working well, keep using it. If a particular message or campaign worked well in the past, freshen it up and reuse it.

Even if you can’t recycle them, old campaigns are a great resource. Historic campaign data can offer useful insights about what does and doesn’t resonate with your customers.

If you want to be thorough, you should compare your campaign data with historical customer and sales data. This will give you a more in-depth analysis and help you to pinpoint why specific campaigns were successful. 

To do this, make use of tools like cloud ERP software. This will give you access to the data you need, but also, as it’s a cloud-based solution, it will allow anyone on the team to access data from anywhere.

In this way, the marketing team can easily cross-reference campaign data with metrics like customer satisfaction, conversion rate, and complaints. It’s also beneficial for collaborating with other departments in real-time, so you can access historical data to make better decisions, even if you’re on the go.

But, it is important to be proactive about this. Simply churning out the same old campaigns because they worked once isn’t going to cut it. 

Customer tastes change quickly. So, even if you feel that a campaign is still as relevant and engaging as before, it’s still essential that you update it for today’s market. 

Utilize Referral Marketing

This is often confused with word-of-mouth marketing and UGC marketing. While there is some overlap between the three, referral marketing is different enough to deserve its own category.

Referral marketing directly incentivizes the customer to bring in new customers. In a typical example, a brand will offer customers a reward—often cashback, a gift card, discount, or free gift—if they persuade a friend to sign up for your service.

It’s worth noting that referral marketing is more common for businesses offering services rather than selling products. These businesses need customers to actively sign up for an ongoing brand/customer relationship rather than simply purchasing a new product whenever needed. However, it can work for product vendors as well.

To make sure customers are properly rewarded for referrals, set up a referral link system. When someone signs up using a customer’s referral link, your ERP software or other system will automatically note the details so everyone gets their referral bonus.

Efficient marketing campaigns don’t have to be expensive. Through careful planning, clear customer insights, an effective ERP system, and clever strategizing, you can run great campaigns with brilliant ROI, for very little initial outlay.

Digital channels offer huge opportunities to leverage your network and engage your customer base in brand-building ways without breaking the bank. 

Sure, you get what you pay for in terms of staff, graphics, and so on. But marketing efficiency is more about knowing where and when to deploy that money. It’s about being strategic and insightful, rather than hoping that money will talk.

With the right approach, you can achieve a high degree of marketing efficiency and fantastic ROI—and you don’t have to increase marketing spend to do it.

The post How SMEs Can Improve Marketing Efficiency within Budget appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Content is considered to be the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.

What exactly does that mean?

Why is content so important for search engine optimization?

First Things First: What’s “Content Marketing?”

Content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content in order to drive brand awareness, traffic and sales.

Please note if your content isn’t valuable, relevant and consistent, it’s not content marketing. If it’s not driving profitable customer action, it’s not marketing.

Gone are the days when you could have just used your target keyword a certain number a times across your document to convince the algorithm that your content is relevant to that search query.

Google has come a long way since then.

Its innovative algorithm is implementing artificial intelligence to teach the algorithm to think like a human being. It is using a variety of signals to evaluate how useful any search result turned out to be.

There’s no faking true value any more.

Authentic value always comes first.

Why Content is So Important for SEO?

Content is traditionally fundamental to SEO because Google needs words and text to understand relevancy.

Even decades after Google algorithm was born and now that Google can now read visual and video content, Google still admits relying on text for the most part:

With that in mind, how exactly does Google understand quality and relevancy, when it comes to textual content?

What is High Quality Content?

Truly Useful Content

Number one, just be awesome at what you do. Google is getting better and better at being able to differentiate what people are really asking for.

Be very clear about who you are and what you do. It’s not guaranteed that you won’t run into those problems, but Google is getting better at figuring out the intent of a query and really finding what the best result should be.

Authenticity and transparency go a long way. It is not about faking relevance and quality signals. It’s about really solving the problems behind search queries.

As a result, it’s getting harder for affiliates and resellers to suck traffic away from brands in branded search queries, without the brand having to do much SEO improvement on their part.

Content and Link Building

There’s another distinct benefit of creating content for your business site: Content attracts links, and without links, there are no rankings.

Content-driven link building is the only safe link building out there: You generate links via creating linkable content. There are multiple formats and tactics behind creating linkable content, and you will need to experiment with all of them to find what works in your niche:

To help your content drive links, reach out to bloggers and journalists in your niche and invite them to read your content and link to it. This is a slightly overused but still perfectly legit and effective way to get backlinks. Use Hunter to easily find emails of bloggers’ and journalists’ you think would be interested in your content.

Their Email Verifier feature is also very useful for cleaning your existing email lists and getting more out of your outreach methods.

Content and SEO: They Only Win Together

So it is quite clear that SEO isn’t really possible without content.

Can content exist without SEO?

It actually can.

But unless you keep SEO in mind when creating content, you rely on a sheer chance to have it ever discovered or found.

When it comes to business and marketing, relying on luck is never a good strategy. You need data and planning to increase your odds of success, and that’s where SEO comes in handy.

It’s becoming much more important for content creators to understand how content is published and discovered on the Internet. In a way, optimizing your content for search is getting easier to understand and easier to integrate into the whole content creation process. 

Why would you create content and put it out there and have someone else come in and optimize it later? If you’re doing the content creation and putting it in a CMS or working with a developer to get it published, well why not integrate that stuff as you’re doing that along the way?

It is especially important for small companies, non-profits, and even government and higher education – those people who don’t have huge SEO resources. 

If content professionals can learn a small amount of basic SEO, they’ll get 90% of the way there. All of the other super heavy keyword analysis, back-linking profiles and pattern analysis, that’s what you do when you’ve already gotten 90% there.

Content + SEO Tools

There are quite a few SEO tools that can empower your content creation process and let your team make more informed marketing decisions. My favorites are:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a keyword research tool that relies on Google search data. It extends your search query and lets you discover what your competitors are ranking for. It is a great content ideation and optimization tool allowing you to see which problems and questions your target audience is struggling with.

2. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is a semantic research tool that takes your target queries and imports search snippets that come for it. Then it analyzes the text extract related concepts and entities letting you discover more topics and angles to cover.

Text Optimizer is a great tool to create lead magnets because it drives long-form in-depth content creation that tackles multiple angles within your chosen topic.

3. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics allows you to identify the most successful content to help you use the data to better understand your audience and focus on what works.

4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo includes lots of tools including content analysis and backlink research. The whole toolset focuses on content signals and authorship making it a great fit for content creators and media publishers.

5. Rank Tracker

With Rank Tracker, you can generate a ton of keyword ideas for your content, create keyword groups for landing pages, and set up rank monitoring for your and your competitors’ websites.

Bottom Line: Content Strategists Must not be Afraid of SEO

Fundamentally, content marketing is all about collaboration. Your content marketing should rely on SEO for ideation strategy and data but it also needs to be unique and creative. Content and SEO teams are both only as strong as their weakest links. The things you publish need to be found organically to break through today’s cacophony of content. Search, content, social, technology, UX and analytics all have to be working in perfect harmony, and so does your team. 

• If there is organization silos, your content will suffer.
• If you have inefficient workflows, your content will suffer.
• And if people don’t believe in your mission and values, your content will suffer.

Strong individuals build great teams. Great teams build great companies. SEO and content should work together to drive a successful digital marketing strategy.

The post Why SEO and Copywriting Go Hand in Hand appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

SEO is vital for any business, but how exactly can businesses use it to drive growth?

Search traffic is historically the best web traffic you can hope for.

Google has been the single most powerful traffic driver for ages, and while its power has been slowly declining of the years, no other traffic channel has come close to organic traffic:

Here’s how SEO can help your business in 2022:

Understand Your Customers Better

One of the immediate benefits of starting an SEO strategy is an ability to better understand (and relate to) people’s journeys around the web.

What is your target audience struggling with? What kind of questions are they asking? What drives their purchasing decisions?

A well-defined keyword research strategy can answer all those questions and enlighten your whole team.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools to perform keyword research because it offers so much useful data including, common modifiers, popular questions, SERP features and more:

You can also run your (or your competitor’s) domain through the tool to see your current positions in Google.

This can give you a more holistic understanding of your keyword rankings, and tell you how people are finding your business (or your competitor’s business) across multiple platforms.

Build More Detailed Buyers’ Personas

Customer personas (also referred to as customer avatar) are people you make up to describe your ideal customers.

Personas make digital marketing more streamlines and understandable by making your buyers easier to relate to. 

When creating a persona, you assign some human traits and features, like gender, income, occupation, etc.

Personas also help you create a customer-centric business model, the only business model that will make your business successful in 2022 and beyond.

To build a persona, you need some kind of data, and that’s where SEO-driven web analytics somes very much in handy. Google Analytics comes with detailed demographics data that will turn very useful for persona creation:

As a business owner, you are, of course, prioritizing your customers. Thus, their feedback is important for you to improve your product or service. In order to learn from your visitors, install Google Analytics tool that collects feedback so that you can analyze it and listen to your customers in order to make your website better. 

No matter how many professionals work on your website, visitors’ feedback is the most qualitative measure of your success. Using conversational forms on your site will help you collect even more data for your SEO campaigns and create more detailed personas.

Take Control of Your Buyers’ Journeys

Buying journeys have become more complicated over the years. Equipped with diverse devices and tools, a consumer may start their journey on one device and continue on a different one. 

They are likely to turn to Google multiple times throughout that fragmented journey, and if your business shows up for multiple queries in multiple sections, you are more likely to win that customer:

A well set-up SEO strategy is targeting more than just organic results. It aims at optimizing the whole SERP (search engine result page):

Take a look at all those sections:

Most of them provide businesses with additional opportunities to get found and engaged with. For example, ranking in the Google Video Carousel can help you with conversions as videos present products and services in an accessible way. Nowadays, editing videos can be done with an online video editor and a simple keyword research and video page optimization can help you bring it among the top SERPs.

A critical cog in the wheel of customer relationships is how well you integrate the online-offline experience of the customer. Every interaction your customer has with your brand doesn’t result in a sale. Neither does every Google search they do. However, engagement is a virtual cycle — more brand awareness means more branded searches and more branded searches mean better visibility, rankings, and ultimately, clicks.

So the best thing for you to do would be to understand (and match) customers’ “intent” at every interaction. Again, this requires alignment between your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Using the right CRM software, you can consolidate the results of your SEO, email marketing and lead generation campaigns, create your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, and funnel back the insights into your content creation process to target them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Identify Your Promoters

If you are into SEO, you sure know your backlinks. But backlinks are not just about higher rankings. Knowing who links to you helps you build stronger niche relationships!

Ahrefs is a great tool for understanding your website’s structure and its backlink portfolio. Essentially, your website’s backlink portfolio is all the websites that have linked from their site back to yours. 

Another great tool is Buzzsumo that allows you to see exactly who is linking to you, and even the author who was found on that page. You can see what content on your website is the most popular, which is especially useful if you incorporate a blog into your website.

You can also set up an alert to receive an email once anyone is linking to your site. This is a great relationship building tactic: Once anyone links to you, reach out to thank, follow and become a friend!

Control Online Context and Sentiment Better

Finally, being there, paying attention to what people see when searching and trying to optimize for that will empower your business with ways to control what people see when searching for your brand or your important queries.

Imagine your current or future customer typing your brand name in Google’s search box. What are they going to see there? How will that impact their buying journey?

Whether you are there or not, your current and potential customers are searching for you and your brand. The difference is, when you are there watching, you can make your business better and make sure you provide the best solutions to their answers.

Conclusion

Of course, SEO offers many more ways to help your business in 2022, including an ability to position your brand as a knowledge hub by driving your content creation decision. 

On top of that, SEO allows you to create the most consistent traffic channel out there. Organic traffic is one of the most valuable traffic-driving channels out there thanks to matching intent (users actually search for answers and solutions, so they are more likely to engage with your site if you give them those answers and solutions).

Customers expect brands to run websites where they can read more about a product or a service, get useful tips from your brand, or find FAQ sections to save time. If you’re about to set up your business, think about ‘budget’ ways to launch a user-friendly website as it helps to grow your business.

The best advice is to do some research, find the tools that work best for you, and never underestimate the value SEO offers for the success of your business.

The post How Can SEO Help Your Business in 2022? appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

You need to know how much *you* should spend on SEO, based on what SEO success looks like for you, how much you can afford right now, and what type of hire fits your business best.

That’s where this article differs from the others online (trying to answer the same question).

We’ll avoid giving you generalized advice and replace it with 3 questions that will tell you how much to spend on SEO marketing.

Because marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all.

How Much You Should Be Spending on SEO Marketing

Question #1: What does an SEO success story look like for you?

SEO success means something different to each company. If you’re making $100,000 a year, SEO success could look like another $20,000 in profits. → But, if you’re making $5,000,000 a year, your SEO strategy needs to bring in high 6-figures to be worth your resources.

To figure out what your SEO success story is, you’ll narrow down how much you’d like to make from your SEO strategy if all goes well. As tempting as it is wanting to make $100 billion trillion from it, let’s keep our feet on the ground.

How many more products or services can your supply chain or team realistically handle?

• Can you add 10,000 more units to your ecommerce store?
• Are you able to work with 15 more agency clients?
• Do you need 5,000 more membership sign-ups?

Your SEO strategy has one job: get more traffic and conversions. Knowing how much more traffic and how many conversions you can handle is the first step to figuring out what you should invest.

Question #2: What can you afford to invest for a long-term ROI?

The best part of your SEO strategy is that it will be around for a long time. The worst part of an SEO strategy is that it takes a few months to get it rolling. SEO isn’t like paid ads that pop out conversions after a week. With SEO, you’ll tap into your inner meditation guru while you wait for the results to come in a few months down the line.

That means you need to invest what you can afford to wait to see an ROI on.

With paid ads, you can invest $1,000 and get ready to see conversions within a week or so. But, with SEO, that $1,000 investment isn’t coming back to you for at least a few weeks. You don’t want to invest more than you can afford to while waiting to see it boomerang back to you. 

For an experienced SEO specialist working full-time, Glassdoor averages a salary of $46,658, but depending on experience and location this is (of course) going to differ.

If you’d prefer to bring on a freelance or hire an agency, you won’t want to hire anybody for less than $1,500 per month. If your business is making 7+ figures, you’ll want to look for someone priced higher.

So, if you hire an SEO agency and pay them $1,500 per month, you’ll prepare not to see your money for a few months. To be extra conservative, let’s say you don’t see an ROI from your SEO strategy for 4 months (which is normal). That means you need to invest $6,000 before you see that money come back.

Is that reasonable for your business right now?

If the answer is yes, we’ll explain how to choose whether you should hire a full-time employee, freelancer, or agency below.

If the answer is no, don’t worry. You can come back to your SEO strategy when you feel comfortable investing at least $6,000 towards SEO before you get an ROI.

Question #3: Does it make sense to hire in-house or a freelancer or agency?

Hiring an SEO specialist comes in 3 forms:

• You bring someone on full-time to your marketing department
• You hire a freelance to work with your team on SEO
• You work with an agency

Which type of hire to make depends on your business. 

→ For some businesses, bringing on a full-time employee might have great tax benefits and makes the most sense.

→ Working with a freelancer is the best fit for other businesses because they can easily integrate into your team.

→ And other businesses need an agency to have maximum SEO support as they build out their strategy.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer for how you hire an SEO specialist(s). It’s just based on what makes the most sense for your business.

Here are our suggestions on who you should hire based on your business needs:

You should hire a full-time Head of SEO if: you want a long-term SEO strategy that spans at least 2 years.

You should hire a freelance SEO expert if: you have a small business or a simple business (with only a few products) and a single SEO expert can handle all the work needed. Note: They’ll be working with your content team or outsourcing content creation.

You should hire an SEO agency if: you want a robust SEO strategy and are willing to work with the agency’s workflows and processes.

The Right Way To Budget for SEO

Budgeting for your SEO strategy comes down to the numbers inside of your business. 

To figure out how much you can afford to spend on SEO, ask yourself these 3 questions:

Question #1: What does an SEO success story look like for you?

Question #2: What can you afford to invest for a long-term ROI?

Question #3: Does it make sense to hire in-house or a freelancer or agency?

That first page of Google is calling your name, and we know your business can acquire one of those coveted spots.

It just takes the right SEO strategy, which comes from budgeting and working with the right SEO specialists.

The post Budgeting for SEO: How Much Should You Be Spending On SEO Marketing? appeared first on DigitalMarketer.