81% of all internet journeys start with search. Organic search drives over 50 percent of all visitors to B2B and B2C websites according to a report from Search Engine Land. Without a search strategy in place marketers are missing out on a huge opportunity to drive additional quality traffic to their website leaving competitors capitalising on those ‘juicy’ high-volume search terms and reaping the benefits. So where do we start?
1. MAKE A LIST OF IMPORTANT TOPICS
Make a list of important and relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
Insurance company example
Car insurance
Multi car insurance
Home insurance
Etc.
2. FILL THOSE TOPIC BUCKETS
Fill in those topic buckets with keywords that you feel are relevant.
Car insurance
Car insurance
vehicle insurance
cheap car insurance
single car insurance...
Multi car insurance
multicar insurance
second car insurance
multi car is it cheaper...
Home insurance
home insurance offers
cheap home insurance
home content insurance...
3. RESEARCH RELATED KEYWORDS
Check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords in each bucket.There are plenty of tools out there freely available to help you with this task, don’t forget to check your competitors too. Typically the keyword tool will show you three useful information for every specified keyword:
Volume (monthly average for your country) e.g. 1,000/mon
Competition on websites (0.00 = low competition to 1.00 = high competition)
Related keywords
My personal preference is Keywords Everywhere. It's a free browser add-on that shows search volume, CPC & competition on websites.
4. CUT DOWN YOUR KEYWORD LIST
Still using the keywords tool cut down your keyword list. Focus on the most relevant keywords with a good volume of traffic. car insurance = Volume: 673,000/mo | Competition: 0.95 Vs single car insurance = Volume: 20/mo | Competition: 0.98
5. SO HOW DO YOU RANK FOR THOSE KEYWORDS?
I have not come across yet a free tool which allows you to upload/generate your keywords list and shows you how your website and competitors rank against those keywords (feel free to comment if you know one). However there are plenty of affordable solutions to do the job. Alternatively, it's a bit laborious but if you are curious you can use https://duckduckgo.com/, because this search engine doesn’t store your data, history and preferences you can check and see which website ranks high for your specified keyword. If you can’t see your website on top it’s time to work hard on your SEO.
6. CONTENT CREATION
Create content based around your keywords list. If you need inspiration for your content creation give this website a go answerthepublic.com
7. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Use the periodic table of SEO from Search Marketing Land. The table is designed to help publishers focus on the fundamentals needed to achieve success with SEO.
The table covers On-the-page SEO and Off-the-page SEO and look at Content, Architecture, HTML, Trust, Links, Personal and Social Use a SEO tool or google sheet to keep track of your changes and monitor the impact those changes are having on your website ranking. You don’t have to check your reports every day or week, leave it one month or two and then review your changes.
This article guides you in understanding the key stages necessary to create a successful multi-channel lead generation campaign.
1. CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES
Define the scope of the campaign with its objectives. Put in place KPIs and commit to it even if it’s the first time, this will set the benchmark for future campaigns.
2. CUSTOMER PERSONA
Research and learn about your products, competitors, the wider industry and its challenges. Create a customer persona using internal/external sources, talk to your sales team, technical department and get some customer feedback. Fill the information gaps with research. The customer persona will help you establish what your target audience care about, the challenges and pain points they face, their requirements in terms of product information, their preferred communication channels, platforms and a multitude of other information which is vital for the planning of your content strategy and the overall campaign.
3. CONTENT IS CURRENCY
Now that you've created your customer persona, it's time to find the 'sweet spot', right at the intersection of the customer's interest and the company's expertise. Finding the sweet spot will simplify and guide the content creation. Anything that does not complement it is not content, you want to spend time producing. Produce educational content that is insightful for your customers and it will also help with your SEO. Sources of content: Create (recycle, adapt, build from scratch). Collaborate. Curate Tell your story through ads, creative storyteller video, landing page, web pages, PR, email, brochures and other marketing collateral Develop an operational plan that outlines all the actions needed to produce the content; who's responsible, procedures and deadlines
4. GETTING YOUR AUDIENCE TO SUBSCRIBE
Use social media to promote your content and drive traffic to your landing page. Once on your landing page, visitors will consume your content and in exchange if the content is insightful, they will subscribe to your mailing list. Use both organic and paid social media channels. Drive quality traffic to your landing page and get visitors to subscribe with a search strategy including both, organic search and paid search (PPC). Establish important keywords that are relevant to your product and audience with a good volume of traffic. Optimise your website content accordingly. Re-market to website visitors across paid social media and PPC campaigns.
5. CONVERTING SUBSCRIBERS INTO CUSTOMERS
Create engaging email content based on the customer journey. Keep your email design simple clean and templated for consistency, promoting one single idea at the time with a clear call to action. Build a program that automatically enrolls new subscribers every day, and send emails to the subscribers at specified intervals moving subscribers through the customer journey.
6. TEST, MEASURE AND OPTIMISE
Testing is a very important part of the process in order to run a successful campaign. Testing and optimising the different elements (creatives, target audience, content, Ads format etc..) of your social, search and email campaigns allows you to adjust, reinvest on what’s working better to make marginal improvements and get a better ROI. Use a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement model. The best model I found is from Google evangelist Avinash Kaushik https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/
CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST
Paid social media: don't ignore paid social media, with some platforms holding over 1,000 of data points about their users, research shows that paid social media is now a more cost effective strategy for content marketing than building organic social audiences.
Landing page: make sure your landing page is search engine friendly and relevant. Keep the design simple, make sure the page loads fast and displays correctly on all screen devices.
Form design: ensure that the form and process to capture users information adheres to the GDPR guidelines, asking only for the minimum information necessary.
Attribution: use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track goal and event conversions across all the channels.
Automation: automate your processes whenever possible. Be effective with content distribution on social media, use Hootsuite or a similar tool to plan and schedule posts across all the platforms all in one place.
Smart testing: priorities element for testing that will make the most impact for your campaign. For example A/B testing different types of audience will have more impact than testing different colour type of CTA buttons or subject lines. When testing only change one variable at the time, i.e. don’t test different Ad formats and creatives at the same time.
Remarketing: as a rule of thumb unfortunately in my experience using remarketing with Google Ads (PPC) or paid social won’t work if your target audience is small.
Remember it’s not about you: be where your customers persona are. Make sure to test different platforms, it's not about what social media you or your boss like it's about being where your customers are, therefore test test and test again to see what success you are having and optimise platforms spent accordingly.
Email content: work on your email editorial first, making sure it’s of quality and flows without any images. Then add simple graphic/image to complement your copy. Too often we see emails having a lot of images distracting the reader from essential information.
Ultimately the success of your marketing multi-channnel lead generation campaign will come down to how much effort you put towards testing, failing, learning and improving at the 6 stages we’ve just covered. And in Google's words always Be There, Be Useful, Be Quick...
