This week, maximize your marketing momentum with renewed focus on your website and blog, which play a vital role in the return on your marketing investment. While there is newly emerging debate on the “essential-ness” of a website for brands, we contend that for most small to medium-sized businesses, websites and blogs form the foundation of an organization’s content hub. The four graphics below, courtesy of HubSpot, an inbound marketing agency, underscore the importance of these content marketing channels.
Your website is one of the most important content channels you own (the other is your blog). It is your virtual storefront, an essential component of your online presence and your branding hub. If you intend to establish authority and some measure of credibility, focus on the website before jumping into the shallow waters of 140 characters or less, surprising your friends, coworkers and families with a revealing selfie or hanging your hat on a 10 second Vine. Your blog is a vehicle to create more pages of -you guessed it- content. It allows you to educate, nurture and socialize. Companies readily use blogs as part of their inbound marketing strategy and focus on educational, data-inspiring and thought-provoking information. In other words, keep those shameless plugs to a minimum to engage with your audience and to establish you and/or your company as a thought leader.
Here are a few tips to manage and maximize your content hubs:
- In addition to static fare on your website, integrate search, social, content and your blog to keep the site fresh. You’ve got to admit that there’s nothing more off-putting than outdated content and bad links. Include news releases and updates, ways to stay engaged (e.g., newsletter subscriptions), new calls to action and offers.
- Make good and plenty sure that your sites are mobile-friendly.
- Review and monitor your site at least once a week to make sure the content is still relevant, links are operational and that your marketing tactics, including optimization, are still effective. Make improvements where necessary.
- Monitoring your website and blog stats regularly will tell you what’s working and what’s not. Key metrics include number of visitors (tracks each time a page is visited ), number of unique visitors (tracks brand new visitors), length of stay (time on the site page, which provides a good indication of your content quality and site design), traffic source (what platform or external marketing channel is driving visitors to your site, which provides a good indication of the strength of your search engine optimization efforts) and pages visited (exploring additional site pages is an indicator of whether or not you are building loyalty and an overall positive site experience). Additional metrics, particularly for your blog, are: subscribers, comments, traffic-driving keywords, likes and social media shares.
- Use a diversity of content on your blog, such as commentaries, polls, video, audio, images, case studies, industry news, infographics, curated lists, guest blog articles and, as Julie Neidlinger, a guest blogger on jeffbullas.com, suggests, answer a question, tell a story, report on a trend and look within.
- Be social and shareable. Distribute your website and blog content across multiple platforms (email, social networks, micro blogs, social bookmarking sites) to create a presence and to reach multiple audiences.
- Be engaging. Encourage and respond to comments on your blog.
While the tips above barely scratch the surface (we welcome your additions to the list), they provide a general guide for the next step: crafting your content strategy. The Salesforce video below is a good start to understanding how to grow the pipeline and social channels via content marketing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE3iWPFf2O0
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This is a topic that is close to mmy heart… Best wishes!
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