At Marketing Works we aim to help our clients enhance their online relationships and engagement with key audiences. As a part of this mission, we’re always looking for new ideas to share.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with Martin Laetsch, formerly with Intel and now the Director of Online Marketing at Act-On Software. Martin is a marketing strategy leader with more than 15 years of experience with prominent companies guiding product management and marketing. While at Intel, Martin defined, built, and managed the world’s first enterprise-class, search marketing program. This has since become the standard for managing digital marketing programs for many of the Fortune 500 companies including Dell, IBM, HP and P&G.
Here are three key takeaways from our conversation that we want to share with you:
- Understand Your Key Audiences: In authoring great content it is important to use constructs and terms that your target audiences are expecting. Before you write or design anything, you need to understand the personas of those who will consume the content and define what information they are seeking and why. Martin shared, “As an industry, we seem to have forgotten why we are creating content and who is consuming it. Google is a very effective medium to get our message out there, but they are not the customer! Very few people make money by being ranked in Google. We make money by attracting prospects, educating them, nurturing them with content, and then convincing them we are the best solution out there for their specific needs. To do this, we need great content.”
- Key to Success = Content Must Resonate with Audiences: Great content is the key to building online customer engagement. Nothing else really matters unless the content is outstanding and relevant to the visitors. As Martin stated, “It doesn’t matter how many links you have if your content is garbage. It doesn’t matter where you rank in Google if nobody clicks the link. And most importantly, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get to your page/site if your customer (or potential customer) isn’t happy with what they read.”
- The Language You Use Is Critical: Co-occurrence is becoming more and more important for optimizing your content. If you want your content to be found through organic searches, it must be written in a way that associates common phrases with the topic. For example, if you are promoting Apple’s iWatch, you will want to use words like Apple, watch, time, wireless, applications, iPhone, colors, etc. in the authoring the content.Tip: It also is important to use language appropriate for your audience. A good rule is to author content at an eighth grade level.
We will continue to share more tips to help you succeed and would love to hear your thoughts regarding what you believe contributes to your digital marketing success.