Relevancy. It’s the buzz word which keeps nudging its way into every conversation, particularly if you’re an online marketer or use search engine optimisation (SEO) for your business. It’s a well known fact that your marketing activities need to connect with a feeling of your target market in order to elicit the desired action. This could be getting them to sign up for a newsletter, download an ebook, request a quote, buy a product (or 3!) or to encourage in store foot traffic. In order to generate the best result from your marketing (both online and offline), you need to ensure it’s relevant, interesting and relatable.
In this blog we will identity 4 strategies to help get you on the right path to producing and delivering relevant marketing.
1. Review Your Internal Marketing Functions
Your internal operating functions are just as vital to the success of your marketing than the actual activity itself. Small business owners need to understand where your marketing falls down and where it thrives. You may only have a small marketing team, a one man show or maybe you’re doing it by yourself, either way it’s important to identify your pain points and understand the relevancy of your marketing tactics. By doing this you can successfully point out the operational functions in your business, whether it’s resources, team size, budgets, clear messaging, goals or objectives to determine its impact on your marketing relevancy.
2. Identify and Document Your Customer Personas
Bunching all of your customers together in the one category and applying the same activities and messages, leads to completely irrelevant marketing and wasted dollars. Understanding your customers and segmenting them out into various personas will assist in making your marketing more targeted and relevant. You need to understand your new customers before marketing to them: why do they need this product or service? What are their pain points? What makes them want to buy it from me? How do they find out about your product or service? Where are they from? What do they do? How old are they? And the list goes on. Persona development is an essential tool in bringing your customers to life and it also ensures there is a clear image and purpose for your marketing activities. Having one document as a reference point for the marketing team ensures a clear, consistent and relevant campaign.
3. Invest in Digital Marketing Activities
You can’t have relevancy and marketing in the same sentence without mentioning digital marketing. Digital marketing is at the forefront of change and it’s not going anywhere, instead it will only get bigger and more imperative for small businesses to participate in. Digital marketing is the one platform that allows you to track, measure and report on the direct results of your activities. From social media and search engine optimisation to online banners and pay per click ads, there are a variety of channels to choose from to market through. Selecting the most relevant platform for your marketing depends on who your target audience is and where they are spending their time online. Understanding the user journey will assist in creating ads and strategies that are highly relevant to you desired audience.
4. Search Engine Optimisation & Content Relevancy
With the introduction of Google’s Hummingbird update in the back half of 2013, came a push for higher quality and more relevant online marketing. The Hummingbird Update is Google’s system (technically called an algorithm) which sorts through all of the information on the Internet and comes back to you with what it thinks are the most relevant answers (in the form of a search engine result).
The Hummingbird update focuses on the meaning behind the words that people search. Google wants to move beyond just finding the pages and matching them to the words in your search. They want to deliver the most relevant, useful and helpful results (websites, information and content) back to the user. Google does this by paying attention to each search query and tries to decipher the human meaning or tone behind the search. Essentially, it is the computer or robot trying to figure out the exact intention behind your search.
This affects your online marketing strategies, particularly for content marketing. It is no longer viable to fill your website pages with keywords in order to show up in the search results, It is now more important than ever to ensure the content you create whether through blogs, videos, ebooks or on social media is highly relevant to your customer’s search.
Marketing in the digital worlds means that you need to adapt and move with the changes to stay relevant and current to your customers. Understanding who your customers are and what they are looking for will help you deliver more relevant and highly targeted marketing.
Image source: Adam Foster | Codefor via Compfight cc
