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Businesses should consider some new growth marketing tips to improve their strategy, since many factors are now affecting online reputation. The steady march of online technology is catching up to businesses that look great online but are less than impressive in real life. Customer reviews, shopping apps, and a plethora of feedback mechanisms are adjusting the virtual world to more closely align with what’s available.

This is happening whether businesses like it or not.

The single best response I can figure out is for businesses to hone in on what they do best, use the digital terrain to separate themselves from the pack, and trust that when they offer the marketplace something of real value, the marketplace will return the favor. Growth marketing is a key way to differentiate yourself and stay ahead of the competition.

In my experience, content is the key element to a successful growth marketing strategy. There are several trends with content to be aware of as you plan your growth strategy.

1. Aligning content strategies is vital.

I used to say that one key to growth marketing success is to kill as many birds with one stone as possible. I’ve said it so often that I finally decided that I don’t want to be known for killing birds so I changed it to “feeding as many birds as you can with one scone.”

True, it’s not rocket science, but the concept does hold the key to growth marketing ROI. To get started, look at each one of your marketing and communication strategies and see how it affects your content strategy.

If you look at Dave McClure’s Pirate Funnel and how it applies to growth marketing, you will see how it’s important to have content alignment across your funnel with awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. All of these strategies are heavily influenced by content creation and distribution strategies so they must be aligned.

Considering the RACI Matrix

Before you spend time executing your plan, take a step back. Chart out how these areas affect each other. You could even download a RACI matrix and walk through the tasks your team is doing. This will help you see how it affects other areas of your company and other strategies.

RACI Matrix

The above visual is an example of how you can create a matrix with the tasks on the left side and the people/areas it affects on the top. To move faster than everybody else with your marketing, you need to have a system set up to maximize the ROI of your content efforts.

One piece of content could be put on the blog and left there to die. Or you can run it through a matrix of some sort. It could be sent to potential recruits to engage them to stay top of mind. It could be used as a sales asset if sent to the right person in sales.

I’ve studied a lot of the fastest-growing companies with effective strategies. They all do some variation of this content alignment. Content is consistently aligned with other aspects of their business and is used in multiple ways to maximize their ROI.

 

2. Niches matter more than ever.

SEO experts have published a wide array of content related to how the Google algorithm is getting increasingly intelligent such that details matter. Search results are moving toward displaying the best answer/resource and not just the resource with the highest domain authority.

Relevancy is becoming key. No matter what profession you are in, educate yourself on the content strategies that work in that specific niche.

For example, I come from a family of attorneys. When they asked me about niche marketing, the first thing I sent them was the book Law Firm SEO. I pointed them to this resource because I wanted them to understand the tactics used in their niche. They agreed it was a helpful read.

To be honest, in the past I might have sent them my own book or something from Joe Pulizzi or Ann Handley. I still might likely do that on occasion. However, there’s so much content out there these days that you have to hone in a bit more on your area.

I’ve designed content strategies for small startups and some of the largest brands in the world and I can tell you one thing without hesitation. If you produce content exactly like everybody else, you will not take the lead in growth marketing.

The reason why I also recommended the above book to my family of attorneys is that I want them to understand the content tactics that are being used in their industry. To me, that’s Step One toward arriving at a successful content growth strategy. Best practices for marketing in your specific industry are something to always keep in mind, of course, but then take the next step and aggressively highlight how you and/or your company do things differently.

Testing Organic Growth Strategies

For example, we recently A/B tested some organic growth strategies with Calendar, an online scheduling and calendar app. We were aware of what others in the calendaring and scheduling industry were doing, so we made a checklist:

We immediately noticed a specific gap. Yes, they were doing PR. However, they weren’t doing it in alignment with desired search terms or areas where they were seeking organic growth. Instead of going for things such as a calendar app in their PR strategy, they were going for article features on Calendar founders or just general PR to get the brand name out there.

These days, the Google algorithm is too smart to just look at best practices that experts say to follow. Instead, it wants to see you naturally own your industry. When content is too sporadic and all over the place, it’s hard for Google to know exactly where they should position you.

Redesigning Your Site

Another way we’ve seen niche marketing really matter is whenever a site is redesigned.

I recommend that as soon as you redesign a site, you have a targeted PR campaign for six months afterward. When you change everything around, Google tries to figure out where you should land. If you don’t help them understand the niche where you should be the best resource, it’s going to put you where the algorithm deems you “safe.”

I was at Content Marketing World last year and a woman I met had hired one of the best website companies. She was mad that her organic growth took a hit and started to think that she had been ripped off. However, her underlying assumption was that if she had an amazing website, that would be enough to increase organic growth.

Maybe, in the long run, that might be true.

However, we’ve conducted enough testing to know that if she would have followed up the relaunch with a six-month campaign, the keywords she had previously owned would have immediately ranked. She could easily have hit the ground running to gain more ground now that her site was amazing. Just that one simple tweak would have helped put her on a quicker path to industry leadership.

3. Have a system in place to collect data, then make your strategic decisions based on that data.

There are certain metrics that you must start tracking to make informed decisions on your growth strategies. Start tracking these common marketing data points ASAP. They include common marketing data such as unique visitors, time on site, social metrics, qualified leads, conversion rates, and opportunities. After that, grow from there once you have a reliable system in place.

Data collection will only get better as technology is advancing at an extremely fast pace. Once you have these systems down, you can use them to project advanced strategies.

For example, there are a lot of great SEO and marketing tools out there. These tools can tell you how difficult specific keywords are or how many links it will take to begin gaining credibility. Recently, I was using a newer version of MarketMuse. It not only showed me how difficult it is to rank for a certain keyword, but it also showed how specifically difficult it would be for me compared to others.

The MarketMuse tool took into consideration industry data, which is common. However, the extra element was taking into consideration how my company already had a certain amount of authority. This affected the data and allowed us to make a more informed decision on going after something more difficult. In this case, we were uniquely positioned to achieve it.

This is a good example of what I’ve hit on in previous tips. You can do things just like everyone else and use tools to look at general search traffic or how hard it is to get a keyword ranking. However, when you think more about your specific niche or how your company is uniquely positioned to own certain things, it can help you grow quicker in that area.

4. Your content strategy should reflect your growth.

One insightful test you can run to see where your content strategy stacks up is to ask a neutral third party to take a look at your company online.

Ask them what they think your revenue looks like, where it seems as though you stack up in the industry, what you are best at, etc. Make sure you give them the freedom to be completely transparent with their answers. If the report comes back and it doesn’t line up with where you are — or better — then you may have a problem.

For example, a friend of mine recently invited me to invest in a company called Tradefull. My initial assessment was, well…this company’s digital presence didn’t reflect what my friend was saying. However, after speaking to the owner/operator, I was ridiculously impressed with the numbers, progress, team, and pretty much everything else about the company.

I provide this example simply to point out that the online presence created a natural trust barrier. You don’t want this for your company, particularly if the online impression is not necessarily accurate. The more you remove these barriers, the more you can go full steam on the growth path you want. Today, Tradefull is on a path to reflecting that success with its content strategy.

It’s important to note that this is the most common thing I see with successful growth companies. Sometimes the digital landscape doesn’t represent the actual landscape.

Years ago, you could get away with this sort of thing, at least for a while. However, nowadays, technology has allowed your competitors to catch up. Differentiating yourself and staying ahead is vitally important. This means that your digital narrative should be realistically aligned with the actual narrative.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, consider looking at it like this: You are putting in the hard work to help grow a company. As a result, at least a small percentage of that time should be making sure the story that people see aligns with that hard work. Perception of your brand can ultimately become reality.

Have a process in place at your board or leadership meeting to measure the perception of market share similar to how you would calculate your market share in sales. The test above can be helpful but also make sure you set actionable goals. Survey how competitors have a presence at conferences, conduct media monitoring, and track how much you are mentioned in industry conversations compared to competitors. You'll find that you are now positioned to set goals to gain more market share of that conversation.

As you look at growth strategies for your company, take into consideration the ideas presented above as you decide where the budget should go. The tips above can help you not only get on a quicker growth path but also can help you get buy-in from leadership and other key players within your company.

Aligning content strategies can benefit other departments, niche ownership can excite leadership bent on industry domination, and looking at the data of your current competitive advantage can all lead to a better growth path. The result will be an accurate perception of your brand but also a catalyst to your company’s growth.

It’s common for companies to recognize the importance of having a strong digital PR strategy. Yet, it’s also common for organizations to find themselves with big investments that yield very few results. It can also be confusing, frustrating, and hard to know who you trust.

Having an effective strategy is important, though. In a digital world, companies need to be found online. They also need to be understood for what they are and capable of managing any message about them streaming across various platforms. Like traditional public relations, it is not so much about the sales language or promotional topics. The key to success, then, is to develop an effective process of getting the message out.

Takeaway:

There are different definitions of everything that is incorporated in PR and there are clear differences between digital and traditional PR. However, most digital PR guides have the same goal of providing clear, positive information about the company or client.

Yet, digital public relations has one clear benefit over traditional methods: speed. It is possible to use these tools to get information out into the online world quickly, which empowers companies to better control the message about them. It also enables a fast pivot when circumstances warrant it. That’s much harder to do in the traditional PR world.

How to Develop Effective Digital Public Relations

A number of components make up a successful digital PR strategy. To create a strategy like this, consider the following steps.

Define Your Goals

What is the end result? What do you want to see as the result of any activity you take? It’s important to consider this carefully. In some organizations, it is about focused efforts to increase rankings in search engines. Other times, it’s to get more traffic, or targeted traffic, to a website. Still, other times, it’s to increase the brand’s identity.

Often, the more specific the goals are, the better. For example, your business needs to grow its online presence. One way to do that is by building more backlinks to your website. You may need to do more heavy lifting in brand building by networking with other websites or complementary companies to reach that goal.

Clearly Outline Your Target Audience

Who do you want to communicate to or with? If you have not yet done so, work to define personas. This should be a very specific process where you are considering who your ideal reader of any content is. Are you looking for people to sell to? If that’s the case, your content needs to focus on your end customer’s needs. Who is this customer?

Get under the skin of your brand. It’s important to do as much research as possible to find out who your customer is and what they do online. Learn what they are interacting with and what makes them buy.

Create Your Content Calendar

You know what you want to communicate and to whom. The next step is to create a calendar that allows you to create the strategy. An online calendar is a fluid tool that may change over time. However, it puts your plan into action by outlining what needs to be done and where. It also gives you a visual to use to better understand your content moving forward.

Your content calendar also provides some structure for your goals in the coming months. That is, it outlines what’s getting posted, what news releases are going out, and what things you want to celebrate.

This is especially useful for seasonal content. For example, waiting until November 1 to post information about military deals for Veterans Day could negatively impact its effectiveness. By scheduling the content in your October calendar, you can make sure it posts at the most ideal time.

Takeaway:

A good focus for PR is to consider four steps. The first is to understand and identify the goals of any campaign. Then, create plans detailed enough to drive the campaign towards its objectives.

From there, it’s necessary to execute the plans according to the goals set. The key fourth step is monitoring, analyzing, and adjusting as needed. There’s no one solution that works for all companies or campaigns.

Building Your Content

You have lots of ideas on where to go from here. The key, then, is to create content that is going to provide the message you’ve selected. Spend some time on this. Look at your audience, goals, and brand voice to create content. You need to fill up that content calendar.

A good place to start is with some interactive tools. You may want to create an infographic, for example, that provides insight into your company. Or create a tool that breaks down some of your company's more complicated data. You may want to showcase some stories about your company. Don’t be afraid to do some storytelling to paint a picture of your company’s goals.

The next consideration is for high-quality thought leadership. Most organizations need to stand out as being an expert in their industry, product, or service. Thought leadership is a big part of successful digital PR. It allows you to create articles, videos, and other content that is published with your name. It’s a great way to build your credibility. Consider providing commentary on your services. Dive deep into your industry’s innovations.

Takeaway:

If you don’t have a strategy in place, your organization has no control. Relying on the in-the-moment events does not allow your business to control messages, create positive opportunities, or pivot when needed.

A lack of strategy also means that any steps you take are likely to be underperforming and inefficient. That is what often leads to overspending on PR. Yet, taking steps now to create a plan can help make your investment go further, creating much improved results.

Publish, Analyze, and Continue to Build

The next steps are where things become busy and involved. If you are working with an agency to help you with your PR, you’ll want to rely on them for all outreach and media efforts. You will need to do some research on your own to determine where your content is going. Look at competitors for some insights.

As you begin to launch data, you’ll want to monitor what happens with it. What are the results of this move? What’s working better than other methods or content types? The more data you have, the more effective you can tweak and improve your content and outreach to achieve your goals. It’s not common to hit 100 percent right out of the door.

You’ll need to make changes over time as factors change. That also helps with building consistency. To reach your audience, you need to put information out there – in multiple forms – on a consistent basis. More so, it takes time. When you are consistent over time and invest in enough quality content, you’ll get impressive results. Without consistency, your organization may not see the results you need.

Why Invest in Digital PR?

As you consider all of these steps, it can seem overwhelming. Yet, what comes from this process is worth it. It enables you to build your brand and develop a company (and an online presence for it) that achieves your mission and goals. It also allows you to become a leader in the industry you’re in. For many organizations, this is critical for those who want to topple big brands or those that want to build long-term success.

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