In the second edition of my book, Digital Marketing Strategy, I added a chapter on the Digital Ecosystem. It’s a vital part of any marketing strategy to understand and one that many of us don’t have a full grip on yet so I wanted to talk a little about this briefly to cover off what I regard as essential concepts to get a grip on today in the latest blog of my Digital 101 series.
Website, App, SEO, Paid Search, Social media, Analytics & Data. All interact in the back end and all cross over in the user experience. How they do and how we maximise the opportunity is important to understand. In a world that is increasingly becoming more digital and therefore increasingly less about digital as its own separate concept, it is vital to appreciate this.
PR and Social media
Social media has changed the face of PR. You should use social media in many ways as a key part of your PR strategy. This includes following trends and social listening to stay relevant and timely, connecting with journalists, including relevant hashtags as well as the obvious distribution opportunity.
Social media and SEO
Social signals are an important considering in your SEO strategy. You will of course be trying to optimise your social strategy anyway but you also need to consider that social signals around links and engagement play a part in your SEO rankings. Think about what content you broadcast, where and how it links into your properties. Focus on engagement over vanity metrics.
SEO and Paid search
This is a two-way relationship. SEO can be a low cost strategy for delivering high quality volumes of traffic and so is often an early channel to be deployed. Using your SEO data to shape your paid search strategy is a powerful means of making PPC more effective. The exact opposite can be done with your paid search data which you can control far more precisely to find SEO opportunities that can be far more effective.
Content Strategy and… pretty much everything
Content feeds social media. It feeds SEO. It feeds your platforms. It positions your business. There is too much to say on content strategy to fit into this blog but consider short form content and a variety of treatments when producing content. Could your article also be an infographic and a video (long and short)? How would this play out across YouTube and SEO. Is your article long enough for SEO whilst be punchy enough for the reader? Are the right keywords included in an organic way? Is your data setup to fully understand what’s happening with your content and where and how to evolve it?
Data and absolutely everything
A marketing strategy is nothing without a good data strategy behind it. Effective targeting, personalisation, automation and messaging is all impossible without effective data. Consider your marketing tech stack. Do you have one integrated set such as Salesforce or Adobe? If not you must ensure your platforms are consistently talking to each other or you will be blind to take effective decisions.
All channels and UX
UX remains critical. I would throw CRO (conversion rate optimisation) in here as well. All your efforts above are far less effective if the experience is poor. In a world that has become more commoditised as consumer power has grown, experience and brand have become key differentiators. You should be continuously monitoring and improving your experience to maximise the benefits of your broader strategy.
There is more on all of this and building a highly effective digital marketing strategy in the second edition of my book, available now.