Modern Marketing

Traditional marketing tactics are geared towards achieving short-term objectives in many cases. Although direct mail and billboard advertising can still bring in new customers, they are no match for digital marketing in most cases when it comes to costs vs. results (ROI) and measurements of efficiency among other metrics, nor when it  comes to speed.

Furthermore, digital marketing is constantly evolving. The advancement in technology has made everything more effective, from collaborating and testing on ideas, to researching the competition and from deploying paid campaigns to leveraging the power and huge user base of search engines and social media. Then there’s data analysis (and market research), which has become a serious and complicated discipline on its own right, since understanding customer needs and preferences help businesses make informed and effective marketing decisions.

Useful digital marketing tools

 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems:  they can aid the communication process between the brand/company and customers, but more important, they help companies keep track of the user journey  by channel, timeline and marketing tactic, from visitor to lead, from lead to client, from new sale to long-term customer and more.

Social media channels: while they don’t apply to all industries (B2B audience is known to be less inclined to use social media for business purposes, but there are channels that cater to B2B nevertheless), when it comes to B2C, they are a boon for businesses, allowing fine targeting and other tactics to be applied with great success.

Search engine optimization (SEO): Before search engines like Google took over the world, SEO was a fringe activity in the newly developed digital marketing world. As search engines grew in importance and pushed legal, social and technical boundaries (sometimes using controversial strategies), SEO took the stage in terms of digital marketing. To find a service provider nowadays – whether we speak about analyst relations or fintech PR – one starts by searching for them on search engines. You want not only to be there, but to rank decently enough to be found.

SEO can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. There are data crunching specialists that use user generated data (like website traffic, conversion rates and many others) to understand the clients and their needs, there are technical SEO specialists that audit every aspect of a website in order to learn what can be improved and how (especially since the advent of JavaScript-based websites), there are content strategists that skilfully combine PR with SEO and content marketing with customer care and there are outreach people, that always try to get a good backlink from well-trusted websites.

Most content marketers, however, still find it somewhat difficult to understand what SEO is all about and what actually works to increase visibility and rankings. Oftentimes, marketers follow the ever-changing guidelines defined by Google, only to learn later on that these are outdated or that, despite the serious research and effort that went into writing a high quality piece of content that is addressing a topic in depth, competitors with more backlinks – sometimes paid – outranked them. We suggest the following:

  • Consider SEO as part of every digital marketing effort
  • Learn the technical aspects of running a website, as well as the content strategy required to succeed
  • Search engines consider backlinks as votes of trust: earn them!
  • Don’t neglect internal links
  • Don’t write content just to write it, make sure it’s genuinely useful to someone

Lead Capture and Conversion: This is the process in which a company collects prospective customers’ information and the process of conversion entails convincing these prospective customers to buy your products. Landing pages, chart bots, pop-ups etc. are all strategies for lead capture.

 

Well-known Marketing Tools

  • HubSpot CRM
  • Google Keywords Planner
  • Buffer
  • Ahrefs
  • Canva
  • Facebook Events
  • Convert flow
  • Hotjar
  • Google optimize
  • MailChimp
  • Google analytics
  • Search Console
  • Screaming Frog

PR agencies need to include the right people with the right skills in their teams if they want to attract new business and keep ahead of the curve.