At least, that’s possible when you work with the right digital marketing agency. The challenge is choosing which agency to partner with. 

There are many different kinds of digital marketing agencies, which can make the decision even more intimidating. Some specialize in niche areas, such as social media marketing, content marketing, or brand awareness strategies. Others are more comprehensive in their approach. 

Relevance, for instance, is a growth marketing agency. That means we use content, digital PR, SEO, and other online marketing tools to create an individualized, comprehensive, and synergistic digital marketing strategy for each client.

So, how do you narrow down which is the right agency for your business? Here are some tips to help you make the best choice for your company based on your resources, needs, goals, and circumstances.

What to Consider When Choosing a Digital Marketing Agency

Before we review the actionable steps you should take to narrow down your options, let’s consider what factors you should assess when looking at digital marketing agencies. 

Remember, you’re not talking about a platform or a campaign. This is a collaborative effort. It requires relationship building and ongoing investment. To work well, you should treat it as a serious, long-term investment. Here’s what to consider when making such an important decision.

1. Assess Requirements and Goals

What are you trying to accomplish? Do you already have an in-house marketing team, and you’re struggling in a specific area like social media or email marketing? Or do you need a partner that can create or overhaul your entire marketing apparatus?

As you consider your current situation, identify the goals, benchmarks, and metrics that matter. What are your marketing objectives? Don’t be vague. Try to identify timelines, expectations, and additional data that can guide your digital marketing agency research.

2. Research Potential Agencies

Once you have an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s time to look at your potential agency options. Research potential marketing agencies on the market (there are a lot of them out there) and curate your list to reach out to.

The goal here shouldn’t be to create a massive compendium of marketing agencies. Instead, keep your shortlist, well, short. Only add agencies that closely fit your requirements and goals. As you conduct your research, keep these three things in mind:

• Expertise: Does an agency have the know-how to back up what they claim they can do? For instance, if they offer social media management, do they have staff with the training, and knowledge to function in that capacity at a high level?
• Experience: There’s a reason Google considers experience and expertise two separate things. Just because an agency has the knowledge doesn’t mean they have the experience. Investigate each agency’s track record. Have they been around the block a few times?
• Reputation: What do others think about a marketing agency? Feedback and reviews provide effective insights into an agency’s track record. Do they have good case studies that demonstrate an ability to deliver what they promise? Have they gone above and beyond for clients?

Expertise, experience, and reputation. These are your guiding lights when assessing your options.

3. Consider Communication Methods

How does a marketing agency’s communication methods align with your own? This may sound like a minor issue, but inconsistent or misaligned communication can lead to unnecessary stress.

Consider how you communicate with your own team. Make sure a digital marketing agency is prepared to communicate with you at the frequency and level of detail you expect from a collaborative partner.

4. Review Agency Networks

Don’t trust an agency that says they can do everything. From the nuances of marketing strategy to the finer details of Google Analytics, there are many things that go into a good marketing campaign.

A good agency should be able to deliver on most things. However, they should also have a high-quality network of trusted partners that they already utilize to refer work. That way, if you need a unique piece of marketing collateral or a service you can’t access, they will be ready with top-shelf recommendations.

How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency

Once you’ve considered your own marketing goals and the potential agencies that can meet them, it’s time to make a decision. Here is an easy, four-step process to narrow your choices down to the single, best candidate for your enterprise:

1. Start by conducting interviews and consultations with your shortlisted agencies. Ask each digital agency the same questions so that you can compare and contrast the answers.
2. Clarify pricing structures and service offerings. Don’t leave any stones unturned. An reputable agency should be open and forthcoming about how they will charge you and what digital marketing services each package includes. If you’re confused, ask for clarification, expecting an informed and helpful answer.
3. Expect customized proposals. If an agency doesn’t offer one, request it. These should do more than detail their services. They should incorporate and be tailored to your business needs.
4. Ask for client references and testimonials. A good agency should always come backed by satisfied customers. Everyone doesn’t have to love them, but there should be a consistent crowd of past and present clients singing their praises. Reviews are an essential form of validation. Look for them.

Use these filters and benchmarks to whittle your options down to the one that best fits your unique marketing needs.

Discovering the Best Digital Marketing Agency for Your Business

It’s hard to overstate the impact of choosing the right digital marketing agency for your business. You want to give an agency months to create marketing plans, set them in motion, and assess the results. That means you want to start with the right group from the get-go to avoid wasting time and resources on digital marketing efforts.

Using a strategic approach in your agency selection (like the one outlined above) can help you choose an agency that isn’t just a good fit. They can help you meet your business goals. 

Once they understand your business better, they should also be able to continuously evaluate your progress and adapt to ongoing changes to sustain your marketing success. They can even help you expand your vision, see new markets and opportunities, and reach for bigger, better results. If you’re looking for a good digital marketing agency to help you achieve your marketing goals, Relevance can help. Reach out now for a free strategy session. Let’s see if we’re a good fit, and we can give you the information needed to make an informed decision about your company’s marketing future.

The post How to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency appeared first on RELEVANCE.

These tools provide data, structure, and insights. They improve efficiencies through marketing automation and can even inspire future promotional frameworks, strategies, and initiatives.

If you’re unsure what growth marketing tools you need to incorporate into your strategy, you’re not alone. There are a lot of tools out there. In this article, we’ve divided growth marketing into eight key categories and provided marketing tool suggestions for each activity.

Let’s dive in.

1. Tending to Your Technical Foundation

The first step in growth marketing is establishing a solid foundation for your site. This paves the way for smooth progress as your digital marketing gains momentum. 

Common technical marketing issues include addressing slow load time, complicated navigation, and poor redirects. These quite yet critical marketing components may be out of sight, but they should never be out of mind. They can hurt your user experience and hamper your marketing efforts.

There are tools that can help. Google Search Console (GSC) is the most important of these, as it provides a detailed analysis of the back-end of your website. You can also use PageSpeed Insights for loading speed analysis while an SEO tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs can do third-party site audits and can give you data regarding search engine optimization across your site.

2. Crushing Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is another major building block of a solid growth marketing strategy. This is the owned part of your marketing, and it should consist of targeted, industry-focused, brand-specific content.

The question is, how do you know your content is performing? Is it top, middle, or bottom-funnel content? Is your content thin or cannibalizing itself? What pieces do you need to optimize or even delete?

Google Search Console can help with this, as can Google Analytics 4. The former focuses on the search engine side of things, while Google Analytics 4 provides user insights. Once again, SEO tools are important in building strong, optimized content. AI-powered platforms like MarketMuse can also help with the planning and optimization process. Other tools like SEOMonitor can help highlight keyword opportunities and cannibalization issues.

3. Benefiting From Backlinking

The 2024 Google Search Algorithm Documentation Leak revealed that backlinks are still an essential part of a growth marketing strategy. How many backlinks do you have? How do your backlinks stack up against the competition? Where can you get more backlinks?

Backlink tools are a tricky one. SEO tools mentioned previously like Ahrefs or SEMRush and Google Search Console remain good starting points here. They can give you the raw backlink data. If you don’t know how to make head or tails out of the information, growth marketing agencies like Relevance can help you draw comparisons, measure results against marketing benchmarks, and discover new backlink opportunities.

4. Tapping Into the Power of Paid Marketing

Paid marketing is a growth hacking tool that helps you supercharge a growth marketing plan. To work, though, you need to know what keywords to target and how to run your paid campaigns.

Ahrefs has a free keyword planning tool that can help you get an idea of what keywords you could incorporate into a paid campaign. Moz offers a free version of its platform for limited keyword research, as well. Google Ads is the platform you want when it comes time to set everything in motion and orchestrate your paid marketing campaign.

5. Streamlining Your Socials

Social media is another critical area of off-site marketing. Social media marketing allows you to connect and engage with your target audience, increasing awareness, developing trust, and building social proof around your brand.

The issue with social media marketing is that it’s overwhelming, which is why most tools here focus on management and efficiency. Social media management tools like Hootsuite, Sprout, and Buffer allow you to schedule and post to accounts from a single dashboard. Platforms like Canva and Unsplash make it much easier to create professional posts, too.

6. Improving Your Emails

Email marketing has always been important. Eblasts can quickly inform your followers about important events and opportunities. Email funnels can nurture leads. Drip campaigns can spread content you’ve published elsewhere. 

In an SEO world that is always in flux, a marketing channel like this that connects directly to an opt-in audience is invaluable. Even so, if you want your recipients to click and your emails to avoid the spam folder, you want to maintain a solid email marketing strategy.

There are a number of tools that can help with this. ConvertKit makes email creation easy. Mixmax makes scheduling a breeze. ActiveCampaign empowers you through cutting-edge email automation options.

7. Optimizing Your Conversions

You can get all of the traffic in the world, but if it doesn’t lead to the right actions, it won’t matter. Conversions can be a number of things, from making a purchase to filling out a form. Regardless, you want to know if your growth marketing efforts are actually bearing fruit or not.

Tools like Convert can help you conduct A/B testing to see what options generate more leads. Optimizely gives you key conversion-related insights into the entire marketing lifecycle. This helps you gauge if your customer acquisition process is leading to consumers engaging in the customer journey.

8. Understanding Your Analytics

Finally, for proper growth marketing to work over the long term, growth marketers need data. Short-term data can reveal if a specific marketing effort is working. Long-term data allows you to track how your site, paid campaigns, SEO content, and other activities are playing out over time.

Google comes up strong here again. Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console can give you a ton of data to work with. In addition, Screaming Frog can crawl your site to conduct audits and provide data-rich feedback. Conductor is another analytics-based tool that hones in on SEO insights to maximize performance. 

Supercharging Growth Marketing With the Right Tools

Every successful growth marketer has a suite of tools to back them up. The key is finding the right platforms for your needs.

If you’re unsure what tools can supercharge your growth marketing plans, we would love to connect for a free strategy session. Together, we can find the tools that can help you align your marketing efforts with your brand’s vision and goal, giving you and your team the best chance at marketing success.

The post Growth Marketing Tools to Incorporate Into Your Strategy appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Ecommerce SEO uses many similar SEO elements, like keywords and linking. However, user intent plays a large role. While ecommerce SEO should still encompass the entire funnel and target top and middle of the funnel terms, it often narrows in on the consumers who are already considering making a purchase at the bottom of the funnel. 

This isn’t easy, as you’re engaging with Individuals further down the sales funnel. Competition over product pages is also fierce, and your digital marketing must remain in lock-step with things like processing and inventory capabilities. 

Ecommerce SEO requires special attention to work well. It must effectively present products and their details through good site structure, on-site content, and back-end information. If you want to integrate SEO into your ecommerce digital marketing, here are five ecommerce SEO tips to help you do so.

1. Build a Strong Technical Foundation

Technical SEO is a critical first step for effective commerce SEO. There is a distinct difference between technical SEO and other forms of SEO. Technical SEO refers to optimizing your content on the back end. These are things like a meta description, title tags, site speed, and even site structure. 

Technical SEO considers the user experience from a unique angle. In the context of ecommerce, it provides specific pieces of information that can help you not just rank in search engine results but put your best foot forward. 

Simply showing up in search results can help with traffic and search volume, but when you’re selling a product, you want search engines to be able to provide more than a blue link to click on. Structured data is an effective way to maximize Google Search. Structured data includes things like:

• Product details, such as name, price, color, and product description.
• Brand and breadcrumb schema that helps Google understand your site’s structure and navigation.
• Local business details (if you’re geographically focused).
• User-generated content in the form of reviews.
• FAQ pages with important answers to common questions.

With ecommerce, you also want to help search engines display rich search results. These are SERP results that flesh out text results with things like images, carousels, and videos. You can test your current pages to see if they support rich results using this tool.

2. Develop a Content SEO Strategy

Good SEO is always backed by a strategy. This gives it consistency and direction to help support your goals. For a ecommerce SEO strategy, there are a few key areas to focus on:

• Product pages: These are your key transactional landing pages. Make sure each page has a strong title, meta description, and image alt text. Provide helpful content (more on that in the next tip) and ensure user experience is top of mind. 
• Category pages: Along with individual product pages, create pages that gather related products into a single category page. This can help users with navigation and aid search engines in indexing your ecommerce site.
• Keywords: Conduct keyword research surrounding each product. (Google Keyword Planner is a good starting point.) Ensure you understand keywords that apply to top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel topics. With sales pages and ecommerce SEO, it’s best to focus on bottom-funnel, transactional keywords that are more likely to convert.
• Linking: Interlink any topically related content on your website to their associated product page. This helps spread link authority from informational pages that tend to get more backlinks to product pages to help them gain organic traffic and build authority.

Once you have your strategy in place, make sure you have analytics and SEO tools set up to help you track effectiveness and make needed adjustments over time. Google Search Console shows you search-result-focused data, while Google Analytics sheds light on user behavior. Get both SEO tools set up and check them regularly!

3. Create Thoughtful Informational Content

SEO factors into the content that you put on and around your ecommerce site pages. (Usually, this is your company blog or resources section.) The key here is to create helpful content that prioritizes readers first and search engines second. Since Google’s Helpful Content Update, its E-E-A-T content (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) standards have become critical to SEO success. 

Demonstrate authority, credibility, and knowledge throughout your ecommerce site’s content. Make sure everything remains topically relevant to your main service areas, too. Google’s document leak in early 2024 revealed that site-wide topical relevance is important for being seen in SERPs.

As a final note on content, make sure you are using your non-ecommerce content to address all of your top, middle, and bottom funnel keywords. This gives you a more comprehensive content library, all of which should link together and connect to your bottom-of-funnel, rich ecommerce content.

4. Address Offpage SEO, Too

SEO takes place off of your ecommerce website, as well. Backlinks, for instance, are a major factor that can boost your site’s credibility. These signal to search engines you have authoritative, helpful content. 

Digital PR is another component of a good backlink strategy. As you seek opportunities to have third-party sites link to your content, make sure to spread some of the benefits to your ecommerce pages, too.

Linking aside, brand mentions in online publications are also a big deal. They signal to search engines that you are genuinely impacting your target market and industry for the better, and you have the social proof to back it up.

Even social media can help with offsite SEO. By posting on social outlets, you can increase brand awareness, grow organic traffic, and gain backlinks. When you share category and product pages, this can impact ecommerce SEO, in particular.

5. Building an SEO-Optimized Ecommerce Website

SEO is a major factor in a good growth marketing strategy. It can improve your rankings, drive traffic to bottom-of-funnel content, and boost sales.

As you implement SEO solutions for your ecommerce website, make sure to track your analytics. Watch your conversion rate, in particular, to ensure that your SEO efforts are positively impacting ROI.

If you aren’t seeing the results you want from your SEO efforts (or you’re struggling to get started with ecommerce SEO in the first place), we can provide a free strategy session to help your company get organized, efficient, and profitable through its online sales channels. Let’s talk!

The post Ecommerce SEO Strategy: How To Do It Well and Boost Sales appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Digital PR enhances your credibility as a brand. Solid human-focused content reinforces your authority in the eyes of consumers. Social media personalizes your brand.

But what about SEO marketing? How does search engine optimization improve your marketing efforts? 

Let’s break it down.

What Is the Goal of SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your branded content online. This includes website pages, sales pages, guest posts, and most additional forms of digital marketing content. SEO cleans up this content so that it shows up in search engine results. There are multiple forms of SEO, including:

• On-page and technical SEO refers to things like keyword research, link building strategies, improving user experience through clear navigation, and helping search engines crawl your site.
• Off-page SEO consists of using guest posts, social media, and similar off-site tactics to link build and create branded buzz on third-party websites.
• Local SEO capitalizes on geographic limitations for businesses that operate within a specific physical area.

It’s important to understand the differences and utilize the various forms of SEO as part of a larger marketing strategy. When done correctly, this can unlock a variety of benefits, including:

• Creating a steady flow of organic search traffic to your website.
• Improving user experience and satisfaction through a better digital experience.
• Increasing brand awareness and boosting your brand’s visibility across your sales funnel.
• Generating leads with minimal costs.

SEO also helps cultivate a sense of trust as consumers see your quality content appear in targeted search results over and over again.

How Does SEO Fit Into Marketing?

SEO is a search engine-centric activity. A quality SEO strategy signals to search engines like Google Search what kind of information your content contains. This allows these search tools to answer search queries by matching your content to users with related search intent.  

As an example, consider a plumber that creates a basic article on unclogging a drain. They use SEO best practices, such as including a target keyword phrase like “unclogging a drain” or “how to unclog a drain pipe.” 

“When a user asks Google “how to unclog a drain,” the search engine can easily find and use the plumber’s resource as a suggested answer on its SERPs. If clicked on by the user, the piece of SEO-optimized content generates organic traffic to the website.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the SEO Basket

SEO can feel like a magic trick. Given enough time (SEO often takes at least six months or more to really kick in), a well-optimized piece of content can generate a steady flow of organic traffic to a website for a very long time.

This can make it tempting to pour all of your resources into SEO content. But you have to resist that temptation.

Good SEO requires balance. SEO success should always come as part of a larger growth marketing plan. 

For instance, when investing in on-page and technical SEO, you also want to make sure you’re creating solid content that benefits your target audience. This means it should always prioritize the reader and only optimize for search engines after reader value has been satisfied.

Fortunately, there are times when you can overlap SEO and other growth marketing efforts at the same time. Digital PR often includes drafting guest posts on other websites and industry publications. Along with building brand credibility, this is a great way to invest in link building and generate value through off-page SEO. 

The important thing is to keep each SEO effort strong and balanced with other digital marketing initiatives. This will give you the greatest synergy and the best results over time.

Using Good SEO to Boost Your Brand

SEO is a powerful marketing tool. However, it isn’t the kind of investment you can make lightly. 

On the contrary, SEO best practices are constantly in a state of flux as Google and other search engines tweak their algorithms and change how they search for quality content. This requires ongoing research.

In addition, properly integrating SEO into existing marketing is tricky. It requires the ability to maximize on and off-page SEO without sacrificing the impact of other things, like your social media marketing or digital PR.

This is where working with an SEO company can be a game changer. An SEO agency can bring experience and bleeding-edge SEO knowledge to the table along with the tools to track and confirm that they are delivering results.

If your brand is coming up short in the SEO department, consider working with an SEO company. The targeted investment in optimizing your content can infuse your marketing efforts with a synergy that will continue to deliver results far into the future.

The post How SEO in Marketing Can Boost Your Growth Plan appeared first on RELEVANCE.

But what does search engine optimization actually mean? What is it that makes the organic traffic that comes from SEO different from other sources of traffic on the internet? Let’s break down the concept of organic traffic and look at some of its benefits, along with how you can improve your SEO strategy to boost organic traffic to your site.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Let’s start with a basic (but critical) definition. What is organic search traffic?

The leading SEO optimization platform Semrush defines organic traffic as “the number of website visitors that come from unpaid search engine results (as opposed to paid results).”

The definition makes two important distinctions:

• First, “unpaid traffic” means you aren't using paid search (things like pay-per-click ads) to artificially drive web traffic.
• Second, “search engine results” implies that organic traffic comes from search engines rather than direct traffic to your site.

You can increase your organic traffic by using SEO optimization techniques. This boosts your SERP rankings and ensures that your website URLs show up more often in front of a potential customer with search intent that aligns with your brand’s solutions.

4 Benefits of Organic Traffic

It’s one thing to understand what organic traffic is. But how can it actually help your brand? Here are four of the biggest benefits that come from a healthy flow of organic traffic.

1. Organic Traffic Is Affordable

The easiest differentiating factor here is the cost. Organic traffic is, technically speaking, free. This is especially true compared to paid search, which requires payment for each ad placement or click. When you stop paying for those clicks, you lose that site traffic, those potential conversions and that revenue. With organic, it’s the gift that keeps on giving if you can stay in those top spots.

Keep in mind that you can still spend a tidy sum on organic SEO and content creation. However, in most cases, the costs associated with organic search are well worth the investment. Once you have the onsite authority established and are ranking well, you just need to do the upkeep to stay ranking well.

2. Organic Traffic Is Consistent

Organic search can take months to build momentum. A keyword could see movement after just a couple of months if you already have onsite authority built up. However, to rank for a more competitive search term can take a year or more depending on what work needs to be done to rank well. Do some keyword research to help you choose a relevant keyword that aligns with your goals.

While it may lack the instant gratification of a paid ad, once you rank for a keyword, you can count on a steady flow of search traffic. This leads to a consistent flow of increased customers that doesn’t require ongoing PPC investment to maintain (as is the case with paid search).

3. Organic Traffic Can Create High-Quality Leads

Organic traffic comes from content that is not just tailored to search engines. It also answers very real human search queries. That means it offers value to readers.

The result of this targeted approach is that you attract readers who genuinely benefit from the value that your content offers. In addition, organic content is often niche and specific, focusing on topics toward the bottom of the marketing funnel. This leads to higher quality leads and more conversions.

4. Organic Traffic Signals Authority + Industry Ownership

When your SEO content strategy targets the user experience, it sends the message that you know what you’re talking about. The fact that the content shows up organically (rather than being clearly placed through a paid promotion) reflects well on your brand, naturally increasing your authority.

Visibility is a critical part of growth marketing. When you organically pop up in conversation simply based on the quality of your relevant content, it signals to others that you are a strong contender in your industry.

Tips to Increase Organic Traffic on Your Website

Organic traffic is important. It can benefit your brand in multiple ways. But how can your business tap into those benefits? Here are a few ways to help you get that organic traffic flowing (or if you’ve already started, turning a trickle of visitors into a flood).

• Optimize your existing content: This is step number one. Whether through cleaning up existing pages, creating new content, or both, make sure to invest in SEO techniques to improve your website traffic.
• Don’t forget off-site opportunities: Along with optimizing your onsite content, look for off-site ways to build SEO, like writing guest posts on industry publications, gaining backlinks, engaging on social media, and publishing press releases.
• Track your traffic: It’s hard to improve organic traffic if you don’t know what it is in the first place. Make sure you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up to track the traffic source and flow of visitors to your site.
• Work with a brand-building expert: Good growth marketing agencies utilize SEO as a foundational element for building a brand. They will have the tools, techniques, and experience to help you improve your organic traffic.

As you consider ways to attract consumers to your brand online, remember to keep organic traffic in the mix. It requires upfront investment and patience. Consider partnering with a growth marketing agency that specializes in increasing organic traffic. With the help of an expert, the benefits that this unique form of marketing offers are too good to ignore if you want to take your company to the next level.

The post 4 Benefits of Organic Traffic appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Let’s run through what growth marketing goals are and why they’re important. From there, we’ll consider what these goals look like in the context of content and how you can integrate KPIs for content marketing into your larger content marketing strategy.

Why Should You Set Goals for Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Before considering content marketing objectives in greater detail, let’s consider the importance of content marketing and the benefits that having goals provides for your content strategy. The biggest benefit is that goals give you a clear picture of where your content marketing is headed.

Content marketing is a vast and complex part of the digital marketing world. From social media to a blog post, emails to ads, each content type stands on its own. Having goals ensures that all of these work toward the same results.

Once you have content marketing goals in place, you can also measure your success and failure easier. This ensures that your valuable content isn’t a black hole of expenses that isn’t performing.

We’ll discuss the specific ways to set measurable goals in a bit. Remember, though, having these metrics in place helps you gauge effectiveness and improve as you pursue your content marketing efforts.

What Are the Objectives of Content Marketing?

There are many different objectives that you can strive for with your content marketing. The main objective of content marketing is to provide value for your target audience.

This should always be a factor, no matter what kind of quality content you create. Content production should strive to educate, inform, and resonate with potential and existing customers and their needs. But value isn’t the only objective.

Content marketing can also align with the three main pillars of a good growth marketing strategy. Here’s how.

Improving Authority

Improving authority is another marketing objective of content strategy. Apart from providing value for readers, it is the number one biggest benefit of content marketing, and should be a primary goal at all times.

Brand loyalty is a major part of sustained success. When you use your content to demonstrate your firm grasp of industry knowledge and expertise, it cultivates trust and establishes your brand as an authority in your industry.

Building Credibility

Another business goal that content marketing can help you achieve is boosting your online credibility. There are a lot of companies online, and likely, you have countless competitors right within your own industry or niche.

Content marketing allows you to show your superiority as a solution for the consumers that you’re targeting. You can use off-site content, like guest posts and other digital PR tactics, to create natural credibility in the eyes of consumers. You also gain some third-party credibility at the same time.

Enhancing Visibility

Brand awareness is another powerful objective that you can target with your high-quality content. As you create relevant content, in particular, you can use an SEO strategy to optimize your site.

This boosts your visibility in search engines. As you associate yourself with various keywords, link to high DA websites, internally link between other pages on your site, and so on, a search engine will begin to prioritize you in SERPs, leading to greater visibility.

What Are SMART Goals in Content?

Authority, credibility, visibility, and, above all, providing value for your end users are all major objectives of content marketing. But these are all 10,000-foot view concepts.

It’s all well and good to understand the big-picture benchmarks behind your content marketing strategies. But what do these content marketing goals and KPIs look like in action? What do content marketing objectives look like in real life?

This is where applying the SMART goals concept can make a big difference. Here are a few SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals you can set to guide you as you create content:

• Maximizing Conversions: Conversions are your own self-defined actions that you want visitors to take. Tracking conversions with a tool like Google Analytics allows you to set specific content conversion goals, such as improving email sign-ups by 10% in the next month.
• Ranking Higher in the SERPs: There are many tools, like Ahrefs and Semrush, that can show how high your content ranks in the SERPs. Moving up the rankings over time is a sign that your content is clicking with consumers.
• Increasing Website Traffic: One of the easiest trackable objectives is traffic to your site. Make sure to consider organic versus paid traffic and use them to create meaningful growth goals.
• Enhancing Engagement With Your Target Audience: Engagements can be anything from clicking on a link to filling out a form, commenting on a social media post, or responding to an email. When you formalize engagements and track them, they become conversions, which you can use to inform your goals.
• Improving Your Sales Funnel: Content can contribute to every part of your sales funnel. Considering your customer journey. How do you generate leads and guide them toward the point of sale? Can you create different content objectives to address weak spots in your funnel?

When you apply the SMART concept to your content goals, it gives them a greater purpose and potency within your larger content marketing plan.

Using Objectives to Guide Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is a powerful way to build a business. But it should never happen haphazardly. Consider partnering with a content marketing agency if you need an expert’s advice. They can help you create a sustainable strategy to achieve content marketing success.

Objectives give your content a greater purpose for your brand. From building authority and credibility to improving visibility and, above all, providing value, make sure you infuse your content with clear objectives that can keep you on track as you create a successful content marketing strategy over time.

The post What Are the Objectives of Content Marketing? appeared first on RELEVANCE.

This can be tricky, as various kinds of content tend to serve different purposes. They can also require different skill sets and tools.

This makes understanding each content type is an essential step in the content creation process. Let’s break down why content is important in the digital marketing world. We’ll also explore what content options are out there and the many ways they can help a content marketer reach their target audience.

Why Is Content Important in Digital Marketing?

Content is a powerful, multi-functional digital marketing tool. Technically, marketers have always worked with content.

However, marketing in the technological age has given birth to a myriad of unique types of content in digital marketing. Blog posts, emails, podcasts, videos, infographics — the list goes on.

Marketers can use these to develop intricate content marketing strategies. These can provide a roadmap that guides them through the vast and overwhelming online marketing world.

From the consumer perspective, content is important because it helps with every stage of the customer journey. Content can help bring brand awareness to a brand and its offerings. It can inform users, encourage sales, and even provide customer support after the point of purchase.

While content is powerful, once again, it’s only effective if a marketer is using the right content marketing type for each situation.

What Are the Types of Content in Content Marketing?

There are many different types of content. Some of these, like blog posts or video content, were already listed above. Other content marketing examples include social media, guest posts, ebooks, demos, case studies, email marketing, landing pages, and user-generated content.

While understanding each individual option is important, it’s also essential to understand the function that each of these plays in a larger content strategy. Below is a list of several overarching categories that content covers. The same kind of content format can function in multiple categories, such as a blog post serving as an educational and self-help marketing asset.

Marketers should be well aware of these categories whenever they go to create content. That way, they can ensure they are using the best content types and formats to reach their intended consumer audience.

• Educational blog content provides information and value to your end user. This includes a lot of written content, like blog posts and instructional PDFs. It can also consist of audio and video content items, like infographics, how-to videos, webinars, and podcasts.
• Community-building content helps develop engagement and trust with your target audience. It often consists of interactive content, such as social media posts and email marketing.
• Gated content uses lead capture forms to collect willingly provided consumer information. In exchange, those individuals gain access to subscriber-only whitepapers, ebooks, videos, emails, product demos, and other unique assets.
• Outreach content helps brands reach a potential customer. It can consist of email blasts, social media through influencers, guest posts, and other third-party-driven content activities.
• SEO content helps a search engine find a brand’s content and connect it to users with related queries. You can optimize any piece of content, but blog posts (which permanently live on company websites) are most often given the SEO treatment.
• Paid content is content that you promote as an ad. A company pays a certain fee, usually for each click. They can apply this pay-per-click (PPC) format to various content types, such as blog posts, or visual content such as graphics or videos.
• Off-site content lives on third-party websites as a way to promote a brand outside of its own online assets. This includes sending emails directly to inboxes, writing guest posts for industry publications, and posting social content.
• Self-help content is similar to educational content. However, in this case, you craft it to answer user questions. This informational content often helps existing customers without the need to reach out to a customer service representative.
• User-generated content comes from consumers. It serves as social proof, and often consists of social posts, feedback, and reviews and can serve as an excellent testimony to both a brand’s products and customer experience.

The variety of content available doesn’t just boil down to different formats and lengths. Each type of valuable content serves a distinct purpose in the content marketing process, and managers should always be aware of the kind of content they need for each project.

Being Purposeful With Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content strategy is a complex and nuanced field of business. As time goes on, it only promises to become more complicated, too.

As you craft everything from short social posts to lengthy videos and whitepapers, remember to be deliberate. Create a content marketing campaign to back up your decisions and an accompanying framework to keep track of your content marketing resources and guide the creation process.

If things get too overwhelming, you can also invest in a content marketing partner to help guide you through the process and breathe life and purpose into every piece of content that you generate.

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As you flesh out your content marketing strategy, you want to consider all of the different forms of content out there. Only then can you effectively choose which ones fit into your marketing plans.

Let’s take a look at the different types of content marketing available and how you can use them to reach your target audience, educate them, and ultimately encourage them to take action.

What Is Content Marketing in Digital Marketing?

Before considering individual types of content, it’s important to remember the purpose of content marketing in the first place. Too often, marketers focus on content creation and have content strategy take a back seat. 

However, you always want to start by thinking of how your content factors into your larger digital marketing strategy. At Relevance, we consider a strong growth marketing strategy to focus on three areas: authority, credibility, and visibility.

Content marketing helps with all three of these things. Its biggest contribution is in the area of authority. Quality on-site content shows your audience that you know what you’re talking about and are a thought leader in your industry or niche.

Content also helps establish credibility through digital PR efforts, such as a guest post. On-site, informational content can enhance SEO, too, by helping with keywords, link-building, and technical SEO strategies.

What Are Examples of Educational Content?

As AI becomes a bigger factor, the quality of a brand’s content is coming into the spotlight. Strong SEO is no longer enough. You have to create great content that genuinely educates, offers unique insights, and provides value for the reader. 

The good news is that Google has provided guidance on how to make good content that will rank. To do this, the search engine has established its E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) guidelines. A content strategy example that follows E-E-A-T could be a company blog post that provides insightful information from a certified professional on your staff.

For those comfortable with digging deeper, the search engine giant also provides Helpful Content Updates. These aid in generating “helpful, reliable, people-first content.”

What Are Types of Content Marketing?

There are many different elements of a content strategy. Each content type below provides its own value as part of your larger content marketing strategy. Let’s consider each one and how it can help you achieve your marketing goals.

Onsite Content

This is the “big one.” Your onsite content is the content that lives right on your own website. It doesn’t require a social media outlet, third-party publication, or even an email service. This content is fully in your control.

Onsite content can take on many different forms, each of which is helpful in its own way:

• Blog posts; provide both short- and long-form blog content that can be newsy, opinionated, and filled with thought-leadership concepts.
• Resources; such as “how-to” posts, supplemental information, and technical guides can provide easy-access self-service support for your existing customers.
• Case studies; are powerful testimonials that summarize and demonstrate past success for future customers.
• Infographics; condense large amounts of information into short-hand, easy-to-understand visual images.
• Sales pages; provide bottom-of-funnel product and service pitches that seek to close sales. 

Onsite content is one of your best long-term forms of content marketing. It can be intensive and expensive to set up. However, once created, content that lives on your site can continue to deliver traffic and provide CTAs in perpetuity with minimal maintenance.

Gated Content

While much of your on-site content is free, there are certain kinds of content that you only want to give people when they’ve taken a specific action. This is called “gated content.” This includes things like:

• Whitepapers; that provide long-form, in-depth content for serious consumers with a pre-existing base of basic knowledge.
• Ebooks; that dig deeper into brand-related topics and demonstrate strong, intimate knowledge of your industry.
• Demos; that provide interactive, hands-on experiences with your products or services.

An example of gated content in action could be receiving an ebook after signing up for a newsletter or submitting a request for a demo. These are important in-depth marketing steps that help move people who are already considering making a purchase toward the bottom of the sales funnel.

Other Forms of Content Marketing

On-site and gated content are two major content options that every brand should consider. But they aren’t alone. Here are several other forms of content that you should consider. Some of these are variations of on-site content, while others are off-site. In either case, each contributes its own value to a larger content marketing strategy.

• Guest posts; are content that you contribute to a third-party site, such as a news outlet or industry publication. These are excellent forms of digital PR outreach and can build brand credibility.
• Social media; includes anything from memes and quotes to lengthy LinkedIn posts that are as long as a blog post. Social media posts help build brand awareness and cultivate branded communities.
• Email marketing; is a unique form of content that you can send directly to an audience that has opted in to hear what you have to say. It is a great way to make confident calls to action, from suggesting reading a blog to encouraging someone to make a purchase.
• Video content; is a well-rounded and engaging form of visual content that presents information in a manner that strongly resonates with consumers.
• Podcasting; is also popular and is an effective way to audibly present branded messages filled with insightful information.
• Ads; are a classic form of content that typically conveys bottom-of-funnel calls to action, such as taking advantage of a sale or purchasing a new product.
• User-generated content; is a powerful form of interactive content that invites your audience to collaborate with you by providing their own feedback, opinions, and advice in relation to your products and services.

From onsite and gated content to the smorgasbord of different formats that content can take, there are many ways you can tailor valuable content to meet the current needs of your brand.

Using the Right Types of Content Marketing

As you consider the different elements of content strategy that you want to use, keep this list in mind. To create effective content marketing, you need to analyze your customers, marketing goals, resources, and so on. Then, consider what kind of content fits into that framework. 

Should you invest in content marketing blogs to inform site visitors and lead them down your sales funnel? Do you need social media marketing content for off-site lead generation or to help you retain existing customers? 

As you identify the different components of content marketing that you need, assemble them into a content creation plan. If the whole thing gets too confusing, this can be a good time to work with a reputable content marketing agency like Relevance to keep your content educational, effective, and up to date. They can help you generate high-quality, effective content that can build your brand’s authority in the eyes of the world, your industry, and especially, your target audience.

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While content may remain a critical part of the marketing toolkit, it is in a constant state of evolution. Let’s consider what content marketing looks like a quarter into the 21st century, along with a few examples.

Why Content Marketing Is Important

Content marketing is a powerful way to build a brand. Marketers can use a thoughtful content marketing strategy to build credibility through third-party mentions. They can use it to provide self-help content that streamlines customer service. A fleshed-out content strategy also creates a starting point for strong SEO.

Above all, a strong library of content can build your industry authority. Google’s new E-E-A-T content standards are amplifying the need for content that is built on:

E-E-A-T sets a high bar for quality content. It means only the best pieces of content with unique industry insights and helpful information will be considered helpful to consumers and, therefore, rank in the SERPs.

What Are Content Marketing Examples?

Okay, content marketing is important. But what does it look like? The answer is a lot of things.

There are many elements of content marketing. This can make envisioning the content marketing process a bit challenging. Here are a few content marketing examples to help picture this all-important strategy in action.

Blog Posts

A blog post is one of the most iconic examples of written content. These are on-site pieces of text-based information that can also include images, infographics, and even embedded videos. 

A blog post can cover anything from a piece of industry news to a deep dive by an SME (subject matter expert) on your staff. This valuable content is created to attract customers (more on organic traffic further down), in order to demonstrate your industry authority and increase brand awareness.

Social Media Posts

Social media content is another classic example of digital content marketing. This form of visual content is off-site and lives on a third-party social media platform. 

A social post could be a short tweet on X (Formerly Twitter). It could be a picture of your products “in action” on Instagram. It could even be a piece of video content from an influencer on TikTok or YouTube. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful content marketing example you can use across your sales funnel. You can set up drip campaigns that provide a slow and steady set of automated emails for new subscribers. You can also use emails to send bottom-funnel sales pitches and CTAs to your target audience.  

Most of this list consists of primarily B2C marketing examples. However, email is a powerful tool that works just as well for B2B content marketing interactions.

Podcasting

Podcasts are fun and relevant forms of engaging content that are becoming more important in larger content strategies. Marketers use them to communicate information in a relaxing and relatable way.

Podcasts can be very short — some are only a few minutes. However, they are often used as long-form content. A podcast could consist of a CEO providing updates to customers or a roundtable discussion (which is excellent for demonstrating industry authority). You can even turn a webinar into a podcast.

What Is an Example of an Organic Strategy?

While there are many examples of content marketing, organic content marketing primarily takes place on your website. A pillar page is a great example of an organic strategy in action. 

A pillar page template usually follows a format that consists of: 

• A primary “pillar” page that addresses a key pain point or keyword and is a few thousand words long.
• A handful of “sub pillars” that tackle topics closely related to your pillar.
• A couple of dozen shorter blog articles that answer specific questions in relation to either your pillar or sub-pillars.

For an organic strategy to work, you should create great content in a scheduled timeline (i.e., don’t take years to make a single pillar). You should also invest in internally linking every piece to the original pillar, sub-pillar, and other relevant areas of your website.

The Importance of Content Synergy

There are many different types of content marketing, and it can manifest in countless ways. However, just because you have options doesn’t mean you can build your content strategy flippantly. 

Effective content marketing can’t happen in a vacuum. It has to be part of a larger growth marketing strategy and vision. Growth marketing focuses on your customer at all times and uses data and analysis to track progress over time. 

Content marketing factors into a good growth marketing plan alongside other key pillars, like digital PR and SEO. When you combine these — like using SEO keywords in your content or linking to an on-site “how to” in a PR guest post — you can create synergistic results that build your authority, credibility, and visibility.

Using Content Marketing to Crush Your Marketing Goals

A successful content marketing campaign is an invaluable part of a growth marketing campaign. Content creation together things like search engine optimization and digital PR. It also provides quality content for customers to use as they work their way through your sales funnel or return in search of self-help customer support.

Content marketing is important — but it also requires focus and strategy. Use the marketing strategy examples above to discover which forms of content marketing are best for your brand and its audience. If you need help as you go along, consider recruiting a good content marketing agency to help guide the process.

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Most of these channels utilize content in one form or another. In fact, marketers love to throw around the term “content marketing” as a part of their larger marketing strategies. 

But what exactly is content? What is its purpose in marketing? How does content marketing strategy really factor into your marketing efforts? 

Let’s consider the purpose of content as a marketing tool and the number one biggest objective that all content marketing should seek to achieve.

What Is the Purpose of Content?

The term “content,” when it’s used in marketing, references a wide range of varying types of content. Different content platforms and formats include a blog post, sales pages, social media, email marketing, demos, videos, and podcasts. 

This wide range means the purpose of content tends to vary depending on how it manifests. A blog post, for instance, can educate consumers while attracting organic traffic and generating leads. An email can nurture those leads and encourage sales. A podcast can build brand awareness and establish authority.

As a whole, content functions as a key part of a marketer’s toolkit. It represents the medium through which they channel various forms of information and messages to consumers. When you create content with this in mind, it takes on a bigger role than simply presenting information. Purposeful content functions as part of a larger content marketing strategy.

What Is the Main Objective of Content Marketing?

With so many forms and uses, it’s easy to wonder what the primary content marketing objectives are when you use content to promote a business. While there are many important factors, though, one stands out above all the rest: providing value to consumers. 

Content varies in complexity, from basic top-funnel topics meant to build brand awareness to complex mid- and low-level pieces designed to nurture leads and close sales. Throughout this process, though, the need to be genuinely helpful and provide real value for your target audience remains a top priority. 

Google has made this abundantly clear in recent years. The brand’s Helpful Content system and updated E-E-A-T content quality standards emphasize the need for every piece of content to provide clear, clean, and accurate value for its intended audience.

Secondary Content Marketing Objectives

Content development should always start with and center on creating content that provides value to the reader. The need for high-quality content is ground zero in the content marketing process. 

However, it isn’t the only purpose that content serves. Good content that educates, informs, and satisfies users creates the infrastructure within which you can achieve other marketing goals.  

For example, a holistic blog post can also build brand visibility if well-optimized for SEO. This helps your brand stand out in the Google search engine SERPs. 

Content marketing can also build an audience through email sign-ups. Self-help content can provide quality customer service solutions that encourage customer retention and loyalty.

What Is Your Content Marketing Objective?

Knowing that content marketing focuses on readers first and everything else second is important to keep in mind as a general rule. But how does it apply to your specific marketing needs? How do you decide what your content marketing goals and KPIs are? 

This is an important question to answer, as it functions as a central part of your content marketing strategy. This strategy should weave together each marketing goal with the resources, plans, and platforms that you have available to create content. Obviously, you need to identify those goals if you’re going to do this effectively. 

The best way to clarify your objectives is to start with your larger marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish with your content right now? Are you focused on lead generation? Brand awareness? Building authority? Generating revenue? To help you build an effective strategy that helps accomplish these goals, consider hiring a content marketing agency. They can be the experts you may need to help crush your goals.  

Once you’ve identified this, consider how you can create effective content with the proper optimization and CTAs to achieve those objectives. As you do so, make sure you are still creating value for your reader with every piece and at every step.

Creating Effective Content Marketing Strategies

It’s difficult to create an effective content marketing strategy without an end goal. Too often, content is created haphazardly or for one-off occasions without a content strategy in mind. 

If you want every piece of content to perform at peak quality, though, you need to identify your content marketing goals and stay focused on them as you go along. This starts with the number one objective of always creating real value for your reader.

As you satisfy this requirement, consider what other goals you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to improve organic traffic? Build your email list? Close sales?  

These secondary KPIs are always easier to achieve when you have the main objective of value creation in mind from the start. 

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