If you’ve seen a drop in organic traffic in the latest year or two and you’re wondering if you need to bounce back from an update, you’re not alone. I’ve seen companies lose all of their traffic from the Google Helpful Content update. Some have suddenly recovered. Others have had a harder road back to the top. Still others are still struggling or have given up.

Don’t be one of those who give up. Google updates are a reality of the digital marketing space, but that doesn’t mean you’re helpless. If you want your brand to survive and grow, it’s important to study why traffic for some companies and individuals is dropping. 

Let’s break that down here. Then, I’ll run over a few suggestions that we’ve found are helping brands restart growth marketing momentum in the new age of AI-driven search.

Why Is Traffic Dropping?

Sometimes understanding the problem gets you halfway to the solution. In this case, if you’re seeing less organic traffic, understand there’s a chance it is from no fault of your own. Google’s AI Overviews (and similar generative AI search engines) are generating huge quantities of basic responses for consumers. This is grabbing a chunk of organic traffic from the traditional “blue links” SERPs.

SERPs are evolving in other ways, too. Along with AIO, Google’s search engine results pages include things like business profiles, featured snippets, and answer boxes. Most of these are designed to keep Google search users within the Google platform, rather than sending them away as organic search traffic to a third-party site. And these SERP features are expanding to better respond to queries and search intent.

User behavior is changing, too. Rather than a starting point, generative AI tools are quickly becoming a place where the bulk of an individual’s research takes place. 

I know this from personal experience. For instance, I’ve been looking for a new car. Rather than go out and dig up the data to compare models and features, I am using ChatGPT to aggregate and clarify my options, like comparing the different trim levels of a 4Runner to see exactly what I want. Using ChatGPT allows me to search in one place, rather than having to click through to multiple pages for each trim level. 

You can hear more about how I use ChatGPT for research nine minutes into this webinar I recently hosted with Relevance President Misty Larkins called Navigating the AI Landscape. The key takeaway here is that search engines and their users are causing a significant drop in organic search that so many companies are experiencing. The question is, what can you do about it?

What Can You Do About AI-Driven Search?

I’ve talked to enough people at this point to know that I’m not an outlier. This is the new way to get search results, and it is dramatically influencing organic search traffic. This isn’t the end of search. It’s just a shift in function — and it means we need to be ready to adjust and adapt. 

That said, here are three of the best ways I’ve either experienced or seen others take action to align with and benefit from the new reality of search.

1. Diversify Content Channels

Diversification is a healthy piece of any SEO strategy. With AI profoundly impacting traditional SEO, setting up multiple content channels is more important than ever. 

This spreads out your impact and allows you to build multiple SEO traffic sources. It also develops an owned distribution network that enables you to invest in various content formats — any one of which might benefit from a Google update, even if another is negatively affected.

Diversification also forces you to focus on a broader growth marketing strategy. Rather than being too granular by over-emphasizing one thing like your social media strategy, you are forced to consider how each piece feeds into your larger strategy. This omni-channel approach to marketing is a bigger need than most people like to admit. For instance, I find many clients who come to Relevance for growth marketing have failed to focus and optimize their nurturing campaigns. Sure, their lead gen is identifying potential clients, and their brand awareness is solid. But this leads to email campaigns that are short-sighted, half-thought out, or non-existent. 

If you want to stay relevant, don’t just think about fresh traffic. Make sure you’re diversifying your channels, being holistic in scope, and A/B testing to make sure you’re meeting nurture and conversion metrics, too. Speaking of metrics…

2. Measure What Matters

Measuring everything tells you nothing. In the past, organic traffic was a major indicator of the success or failure of an SEO initiative. That simply isn’t the case anymore. 

I already touched on the fact that AI Overview and AI-powered search tools are siphoning away traffic. If you’re curious how much traffic, Search Engine Journal recently shared that nearly three-quarters of problem-solving queries feature a Google AI overview answer. 

The reality is that people simply aren’t clicking through search results the same way they used to. So, what metrics still matter, then? Some things are the same. Impressions, keyword ranking, and on-site technical SEO, for instance, are still worth watching. In addition, track meaningful metrics including:

• Return on investment for SEO
• Customer lifetime value
• Cost of acquisition
• Conversion rates

Each of these is still relevant, even as AI search influences them. Conversion rate optimization (CRO), for example, is even more important now that traffic is lower. If you’re getting a decent amount of traffic, make sure you're converting that traffic efficiently.

Direct traffic is also a growing factor. At Relevance, we’re seeing more people with increasing direct traffic as people discover brands in GSEs and on social platforms and find they want to learn more.

One great example of this is one of my ecommerce clients that sells to distributors. While they had a slight dip in organic traffic over the last three months compared to the previous year, their direct traffic increased by 10%. We’ve attributed this shift primarily to this ongoing change in search behavior.

The takeaway here? The way people search is changing. Make sure your metrics are adjusting along with this shift.

3. Stay Adaptable

My final piece of advice is an oldie but goodie. Stay adaptable. This has been true for years, and the need for flexibility is only increasing as technology becomes more sophisticated and capable. 

If you’re noticing changes in your growth marketing results, take the time to adjust your strategy. Use tools like Google Trends to track changes in your industry and audience. Be proactive about tracking and testing new AI marketing tools and features. 

In a broader sense, make sure you’re evaluating quality over quantity while the entire digital marketing world is making this AI-powered pivot. Stay focused on your audience and always create content for readers first and search engines second. Watch the right metrics, and above all, make sure you keep a human touch in all that you’re doing. 

Adjusting to Lower Traffic

If you’ve seen a drop in your organic traffic, don’t panic. A lot of brands are doing the right things right now and seeing the same kind of discouraging results. 

If you want to recapture some momentum, don’t just go back to the same-old SEO playbook. Invest in diversified content channels, omnichannel growth marketing strategies, and tracking helpful metrics. Stay adaptable, and foster a teachable mindset as you go. 

If you are looking for a helping hand, our team at Relevance can help. We have walked alongside our clients throughout the last year, helping them make adjustments and stay on track toward their growth marketing goals. Contact us for a FREE strategy session, and together we can look at the best next move for your brand in the new era of AI search.

The post Drop in Organic Traffic? Here’s How to Get Back on Track appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Our marketing team has spent months exploring the nuances of generative AI in digital marketing contexts through client meetings and hands-on experiences. We’ve seen what AI marketing tools can do, and trust me when I say it’s something marketers can’t ignore anymore. 

If you’re looking for ways to supercharge your growth marketing with AI marketing tools, I have some ideas for you. Here’s what I believe to be some of the most effective ways to leverage AI technology for better results as you promote your brand this year.

Smart Ways to Leverage AI Tools

Below are several key insights I've gathered that can transform each marketing campaign you put together. (And as a marketer, I don’t use that word lightly.) Keep in mind as you read that the goal isn’t to replace you or your staff but to help AI and marketing automation work for you. 

These suggestions are inspired by insights taken from a recent live webinar hosted by myself and our Chief Strategy Officer Emma Kessinger on Navigating the AI Landscape. You can find the webinar in its entirety at that link. 

Alright. Let’s dive in!

1. Use AI Note-Taking for Enhanced Meeting Engagement

Tools like Fathom have revolutionized how we handle meetings as a team. Again, the goal here is to expedite and enhance ongoing activities as a growth marketing agency, and having a competent note-taking AI application has been a key factor in easing the everyday gruntwork.

One of those activities is interviewing subject-matter experts. Adding expert analysis and opinions to your content has become really important for any good growth marketing strategy, but gathering that information can be time-consuming. 

Using AI note-taking tools allows us to automatically capture and organize SME meeting notes. We found this doesn’t just help you take notes faster. When I’ve done this, even with in-person clients, Fathom has allowed me to stay engaged in the conversation. I can focus, knowing that when it’s done, I’ll have all of the notes recorded and even highlighted at important points.

2. Capture Content Creation Tone with Claude AI

Streamlining note-taking is a pretty obvious use of AI (even though we’ve found you need to be thoughtful about how you implement it). However, you can also confidently use the right AI tools when creating content for clients, too. 

You can use tools like Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT—and I’ll talk about some of those in a minute. Personally, though, I need to start with my favorite. I’ve found Claude is the best way to handle something as personality-driven as branded content, making it a game-changer for marketers. 

This is because the AI platform excels at capturing perspective. Trust me when I say that Claude is exceptionally good at capturing tones and voices. We used it for parts of our email newsletter and found it was actually helping us expand our content precision and resonance. 

For instance, we trained it on different brand voices, like “professional with a sense of humor” and “a little bit of snark.” By testing our prompts across different email subject lines, we found that our customer engagement went up with more punny subject lines.

As with all good AI tools, Claude doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. You have to tell it the “role and the goal” in each prompt if you want that personality to come through. Still, for me, Claude is one of the best options to maintain a professional, individualistic, and approachable branded writing style, whether you’re composing an email, summarizing lengthy content, or anything in between.

3. Conduct Research and Data Analysis with ChatGPT

Content creation and growth marketing strategy are multi-faceted. In the same way that you wouldn’t work with one single person to strategize, develop, and execute an entire marketing campaign, you shouldn’t use a single AI marketing tool, either. Something like Claude might be great for tone, but when it comes time to dig deep into that customer data or market research, I still say ChatGPT is one of the best options out there—especially if you’re springing for the paid version.

The OG AI tool is great at analyzing data sets and spreadsheets. From conducting product research to the ability to drop a URL into the search bar to analyze an entire website, ChatGPT is great at aggregating information from multiple sources, analyzing that information, and then synthesizing it into understandable takeaways. 

ChatGPT also excels at breaking down complex concepts. If you’re trying to understand nuanced elements of a growth marketing campaign or a client’s product functionality, it can help break things down. It’s even a great assistant for personal things, like car shopping or, from my own experience, helping your child with her math homework.

4. Experiment With Visual Content Creation with Adobe Photoshop AI

Text-based AI tools are common, and most people are more comfortable with them. But I’ve found most people are neglecting the visual side of AI tools. In a year where AI is expected to shift from experimentation to targeted execution, expect more comprehensive applications of AI to follow, including more sophisticated forms of visual AI content generators.

There are already several options out there. Traditional tools like Canva have built-in AI features. Sora just released a text-to-video AI solution in December of 2024. My favorite option, so far, though, is the generative AI features in Photoshop, which remain one of the premiere ways to produce realistic computer-based visuals.

This is perfect for creating quick custom graphics. It’s ideal when you’re trying to generate website imagery to support text pieces or sales pages, too. It can also help with making minor design adjustments when you don’t have a full-time designer on staff. We even use the tool on our own website at Relevance to refresh our images.

5. Content Analysis Tools

Relevance has always been big on content audits. You have to be willing to give your existing content a hard look and decide where to optimize and where to delete things if they aren’t performing well.

Not surprisingly, AI is making major inroads in the content analysis side of things, as well. Specialized tools like MarketMuse and SEOmonitor are streamlining this side of long-term content marketing by automating content quality assessments, keyword research, keyword grouping, assessing topical authority—you name it. 

As you create content, let AI ease the burden of babysitting it over time. You can create prompts and even use an AI-powered tool with built-in features specifically designed to help you prune bad content and optimize the good stuff. Tools like SEOMonitor can help you clarify topical authority. You can also use AI to identify content gaps and page optimization opportunities. This area is less defined than content creation. Don’t be afraid to be creative as you look for ways to use AI tools to manage your content over time. 

Embracing AI in Growth Marketing

AI is changing things quickly, but marketing is still a necessary part of business. Don’t let the disruption discourage you. Look for ways to embrace AI as part of your daily marketing activity.

At Relevance, we have learned that you always need to look for the latest marketing AI tools, try them out, and then see if and how they can help your internal activities. If you can learn to thrive in that kind of ongoing evolutionary process, you’ll be able to recapture that momentum and transform your brand from a reactionary follower to an industry leader.

If you’re looking for help integrating artificial intelligence into your growth marketing plans, contact our team at Relevance. We can set you up with a FREE strategy session to look at your best options and help you chart a profitable path to growth.

The post Supercharging Your Growth Marketing With AI Marketing Tools appeared first on RELEVANCE.

This is why I’ve been paying more and more attention to brand marketing. This is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on broader elements like brand positioning and your brand’s image, values, and identity, as opposed to typical product- or service-oriented marketing messaging.

With AI overtaking everything in online search, brand marketing has never been more important. Our team has found that Google is prioritizing brands that have a strong identity and clear content marketing goals that reinforce a delineated brand identity. 

Successful brand marketing will do more than land you references in AIO summaries, too. It can help you rank in those blue links and stand out to your target audience. Overall, brand building should be an integral part of any growth marketing strategy you have in place today.

If your branding is struggling in 2025, here are some tips to boost recognition, engagement, and SERP ranking through marketing your brand.

1. Research What Is and Isn’t Working Right Now

A solid brand strategy works from a place of data-backed knowledge. Start your branded marketing initiatives with a thorough analysis of your branding. Here are a few questions to ask:

• Is your brand a thought leader in industry discussions?
• Is your brand receiving consistent, positive digital PR and online mentions?
• Is your brand getting backlinks to boost SEO and signal your authority to Google?
• Is your ideal audience finding you through organic, earned, or shared marketing channels?
• Are you up to date on competitor research and aware of what they’re doing right and where they may be weak?

Where are you doing well? Where could you be doing better? Gather this information as your starting point so that you can first determine your brand marketing goals and engage in effective brand marketing that builds on what you’ve already accomplished.

2. Understand and Reinforce Your Topical Authority

Every brand marketing strategy should have clearly defined areas of excellence and knowledge. These are your swim lanes, as we call them. They are clear areas of expertise that all of your onsite content should focus on, reinforce, and connect to in some way. Vectorizing your website is a great way to see how well your content lines up with your swim lanes. It’s worth the effort to clarify where you want to focus and then invest in those areas.

For instance, when I was working with a greens powder company, after a thorough review, I found that the site only had a few blogs—and they were unrelated to greens powder. My response was to build brand awareness by implementing a content strategy focused on brand identity and topical authority.

I created content about greens, drinking greens, and their health benefits. Given time (SEO can take months to fully flesh out), we saw clicks for queries related to "greens" go up by 31%. Impressions for those same queries went up by 131%. 

Creating content in your swim lane helps you perform better in your topical areas. It generates targeted brand engagement, builds brand consistency, and associates your company with the topics you want to be known for.

3. Show Your Unique Expertise

Everyone knows by now that Google wants to see people-first content. This is also a critical part of being a brand marketer. Brand recognition must come from content that doesn’t just rank for the right queries in SERPs. It has to actually provide genuine value to readers.

While it’s good to create foundational content within your swim lane, AI Overviews and related tools are already answering those queries, often without click-throughs to the sources they use. If you want to serve your readers (and coax them onto your site), you need to back up your basics with content that demonstrates your specific industry expertise.

From what I’m seeing right now, the brands that are shining aren’t the ones offering 101 knowledge. They have those content pieces, and it helps signal their topical authority to Google. 

However, they reinforce the rudimentary knowledge with unique, helpful perspectives. These integrate subject matter expert knowledge and show a new angle, process, or solution search engine users might not have thought of before. This kind of association with quality, mid- and bottom-of-funnel content is what builds a strong brand marketing strategy.

4. Build Your Thought Leaders

Your branding won’t have substance without thought leaders. Consider the people within your leadership, teams, and departments with innovative ideas and industry-leading knowledge. How can you build these people up? How can you promote your brand story through their unique takes on the industry? 

You can interview an expert for a piece of content on your site. Use quotes from them in your social media marketing and in your email marketing, too. This is important for Google's Knowledge Panels and new SERP features that highlight individuals at companies. The more publicly authoritative your experts are, the more likely your branded content will show up.

I built up thought leaders when working with the founder of the new kids' phone company, Gabb. Along with posting on their own site, we worked to get the founder bylined on major sites like Entrepreneur and Forbes. We also reposted his commentary and insights on Medium and LinkedIn. 

I encouraged him to talk about relatable things surrounding the struggle of kids having phones. This built his thought leadership and, in turn, helped to build the brand for the company overall. They saw a 26% increase in branded traffic, as well as a 605% increase in organic traffic and a 1586% increase in the number of ranking keywords during our time working together. Emphasizing a thought leader helps not only improve the brand but also helps all the marketing efforts you have in place be more successful.

5. Optimize Your Brand Messaging

Finally, make sure your brand story is always putting its best foot forward with each piece of content that you create. Highlight what sets you apart whenever it organically makes sense, and make sure you’re communicating your areas of expertise across your website. To do this, have a strong grasp on your brand story, set brand guidelines in place, and always keep an eye on your goals.

Our team saw the benefits of the cohesive messaging of a telehealth company we worked with—not just on their website but across all marketing and communication channels. From their email newsletter to their social profiles, the brand voice, messaging points, and unique value proposition were the same. 

They also featured their clinicians on their social channels (subject matter expert power!). And while we weren't in charge of those channels, it was integral that their messaging was consistent, regardless of its location online, and was supporting their overall branding for a cohesive strategy to support a strong brand. That work helped to increase the success we saw with their SEO strategy and led to a 358% increase in keywords ranking in position 1 and a 319% increase in organic traffic during our work together.

Investing in Brand Marketing Strategy Right Now

The wave of AI content is building, and brands that remain passive will eventually fall behind. Building up your brand equity is the best way to safeguard your business against whatever the future of search may hold.

A strong brand identity provides consistency in messaging, clear areas of topical authority, and unique perspectives and expert advice. These are the building blocks of a business that can weather the AI-driven future, no matter what that future looks like.

If you’re looking for support in building a rock-solid brand that can thrive in an AI search world, reach out to our team for a free consultation. We can get started on step one right away, evaluating where you stand and considering what steps could help you reinforce your brand story. I look forward to hearing from you!

The post Why Brand Marketing Matters More Than Ever appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Case in point: Fintech. 

If you’re a fintech company, you’re doing business in the competitive and ever-evolving financial technology sector, rife with competition and burdened by regulations. On top of that, fintech companies operate in YMYL (your money, your life) territory, which means accuracy and trust are critical. I’ve worked with quite a few clients that fall into this industry, and the first step is always to make sure trust is at the center of your strategy. 

Acquiring customers in the fintech industry isn’t easy, which is why you need to have a solid plan in place to reach your marketing goals. Whether you’re a startup or an established fintech company, here are some top tips (backed up by experienced examples) that can help you establish a strong fintech marketing strategy.

1. Look at the Data

Google may have rolled back its plans to kill third-party cookies in 2024, but that doesn’t change the fact that privacy is a priority for the internet. This de-emphasis on third-party data has made first-party data more available and important, including when you’re building a marketing campaign. First-party data provides valuable insights into the behavior and beliefs of your audience.

Before you begin allocating marketing efforts, look at your data. Where are your customers coming from? Where are they converting? What channels are yielding the results you’re looking for? Which ones need improving? 

I saw the power of a first-party data review when working with a fintech client that had been marketing and tracking their data but wasn’t paying attention to it. I conducted a thorough review of the information to identify what areas were working and which ones had the highest opportunity so that we could prioritize them. This included a deep dive into GA4 and GSC to see what was getting traffic and what keywords were leading to sessions. It also included reviewing their internal data about their ideal client profile so we could align with it.

If you’re building a fintech marketing plan, always start with your data. Use the past to help you direct your future moves.

2. Identify Strengths and Understand Your Landscape

Every brand should have a clear unique selling proposition or USP. This factor helps you build brand awareness and makes your product or service stand out — and it’s just as important in the financial service sector as anywhere else.

The fintech landscape is fiercely competitive. There are many well-established fintech companies and countless startups all fighting for market share. If you want your marketing to stand out above the next brand’s ad or message, ask yourself these questions in this order: 

• What areas should you be known for in your industry?
• What are your main services, and how do they align with those areas?
• What elements about your business make your service unique?

Along with internally identifying your USP, you want to consider the external factors influencing the fintech business landscape. What kind of content marketing is ranking in the SERPs? Do you need to run paid ads to cut through the competition? 

While working with the same fintech client mentioned above, we used competitor research to illuminate the best opportunities available to that brand. I studied larger companies, reviewed similar-sized enterprises, and even looked at a fintech startup or two. This gave me a broad sample of what marketing resonated with fintech audiences at the time, rather than only focusing on similar-sized brands. This research shows not only what is working and what isn’t for others, but also helps to find more niche areas of opportunity that others could be overlooking in their content marketing efforts.

If you want your fintech marketing strategies to succeed, start by identifying your strengths and studying the landscape you’re operating within.

3. Create the Right Content

Inbound marketing, especially content, is a core part of any marketing strategy. However, the kind of content you create has become an increasingly important part of the strategic planning process to drive brand awareness and customer engagement. 

The internet is still reeling from the impact of major changes, like Google’s Helpful Content Update and the shift to AI-generated search responses. One of the big changes here is that you want your content to be more engaging, unique, and invaluable. 

Simple answers are no longer going to cut it. Instead, think through the types of content that encourage fintech audiences to engage with your brand’s marketing assets and attract potential customers. This could be:

• Educational content that informs.
• Helpful content that instructs.
• Product reviews that explain the features and benefits of complex tools.
• Interactive demos that provide multimedia elements.

The relevance of the topics that you cover is just as important. For instance, when I was working with a fintech client, I emphasized the need for timely content. They were focused on alternative investments, and at the time, they barely had any content on their site about them. Because of that, I helped them develop 401(k)-focused content centered around alternative investments. 

First we created some foundational content about what alternative investments are and why they can be beneficial, but then got deeper into specific types of alternative investments and specific strategies for incorporating them into your retirement plan. This helped them rank for a competitive, up-and-coming search term by demonstrating their authority without fighting against stiff competition or paying for expensive ads.

If you want your content to stand out and build customer loyalty, make it unique, engaging, and relevant.

4. Iterate and Optimize

You saw this one coming, right? It’s the necessary final step to any successful marketing strategy, especially in an industry that moves as fast as fintech.

As the finance and technology sector evolves, so should your marketing strategy. Regularly review your data (see Step 1) and see what is working and what isn’t. Hone in on what resonates with your audience and produces results. Fix what isn’t working or ditch it and reallocate the resources.

I’ve found that the devil is in the details with this stuff, too. For instance, with a fintech client, I noticed the author bios on their site did not contain information that we know Google appreciates according to E-E-A-T guidelines. I used the review process to optimize their bios and highlight their team’s credentials, linked their social bios to provide more social proof, and elaborated on their background in their bio. This simple action helped meet Google’s E-E-A-T standards and established the fintech brand’s content as coming from thought leaders who provided insightful, cutting-edge information.

If you want your fintech marketing to have an impact, perpetually revisit it and look for ways to optimize, update, and improve it.

Building a Successful Fintech Marketing Strategy

If you’re going to invest in growth marketing, you want to do so with an eye toward industry ownership. With fintech, this requires a thoughtful strategy. 

Start with your past data. Assess your strengths and study your current industry competition and landscape, too. Then, use your research to inform targeted content that you regularly review. An effective strategy is a great way to stand out in an industry with high customer acquisition and the need to develop a unique level of trust both before and after the point of purchase through targeted marketing efforts. 

If your fintech startup or even an established company is struggling with its marketing, reach out for a free consultation. Our experienced team can help you assess your situation and develop a marketing strategy that can propel your company to prominence, even in an industry as crowded as the finance and technology sector.

The post How to Create a Fintech Marketing Strategy appeared first on RELEVANCE.

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.

The online healthcare industry can be brutal. Competition is fierce, and major healthcare providers like the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, or government organizations like the CDC typically win that coveted #1 spot in the SERPs. 

So what can you do to stand out in such a tough space? As with most things in life, I think one of the best ways to find the answer is from the experience of others.

Four Takeaways From Our Telehealth Growth Marketing Experience 

To succeed in digitally marketing themselves, small and mid-size brands in the healthcare industry must build credibility through consistent, strong content marketing. They must invest in high-quality, targeted educational libraries that align with their core mission and that use SEO strategies to help show up in search engine results.

How do I know this works? Because I’ve seen it up close and personal over a 5-year span.

Here are four takeaways on how critical that content and SEO marketing strategy is in healthcare marketing. They come from a case study where we helped a telehealth company rank better for key commercial terms. 

1. Always Start With Thorough Research

I’m going to assume you operate in the healthcare industry. Picture this with me for a second. Imagine a patient comes in, and you a healthcare provider hand them a prescription without even looking at them or saying a word. 

Crazy, right? If you don’t skip the diagnosis stage for your patients, you shouldn’t do so with your SEO strategy or content marketing, either.

That’s why, when we started working with the telehealth brand, we performed an SEO audit, did keyword research, crawled their site, and observed their existing paid campaigns and social media marketing. We wanted to understand where they stood, their strengths and weaknesses, and their technical foundation.

We always do this because you have to know where you currently stand if you want to set goals and strategies that will work — and trust me when I say that this is a very important part of the process. Too often, we’ve seen brands balk at paying for strategy. They want to jump to the visible, measurable stuff. The problem is, if you don’t research and strategize, your action plan will inherently be weak, uninspired, and possibly even flawed. If you want to know where you should place the most value in the process, it’s here, in your strategy.

In this case, we found the brand had a solid foundation for building topical authority in the health space, but it wasn’t perfect. For instance, they had a robust FAQ library, but it was on ZenDesk, not their site, which meant they were missing out on SEO and traffic benefits. Their content was also limited in scope, they lacked internal linking, and they weren’t maximizing the impact of their existing content.

The Takeaway: Always start with a thorough analysis of where you are if you want to maximize your chances of getting to where you want to go. You will miss key optimization opportunities on a site if you don’t first review your current state.

2. Identify and Go After the Big Opportunities

Marketing used to be a fairly limited activity. In the digital marketing age, you have limitless opportunities. From SEO and back-end optimization to email, social, on-site, and digital PR, there is an endless list of owned, earned, and paid ways to promote your brand.

The question is, where should you direct your limited resources?

In the case of our telehealth client, we looked at the site by service line to see where traffic was coming from. We pulled in keyword research to identify targets based on these service lines, too. At the same time, we studied other areas of existing healthcare marketing to see what was working and what wasn’t.

Our goal was to tie in all of this information to ensure we were reinforcing and building on what was already working in their digital marketing strategy. If you silo your marketing effort, you’ll end up wasting resources and, at times, even working against yourself. Instead, use a holistic, knowledgeable approach to figure out the best places where you can put fresh emphasis and focus.

With our client, we found their core service line was actually capturing a decent amount of bottom-of-funnel (or BoFu) traffic. That was great news, and we were able to use it to direct our attention to improving middle- and top-of-funnel marketing in that area. 

We applied a similar approach to auxiliary service lines and found plenty of opportunities for additional improvement. We evaluated each one’s ROI, such as average cart value, one-time vs repeat purchases, and lifetime value, and set our priorities based on that information.

The Takeaway: Don't put your efforts into something that won't have a chance of performing well. Always invest in improving and complementing the marketing that is already working. But make sure you’ve reviewed core information to create a strong, data-backed strategy.

3. Figure Out Your Starting Point

All of this leads you to your starting point. (I know, it’s easy to feel exhausted just getting here, but hear me out. It’s worth it!) 

Once you’ve studied your current situation and invested in finding and prioritizing opportunities, you’ve set the stage. Now, it’s time to pick your starting point. Some primary factors to consider when choosing include:

• Figuring out if your content is educational, helpful, and following E-E-A-T best practices. 
• Ensuring your content is focused on topical areas where you want to build brand awareness and industry authority. (Optimize or eliminate everything else.)
• Determining how much traffic you’re getting and where in the funnel you need to focus on increasing those numbers.
• Assessing your backlink portfolio and considering where you can feed that credibility through third-party validation from authoritative sites.

Use your assessments from sections one and two to guide how you choose from this list. 

With our telehealth brand work, we found, along with a healthy content library, the brand already had a solid foundation for SEO. They were also using pay-per-click, internal and external PR functions, and a conversion rate optimization agency and social media team. 

In other words, all of the pieces for success were there, and we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just needed to orchestrate everything so that it produced the synergy and results they were looking for.

The Takeaway: When shaping digital healthcare marketing strategy, don’t reinvent what’s working. Perfect it. And ensure all areas of marketing are supporting each other so any one area isn’t working in a silo.

4. Focus On the End User

So far, my advice has been about technical elements, gauging metrics, and observing marketing activities. My final thought is to focus on the end user throughout your detailed planning. Everything else is important, but you always want the user in mind while you’re considering them.

SEO is the best example of where this can go astray. It’s tempting to focus on search engine results when using SEO. But that isn’t the goal. SEO works with content marketing to improve the user experience. The goal should always be to use search engine optimization to get your healthcare services and content in front of the right people.

That means you want to create a comprehensive library of robust SEO content that meets user needs at all stages of the funnel. You can use it to secure backlinks from external outlets, create social media content, and boost your credibility—but always keep that end user in mind.

By doing that, we were able to not just provide our telehealth client with genuinely good, optimized content but also ensure that it spoke to customer needs and pain points, serving their audience at every step.

The Takeaway: Always keep the end-user in mind. Write for the reader instead of a search engine if you want to actually create useful content that will engage and help people.

The Results of Good Healthcare Content Marketing and SEO Strategy

Okay, so if you do all of these things I’m recommending, what does it look like? What does it accomplish? After three years spent creating 146 online pieces and seeing 700 assets and links for our telehealth client, here are a few of the biggest takeaways:

• They had a 119% increase in conversion rate.
• They experienced a 254% bump in pageviews on optimized pages.
• They saw a 358% climb in the number of terms that were ranking #1 in Google SERPs.
• They had a 142% growth spurt in terms of ranking 2nd to 10th in those SERPs.

I also noticed that over the course of the partnership, new services ranked quicker for important terms as they benefited from the synergy of the site’s overall success. This is key to show that if you focus and put the effort in one topical authority area at a time, you’ll be rewarded when it comes time to move to the next.

Learning and Moving Forward to Greater Success

As we look back, there are also a few things I’ve learned from the telehealth case study that I think we could have done better. 

For instance, I wish we could have created more content in those three years to match their expanding service lines. I also wish we could have added more first-person perspectives from healthcare providers, clinicians, and patients. 

These aren’t shortcomings. Every marketing strategy requires some sacrifice. As the marketing world evolves, though, it’s always important to have these in mind as we form each new plan moving forward. 

As you look over the four lessons above, what stands out to you? Where are you already killing it with your healthcare digital marketing strategy? Where can you use some help? If you find you’re looking for a partner as you sort through things, reach out for a free strategy session with our team at Relevance. We can shed light on your current situation and orient you toward future success, even in an industry as crowded as healthcare.

The post Healthcare Digital Marketing: How We Used Content + SEO to Grow a Telehealth Brand's Traffic 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.

It’s easy for SMB (small and medium business) owners and their teams to feel that a full-fledged marketing plan is out of their reach. While they may lack the resources to go toe to toe with larger competitors in the market, though, that makes the strategic planning and guidance of small business marketing efforts that much more valuable.

Let’s go over what it means to create marketing plans for small businesses, why having a small business marketing strategy is so important for success, and how your business can create its own master marketing plan.

What are Marketing Plans for Small Businesses?

A marketing plan, at its most fundamental level, is a series of steps that you can take to promote your brand and its products and services to consumers. In other words, a marketing plan isn’t your actual marketing activity. It’s the strategy or guidelines that you create to set those initiatives in motion. 

In the context of marketing plans for small businesses, this could include anything from creating a website to crafting an email drip campaign, drafting a social media marketing campaign, building credibility through digital PR, and more. A small business marketing plan takes the limited resources of a small business and considers how that entity can effectively reach its target audience with its marketing.

Why are Marketing Plans for Small Businesses Important?

Grasping the goal of a marketing plan is the easy part. For a small business team with finite time and resources, justifying the investment in a marketing plan is where things can bog down.  

It’s tempting to redirect your team’s efforts toward activities with more immediate or tangible results, such as sales or product development. When you take the time to invest in a genuine growth-oriented marketing plan, though, you can provide a long-term blueprint for growth that you simply can’t recreate through other areas of business activity.

The goal of a marketing plan is to create basic parameters, such as a schedule and marketing budget, that help you optimize your promotional resources. Developing the plan itself may require some extra investment, but the benefits are well worth it.  

By planning ahead of time, you give yourself the opportunity to consider all of your marketing options. It also allows you to either establish or revisit key factors, such as your target audience, primary selling points, and your competition. From there, you can decide which marketing activities are the most cost-effective and beneficial for your brand, as well as the order in which you need to execute them.  

For example, a marketing plan might reveal that paying for ongoing PPC (pay-per-click) ads is exorbitant and expensive over the long term. It also may reveal that the money saved from slashing your PPC ads in half allows you to invest in a content marketing strategy. From there, you can plot out the steps required to generate, optimize, and promote that content (see the next section) as an effective way to put your marketing in motion. 

Small business marketing plans also allow you to gauge the ROI of your marketing investments over time. This gives you the ability to make adjustments and maximize results as you go along. It also frees you up to be more creative in your long-term approach to marketing by building on past successes that you otherwise might not have known about.

What Should You Include in Marketing Plans for Small Businesses?

If you’re sold on the concept of developing a marketing plan for your small business but aren’t quite sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place. In the following section, we’ll break

down a step-by-step analysis of how you can turn your marketing ambitions into a solid plan of action that can guide you.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

It’s easy to skip this step, but trust us, you don’t want to do that. Most small business owners think they know their marketing goals — and in a certain sense, that’s true. As an involved executive of a smaller enterprise, you probably have your finger on the pulse of your organization more than most leaders. 

But that proximity to daily operations and activities can also make it easy to cloud out the big-picture stuff at times. Before you establish your marketing plan, take a minute to step back. 

What are you trying to accomplish with your marketing in the next year? What about the next five years? Do you want to generate revenue? Build brand awareness? Increase online visibility? Spark long-term growth? 

Each goal is related to your marketing, but the differences are important. Get each specific marketing goal in place before you flesh out your plan.

Step 2: Identify Your Audience

Your target audience should be the central focal point of your entire operation. When you develop products, you should consider whom they serve. When you bring them to market, you want to consider how to communicate to a select group of consumers that they’re available to solve their problems.

Make sure you have a buyer persona in place that reflects precisely whom you’re trying to market to and what their pain points are. If you’ve already considered what your customer base looks like, use this step to review that data and ensure that it’s informed by up-to-date market research.

Step 3: Consider Resources and Competition

As a final step to set the stage for your planning, review what resources you have available. As a small business, do you have a marketing team, or does that responsibility overlap with other employees (or yourself)? How much time do you have to invest in marketing? What is your marketing budget? What assets do you already have, such as a CRM or social media marketing tools?

Also, consider conducting a fresh round of competitive analysis. You likely did this when you were pulling together your business plan. Go back and observe how your competitors are marketing themselves to your target audience. Note the pros and cons of their efforts.

Step 4: Identify the Marketing Tactics You Can Use

Now comes the marketing magic. Once you’ve considered your goals, target audience, resources, and competition, it’s time to bring it all together. 

Consider the marketing tactics you have available and which ones best meet your current marketing needs. Then, weave these marketing ideas into a plan that considers resources and timelines. A few common marketing tactics that work well for small businesses include:

• Creating a strong website: This becomes your central online presence and a place to host your blogs, user-generated content, landing pages, and other content marketing.
• Optimizing your website: SEO is important. Optimizing your site with long-tail keyword phrases, links, and technical SEO (think metadata, mobile-friendly, etc.) is a powerful way to maximize your content creation efforts.
• Build up off-site marketing: Create a social media presence using platforms your target audience prefers. Nurture email marketing, as well, including drip campaigns, newsletters, and targeted announcements.
• Organize leads in a CRM: As a small business owner, you want to stay organized. When your marketing begins to gain momentum, have a customer relationship management (CRM) platform ready to keep things organized and under control.

Remember, you’re a small business with limited marketing resources. Consider which tactic is particularly relevant to your brand at the moment, and invest in those areas first.

Step 5: Establish Success Metrics and Feedback Loops

Finally, consider how you’ll track your marketing over time. Use tools like Google Analytics 4 to keep tabs on important marketing metrics, such as ranking for brand keywords, measuring organic traffic, and tracking conversions.

Also, request feedback from customers and team members and then use that information to hone your marketing activities moving forward. If you’re unsure how to adapt your plan (or create one in the first place), consider working with a growth marketing agency that can bring a cost-effective degree of experience and knowledge to bear on your brand’s marketing initiatives.

Building Master Marketing Plans for Small Businesses

As a small business, you may have limited time, money, and tools to work with. However, that doesn’t mean investing in a marketing plan isn’t worth it.

On the contrary, creating an effective marketing strategy helps you ensure that every ounce of resources you pour into promoting your business has a purpose. This gives you the best chance of sparking genuine, measurable growth, which can enable you to build larger marketing budgets, plans, and strategies in the future.

The post How To Create Marketing Plans for Small Businesses appeared first on RELEVANCE.

The goal of a startup team is to grow a company from nothing into a dominant force in its industry. While entrepreneurs are clearly invested in growth, that doesn’t mean they understand how to incorporate the concept into their digital marketing.

Too often, a startup owner is only willing to invest in haphazard marketing activities. They neglect to create a solid startup marketing strategy early in their business’s life.

The thing is, the startup phase is the ideal time to invest in long-term marketing. That’s right. It’s actually the best time to initiate a solid growth marketing strategy. Here’s why.

What Is Growth Marketing for Startups?

Growth marketing sounds simple — and at its core, it is. Growth marketers help brands grow. The nuance comes from the way that they do so.

For example, a growth marketer is not the same as a growth hacker. The latter utilizes a low-cost marketing tactic to acquire a new customer quickly. This leads to dramatic but unsustainable growth.

In contrast, a growth marketer uses similar low-cost marketing tactics. However, they weave them together to create synergistic, sustainable growth over the long term. These growth strategy tactics tend to revolve around three key pillars:

• Developing authority through content marketing.
• Encouraging credibility through digital PR.
• Increasing visibility via SEO. 

So, how does all of this apply to startups? Consider this.

Growth marketing doesn’t require a massive budget or a 10-year marketing plan. It is an approach to marketing that can shrink or expand based on a company’s resources. This makes it an accessible and effective way to promote a new business — when done well, of course.

Why Is Growth Marketing for Startups Important?

Growth marketing isn’t just accessible. It is an ideal way for small businesses to begin building marketing momentum. Here are some of the specific elements that make growth marketing so ideal for startup marketing.

Growth Marketing Is Flexible

Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing is also flexible. For instance, if you already have a solid resource library on your website, you may not need to invest in more content creation. Instead, you can round things out by focusing on digital PR or working with an SEO expert to clean up and optimize your existing content for a search engine.

Growth Marketing Is a Long-Term Investment With “Snowball” Potential

Growth marketing in the startup phase gives you the longest possible runway to generate, adapt to, and optimize results. This is a big deal. 

Remember, growth marketing isn’t growth hacking. Growth marketers seek sustainable, long-term growth through consistent, targeted marketing activities. Given enough time, this can create a snowball effect. This is helpful for any established company. For a startup, though, it can provide the early impetus to send their growth into the stratosphere.

What Are Tips for Doing Growth Marketing for Startups Well?

Growth marketing has exciting potential. But you need to engage in growth marketing in the right way if you want your marketing efforts to pay off. That said, here are a few tips to help you kickstart your startup’s growth marketing the right way.

1. Define Your Growth Goals

Always start with goals. As a startup, it can be difficult to reduce your promotional focus to a single set of objectives. Review your business plan and consider the initial goals you should aim for, especially where your marketing budget and revenue are concerned.

These can be both short and long-term objectives. The key is to have a specific focus from the get-go. Growth marketing takes time, and you don’t want to invest in the wrong areas.

2. Know Your Audience

Your target audience should be at the heart of every growth marketing decision that you make. From messaging to tactics to channels, filter everything through your ideal consumer’s eyes.

The advantage of engaging in growth marketing in the startup stage is that you likely have a decent amount of market research available from initially setting up your business. Use this data to build buyer personas, tailor your content marketing to your ideal customer, and ensure that everything is focused on your target market.

3. Choose Your Growth Marketing Themes

It should be pretty clear by now that growth marketing techniques work best when they're focused. This includes your messaging. You don’t want to market every benefit and perk your company offers, or you’ll spread your resources too thin. Narrow your promotional messaging down to two or three primary themes that set your brand apart.

These are the things you want to build your reputation around more than anything else. They answer customer needs and set you apart from the competition. As you start building a growth marketing strategy with limited resources, focus on one of these themes. You can diversify your resources to bring the other themes into the picture as you grow.

4. Use the Right Growth Marketing Tactics and Tools

There are many different ways to engage in growth marketing. Guest posting, social media, referral marketing, and influencers are great for digital PR. Keyword research and linking while creating blog content are excellent for SEO. White papers, how-to videos, and email marketing are powerful forms of content strategy.

Your job is to consider which of these tools is accessible to you right now and can provide the most effect within your industry and for your startup, in particular. Whether you’re using email for nurturing authority, working with an influencer for credibility, or boosting visibility and brand awareness with better technical SEO, make sure to consider each tool you have available. This is where working with a growth marketing agency can help you develop the strategy for your startup that brings all of your options and resources together in the most effective way.

5. Focus on Quick Wins and Future Goals

Growth hacking obsesses over short-term gains, but that doesn’t mean quick wins are a bad thing. It’s overemphasizing them through various growth hacking tactics that derails marketing momentum over time.

If you want to benefit from growth marketing, you still want to look for quick wins (such as working with an influencer for fast exposure). The trick comes with balancing that with long-term investment, such as search engine optimization, which can take months to generate results. Keep both in mind as you go along.

Using Growth Marketing to Get Startup Momentum

Growth marketing for startups is a steady, synergistic approach to marketing. It utilizes all of the marketing tools and tactics available, adapting them to your company’s needs and resources.

This makes it an ideal option for a startup. Use it to build a thoughtful growth marketing strategy for your burgeoning brand. This can provide some early momentum that can only continue to grow as your young company finds its sea legs.

The post Growth Marketing for Startups: Why It's Important and How to Do It Well 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.

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