Digital Marketing Strategy
2017
As the world continues to move digital, there seems to be a growing divide between where the leading edge of marketing is and where the mining industry stays stuck.
The following is a detailed look at where I believe we should lay the groundwork to transition Millrock into and take advantage of the digital ecosystem that is out there.
To sum up the results of all below in just a few works, the focus will be "more leads, more brand awareness" and all will be done so through focused, targeted and trackable systems.
The digital marketing strategy will consists of 4 sections:
For this, I've opted to leave social media out, until we have a more in-depth discussion about it.
1. ANALYTICS
Analytics are integral to understanding and refining the digital investor experience. Without analytics, we're simply hoping that our actions make an impact and that we are spending money well.
Research shows that “90% of business managers believe analytics has the ability to improve sales and another 62% report they believe analytics can increase sales by more than 20%.”
Examining the data offers the chance to learn what we're doing right and what needs more attention. It takes the guesswork out of the equation and makes sure that the resources we are spending in all areas are effective. A good analytical approach will allow us to track investor behaviour, record and understand digital interactions, give us data to answer questions about investor dissatisfaction/lack of conversions, and get a better understanding of what the investor is looking for.
Some examples of what we'd focus on:
- What content/pages are resonating most with my audience?
- Is any platform underperforming when compared to the others?
- What terms are bringing in traffic, and what do they search for once on site?
- Which landing page is delivering the most conversions? Why?
- How are visitors engaging with individual pages?
- The Behaviour Flow – how are investors moving through the site?
- Event Tracking – what leads to a specific desired or undesired event?
- Channels - where is our traffic coming from?
- Exit Pages - what's causing people to leave our site?
Ideal Monthly Investment: ~$500 to $750 per month
2. SEO Analysis
SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. It encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines.
There are many aspects to SEO – from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand, other times it is about creating ongoing content to continue to drive traffic and optimize ranking. We'll focus on the later.
Why does SEO even matter?
The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, with Google getting over 100 billion searches a month (Mashable, 2015). Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic—people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the roadways that make this happen. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.
SEO helps make sure search engines can find your site.
Here's something important things to know:
- Search is very, very popular. Still growing strong at nearly 20% a year, it reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
- Search drives an incredible amount of both online and offline economic activity.
- Higher rankings in the first few results are critical to visibility.
- Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but also instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company or website.
Like analytics, a solid analysis of SEO will give us a foundation to build on.
Ideal Monthly Investment: ~$1,000 per quarter
3. CONTENT MARKETING
This is the bulk of the digital strategy and is what will continue to drive new traffic to Millrock's site and increase brand awareness. It is a strategy can we can invest slowly into and increase as we see more and more results.
Some of the stats:
- 60% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. (HubSpot, 2016)
- 54% more leads are generated by inbound tactics (content marketing) than traditional paid marketing.
- 2x as many marketers say inbound delivers below average cost per lead than outbound methods.
- $20K is the average companies save per year by investing more in inbound than outbound.
- 72% of marketers say relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic. (Ascend2, 2015)
- 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search. (Google, 2015)
Our Strategy: SEO Copywriting
Content needs to accomplish two goals:
- Appeal to the investor (customers, clients, prospects, readers, etc.) and
- Solve a particular search problem that ranks well with Google. To achieve this, I recommend we focus on SEO copywriting.
SEO copywriting is all about creating useful, compelling and valuable content that targets specific keywords so that other people will find it, enjoy it, and gladly promote it on other platforms. This increases the authority and relevance of your content and improves its ranking in Google for the selected keywords. So when you highly recommend something, Google sees it relevant and you will achieve greater SEO content results.We all know what happens when you type a search query into a search engine and hit “enter”: You get a list of search results that are relevant to your search term. Those results pages appear as a result of search engine optimization (SEO). In a nutshell, SEO is a method of optimizing (enhancing the effectiveness of) your content for the search engines, in order to help it rank higher than content from other sites that target the same search terms.
Steps to setting up SEO copywriting:
- Research and understand all relevant keywords, on an ongoing basis
- Select particular keywords to focus on
- Use those keywords to create content
- Good content gets read more, shared more, and engaged with more. All of which drive investors and brand awareness.
Ideal Monthly Investment: $1,000 to $3,000
4. PERSONALIZED INVESTOR SERVICES
Enhancing the experience investors have with us digitally ensures our brand is perceived as a more reliable, trustworthy and human brand. Investor experience includes all the interactions before, during, and after the investor has engaged with us.
Studies discovered that “47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service" and while we don't sell products per say, it is not a stretch to assume the same rationale holds true for investors.
Building Relationships With Personalization
The scope of this is to be able to scale the amount of personalization Millrock and Melanee is able to achieve without increasing the burden of work drastically. Personalized and humanization of a brand can increase sales up to 20% and offer a significant number of opportunities to build trust with investors.
How This Will Be Achieved
This will be achieved by installing, setting up, utilizing and monitoring digital systems (such as Intercom) that allow for personalized digital experiences.