Digital Marketing Manager
Digital marketing strategy is directly linked to the goals of the business and broadly speaking covers a number of avenues. To be successful it is necessary to develop an holistic framework that will deliver results. The Digital marketing framework is not fixed but is allowed to evolve over time.
Digital marketing is centred around new client acquisition and retention to support the growth needs of the organisation.
The key areas of digital marketing can be broken down into a number of elements:
- Website
- Blog
- Forum
- Social networking / marketing platforms
- Direct e-mail
- Affiliate marketing
- Pay Per Click
- Analysis
Overview
The website is the centre of all activity and is the primary source for new client acquisition and retention and therefore must be fit for purpose whilst appealing and user firendly.
Keywords
Establishing the right keywords is based what you do and where you do it. A national company will need to focus onboth generic and local target keywords. I.e. Generic may be "Organic vegetables" but a significant source of "warmer" leads will come from "organic vegetables essex".
Relevency of content to keywords is essential. It sounds obvious but relevancy is now as, if not more, important than "back links" for page rank. The theory of linking sites passing authority, page rank, in hindsight is misguided. The abuse of this measure i.e. link farns and paid links etc are all black hat techniques. So the simple asnwer, rather than waist resource trying to shut them down, is to diminish the importance.
Optimisation
Otimisation for the correct keywords goes beyond the obvious, yet esential page title, meta description, "H" tags and density. URL, Inbound link text and internal link text all plays a role. This is especially true of e-commerce, blogs or any other dynamic data where search enging friendly URL's are important.
Internal URL's should extend keywords by telling a story. For example www.orgnic-produce.co.uk can be extended to www.orgnic-produce.co.uk/fruit and again www.orgnic-produce.co.uk/fruit/apples.html. To a search engine it will give relevance to the keyword organic produce fruit apples. Hence will perform well for organic apples, organic produce, organic fruit etc.
Duplicate content reduces search result placement. Since February 2009 Search engines announced the problem of canonicalisation. If you can access your website using both http://www.yourwebsite.com and http://yourwebsite.com then, to search engines, there are two independent website with duplicated content. The result is poor performance. If you run a franchise network the problem with duplicate needs to be addressed. Creating your own affiliate marketing scheme can address this problem.
Performance
Performance is increasingly important since the roll out of Google Caffeine. The load speed, as well text to code ratios, is now measured. This in part is due to the increasing number of individual using mobile devices to access the Internet. The target load speed is one second or less. Google web pages load time is .6 - .7 seconds.
Overview
A blog is an effecive way of extending your keyword base and increasing your domain authority when hosted within your domain. Your blog is shpud be the hub of your social networking. Using pings and feeds to external sources you can automate much of your social networking by pinging / feeding other sources such as digg, Twitter, facebook, stumbleuponand delicious to mention just a few.
Blogging
Blogging is less formal than static pages of the website and should flow with the seasonality of the business to reflect current affiars. For example a blog about healthy eating, for an organic produce provider, is liley to track television programmes based on the subjects covered. Blogs also provides personality to the organisation so having specialist within the organisation offering tips and advice is a great way to build a following and loyalty enhancing brand.
Extend
Allow comments to certain blogs to gain feed back and discussion.
