The digital world is a constant and fast-paced changing environment. What you knew to be true and working yesterday may not be relevant tomorrow. I'm not exaggerating. If you want to be successful in the digital marketing for your business, fresh knowledge is the key.
I mean, just look at this. Google introduces new and smarter bots to judge the quality of your content. That, among other criteria, determines how high or low you will rank in the search engine. The SEO techniques of 2015-16 are a no-go area for those who want to achieve a front search position. Until 2020, even what we do today will be irrelevant. Paid search was something everyone was and is still doing. In the next two years, smarter marketers will stay away from it.
Facebook, Instagram and the other social media channels bring up new updates pretty much every month. Those include, interface changes, introduction of a new feature or an algorithm tweak. Not to mention, the numerous new apps and social networks that emerge every single day.
So what happens if you don't keep up to date? You simply fall behind. Your business becomes stale. Your competitors rise above you. I don't want this for you. I want you to be successful! This is the reason why I run this blog. Every week I choose a topic that will enrich your knowledge and help you market your products and services better on the Internet. Why is this so important? Why do I say fresh knowledge is the key to success? Keep reading. You'll find the answers.
1. Build Your Strategy
Strategic planning is the main responsibility of every business owner. You need to research the trends on the market, understand the current political, economic and social atmosphere and be familiar with the forecasts for the future conditions. In terms of marketing, you need to know where the industry is heading. What are the new techniques that work for new releases and updates.
If you have been reading MBC's blog you know that in the last 3 weeks we covered the future trends in branding, website design and digital marketing. If you haven't had the chance to read those articles yet, now is the moment. The knowledge you'll gain from them will help you build your marketing strategy.
2. Stay Relevant
Not only your communication methods change frequently. Your customers' needs and wants change as well. You should constantly update your knowledge of your target audience. For example, today people seem to be busier than ever. They rarely have time to read long blog posts, no matter how useful the outlined information is. Instead they'd prefer to hear the answers and know-hows they are looking for. Moral of the story: produce more video and audio content.
How does your ideal customer look today? What are their interests, what do they like and dislike? Is there a specific pain they are experiencing that you can provide the remedy for?
3. Innovate
With fresh knowledge come fresh ideas. It's new ideas that drive innovation and innovation almost always equates to success. Being aware of the current state of your industry, profiling customers correctly and following the future trends will allow you to create truly needed solutions to growing market problems. There's no way you could achieve that if you do what you've always done. Do more to become more.
4. Stay Ahead of the Competition
If you are in business you have to be ready to compete without a break. Market leaders stay on top by constantly updating their knowledge about every single area of the business, customers and what others are doing. The moment you say to yourself "I know enough to keep this business going" is the moment you lose your biggest advantage. Someone somewhere is taking that online course, reading that online book, hiring that coach you thought you don't really need.
5. Produce Timely Content
Do you know the "rank high" content formula? Let me tell you what it is. On the first page of Google you will normally see content that:
has good quality - answers the questions people have/ educates people
is not over optimised - less than 2.5% keyword density
is engaging - has many shares by different users on different platforms
is timely - talks about a topic that is popular at the moment and spikes the public interest.
That last feature made my blog post about IGTV the best I've written so far. It has been seen and shared so many times since June till today. It has been referenced in YouTube videos and other articles on the Internet. The main reason why this happened was because I published the article only 2 days after the official announcement and release of the app. Many people didn't even know something like that existed and I was one of their fist sources of such information.
Creating timely content is essential for your digital marketing success. And to be able to create timely content you have to update your knowledge constantly and follow the news. One of the best ways to do that is to set up Google Alerts. This way you will get an email notification any time there is news related to the fields you are interested in. The other thing you could do is get in as many business networking groups on social media as you can. The ideas, advice and updates you can get from those groups are nothing but gold.
My team and I have created a new platform where you can upgrade your business knowledge every day. We called it Teach Me How to Biz. And while we are still building the functional VLE and compiling valuable content in various formats to put on there, we invite you to have a look at the beta website. It is built only for informational purposes, but we would love you to subscribe so we can keep you up to date with the progress every step of the way.
