3 Tips for More Focused Marketing Efforts

Editor’s Note: Here at Dispatches, we are always looking for ways to help our readers do things. For some of our readers, that means helping navigate the working world, for others, it means assisting in the ever challenging question,“what’s for dinner?” For still others, it means figuring out how to balance family life with everything else. In an effort to aid in all of these endeavors, we have collaborated on this article written specifically for our readers.

The key to good marketing has always been in determining the desired audience and targeting their wants and needs. The average Internet user consumes more content than ever before. 

This is why the online marketing campaign for your business needs to be bolstered by good, current website content. Focused content is about three things:

1. Word count
   When Google is returning results to a user, they (supposedly) want to send them the best results. Sure, we can argue all day about to what extent Google cares about who is paying them the most to get search visibility. The provable fact is that Google advertises itself as a search engine that returns good results and for most users this happens.
   
   So when a user enters a keyword, Google will often find thousands of articles based on that phrase. But keep in mind, it can be difficult for a search algorithm to judge a subjective thing like quality of the articles (When I taught the introduction to journalism writing class, I had several days covering just this topic). One of the metrics Google uses is word count. It’s assumed, correctly or incorrectly, that larger word counts mean better articles. It’s true that longer articles often mean a more in-depth look at the subject. Bigger word counts can also mean a higher amount of fluff in the article. Eventually, Google will catch you if you’re just filling articles with low-quality writing.
2. Other marketing techniques
   Of course, writing good content isn’t enough to guarantee success. In terms of basic search results, Google cares about other things aside from quality. But just because your page doesn’t show up on the first pages of Google, it doesn’t mean you’re simply not paying them enough. It could just mean that Google hasn’t paid any attention to your site.What you your site is lacking is search engine optimization. People tend to underestimate just how involved SEO can be. If creating content is what you are good at doing, you may want to consider leaving SEO to an expert SEO company.
3. Video content
   I’ll save my complaints about the demise of the written word’s esteem another time. For now, it will suffice to point out that creating relatively good quality, easy to watch video content is just as important as creating written content. Cisco estimates that video content will make up 69% of all online consumer traffic by 2017. Despite the fact that consumers clearly love video, most business owners are surprised by such a finding. They’re also worried. Video content can be more expensive to produce and low quality is more apparent than low quality writing.But if you do a video marketing campaign really well, then you could be looking at astonishing outreach. YouTube receives more than 1 billion unique visits on a monthly basis and much of that content is re-shared throughout the world-wide web. If that video content is also hosted on your website, then you could be looking at great link-back potential. Read up on how to create good video content.

Ultimately, marketing small and large businesses is very similar. Focusing on word count, other marketing techniques and video content will be a step in the right direction for making sure your business or organization is easy for consumer to find, relevant and easy to do business with.