Online Marketing Opportunities You Are Not Tapping Into

Most companies today have some type of budget for online marketing. A few companies spend upwards of $25,000 a month to bolster their online presence on search engines, in social media, and everywhere else on the web. Regardless of the size of your online marketing budget there are some very common areas that most companies completely ignore.  These are often the biggest, and best, opportunities for making massive headway online.

Opportunity #1: Real content developed by your clients

While your SEO company may be creating blog posts for you, uploading YouTube videos and posting on social media, most of those efforts are nowhere near as valuable as a piece of real content from the actual business that you conduct day-to-day. For example, a campaign where you ask your real clients to post a picture or video showing them engaging with your product or service can have massively better results than anything an outsider can develop for you.

In a specific example, a company that makes fitness gear such as gloves or shoes might start a contest where they ask their clients to take a simple video of themselves wearing their gear in the gym and post it with specific hashtags. Those who post the most engaging content that gets the most traction online in the form of likes and/or comments receive a prize (some free gear) and a discount on new gear.

Opportunity #2: Real content developed within your company

Just as a real piece of content showing your customers using your product or service is much more effective, real content produced by you and your employees in-house can work wonders. Today the algorithms used by Google, large social media outlets and other search engines are intelligent enough to identify content that actually engages, as opposed to content that simply takes up space. Google and other search engines have learned to ignore content that does not engage.

For example, an Italian restaurant that makes great pizza in a brick oven might post a video taken with an iPhone by one employee in the kitchen as another throws the pizza dough up in the air and attempts to make the perfect pie, while two other employees cheer him on, or even tease him a bit. A clothing company may post pictures of employees actually engaged in the art of making the apparel or using a silkscreen machine to brand it.

Opportunity #3: Truly educational content

While many SEO companies have writers who can create large volumes of content for you, the reality is that the most engaging content is that which truly educates the general public and your specific target audience. For example, a real estate agent might write an educational article about a few simple things that homeowners can do in an hour or less on the morning of their open house in order to make their home even better for the day.

In another instance a marketing company might put out an article, just like this one, educating potential clients on how they can get maximum results from their marketing by doing simple things on their own. While this may seem less fruitful than simply advertising your services, it can actually do a lot more in the long term for your company’s growth by establishing the trust of your potential clients.

Opportunity #4: Content created with passion

I have published content to websites using marketing companies, marketing departments, or individuals told to create content specifically for the website. Even companies with blogs typically feature content that their clients, employees, and even they themselves would never bother to read because the material was not written with passion. If you are able to generate content written by someone with true passion for the subject you will generate much more buzz, more traffic and greater goodwill with those who read the content of your website or blog.

Of course, the easiest way to attain content written with passion is to have a blog where your own employees have the opportunity to write guest pieces and even have their own individual blogs. As they begin to write about the things in the business they are passionate about, you will not only have a lot more content, but you will have content that truly engages your potential clients, and influencers who can connect you with vast numbers of people.

Opportunity #5: Extremely targeted individual pages on your website

Creating individual pages that target something specific, such as a small geographic region or a small category of products or services, can be a very effective way of not only ranking for long-tail keyword phrases, but also generating content that specifically targets a potential client. A plumber for example, who services a specific county with 35 different cities might launch 35 individual web pages with unique content written for each of those individual cities. This adds a very personal touch to the service that they provide and the search engines will favor these pages over generic pages of the website. Potential clients are directed to a page that gives them the feeling of a personal touch.

Opportunity #6: Tapping into all major social media outlets, instead of just the one or two you personally like using

Each person has a different preference when it comes to social media. They may find themselves spending a lot of time on Facebook while not engaging in Twitter or Google+. The reality is that all the top 15 social media outlets have a great following and companies should have written plans and procedures that consistently create engaging content on all of these platforms. Doing so will generate a following of different types of people on various networks with different interests and angles.

Opportunity #7: Cross-promoting your content

Now that you are utilizing all social media outlets, your employees are engaged in blogging, your customers are posting pertinent content about how your product or service is used in the real world and you are generating buzz with your extremely engaging content, it’s time to ensure that they all connect well. While this seems like an obvious thing to do, it’s probably the most difficult task because it requires massive planning and systems to ensure that all content follows some simple guidelines that allow it to be connected to other content. Thus a blog post created by an employee is instantaneously supported by posts to all the major social media outlets, backed up with PR efforts and included in your next email marketing campaign. This ensures your content does not simply sit on a website collecting dust and being crawled occasionally by a search engine that doesn’t send traffic to your stale page.

The simple steps outlined above can be the start of an incredible marketing campaign for your company. Utilize them well and watch your rankings and your traffic soar. If you aren’t able to develop systems to keep all these wheels turning simultaneously in-house, engage with a marketing company that provides these services specifically and knows exactly how to maintain a system like this. Whatever you do, the minute you put down this article go create a real piece of content about your company and put it out there for the world to see.