Dating back to Ancient Greece and Egypt, monumental structures have relied on the strength of stone pillars, working together to support an immense amount of weight and pressure. Over the past 2,500 years, the Parthenon has been rocked by earthquakes, blown up by exploding gunpowder and suffered severe fire damage, yet it and its pillars still stand today.
“The way we apply digital and online marketing to a business is no different,” says Scott Wilson, founder, and CEO of RankHigher.ca, a Burlington, Ont.-based digital marketing and SEO firm. “Every business should be built upon the same principle, using a plethora of marketing pillars to uphold the pressure of its success, and together produce significant results.”
Today, there continues to be a number of businesses that rely on a single pillar and Wilson calls this the ‘high diving board approach.’ If this one pillar comes crashing down, businesses can find themselves in a hard freefall to the ground. For example, if 10 years ago a business’s only pillar was the yellow page ad, they would have lost their only method of reaching new customers and growing their market share once consumers stopped opening the phone book for information.
Wilson explains there is a clear and significant risk to having just one or two pillars, which is why he recommends the Parthenon approach.
Four of the many marketing pillars businesses should use to build a solid foundation:
• Search Engine Optimization: Earning top rankings in natural organic Google search is still one of the best ways to grow a business. When a consumer is searching for a product or service, cutting through the clutter of over 130 trillion web pages to appear among the first few results is crucial.
A great tip is to write 2,500 words of unique text, inserting your core keyword up to but no more than 19 times. The use of latent semantic language lets Google find relationships between those keywords and the ones in the search query. Consumer testimonials are also a great method to include keywords and improve your Google ranking.
• Search Engine Marketing: While it may take a while to earn Google’s trust through SEO, Search Engine Marketing can be turned on fairly quickly. With SEM, businesses pay to play, while maintaining full control of speed and budget. SEM allows for targeting of prospective customers through search engines such as Google and Bing.
SEM is also a great way to do A/B testing on coupons and special offers to find the one that resonates with your perspective customers. Once a winner is established this can be used with SEO, social media or print media.
• Paid Social Media Ads: Social media advertising allows businesses to target customers based on location, demographic information and interests. This provides a far better ROI than traditional marketing because you have laser beam focus on your potential customer.
• YouTube: Having a branded YouTube channel for a business can be a powerful marketing pillar as many consumers go to YouTube to search information about a company, and to gain a better understanding of the product or service they offer by seeing it in action.
The most powerful YouTube videos explain the benefit of what the company offers, and the function of a specific product or service. These videos can be easily embedded to social channels or websites, and integrated with SEO and SEM for optimal results.
A YouTube video of customers telling the story of how a product or service helped them has proven to be a highly effective marketing method.
“These digital and online marketing pillars are meant to interrelate and support each other, just like the Parthenon,” adds Wilson. “Business owners and marketers must ensure each of these are given equal focus, attention and importance, and that they are working well, both independently as well as collaboratively.”
Based out of Burlington, Ontario, RankHigher.ca began in 2002 and has since built a team of 50 expert digital marketers, who drive business growth for their clients through the implementation of innovative, profit-driven solutions. Understanding a business' online opportunity, building mobile-friendly search-optimized websites, online advertising campaigns, social media marketing channels, online reputation and brand awareness, video production and more.