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Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Darkam Marketing : Darkam Marketing : Simple Link Building Tactics to Grow Brand Authority
April 29, 2020 at 11:17PM
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April 29, 2020 at 11:17PM
Darkam Marketing : Darkam Marketing : Simple Link Building Tactics to Grow Brand Authority
April 29, 2020 at 11:17PM
Darkam Marketing : Darkam Marketing : Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully
April 29, 2020 at 11:17PM
Darkam Marketing : Darkam Marketing : Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully
April 29, 2020 at 11:17PM
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Darkam Marketing : Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully
April 29, 2020 at 08:17PM
Darkam Marketing : Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully
April 29, 2020 at 08:17PM
Simple Link Building Tactics to Grow Brand Authority
It is no secret that link building is one of the most challenging, yet most vital tactics in search engine optimization. Google holds such high regard for high-quality backlinks, because they are the best indicators of whether or not your website is authoritative in the space.
Through basic crowdsourcing, Google can use website data (number of links pointing toward your website) to determine the viability and relevance of your website on certain topics.
So why is link building so difficult?
Over the years, SEOs from all over the world have been able to manipulate Google’s algorithm through black-hat link building tactics like link farms and link buying. In response, Google has determined what patterns are a result of such tactics and severely punish websites who continue to use these methods.
As a result, websites must now be creative with how they utilize different strategies that result in a higher volume of backlinks naturally. There are several things to consider, however, when executing link building strategies, including:
- The difference between unique referring domains and backlinks
- The importance of link flow
- The influence of digital PR
Focus on unique referring domains
When you are approaching link building, it can be tempting for your team to chase after as many backlinks as possible, regardless of where they come from. That may be beneficial for the first few links; however, after a while, you will start to see diminishing returns.
The reason why the crowdsourcing analogy is so helpful to explain this is simple: the more that authoritative websites approve of your website’s content, the more Google will recognize your website as authoritative as well.
If you continue to receive backlinks from the same website over and over, Google may think that you are participating in questionable techniques, and you may be impacted negatively.
By having a goal of increasing unique referring domains, you naturally go after links from a variety of websites rather, minimizing your risk in getting negatively affected by Google’s algorithm.
With that being said, there are plenty of websites that use content aggregation methods, like Databox, where you can easily obtain a link. You will not ruin your authority by submitting content through their website because:
- Databox is an extremely reputable source of content.
- The number of links that you get in return from them are not high enough for Google to flag them as an issue.
The best advice I can give is to additionally seek other unique link building partners to improve your overall authority even further.
Why link flow is critical
Link flow is defined as the rate at which new backlinks are flowing into your website. To understand why link flow is important, you must grasp Google’s E-A-T guidelines. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
To determine authoritativeness and trustworthiness in your industry, create new content that gains high volumes of quality links. This continuous flow of content and links shows Google that:
- You are active in your industry and community.
- Other authoritative websites are still cosigning your authority.
A slow link flow can indicate lost relevance or trustworthiness in your industry or on the internet as a whole. Continue to create relevant content and actively engage your audience in an ongoing attempt to gain quality backlinks. Quality over quantity is the key.
Influence of digital PR
Digital PR (public relations) is a pillar of digital marketing that focuses on media relations, thought leadership, and relationship marketing. While link building is not the primary (or even secondary) goal of digital PR, it can be a pivotal link building tool.
One of the main focuses of digital PR is brand awareness, which can include outreach to relevant podcasts for a company representative to be a guest or pitching the digital media to cover a new company story. Most of the time, when you, your company, or a subject matter expert at your company is featured on a podcast, is at an event, or is in the media, the website will link back to your website.
These tactics do not directly affect your SEO goals, but if your website starts gaining backlinks from highly authoritative websites, your ability to rank for more challenging keywords will improve significantly.
It is crucial to have your PR team and web strategy team work hand-in-hand on digital initiatives. For an effective digital PR strategy, you need:
- A designer to create infographics or other marketing materials
- A dedicated outreach strategist who is the face of the PR team
- A web strategist who works hand-in-hand with a link building lens
Some creative teamwork can help improve your digital outcomes drastically.
3 tactics to try on
Because link building can take a large portion of your time, think of creative ideas that are simple to execute on and powerful enough that your return will be worth it.
I have broken down three data-backed link building tactics that have proven continuously to grow brand authority.
Thought leadership
Think about all of the blogs, newsletters, or podcasts that you consistently read, listen to, and refer to on a daily basis. For marketing blogs, it’s Marketo, G2, and SEMrush. For general business blogs, it’s Mashable, Business Insider, and Forbes. In tech, it’s TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and ReadWrite.
There is a reason as to why you keep returning to these blogs. Why? They are known to publish content representing high-quality, their content is data-driven, and their pieces are written by experts in their respective industries.
Not only do people constantly refer to them verbally; they backlink to these sites as well.
Business Insider ranks with an Ahrefs rank of 242 (out of the entire Ahrefs database), with over 114M backlinks from over 458K websites.
TechCrunch ranks with an Ahrefs rank of 294, with other 73.1M backlinks from over 319K websites.
Depending on the industry your company is in, these thought leaders differ vastly. However, one feature is very much consistent: good authoritative content generates a high volume of backlinks with the right audience. It’s not rocket science.
Unique research
Some companies create reports that cover multiple verticals or sub-verticals. For example, for digital marketing that would be content, social media, SEO, email, advertising, web strategy, and market research. They create unique infographics for each research report and make them highly shareable, with little to no friction.
By putting out the annual report, they generate thousands of backlinks from many websites, in addition to generating unique referring domains.
By creating a report that is widely respected and referenced in your industry, you can generate a large amount of SEO value, in the form of authority, to your website.
Guest posting
Guest posting (or guest blogging) is the process of sharing content with or writing content for another website, with the hopes of gaining a backlink in return. Companies utilize guest posting strategies to produce high-quality content on authoritative publications throughout their industry. Guest posting can also improve companies’ organic reach through SEO, social media, and more. Overall, it helps your brand be more visible and shows that other companies trust you to share your expertise as well. Think about it, they trust you enough to share content on their own website.
In return, the writer typically includes a useful link back to their website to further authoritative value. Depending on the company you write for, they may reserve the right to remove that link whenever they please. If you haven’t already written the content for them, you might have to burden that risk.
Regardless, guest posting can be helpful in your digital PR efforts and improve brand awareness to audiences that you previously have not had access to. You may gain a link directly from that website, and you also might indirectly gain backlinks from the subsequent readers of their website and blog.
Directive utilizes guest posting as one of their main drivers of referring domain growth (as seen below).
Key takeaways
Link building is, and always will be, one of the more influential ranking factors in search marketing. Google continues to view quality backlinks in high regard and will continue to crack down on inorganic link building schemes that “trick” their algorithm.
Building audiences who continuously consume your content will, at the least, slowly link back to your website. Creating relevant and unique content will organically build links to your website. Creating professional relationships with other websites in the same space and sharing content will continue to build links for your website.
There are other simple link building techniques such as broken link building and brand mention outreach; however, these should not be the centerpiece of your link building strategy.
Understanding the power of the basics of relationship and content marketing will prove to help you out more than anything else. Take advantage of the relationships you have set, and focus on creating more down the road. Continue to provide value to your target audience and to partners you work with, and link building will be smooth sailing from here on out.
The post Simple Link Building Tactics to Grow Brand Authority appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
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Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully
A customer journey map helps businesses see their products and processes from a customer’s point of view. Plotting a customer journey map gives business owners and marketing and design teams valuable insight into common points of friction so they can improve customer experience and ultimately make more sales.
In this article, we’ll explore what customer journey mapping is, followed by a complete step-by-step guide to plotting your own map.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
“Your customers are human… You should understand their challenges and their vernacular, from both a macro and micro level, and then connect the dots back to your product or service.” – Forbes
You are not your customer. What’s intuitive to you may not be intuitive to them. What’s attractive, alluring, and inspiring to you may turn off your target market. It’s not just preference, either. Your behaviors and habits, your limitations and concerns, and your life experience all shape your purchasing decisions. And, chances are, yours do not align with your ideal customers.
Customer journey mapping allows you to become your customer, to walk in their shoes.
You want your customer’s experience to be seamless from start to finish and across multiple channels and touchpoints. Questions will inevitably arise, and you want your customers to find the answers and reassurances they need to commit to a purchase. By tracing the experience step-by-step, your map will help reveal issues with siloes in your business, issues that are specific to your customers, that are not assumed or predicted but grounded in your customer’s unique reality.
The benefits of customer journey mapping include:
- Identifying where customers interact with your business
- Determining whether the customer journey is logical
- Identifying and focusing on different needs at various stages of the buying funnel
- Revealing gaps between the desired customer experience and the real customer experience
- Allowing businesses to allocate expenditure on development priorities that matter most
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
Step 1: Determine Your Objectives
Why are you making a customer journey map? What goals are you directing this map towards? What experience will it examine? Which type of customer will it follow?
These objectives will guide the remainder of the plotting process, so be sure to think long and hard about the who, what, and why.
Step 2: Create Customer Personas
“If your brand is like many others, you might not be able to map out that customer journey. And the reason may stem from a deeper problem: You can’t identify the customer.” – AdAge
You cannot track a customer’s movements if you don’t know who they are, what they like, their pain points, and their aspirations. One of the best ways to flesh out your customer personas is to survey and test real-life people that have engaged with your brand.
Some valuable questions could be:
- How did you hear about our brand?
- Have you made a purchase with us? What was the deciding factor?
- How easy do you think our website is to navigate?
- Have you ever contacted our customer support team? If so, was it helpful?
- What goals are you trying to achieve with our company? What problems are you trying to solve?
- What attracts you to our brand?
- Is there anything we can do to improve your experience?
Research and questionaries will likely leave you with several customer personas, different distinct groups that interact with your brand. Your customer journey map can’t effectively cover them all, so select one or two to focus on.
Step 3: Identify All Touchpoints
Touchpoints are the places on your website and online that your customers can interact with. For example, adding a product to cart, engaging with a social media post, opening an email newsletter, and so on.
You might find that there are fewer touchpoints than you expected – could this mean customers don’t hang around your site long enough to make a decision? Or, there could be more touchpoints than expected – could this mean your site is too complicated and there are too many steps to get to an end goal?
Step 4: Decide on the Type of Map
The type of customer journey map you decide on will depend on your objectives. The main types of maps include:
- Current state. The most common type of map, the current state map allows you to visualize the actions, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions your customers experience when interacting with your brand right now.
- Day-in-the-life: This maps your customer’s day from morning to night. It details their habits and activities, whether that includes interacting with your brand or not.
- Future state. These visualize what you predict will be the actions, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions your customers will experience during future interactions with your brand.
Step 5: Plot the Customer Journey
You know who your customer is, and you have narrowed your focus. Now, it’s time to plot the customer journey step-by-step. At this stage, just focus on actions. What actions are your customers taking, and at what time?
Step 6: Take the Customer Journey
This is the crucial step – put on your customer’s shoes and work your way through the customer journey you plotted in step five. Take note of pain points, moments when you don’t get the information you need or the experience you expected. Analyze actions that feel natural and identify why.
This step allows you to focus on the areas where your customers’ needs are unmet. From there, you can fine-tune your offering to ensure that brand engagements:
- Provide a valuable, intuitive experience
- Solve your customers’ problems
- Promote trust
- Feel personalized
Follow these steps to create your own customer journey map. Do it well and you’ll find that it not only serves your customers but also delivers value to your business.
The post Customer Journey Map | 6 Steps to Build It Successfully appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
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April 29, 2020 at 02:17PM
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April 29, 2020 at 02:17PM
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