The Talk was hosted by students of Amrita School of Business on 11th December 2014, Coimbatore. The core focus of the talk was the strategic execution of Digital Marketing, SEO and Content marketing
Digital Marketing: Digital marketing helps you tell your target audience your existence. In the past, when the Internet was not as popular as these days, people were restricted by the source of information they can have access to. Most of them got information from newspapers, magazines, or TVs. Thus, if being a small or regional business, you may only have to spend a fairly small amount on newspaper or other channels, and you can have a monopoly of the whole market in that area. Nowadays, however, everything has changed on the Internet. With the help of the Internet, consumers have free access to an unlimited amount of information worldwide. This has also changed their purchasing funnel as the rise of the “zero moments of truth”(ZMOT). Due to the competitiveness of consumer products, they now have countless choices, and if you are not there to help when consumers trying to make a decision, you are out.
Second, digital marketing helps you understand your target audience. In the past, consumers’ needs were monotonic and easy to predict. Sometimes a business may not even pay too much attention to consumers’ needs since a good product spoke for itself. The Internet, however not only offers them chances to understand what they like but also choices to satisfy their needs. Therefore, if you cannot satisfy consumers’ needs, then you are out in the competition.
SEO: These days, if consumers have questions about a certain product or are intrigued by a product, the first thing they may do is to open their browser and search for that product. If you are not there to offer them a good impression, then you may be deleted from their purchasing funnel. SEO is the exact tool that helps you prevent that from happening. Understanding the algorithms of search engines may help you revise your website and appear at a high rank in the search results pages. The key to do this is to understand the search intent of your target audience. Nowadays, Google has changed its algorithms from only focusing on keywords to the topic association. Understanding searchers’ intent becomes more important since the top results are not those with the most keywords but are those with the most relevant content and those people find most helpful in that certain topic. Businesses should first come up with a list of potential keywords, and then group those keywords according to people’s intent. Then they should build their websites based on the intents, not only including the keywords but also revealing people’s intent in making that search. Next, businesses need to update their webpages regularly and maybe create other contents around potential new intents, and in this way, even their old customers may learn something new from the websites. Besides improving organic search results, another effective SEO strategy is sponsored search. By analyzing the performance of each keyword via metrics like average position, impressions, click-through rate, the average cost per click, conversion rate, and cost per conversion, businesses can discover consumers’ intent, and then decide which keywords to invest more, and which to be eliminated. Fortunately, Google and other SEO websites offer various tools for businesses to utilize.
Content Marketing: It is to bring a story that should convince the target customer logically. Content Marketing is the creation and distribution of content for the purposes of connecting with potential customers and engaging with current customers. The term Content encompasses a variety of media including articles, videos, podcasts, webinars, newsletters, photos, infographics, and more. Content Marketing has several key advantages. It has the potential to generate free (aka “organic”) traffic from the search engines. By creating content around subjects that are of interest to your client base, the traffic that this content brings to your properties is pre-qualified as being in the market for your offering. Quality content establishes your company as an expert in your space, and keeps you top-of-mind with your prospects, relative to your competitors. By providing value in your content, you are also establishing goodwill with your prospects.