Biggest Challenges for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy is constantly changing with new technology, apps, social media platforms and search engine updates. Rapid developments make it difficult to come up with a long-term strategy that works for your target audience. The following are some of the biggest challenges your marketing team will face and some solutions to make their jobs easier.

Move Away From Keywords and On to Content Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a facet of your marketing strategy that changes quickly, so it’s important to stay on top of updates. One of the changes that gives marketers a hard time is keywords.

Marketers used to be able to target keywords that customers typed into a search engine related to their business. They could put these keywords into content on their own blog and on other sites to rank higher in Google’s algorithms. Unfortunately, this led to keyword stuffing (putting as many keywords as many times as possible into an article) and the content lost its value to readers. Google’s Panda update aimed to prevent these bad practices by adding more qualifications to their ranking algorithm than keywords, which required more time-consuming and scrupulous practices from marketers.

However, this doesn’t mean that keywords are completely irrelevant to your marketing strategy. SEO and keywords should be part of your content marketing strategy — just not all of it. You no longer need to fit your keyword into your content seven times or use as many keywords as possible in one piece. Instead, focus on creating relevant and valuable content that your customers want to read. Kissmetrics explains that you should include your keyword in your title, URL, subheaders, meta descriptions and content (as long as it’s relevant), but shouldn’t stuff your article with it.

To help your team move away from a strict focus on keywords, come up with relevant concepts that fit your brand values and products and that you know your customers will want to read. This technique will bring the rankings you desire.

Work Around Ad Blocking Software

Ad blocking isn’t new, but it still causes a lot of problems for marketers. Ad blocking software used to be used solely by tech-savvy fringe groups, but now more and more people are using them to take control of their internet experience and businesses are starting to notice the impact. You place your advertisements on websites to attract new customers, boost traffic to your site and market new products or services, so you need readers to see them when they’re surfing the web.

There are a few ways you can work with your internal team and your publishers to solve this problem. Many publishers are using software that gets around ad blockers while others are asking their readers to whitelist their site or pay for content, according to a HubSpot study. Communicate with your publishers to find the best options for your relationship. Find ways to create less obtrusive ads so users are more likely to whitelist the site, or make ads that get around ad blocking technology.

Another way to get around ad-blocking software is to invest in native advertising and sponsored content. Native ads are integrated into a publisher’s website and mimic the look and feel of the site so they are a cohesive part of the content even though they have a specific call to action (CTA). Sponsored content is similar to native advertising in that it blends in with the rest of the site, but it doesn’t necessarily have a CTA. Search Engine Journal suggests these two methods as alternatives to ads that may be blocked because they help with banner blindness, create a positive user experience and are informative. Just be sure to follow all Canadian Ad Standards guidelines so that you don’t get penalized.

Understand Organic Content and Paid Advertising Within Your Digital Marketing Strategy

There is a lot of noise competing for your customers’ attention online. There are countless articles, videos, infographics and advertisements flashing before their eyes every day. While organic content is still important for your SEO rankings and social media campaigns, it might not be enough to attract customers.

This is where paid advertising and promotion comes in. If you’ve created an amazing study, article or video to help convert readers into customers, it’s probably worth paying to promote it. For social media campaigns, Buffer suggests boosting a Facebook post or promoting a tweet to get it in front of more people. You have already spent time, money and other resources to create something great, so you should be willing to pay a little extra to have your audience see it.

To help you decide what is worth promoting, WordStream recommends looking at your goals for your campaigns. If you want to boost traffic, pay to promote the piece on social media. If you want better leads, set up a wall that makes users put in their email address or phone number before they can read it. If you have a specific CTA, pay for native advertising or a pop-up ad on a relevant site.

Marketers will always have to work hard to keep up with the changing times as traditional digital marketing evolves. But with effective digital marketing strategies and a little know-how, you can come up with a solution to keep your business strong.

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