An Introduction to Inbound Marketing: Part Two

In my last blog post, I gave a brief overview of the differences between inbound and outbound marketing, as well as paid, owned and earned media. Today, I'll be focusing solely on earned media, and how it can specifically help brands increase awareness and engagement with their target audience. Earned media is a culmination of content writing, search engine optimization and social networking to generate more brand awareness and website traffic, which if done correctly, could equate to more sales.

Content Writing

Do you currently write a blog? Blogs are a great way to generate traffic through the search engines, which crave fresh, original and helpful content. Blogs can also add personality to your brand. Need ideas? Let's say you are a resort destination. How about providing your insights on the best places to eat, shop or take a hike. You could let people know about secret swimming holes or insider deals and local specials. Try grabbing a video camera and interviewing some of your staff on their particular talents (cooking, mixology, etc). Once you get in the rhythm, you'll find there are more topics to write about than you will have time for. Which leads me to my second point: create a calendar. You need a plan of attack when writing a blog, so that your messages stay consistent, focused and on-topic as well as timely. You also need to make sure your blog is keyword-rich and has a consistent theme, which helps people categorize it and (hopefully) link to you. The number of links you have to your website is one of the major factors in search engine ranking. Make sure you include your blog on the major directories. Lastly, it's important to host your blog on your own website. If your blog lives on Blogger, your website won't get the link juice you're working so hard to achieve. Consider making it a subdomain (http://blog.yourwebsite.com) or a directory (http://yourwebsite.com/blog).

Now, let's take that blog content a few steps further. Expand some of what you've written into online press releases to gain even more traction. There are many free or inexpensive wire services you can try and determine which ones work best for you. Make sure you change the headline slightly for each send to enable better tracking of your release and to allow for greater variation of keywords. Once you send them out, you'll probably be able to get ranking under Google News for a few days or a week, so make sure to time the sending of the release for maximum impact. If you search for your headline in quotes, you'll also be able to see how many times the story has been picked up (see image below).

Search Engine Optimization

When writing for your blog, website or press release, you need to make sure you incorporate keywords and phrases for which you would like to be found. Hopefully, you have already installed Google Analytics for your website (if not, do so now!). This is a good tool to use for discovering which keywords people are searching for to find your website. There are also many keyword tools you can utilize to find other keyword opportunities. Just be mindful that you are writing for humans, not machines. Content can easily start to look strange to people and search engines if you are just stuffing it with keywords that don't look natural. Make the keywords link to other pages on your website, which also helps the search engines determine what terms your website should rank for. Lastly, when creating new web pages, update the meta tags, such as title, description and header of your webpage with your keywords to make it easier to find as well.

Social Networking

Social media tools have recently started to influence search engine rankings and can help your online visibility. You probably already have a Facebook Page. That's great. Hopefully it is a Business Page and not a Personal Page. You can be punished or even thrown off of Facebook if you are incorrectly marketing your business through a Personal Page. Now, grab that editorial calendar you created for your blog and start to incorporate those topics into Facebook. Link to your blog articles, seek out input from your followers and ask for their participation as well. Try not to be too "salesy" or post too often. It is very easy to for someone to hit the "hide all posts" button and bury you from their news feed. For every one post about your business offerings, post four more about your business category. Be entertaining, engaging and informative. Posting photos and videos is also important. They tend to have the highest click-thru rates.

Twitter is another social tool you can you use to increase your online presence and gain followers. To help build your list, check out WeFollow, which lists Twitter users by topic and keyword, to help you find the people who are in a similar category. You can also use an application like TweetDeck to search for people or topics that you would like to participate in or find posts that you can share with your followers. Again, photos and links to video tend to perform best in this space as well. To make your posts more easily findable, utilize the hashtag, or # symbol before your keywords.

Finally, register your business and participate on place-based social networks including: Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla. These "check in" and peer review services are gaining more popularity quickly as mobile smart phone penetration continues to grow. These services allow people to find out what restaurants, lodging and attractions are nearby them in a given location and more importantly, find other people's reviews about them. As a business owner, you can claim your place on these services and monitor what is being said about you. Moreover, some of these sites offer tips and reward people with discounts for checking into your location a certain number of times.

The compounding effect of good content, search engine optimization and social media will bring you more website visitation. However, ideally you are not just linking everything to your homepage. If they only land there, having them find what you intended decreases greatly. Instead, you will need to create several landing pages to capture specific types of leads as they arrive to your website. Offer them something of value (another interesting article, a free trial of your service, a discount, etc.) so they will leave you some form of contact information. Once you have that, you will be able to send specific follow up offers and hopefully convince them to become a customer. Sounds like a lot of work doesn't it? Taking advantage of all of these "free" or inexpensive tools actually take quite a bit of someone's time to get it right. Take inventory of your resources. Do you have people who are already passionate about social media? Do you have anyone who currently writes their own blog? If not, you may want to team up with a digital marketing agency that is familiar with all of these tools, can share the responsibility with you and keep you on a strategic path with measurable goals to gauge effectiveness.