Digital Forensics: Reverse Engineering The Digital Footprint To Win On The New Web

One of the most overlooked opportunities for winning the SEO/social media marketing game today is research.  The great thing about our new digital world is your customers and competitors leave a digital footprint that you can examine to better target your marketing campaign.

Think about it.  With a little reverse engineering, you can find out how your customers search for solutions that your products and services can help solve. New tools let you easily find important competitive information like back links, campaign length and targeted keywords.  Doing this work can give your business a huge competative advantage.  The problem is most businesses jump right into social media tactics and skip this important step.

Use this opportunity to your advantage.  Here are some key steps to take right now to win the digital marketing advantage.  We have a more detailed view of this process in our special report “Digital Forensics”.

1) Keyword Research: This is such an important part of the process but often left to junior staff or worse, outsourced to people who do not understand your business.  Identifying keywords and phrases with good volume, less competition, high commercialization and solid economics is tough.  Make sure you have a process set up for your business to evaluate your keyword targeting strategy.

2) Competition Inventory: Who is serving your market, what is their USP, how does that translate into keyword targeting, campaign longevity, customer conversion mechanisms and landing pages.  Identify what works for your competitors and use it.  Find gaps in their strategy and exploit them.

3) Customer Behavior:  What do customers want versus need?  Find the top 5-6 forums and blogs that your customers are hanging out in and listen.  How do they describe their problems and needs.  Look for psychological triggers that can help you get an edge in your business positioning and copy.

Make sure you are taking advantage of the research phase of your digital marketing planning.  You will be rewarded for it in market share and profits.

Social Marketing for Business: Hit pay dirt following these three simple (not easy) steps

Whether you are just getting started in social marketing or have been testing out the waters with few victories, the one thing you need to achieve social marketing success for your business is a game plan. Randomly joining social networks and submitting content without purpose can be time-consuming and ineffective. However, don’t think that your plan must be complicated and professionally-designed in order for you to succeed. In fact, these three simple (although not always easy) steps, can help you to hit pay dirt in no time.

Step One: Set a Firm Foundation with Solid Keyword Research and a USP.

It is imperative to identify a keywords list and use those keywords to attract search engine spiders. There are free tools available to make finding the right keywords for your business a snap. One such tool is the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Here, you can find the keywords people are plugging into the search engines as well as what your competitor websites are using.

Once you have identified the keywords and phrases best for your niche and business, you must add them to everything you do: domain names, blogs, article titles, and content. The search engines will pick up on these keywords and with quality content you have a great chance of receiving a higher ranking, which will put you at the top of the search engine results—right where you want to be.

Finding the right keywords to use helps you to create the all-important Unique Selling Proposition (USP). As you consider being unique and setting yourself apart from the competition, it makes sense to choose keywords that are popular yet do not have the most competition. For example, a website selling wheelchairs could focus on “wheelchair” as the top keyword, but there would be significant competition for that keyword. However, using the words “quickie wheelchair” helps to gain more targeted traffic and side-steps the primary competitors.

In addition to targeting unique keywords, you will want to offer a unique selling proposition. This means you want to offer a solution to your target market that somehow stands out and is different than what you competitor’s can offer. Whether it is a special service, bonus products or a cutting-edge solution, make sure you are offering you customers something of value that is solving a problem or meeting a need.

Once you become familiar with the Google Keyword Tool, you can begin utilizing more sophisticated tools such as Market Samurai, Niche Bot, Wordtracker and many others. You will also want to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to reverse engineer your competitors’ sites. With this you can find out who their customers are and then target the high PR value sites for you own linking strategy.

Step Two: Establish Your Marketing Branding and Communication Touch Tones

Developing a brand for your business is one of the most important steps you can take in securing customers and making the sale. Your brand is the essence of who you are, how you differ from your competitors and why a customer should choose to do business with you.

So what is a brand? It’s more than your name, motto or the colors of your banner. It is a culmination of all of the different aspects of your business. In order to create a brand you must consistently communicate your business mission and purpose as well as promote a consistent image, personality and voice to your target market.

The idea of communication touch tones goes hand-in-hand with your brand. To have a cohesive brand that works, you must fine-tune your communication styles so that the customer can hear something about you, read a tag line, see a logo or banner ad, and know it is your business. This consistency and uniformity throughout all of your social marketing communications creates trust and loyalty in your customers—these are the keys to a solid business.

Furthermore, you want to ensure your brand identity can be differentiated from your competitors’. You want to stand out and offer something unique to customers. Focus on really plugging in your primary and secondary target keywords to reach your desired customer.

Step Three: Implement Social Media Layers Effectively

It is far too easy to get distracted when it comes to social marketing for business. The social media networks are seemingly endless and there is always a new guru touting the best new method for conquering social marketing once and for all. Here’s the thing: if you can just buckle down, create something of value, know your target market and develop the content pumps for distribution, you are well on your way—no guru necessary!

As you are searching for the right venues for your content, try to start by identifying two of the most appropriate social media sites for your niche and target market. Explore the forums and blogs to find out which ones seem to be more active. Ask yourself: who are my ideal customers? Which social media sites do they use? Once you have narrowed it down to two sites, become a member there and follow other members who seem to have a great following and have similarities to your niche or marketing style.

Get a handle on what works for specific social media sites and then prioritize the ones you have chosen. The next step is simply pumping out the high quality content to these sites in order to quickly establish your reputation as a business that offers something of value.

Keep in mind that social media sites are not the place to spam, posting copies of blogs or articles from other sites or just offer remixed articles. Be original. Be unique. And set yourself apart from the competition with creative and compelling social marketing campaigns.

Chris Marentis is a serial entrepreneur and recognized Internet Marketing expert having served as SVP at AOL and CEO of Clearspring Technologies. For more information on Social Marketing for Business, go to http://www.surefiresocial.com today.