Marketing and SEO go hand in hand, but each topic has many ever-changing subtle nuances that require extensive research and expertise to master. This is why you often hear about SEO and marketing separately.
But, in the modern world, if a business wants to thrive it must find a way to bring together SEO and marketing efforts to optimise all aspects of brand reputation, awareness, growth, sales and more. This article will explain what marketing objectives are, what SEO goals are, and how SEO goals align with marketing objectives.
Let’s dive in.
What Are Marketing Objectives?
Promoting new products or services is often the first thing that comes to mind when you think of marketing objectives or brand objectives. This is an important aspect of any business, but just one part of a bigger marketing strategy that aims to promote business growth, increase sales, and build brand authority. Let’s take a closer look.
Business Growth
1. Lead Generation
Identifying new potential customers for a business’s products or services is called lead generation and it’s a big part of how marketing supports the sales team. This process includes collecting customer research, gathering industry insights, and creating content that encourages the audience to give you their email or another form of contact information.
HubSpot, for example, implements lead generation by offering a free course at the end of their inbound marketing article. The article is full of useful information which attracts readers who want to learn more. Offering a free course that only requires users to create an account is a great lead generation strategy for this type of content.
Sites like this also have a chatbot that opens a chat with the reader once they’ve scrolled to the bottom. This is a great way to target new customers who aren’t sure what they want yet. In this example, the chatbot target’s new customers by guiding them to other links within the site that could be helpful.
In the example below, this website opens a pop up for free SEO advice after users finish reading their guide to guest blogging. This is another great lead generation tactic.
Other online lead generation options which you could try include:
2. Targeting New Customers
Effective lead generation starts by targeting new customers. Whether a business is just getting started or if a business already has a loyal following, but wants to expand, targeting new customers is key. This can be done through marketing that meets individuals at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. But before you can do this you need to know who your new target customers are. Here’s some ways you can achieve this goal:
Review Your Existing Customer Base
Identify Who Your Competitors are Targeting
Analyse the Purpose of Your Product or Service
Choose Your Preferred Demographics
Consider Personality Characteristics
Reflect on Your New Target Market
3. Retaining Existing Customers
Once you’ve targeted and hooked new customers it’s up to marketing to nurture the relationship and retain them. Customer retention happens through consistent and subtle actions which include:
These are just some of the ways you can help to retain existing customers.
4. Build Brand Awareness
Brand awareness goes beyond targeting new customers. It’s a process of creating a presence online and offline that people recognise and trust as a reliable source for information, products, or services.
Look at the logos below. I bet you can guess which brands they represent and also their level of quality by simply seeing their logo.
Nike and Mercedes are just two examples of how brand awareness through marketing can impact business success. There are many ways you can build brand awareness and some of these include:
5. Grow Digital Presence
Digital presence is everything in modern marketing. A brand’s digital presence includes content on their website and off of their website.
All content and website elements on every website within a business’s network represent the brand. This includes:
Content off the website also represents the brand. Though you have less control over what another site says about your company, you can guide the narrative. To create opportunities for positive brand representation outside of the company website you can try:
Growing digital presence is a complex process that will continue to evolve. Give it time and you’ll see a major difference within months.
Increase Sales
1. Promote New Products Or Services
The most obvious way marketing and SEO supports sales is through product or service promotion. We touched on this a little in the beginning. Promotion increases sales because it puts information about new and existing offerings in front of people who want to purchase.
One way to measure the success of marketing efforts is by surveying new customers. The classic ‘how did you hear about us’ question lets customers tell you what guided them to purchase.
There are a few ways you can help promote your products with marketing and SEO and these include:
Inbound Marketing
Paid Advertising
Increase Sales, Revenue, & Profit
Effective SEO and marketing can lower customer acquisition costs while also increasing sales, revenue, and profit. Lower cost and increased profit because of consistent marketing efforts, sounds like a win-win. But how do you target your marketing to be more effective? Some things you can try include:
Research
On-Page Content Optimisation
Off-Page Content Optimisation
Build Brand Authority & Loyalty
1. Building Authority
Authority is one part of how search engines rank a business’s website on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Does the acronym E.A.T sound familiar? If not, here’s a quick overview.
E.A.T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness and this is a template for how search engines judge a website. We’ll get into this more when we talk about SEO.
Industry authority is built by creating opportunities for thought leadership. Some of these opportunities include:
Consistently Connecting with Your Audience
Connect with Other Audiences
Other ways include consistently showing up through social media posts, press releases, news features and more.
2. Develop Brand Loyalty
There are many different ways marketing creates a sense of loyalty from customers. Sticking to brand guidelines, sharing business values, and using a consistent tone are some ways businesses subtly build loyalty. Customers and potential customers want to relate to and connect with a brand.
Some ways to get your audience to connect with your brand are:
Apple is a great example of a brand that built a community of followers through consistently offering high-value products that have a user-friendly interface and sleek design.
Why Are Marketing Objectives Important?
A marketing strategy is made up of a series of objectives. Marketing objectives are essentially SMART goals or key milestones that create an outline for success. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound are the criteria for a SMART goal.
Marketing objectives align closely with big-picture business goals like increasing profit and improving industry authority. In the previous marketing objective examples, you can see how each objective creates an outline for achieving the broader business goals.
SEO essentially does the same thing.
How Do SEO Goals & Marketing Objectives Align?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is the process of improving the quality of content on a website and increasing the amount of traffic a website receives from search engines.
To see how SEO goals align with marketing objectives we’ll explore some key SEO goals within the three major themes we discussed in the marketing objectives section: business growth, increase sales, build brand authority and loyalty.
Business Growth
1. Increase Conversions
Conversion is the process of a page visitor converting to a customer or completing any desired action on a page. Some examples of conversions are page visitors providing their email on a contact form, downloading a PDF, or making a purchase.
SEO increases conversions by examining who is visiting a website and why they’re leaving the page before converting. In some cases, the conversion rate could be low because the website is not attracting the right audience.
In those instances, the SEO strategy would start by narrowing down specific keyword phrases the target audience is searching for and then creating a strategy for updating all content and creating new content to target those phrases.
Before increasing the conversion rate, it’s helpful to target increasing visitor time on a page. This means capturing their attention and keeping them on a page long enough for them to see the value a page offers. Some SEO strategies for increasing visitor time on a page and improving the conversion rate are:
When the conversion rate is increased this means that a higher percentage of organic traffic is willing and ready to buy. This naturally leads to business growth. Another way to increase the amount of quality traffic to a website is through backlinks.
2. Improve Your Backlink Strategy
Building quality backlinks is another way to increase business growth. Backlinks are links on a third party website that link back to your website.
Backlinks can be created intentionally through guest posts, sponsored content, and image insertions.
Backlinks can also be created naturally through content that is created about your business without any action from your business. If Example Business Inc. owns a beach resort, a natural backlink could come from a local blogger who visited the resort and mentioned their website in a blog post. If Example Business Inc. also runs wellness retreats at the resort, a natural link could come from a regional publication that ranks the top 10 wellness retreats in the area.
It doesn’t matter if a backlink is organic or sponsored. All quality backlinks build authority and increase traffic to a website. Here’s a great article about the best practices of blogger outreach to get you started.
Increase Traffic & Sales
1. Increase Organic Traffic
The biggest goal of SEO is to increase traffic to a website from search engines. This requires understanding the subtle nuances of search engine algorithms which are always evolving to improve the search experience. Right now, E.A.T is how we create the most optimised content. As we explained earlier, E.A.T stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Building backlinks is one way to improve E.A.T for a website. Targeting specific keyword phrases and building a pillar and cluster model for creating content is another great way to increase web traffic organically.
Increased traffic is just the beginning. Once the traffic has landed on your website, you want to keep it there as long as possible.
2. Decrease Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures the amount of time a visitor spends on a page before leaving the website. This takes us back to the examples we listed earlier that increase visitor time on a page. Let’s expand on a few.
Build Brand Authority & Loyalty
Strengthening domain authority is the biggest way SEO contributes to building brand authority and loyalty. Building backlinks and creating blogs or other kinds of internal content that display thought leadership are some ways to strengthen domain authority. All strategies will take time to see results. Domain authority increases slowly as search engine bots scan and index a website.
One way to control how search engine bots see your website is through a robots.txt file or meta robots tags. Check out The Ultimate Robots.txt Guide for Beginners to learn more about the robots.txt file and how to use it.
So you see how marketing and SEO both take clear steps toward business growth, increasing sales and building brand authority and loyalty. Marketing has a more broad and multiplatform approach to increasing brand visibility. SEO has a focus on optimising a brand’s digital presence. And both are essential for business success in the modern world. How is your marketing and SEO efforts doing?
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