By Lachy Banton on Thursday, March 24th, 2016 in Uncategorised.
I love analogies. They make complex topics understandable and help build a connection with your listener. I don’t know the first thing about space-time, but if you tell me how space-time is like a trampoline with a bowling ball on it, I’ll understand the concept pretty quickly. So to understand how a digital outreach strategy should work, let’s – for this article – pretend that your products/services are a quilting group.
Yeah, a quilting group – just roll with it. Your friends having been talking about taking up quilting for weeks and now you have a group every Tuesday at 5pm. How do you get your friends to attend this group? You wouldn’t write and print a bunch of flyers about your new quilting group only to leave them on your coffee table then wonder why no one shows up. So why would you write a blog then wonder why your traffic hasn’t increased?
The objective of your digital outreach strategy is to bring awareness of something valuable, useful or interesting. Your audience, not you, must find it compelling – be it an infographic, an article, a tip, a video. You get the idea. If it’s not interesting, they won’t read it, share it or click on it.
Being interesting begins with writing.
Take Seinfeld – the idea is a show about nothing. Doesn’t sound very compelling. But when you watch it, the writing and execution take that idea and breathe life into it.
This is where it gets a bit tricky. When writing, whether it’s a blog, web copy or social posts, it pays big dividends to write for humans, but optimise for robots. That is to say, don’t stuff your content with SEO keywords. Nobody wants to read that, not even the soulless search engine crawlers.
Pick up any SEO article (or copywriter) worth its salt, and it will tell you that Google prefers natural content over obvious SEO tripe. There is little value in ranking well, only to have your visitors bounce off your page because it’s boring, bland or difficult to read.
In short: focus on your reader, but help the robots find your content.
So you have a compelling, well-written, well-balanced piece of content – now how do we drive traffic to it?
Post. Post the crap out of it. Publish it on LinkedIn. Share it on Facebook from your company page, then share it from your company page to your personal profile. Post it on Google Plus. If you’re not on Google Plus, GET ON IT NOW! It will go a way to improving your ranking.
It also pays to do a little research into when you should be posting, as it changes from social platform to platform. For instance, recommended posting times for Facebook users (who browse both while at home and at work) are as follows:
Finally, increase the frequency of your posting. Post articles, images, infographics, blogs, videos – anything relating to your industry. Set aside 20 minutes at the end of every day to schedule these posts. If you don’t have time, outsource it to a copywriter. Stay tuned for my next article where we’ll look at what kind of content you should be posting and why.
Lachy Banton