Incorporating the Marketing Triad—paid referral sources, organic reach, and content marketing—yields results and drives traffic effectively. However, reliance on paid referrals alone, such as Facebook and Google AdWords advertising, means traffic is contingent on continuous investment. The moment funding ceases, traffic notably declines. Understanding and leveraging the Marketing Triad ensures a more balanced and sustained approach to driving traffic and achieving marketing goals.
Understand Your User’s Mindset
While there can be an immediate reaction, the long-term buy-in from customers just isn’t there in most instances with paid advertising. However, users that find a site through organic search have a different mindset. They were looking for an offer, a product, or information and found it. The odds are the site owner provided a useful and helpful experience. Thus, there’s a strong likelihood customers will return. This is where brand loyalty and product recognition starts coming into play.
Fathom What the Marketing Triad Can Accomplish
Business owners with websites cannot overlook the fact that marketing success lies in recognizing there are three elements that lead to success in a natural, holistic way: optimization, social media, and blogging. Think of a website as being the foundation for a garden, and onsite content development and social media as being the fertilizer. Citations, link building, and other effective methods provide the water that marketers can use to further nourish both the foundation and fertilizer. Consider the triad:
- Optimization – Conduct an audit of your website. An audit implies that you’re taking the time to examine elements that can affect a its performance. This allows you to set new goals with respect to what’s found, and to come up with new tactics to reach new goals. Check the site’s SEO descriptions and meta titles. Make sure you’ve optimized each page with the appropriate keywords and that content is relevant to the page topic. Make sure the content provides valuable information and that it’s shareable.
- Blogging – Blogging allows the site owner to dig deeper into their industry. This is where marketers can address customer pain points, and site owners can demonstrate their expertise. Blogging provides an endless array of opportunities for SEO and is a platform for creating expertise.
- Social Media – With social media, site owners can step boldly into the public arena and promote content in a most effective way. Users have immediate access to any new content created. The primary value of social media is to give waiting and willing eyes and minds something to see and digest.
Connect the Marketing Triad with a Sense of Purpose
Optimization, blogging, and social media all support each other and can come together to effectively promote business growth. Each social media post can promote an idea or content already written that connects back to the website. Thus, there is a key connection between optimization, blogging, and social media. The following tips can help empower the three key strategies even further.
1. Carefully choose your social media channels. Some say there’s an overload of media channels. Look beyond the most popular, like Facebook or Twitter, to define your audience and develop ways to continually connect with them.
2. Consider posting a blog several times a month, or even once a day. Pick the amount you can reasonably keep up with, and keep up with it. It may seem like a lot of work, but people are on the move and may miss your single updates. Content production, including blogs, allows you to get the most bang for your buck. Stretch your content among your chosen social medial channels as far as it will go.
3. Utilize visuals on your website, blog, and social medial pages. Content is powerful, but visuals will quickly catch a reader’s eye. People also tend to retain a plethora of information when it’s presented in visual form.
4. Offer up content that is useful and easy to share. For all content posted, make sure to include social sharing buttons too. Keep in mind that a lot of exposure comes from people sharing your content. One person who shares your content may give you an additional thousand views, or far more. Plan to monitor the metrics associated with sharing over time.
Your marketing triad will create a trusted source of information and branding for users. Up to 92 percent of people will trust a friend or family member’s recommendation over all other forms of advertising. Trust the “triad” and allow it to work for you.
