With effective online marketing, you can promote your business in ways that are rarely possible through traditional marketing, or without a huge investment.
Digital marketing helps you establish brand identity and recognition, build your credibility, generate interest, drive traffic and — the ultimate goals — increase sales and the bottom line.
Consistency in online marketing is multi-dimensional. Depth of consistency means that your style, message and value proposition is the same across all of your digital marketing platforms. But that’s the easy part.
Meaningful consistency requires diligence over time. As we like to say, you can’t simply “set it and forget it,” at least not if you want to maximize your results and marketing budget.
When we talk about the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX), we explore what your prospects and customers get from your online marketing and how they interact with it. But we must also explore how it makes them react.
Depending on your industry, niche and business model, you may establish yourself as a serious and conservative business (ideal for a CPA or legal firm). You may prefer to portray your company as fun, energetic and progressive (a tech startup, for example). However you establish your brand’s identity, maintain that tone throughout your online marketing.
If you diagram your online marketing effort, you’ll find that it resembles a wheel. The hub is your website. Radiating from this hub are all of your primary digital platforms. This might include your blog, social media, email marketing, guest blogs, landing pages, directories and paid advertising.
The purpose of each platform is twofold: 1) to drive traffic to your website and 2) to improve your search engine rankings. You won’t accomplish either of these objectives unless you maintain consistency of style, message, branding, graphics and keywords.
Maintaining consistency over time requires regular updates of your hub (website) as well as all your platforms.
The schedule varies across clients and industries. For example, you may put up a new blog post one or twice each week. You pay post on Facebook three times each week. Some companies send out a semi-annual catalog, publish a monthly newsletter or launch a new Adwords campaign every other week.
What you do and how often you do it isn’t as important as your consistency. Once your customers come to expect your monthly newsletter, they’ll notice if it’s not there.
Don’t believe you can create that kind of buzz with a newsletter or catalog? Take a look at the obsessively loyal devotees of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer, the Penzey’s Spices catalog, The Tasting Table newsletter or the Daily Skimm.
Now that we have a better understanding of what online marketing consistency is, we need to understand why it’s so important.
Prospects and customers across every demographic have one clear preference in common: They value consistency highly.
The path from prospect to customer to brand loyalty takes time. You must engage in a courtship of sorts to lead a prospect to a purchasing decision. Once you’ve sealed the deal, however, you must continue your efforts to keep them coming back.
Remember the children’s song that goes, “Make new friends but keep the old?” (One is silver and the other’s gold!) The more repeat customers you have, the lower your marketing costs will be. Brand loyalty also increases your market share, returns higher profit margins and helps you stand firm against competitors, even when they undercut your prices.
Consistency in message and communication helps you meet customer expectations and build trust. These results are very well worth the effort required to maintain consistency in your online marketing.
If ensuring brand loyalty isn’t persuasive enough to convince you to be consistent in your online marketing efforts, let’s look at what consistency means to Google — and to your search engine rankings.
Google demands fresh, engaging, high-quality content. If you provide it on a consistent basis, Google and the other search engines reward you with better placement in the rankings. Fail to provide consistent updates to your website content and blogs, however, and Google will punish you by dropping your hard-earned SERP.
When you provide consistent updates to your online marketing, Google’s web crawler bots learn to revisit your site regularly and update your rankings accordingly. If you fail to maintain that consistency, they will move on to your competitors.
The volume of fresh content that you need to keep both Google and your customers happy will vary, depending on your industry, your location and the level of competition you face. If you need help with determining the type of content you need or how frequently you should update your online marketing, we can help.
Be Locally SEO is the Utah expert for online marketing, SEO and PPC advertising. We understand the demands of search engine optimization, and we specialize in helping our customers maintain fresh, consistent content. If you want to continue your steady climb up the page of search engine rankings, contact us today to learn more about how online marketing can help your business.