Driving Business Value and Growth through Online Visibility

A couple of weeks back, I had attended a Webinar by Growth Folks Community from Bangalore. It was worth the time; and this blog talks about everything that I perceived from the session, give it a read, and do let me know your thoughts.

Meanwhile, Click Here to register for the next session by Growth Folks, and trust me you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity.

But hey, coming back, wondering what is this blog all about? 🤔

In this blog we will be discussing how to drive business growth with Online Visibility and how can this strategy drive Business Value and Growth. We will also discuss some of the key features of pointers along with a use case, where a dental service company had changed their marketing strategy without actually increasing the marketing budget. In fact they have managed to bring down their marketing budget as compared to before.

So to begin, one of the key factors, all the marketers have to focus on is the quality and quantity of traffic that a business is able to generate. It goes without saying, in order to see significant growth in your traffic, a marketer has to understand which sources are helping them generate traffic. This has to be reviewed on a monthly basis so that you are aware of what’s happening and you are not burning the marketing budget. This is the right mechanism to do marketing for any organization.

Before getting started with the marketing plan for generating traffic, any organization, be it large or small business, has to understand the importance of setting up the right marketing budget. This marketing budget might differ from Industry to industry based on the cost of customer acquisition.

According to a report by Gartner 25% of the revenue for established organizations is being spent on Marketing.

The marketing budget is also heavily dependent on the choice of marketing channels. In huge crowded markets, you always have to understand that as a business no matter how much you are spending, to get noticed, you have to be innovative with the right USP. Companies out there are literally fighting for Human Attention. According to a recent study, it is said that in this digital age with so many digital campaigns being run, the average attention span of a human being is 8 seconds, which is lesser than compared to that of a fish. So understand, with 8 seconds it is very important for us to convey the message, if you ensure you have managed to hold them for 8 seconds then you are doing a good job. But you also have to understand that you target the right people, with the right frequency through the right set of channels with the right budget. If you fail to take care of these pointers, then you might have as well have burnt your marketing budget already.

We have to understand that marketing is all about return on investment. It simply does not mean that marketing is just considered as an investment, instead if you are investing money in your marketing campaigns, you have to ensure that you target your specific audience and also ensure you stand out from your competitors. If you, as a product need the right market visibility, then you have to focus on the above parameters and should also ensure that you do not invest a lot on all the channels instead find out which is the right channel that is working for your product and focus more on that particular channel. This way you can get results faster and also you get more time to invest in those specific sets of channels with the right set of audiences. These right sets of channels can be found out only by testing. This will definitely help you increase your online visibility as well.

Now, you must be wondering what is Online Visibility? Let me sum it up for you, as SEMRush defines it;

Online Visibility is the efficient presence of your brand in the relevant online consumer environment. Another important thing that you have to understand is, we are living in an era where our customers want us to empathize. As a marketer or as an organization, you have to ensure you are regularly in touch with the customers and meet their demands or needs. So, “the true foundation for your marketing efforts nowadays is to understand the real needs and the context of your current/potential customers” as stated by Anna from SEMRush, Russia.

Here are a couple of things you have to keep in mind while you are looking forward to customer acquisition through your marketing campaigns:

• The first thing is, to understand the type of business and how it is going to help your customers solve their challenges. This for purely marketing purposes, based on your analysis, you will be able to understand what are the channels you can use for your marketing campaigns.
• The second thing is for you to understand who your target audience is and what they love the most. This will help you understand what they are searching for while they are online.
• The third thing is to understand your customer better and convey to them how you are going to help them by offering them your product.

To help you understand better, I will talk about one of the success stories mentioned by Anna from SEMRush which is one of their favorite success stories. This company in the dental industry was able to grow from 80,000 to 1.5 Million Dollars which was only possible because they changed their marketing strategy based on the above-mentioned pointers.

Let me give you a gist of the entire planning and execution which will help you avoid repeating any such mistakes while you are planning for your marketing strategies. Smile Works is a Dental Company based out of the UK and they generally spent 10% of their revenue in their marketing campaigns. This is a nominal budget and just like any other company, they spent it on Ads for getting traffic. But the problem they faced was, people, visiting their page but not being converted as they were not interested in Dental Treatments at all. They failed to attract the right audience, as they were just focusing on the reach of their Ad campaigns.

On doing a proper RCA of their marketing strategy, they realized what was going wrong from their end. They understood that just by showing Ads, no one can sell trust for any of their High Professional Services. So for that, they had to educate people on what they are best at, once they know about your expertise, then they are ready to pay the bills. To ensure this, they had to come up with a new approach. While doing so, the first thing they focused on was SEO as this is the best option to drive user intent. Whenever any human has a question or wants to know more, Google is where the customer journey starts. This is for 90% of customers these days. Taking this into consideration, Smile Works decided for an Optimization to improve their organic search.

While doing so, they understood that Content is King and in order to get noticed, they had to carefully craft content that suits best for both, Users and Search Engines. They then started preparing content related to what real-life questions would be asked by their set of audiences based on their needs. Once the search and are educated about dental services.

The next thing to do was, to have the right set of keywords. You have to do proper research to have the right set of keywords. The best way to get the right keywords is also to understand how your competitors have been using it for their strategy. Another thing to be considered is to have questions as keywords, this is because usually, questions are the keywords with high consumer intent. This way, Smile Works was able to reach out to potential customers and the results were amazing. They managed to grow from 5% to 26% within a year. Our learning from this should be, to target the right set of customers who are genuinely interested in our product, by pushing the right content focused on the customers' intent.

To conclude this blog, my suggestion to all Marketers or Growth Hackers out there is to put your customers first, and help them find the content they need based on customer search intent and then you need to think about both search engines or channels. And focus on the Content you are planning to push because that is what will help you convert your potential customers.

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