So you’re great at what you do. Whether you’re an expert, service provider, or a product innovator, you want to stand out from the crowd. Simple logic would suggest that excelling in your field should be sufficient to become an industry leader. In reality, you will need to take additional steps to announce your presence and establish yourself as a trusted authority. That’s where growth marketing tactics come into play.
Growth marketing is effective for industry ownership because it uses data-focused methods to create long-term results with a three-pronged approach. By building your visibility, authority, and credibility, that’s where you move the needle in becoming the gold standard for your field.
While it might seem like a daunting task, industry ownership is absolutely achievable. In this article, we will go through the growth marketing tactics that can get you where you want to be.
It’s hard to know how to improve your visibility without getting a baseline. A technical audit should include data analysis regarding your website functionality and overall web presence.
Website audits can be especially useful. Even if your site looks impressive, visitors may find it difficult to navigate or unengaging. Data relating to seconds spent per page or impressions may suggest useful improvements that could be made.
A thorough audit might include a detailed meta description review, indexation, and ux information. This data is vital for growth marketing goal setting and planning. A good audit will help set a strong foundation for the rest of your efforts.
Selecting your priority keywords typically begins with keyword research. You’ll want to determine which keywords are most relevant to both your business as a whole and specific sales funnel sections.
Once you have a larger list of keywords that may prove useful to rank for, determine what is attainable. If you have a limited budget, it may prove fruitless to target high ranking keywords rather than more specific, easier ones. If your marketing budget is nearly unlimited, then highly competitive terms might be within the realm of possibility.
Overall, you want to think through if your goals are to grow traffic or focus on conversions. Growing traffic would mean more broad, high volume, awareness level keywords. Focusing on conversion goals means more specific, lower volume, consideration level keywords.
Just because a blog post is well written and useful doesn’t mean it’s rankable content. For best results, make sure your content is in SEO-optimized format and factors in keyword search intent.
And since growth marketing is very data driven, monthly analyses can ascertain how your content efforts are performing. That way, you can craft future content to include what has been working and change anything that hasn’t.
Once you have created content that is well-optimized to the search intent of the words you want to rank for, you need to do some link outreach. This includes securing backlinks to signal to google that your content is solid and authoritative.
If you prefer to do your outreach in house, you’ll need to reach out to publications and blogs related to your field. You can present content you’ve generated such as data-intensive long form guides and hope they would find it valuable to include with their work. However, reaching out cold can be very time consuming and isn’t likely to generate a high rate of acceptance.
The more popular method for link outreach is to request a marketing agency do so as part of a custom SEO plan. Digital marketing agencies typically have a great number of pre established relationships with various publishing partners and blog sites. That way, you can offload link outreach and get back to the income-generating aspect of your business.
Look at the overarching themes or topics your company should be known for. Once you make that determination, create content around those themes and have them well organized on your site. This content should link to your other rankable content to show onsite authority to Google.
This not only signals to Google what the most important content on your site is, but it also helps make your site’s content more organized overall.
You need to be easily found by customers who are in various stages of the sales funnel. Individuals looking for basic information about your product or service may use different methods than those ready to buy. Being a top result for a variety of customers displays more authority in the industry.
Consistent, high quality content is a key factor in presenting yourself as a stable authority. A sporadic burst of information followed by a long dry spell doesn’t provide an impression of longevity.
You want to present yourself as someone who is knowledgeable and professional in your field. Consistent content not only implies that you’re serious about your industry leadership role. Search engines also tend to favor it compared to a large content drop.
There are numerous ways that your content can get more attention from media sites. One of the excellent growth marketing tactics is to create content that is linkable. Linkable content is typically well written, includes data, and provides actionable insights.
Posting blog articles on your own site gets the content available. Having outside publications link back to those articles establishes your content as a credible source.
In an ideal world, mentions of or quotes from your posts would be picked up by top tier publications. However, even unheard of publications linking back to your content can be very advantageous. If others cite your content as an expert source, search engines consider you to be a credible expert.
Look at industry-specific and broad publications and reach out to get your company mentioned through your linkable content. This builds credibility.
Being consistently mentioned in industry conversations is important to your strategy. This may include a link back to your site that supports SEO efforts. Even without a link, mentions are important for SEO efforts in general as they signal you're an authority in the industry.
Industry ownership typically doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a great deal of planning and dedication to making small gains over a long period of time.
By putting these growth marketing tactics into practice, you can create a custom strategy that builds your brand. From this solid foundation, you can meet your industry leadership goals.