One of the factors that led me to co-found MoreVisibility nearly 20 years ago was the notion that everything being discussed and practiced was fresh, efficient, unchartered territory that hardly anyone understood. Coming from a background in more traditional Direct Marketing (call centers, catalogs, etc.) where technology was evolving, but the base level concepts were tried and true, the Internet was like the Wild West of knowledge grab and curiosity. Learning the fundamentals was essential, but as everyone quickly discovered, it was incredibly fluid, with a changing cast of players (think long gone Search Engines like AltaVista and Ask Jeeves) as the web evolved.
Today, the sheer quantity of marketers who speak the “digital” language has exploded as everyone’s lives have been shaped by the web, both personally and professionally. The challenge though is to be able to differentiate from being functional at a high level to being an expert, and like everything else in life, becoming an expert and maintaining that status requires a continual investment of time and effort.
The pace with which things change continues to be incredibly brisk. The search engines, social channels, shopping portals, etc. are continuously rolling out new features and programs along with the SEO algorithmic updates and enhancements to analytics platforms. Given the monumental task of maintaining expert status with all elements of Digital Marketing, here are a couple areas that I’d put at the top of the priority list:
- Analytics… The ability to pinpoint exactly where your conversions are coming from continues to improve. Leveraging that data is a function of having analytics set up correctly, understanding the data and making the most appropriate adjustments to campaign settings and Organic efforts.
- Content Creation… This isn’t just adding new blog posts or refreshing what’s written on your website, it’s about incorporating varied formats of content (words, videos, infographics, podcasts, images, etc.). The types of content and the places it exists (on and off site) are incredibly important and should be tailored to the web habits of your target audience.
- Amazon… If you are involved in any ecommerce activities, it’s become increasingly essential to have a deep understanding of the competitive landscape and the role that Amazon plays. According to an article published by eMarketer (9/19/18), Amazon is now the #3 player in terms of US digital ad revenue, behind Facebook and Google.
Within MoreVisibility, we have teams of specialists who are focused on specific disciplines (SEO, Interactive / Paid, Analytics, Social & Design / Development). Although many of our team members choose to become highly proficient in more than one discipline, most find themselves more than busy keeping up with changes and new opportunities in their niche discipline and applying that to our clients. Whether you’re doing everything in-house, using an agency or a combination of the two, be sure that both you and your agency are continuously investing the time to learn about what’s new, what’s old and most importantly how to leverage their knowledge for improved performance.
MoreVisibility publishes four blogs, SEO, SEM, Analytics & Social, along with our podcasts, webinars, live workshops with Google and monthly newsletter. Please check out the knowledge share we’ve been employing for the past 19 years and let us know if we can help you.
