For media companies to thrive in the digital ecosystem, they must acknowledge the revolution caused by the use of mobile devices to access the internet.
With more and more people – nearly three-quarters of the world population by 2025 – preferring to access the internet using their smartphones, organizations cannot help but pursue updated and mobile responsive websites.
Content marketing has been around for a long time and if you thought it is about to die, you are completely mistaken. However, while the past decade witnessed a saturation of blog content, the digital arena is causing a revolution.
For instance, recent years have seen the rise of the importance of video content as more and more embrace the internet. Today, a huge number of customers prefer watching a video of a product they are considering using before deciding to buy.
Organizations are embracing other forms of content such as infographics, articles/case studies, research/whitepapers, webinars/online events, e-newsletters, photos/illustrations, and news releases among many others.
Social media marketing comes in handy as well in the world of digital marketing. While creating great content will help you expand and strengthen your brand, it will not make sense if nobody can find it.
That’s where social media comes in. Media companies can use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share the content they create and to ensure an increased reach.
The rising need for media companies to adopt multichannel marketing and automation means that businesses cannot thrive in the absence of integration.
The beauty of integration is that media companies can also enhance their business processes, not just achieve an effective integrated digital marketing strategy.
The world has witnessed various technological revolutions during the past few years. Still, none of them has been so impactful, like the internet – especially in the world of business and marketing.
The digital era has brought about major trends in the media industry, besides causing dramatic changes to the ways consumers interact with media companies. Consumer behaviors and patterns have also been significantly affected.
Look at the new digital consumer, particularly millennials. They are increasingly making the internet their primary source of information. The internet is now officially part of our lifestyle – whether we like it or not.
Business owners and marketers operating in the world of media have no choice really but to grab the opportunity that this new consumer behavior presents.
Sadly, while a good number of media companies have embraced digital marketing, they still lack a future-proof digital strategy.
A recent Smart Insights’ Managing Digital marketing research report revealed that 45 percent of companies do not have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy, with 17 percent attesting to having a defined strategy that hasn’t been integrated into the firm’s marketing strategy.
Only 38 percent of the respondents answered affirmatively to the question of integration.
Image Source: Smart Insights
If you have not fully embraced digital marketing, do not waste any more time. Your company is losing more than you can ever imagine. Upon incorporating digital marketing, you will soon realize that you need integration for things to work seamlessly.
When you are doing something for the first time, confusion and uncertainty are inevitable. Figuring out what the new trends are and how to approach them can be quite difficult and time-consuming.
However, the complexity of setting up a digital marketing and integration solution should not worry you too much. All you need is a clear goal of where you want your media house to be in the future, buy-in from your team, and especially the decision-makers and the right integration partner.
This whitepaper will help you make sense of digital marketing and integration, what they entail, and why you need them. It is a comprehensive guide that will help your business get to the next level even faster and more efficiently.
Media companies must constantly ensure that their websites are updated. They are no longer trend followers but trendsetters. People look at them to find out what’s hot — even in web design and development.
You can tell your website was created a while ago if it does not fill the entire computer screen. Or perhaps your content needs a bit more work?
A frequently updated website attracts visitors and search engines. When this happens, media companies make more money. So, yes, spending time and money on having an excellent website is a worthwhile investment.
Another thing you should consider when evaluating the state of your website is its responsiveness. There’s nothing more frustrating than a nonresponsive website.
According to a survey published by WARC (World Advertising Research Center), about three-quarters of the world population (72.6 percent) will utilize only their smartphones to access the internet by 2025 – close to 3.7 billion.
Image Source: Statista
The same survey predicted that more than 1.3 billion people would access the internet using their PCs and smartphones by 2025. Sixty-nine million people will use their PC only to access the internet. About two billion people currently use their smartphones only to access the internet – according to WARC estimates.
Judging by the above figures, media companies have huge opportunities to sells their products through mobile internet. In 2018 alone, spending via mobile apps was an overwhelming $101 billion.
This money was accumulated through in-app purchases, paid downloads, and subscription fees – with a huge portion of it being spent on gaming.
So, what is the best way forward?
Check if your website works on screens of all sizes. See what happens when you minimize your PC window. Does the website still display properly? If not, it means that you need to tweak your website a little to ensure responsiveness.
Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Doing so will help make Google extremely happy for obvious reasons. This year, Google announced that they would begin to consider (from July 1, 2019) the mobile versions of websites for purposes of search engine optimization (SEO).
How will the mobile-first indexing affect website owners? SEO rankings of poorly done mobile sites will fall significantly – mainly because Google has predominantly begun using the mobile versions of the web content in indexing and ranking.
In the past, Google relied upon the desktop version of a site’s content to evaluate the page’s relevance to the query of a user. Nowadays, since the majority of site visitors access Google Search using mobile devices, Googlebot majorly crawls and then performs indexing with the smartphone agent moving forward.
What’s more, about 80 percent of local mobile searches usually result in a purchase. You cannot afford to ignore this consumer trend. Other important website aspects to consider include:
- Ensure that your website satisfies modern web standards as well as best practices.
- Make sure your website has a complete call-to-action. See the figure below.
Image source: Golden Oak Webdesign
- Complete the metadata – title tags, alt text and descriptions, and so on – of your site accurately. Failure to do so negatively interferes with your visibility on search engine research pages.
- Set up a business blog if you don’t have one already. It is usually a big plus for the performance of your website as far as SEO and gaining a competitive edge is concerned. You should also see it as an opportunity to showcase your expertise and knowledge.
- Optimize your website by using location-targeted keywords and addresses.
Image source: Medium.com
Over time, internet users have developed a growing interest in content – explaining why content ranks high in the list of the most effective techniques of establishing and strengthening brands.
It means that content marketing is still a critical component of digital marketing. Organizations should view this as an opportunity to demonstrate their authority in the industry.
While the quality of content has always mattered and will continue to matter a lot, media companies must develop a greater interest in determining who the intended recipients are.
The effective modern marketing dictates that organizations seek deeper and more sophisticated knowledge and understanding of their target market. It enhances the preciseness with which you steal and keep the attention of your target market.
In that case, while we cannot dismiss the significant role that general audience plays, having specialized material for specific target industries and experts will deliver impressive results.
This, combined with improved methods for measuring the effectiveness of content, will give you an upper hand in the industry. While at it, remember to keep content marketing as relevant as possible.
Image source: LYFE Marketing
Besides blogs, the other important type of content for digital marketing is video marketing.
A good way of remaining competitive in this digital marketplace is to use videos to not only grab the attention of your target audience quickly but also to keep them always engaged.
Today, consumers are engaging with more video content than ever before. People spend a third of all their online activities watching video content.
This positive response has consequently made video one of the best forms of content marketing for reaching out to the target customers and engaging them, especially in the media industry.
Consider using social videos particularly, because the significant number of shares they attract doesn’t even come close to that of any other type of content. Furthermore, modern customers will most likely watch a video about a product they are considering buying before purchasing it.
Media companies can use this opportunity to convince their target market to purchase their products/services. You may use product reviews, generating how-to videos, or even record a video while unboxing your product and share it with your target audience.
You’ll be surprised by how fast your customers will look for the product to buy it. However, your videos need to be well packaged and seek to solve the customer’s problem.
Videos considerably impact the buying decision of a customer. One of the best places to post these videos is on your landing pages. This will also help you enhance your conversion rate.
Remember to keep track of your video marketing metrics (number of views, engagement, conversion rate, social sharing, feedback, and the total cost) from the beginning of the campaign.
These metrics will help you determine what is working and what isn’t. Use the data you gather to tweak your video for better performance and a higher ROI.
The diagram below shows other types of content with the degree of effectiveness and difficulty to create presented in the form of a percentage.
Image source: LYFE Marketing
Irrespective of the types of content you use, you can become one of the most popular brands in the media industry by generating engaging and authoritative content. Use content to define your brand.
Brands such as Disney and Netflix boldly stand out as authoritative information sources using video content and numerous others. Netflix uses movie trailers first to inform its customers about the availability of new films, get them hooked, and before they know it, subscriptions go up in the nick of time. Disney utilizes a similar strategy.
Once you’ve created great content, you must find a way for people to find and interact with it. One incredible way of achieving this is through social media. Share it on all your social media pages for maximum impact.
This tactic will enable you to reach more people, which will, in turn, expose your brand to a wider target audience as well as create more chances of generating leads.
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are valuable tools for promoting content. They allow you to reach a large as well as a highly targeted audience that is likely to respond to your brand positively.
When it comes to Facebook Ads, consider targeting people who love companies and products similar to what you sell. It will help you get the attention of an audience with an excellent response. Twitter Ads is even better as it allows you to target the audiences of specific people and brands.
Use your social media accounts to create content that tells your story in an engaging way. Utilize pictures, live streams, or videos to tell/sell the story. Such a process will help your brand build a unique style and tone capable of setting you apart from other media companies.
Besides going digital, the current marketing world is also highly integrated. A brand that wants to succeed must embrace digital and integrated strategies not only in its marketing efforts but also across the entire spectrum of business processes.
So far, online advertising has surpassed ad spend made via cable and TV networks. This is just the beginning.
Media companies are seeing beyond succeeding. Most of them are focused on obtaining competitiveness. A truly competitive media firm goes for an effective marketing method capable of delivering results in the form of impressive revenues and faster/higher return on investment.
However, this can prove difficult to accomplish if a company chooses to stick to one channel. This means that you must find a way to use different techniques of digital marketing seamlessly.
The big question: is this possible?
Yes, it is! The answer lies in your company’s willingness and readiness to invest in integration. Organizations that have shied away from an integrated digital marketing campaign tend to think that it is a complicated process and that it is only designed for big enterprises.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Even small and medium businesses in the media industry can easily adopt integration.
A multi-channel, adequately integrated digital marketing strategy will work wonders on your online presence and guarantee your brand recognition.
Image source: ResearchGate
Why do you think some companies are doing so much better than others?
Let’s consider the case of PBS, America’s biggest public media enterprise. Public Broadcasting Service operates close to 350 stations that serve all the 50 states, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, U.S Virgin Islands, and Guam.
To ensure efficiency, PBS saw it fit to adopt Salesforce. This way, they can deal with members of staff in both sales and customer service. They also recognized that a successful digital marketing strategy must incorporate automation, and hence, started using Mailchimp too.
Then they realized the vital role of integration in enhancing their business processes, and that’s where SyncApps came in. SyncApps facilitates a perfect integration of Salesforce and Mailchimp.
Other great examples are Vimeo or Disney.
For quite some time, both companies have been using SyncApps for Salesforce and Mailchimp in marketing team projects.
The top-performing media companies know that digital marketing is here to stay, that it is causing a revolution, and that more is yet to come.
That said, media companies have no choice but to embrace the different techniques of digital marketing and devise a well-thought-out strategy not to achieve company goals but also to become competitive.
The first thing that you need to do is align your website accordingly, among many other things, ensuring that it is mobile-friendly, and has great and fresh content always.
When it comes to content, media companies must diversify. Gone are the days when a company only relied on blogs. Digital marketing best practices demand the use of different tools and techniques, as outlined above.
Lastly, with the need to use many types of digital marketing methods and the almost mandatory automation, integration is now a must-have.
Not sure how to move forward with integration for your media company? Schedule a free consultation with our integration experts — we’re always happy to help!
