How are you updating your online marketing to fit 2014?
As the online marketing industry evolves, your strategies need to evolve with it! It's a fast-moving industry, and it's important to update your strategies at least once a year to ensure you're staying on top of the latest trends.
So, here are our picks for the best ways to optimize your online marketing in the coming year!
Five Ways To Boost Inbound Marketing In 2014
1 - Better Targeting
Online leads respond best to messaging that they believe relates to them, directly. Many Internet users are quite savvy about spotting ads and other messaging that are so broadly-worded as to appeal to millions of people at once, and they usually tune those messages out.
Generally speaking, you'll see more success from your online marketing if you subdivide your markets and try to craft messages with more personal appeal. Good buyer personas make this targeting vastly easier.
2 - Higher-Quality Content
In the last couple years, Google has declared open war on poor-quality recycled content online, and have been all too willing to penalize webpages they believe aren't producing quality materials.
As Google moves towards being able to handle purely "natural language" searches, like "How do I keep my cat healthy," this is going to have a ripple effect on content online. Articles, videos, or slideshows that best address these searches -especially questions- will get the best search rankings.
If you're currently hiring bottom-bidder writers to recycle content from other articles, you're likely to see diminishing returns from this strategy. A small investment in better content creators can pay off significantly in search page results.
3 - Effective Landing Pages
One of the most effective ways of converting random website visitors into leads is through premium content that requires signup on a landing page. When someone gives you their contact information in exchange for a download, they're -knowingly- inviting you to advertise to them.
Increasingly, you can get better performance from landing pages by deliberately using them to screen out unqualified leads.
If you're only marketing to, say, C-level execs making at least $100K a year, include those questions in the signup process. Anyone who refuses to give their job title or income range is probably not qualified anyway, so why harvest their email? It would only waste your sales team's time.
4 - Social Media Engagement
There's an endless "chicken or egg" argument going on over whether social media engagement causes better search engine result placement, or if better SERPs bring more social activity.
Whichever it is, the research in the last couple years has been remarkably constant: If you have high social media 
activity, you're likely to have high search rankings as well. (Or possibly vice-versa.)
Currently, and unsurprisingly, Google+ engagement correlates most closely to higher Google search page rankings. However, Facebook engagement isn't far behind. You should definitely look into expanding your social media operations in 2014, to leverage this effect.
5 - Search Engine Optimization
"Good old fashioned" SEO isn't dead (yet), and it's still a vital part of your online marketing strategies.Just as a quick wrapup of tips for modifying your SEO in 2014:
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Pure keywords are now nearly useless. Target key phrases with variations, or else target questions people are likely to type into Google.
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Be a polite linker. Try to include the name of the site and a description of what you're linking, to encourage others to do the same for you.
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Share your new content - especially premium offers - through your social media outlets, while encouraging users to share.
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Utilize more of Google's internal promotional tools, like using G+ Authorship tags and a full Google Places profile. Also unsurprisingly, Google rewards websites using their proprietary services with better search placement.
Feel free to add to these tips in the comment section below!
