The key things you need to know from BrightonSEO

We’re big fans of any sort of takeaway in the office, mainly those we can eat but also those we can learn from. Just last month, our Co-founder Amy Simpson and Digital Marketing Specialist Vik Pearce headed down to BrightonSEO, soaking up everything you need to know about digital marketing.

From the latest tips and tricks in paid social and influencer marketing, to the benefits of building watertight SEO strategies, sit back and take in our experts’ key titbits from BrightonSEO this year.

Paid Social and Influencer Marketing

Activating paid social campaigns on your target social channels can be a huge driver for generating new business leads for your company, reaching target audiences beyond your existing following. But, this can often come with challenges, primarily the difficulties of building trust amongst audiences through sponsored brand-created content.

According to experts at BrightonSEO, user generated social content gives companies a 28% increase in engagement on average, and is 92% more trusted amongst audiences. A great way to capitalise on this is through outsourcing Influencers, or Brand Ambassadors, to build further awareness of the products and services you provide.

With influencer marketing performing as high as 60% better than brand-created content, it’s hard to deny its effectiveness when it comes to getting your brand name out there. Plus, there are plenty of options to choose from when it comes to onboarding an Influencer that’s right for your brand. From Micro to Macro, and the rise of the ‘Genuinfluencer’, there are a wealth of options that work to optimise engagement, reach and brand trust depending on which route you choose to follow:

• The Micro Influencer – Tends to have a smaller following of around 10,000, but can gain as much as 7 times more engagement than Maxi Influencers through building a close-knit community of followers.

• The Macro Influencer – Can have a follower base as large as 1,000,000 and are often considered to have celebrity status. Macro Influencers can be hugely prominent figures in creating trends and building ‘hype’ around specific products and services.

• The Genuinfluencer – Seeing a recent spike in popularity, ‘Genuinfluencers’ are trusted widely by their following because they genuinely believe in the product, and are advocates of the brand. They will often create values-based content, giving honest and detailed opinions on brands’ offerings that will help to build a more stable client base.

The key takeaway here is to diversify paid social and use a range of channels to hit your marketing objectives. Choosing the right form of paid social promotion entirely depends on your specific goals, and to build trust and loyalty amongst consumers, it’s important to get creative with user generated content to give a more organic feel to your social output.

SEO

SEO is a key strategy for driving traffic to your online platforms. Having a well-constructed SEO strategy will help to build site engagement with your key target audience, and can ultimately generate important new leads.

The more recently developed concept of purpose driven SEO really caught our experts’ attention, and can be key to ensuring your values align with the audience you’re reaching. Creating citable content around your mission, product and the story of your brand that is both educational and relevant to the reader is vital. By including well constructed data, research and opinions, audiences will be able to easily reference your content time and time again, creating valuable backlinks for your website.

It’s also important to centre your keyword research on primary users, rather than competitors, to differentiate your offering and really hone in on generating leads. Creating a simple reporting system that can easily determine leads, conversions and sales is key to analysing SEO success here. Plus, ongoing monitoring at a consistent rate IS in fact different from reporting, and just as important to ensuring your SEO strategy is doing its job!

So there we have it. Our key digital marketing specialist takeaways from BrightonSEO this year. The more your business adapts to the ever-changing world of digital marketing, the better positioned you’ll be to direct online traffic to generate all important leads. If you’re looking for an outsourced marketing team to help create a watertight digital marketing strategy, get in touch today. We’d love to chat.