Digital promotions are essential for increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to a particular website and generating activity. These needs should be considered at the outset, such as choosing a suitable brand name which corresponds to a sensible URL or Twitter handle for the project. It is good practice to ensure that: –
- Naming conventions do not limit future use (e.g. Dialogue2010).
- Any words used are easy to spell.
- The solution is short and subsequently memorable. Shorter the better.
- The solution is meaningful – to the extent that it could be guessed.
- Special characters and words with double meaning are avoided.
Multiple pages, hashtags, links or domains can be useful for tracking purposes as it is often useful to assess the impact of individual campaigns. Using a URL shortener such as bitly.com or goo.gl will provide extra space for communications and help track interactions with any particular piece of content.
Assuming that the digital channel best fits a target audience, some sort of digital marketing (free or paid) will be necessary to gain the attention to a participation opportunity or output.
Example low-cost methods are typically based on ‘owned’ media and include: –
- Email distribution (It is best to use tool to manage the process, such as MailChimp. This will help you measure interactions and manage subscriber lists as well as avoid your emails getting listed as spam);
- Tweets by influencers – this may involve asking influencers to re-tweet your content;
- Text messaging;
- Targeting posts on popular public spaces in existing social networks, forums, groups or web pages. For example, writing on the comments section of a Facebook wall or online forum;
- Authoring specific content (e.g. ‘guest’ blogging);
- Creating travelling ‘widgets’ or banners which can be displayed in a prominent position within your network of websites;
- Using email signatures for signposting purposes;
- Including digital links on printed materials;
- Deep linking to external content in order to generate search engine attention;
- Getting listed in a directory;
- Putting ‘social sharing’ buttons on existing content to make the process of sharing easier;
- Publish slides (presentations) and research to content networks such as such as Slideshare and Google Scholar in order to create inbound links;
- Basic search engine optimisation (SEO).
Example paid methods include: –
- Content marketing (e.g. sponsoring a particular piece of content or advertorials, such as YouTube Ads);
- Sponsoring search engine keywords;
- Social media marketing (e.g. Facebook or Twitter ads);
- Paying a popular influencer to create and share content on your behalf.
It is worth noting that the process of creating (but not placing) and advert for a social network can help generate useful insights. For example, Facebook Ads provide an estimated reach for unpublished adverts based on and any particular attribute that you wish to target in their network (e.g. geography, age, interests, gender). Similarly, Google Adwords Keyword Planner can be used to see how a list of keywords might perform.
Search is the gateway to content discovery, with around 80% of internet users entering websites via a search engine. Ensuring that content is useful, relevant and deep linked as well as serving it quickly and in a format which helps search engines index it will improve the way content is retrieved.
This article originally appeared on tCI Wiki
