Today, I'm going to share some of the most important things that digital marketers often
ignore but really shouldn't be ignoring.
So let's kick things off with the first thing that often gets overlooked and that's platform intent.
Now, chances are, you haven't heard of platform intent.
That's because I just made it up.
But nevertheless, I think it's one of the most common and important things that digital
marketers ignore whether they're in the beginner or advanced categories.
So, what is platform intent?
Platform intent refers to a user's subconscious intent when they go to a specific platform.
For example, when you login to Pinterest, you're probably looking for visual ideas or inspiration.
On Google search, you're looking for straight-up answers to problems.
And on YouTube, you probably want to be entertained or learn something.
We go to different websites with different intentions.
That means when you create marketing campaigns, you should match your format
and messaging to the primary platform intent so you can connect with people in that moment
where they are.
For example, Rebecca who manages our Twitter account repurposed this blog post
into a tweet thread.
And rather than copying and pasting everything from the post, she gets that many Twitter users
login for snackable advice.
And that's exactly what she's done.
She summarized each point with only the most important information.
So the next time you want to take 1 piece of content and turn it into 47 different ones,
remember that "repurposing" is not "republishing."
Alright, the second thing that digital marketers ignore are competitors in different niches.
Now, it totally makes sense to keep an eye on your direct competitors and to learn from
the good and ditch the bad.
But it's also important to keep an eye on what marketers in other niches are doing,
otherwise, you'll miss out on some super- smart strategies that can be applied straight
to your business.
For example, you might have heard of Canva, a popular design tool made for non-designers.
Now, if you're anything like me, you may have stopped using their tool and completely forgot
about them.
But did you know that they've grown organic traffic to nearly 100 million monthly organic visits?
I know, right?
I was in complete shock and knew I had to dig deeper.
So I went over to the Site Structure report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer and after about 10
minutes of research, I came up with content ideas for a completely unrelated niche and
product – a dating app.
Here's what I mean.
Canva has done a really good job at scaling based on a verb related to design – create.
You can create logos, resumes, posters, you name it.
They have landing pages for them all.
Now, for a dating site, you can apply the same principle with verbs like "date" and "marry."
Let's take common phrases using those words and variations of those words and run them
through a search in Keywords Explorer.
Now, if we head over to the matching terms report, you'll see a ton of keyword ideas that
cumulatively get millions of searches every single month in the US alone.
Create content for these pages that matches searcher intent and can help with conversions,
and you're now on your way to replicating Canva's create subfolder.
Alright, the next thing digital marketers tend to ignore is omnichannel user experience.
Now, when people think of UX, they often think of apps, onboarding, sign up forms,
or landing pages.
But today user experience needs to be looked at more holistically.
Let me explain.
Around a decade ago, marketers would look through Google Analytics and put all of their
efforts to improve metrics like time on page and bounce rate because they felt like these
were indicative of a visitor's experience.
And it kind of made sense because if people stay on a website for a long time and navigate
to other pages within the site, then they may be having a good user experience.
Well, today, marketing is more focused around customer journeys and experiences rather than
one off pageviews or GA metrics that lack context.
We want people to have a positive experience every time they have an interaction with our
brand, whether it's with our product, content, through social media or direct on live chat
with customer service.
Now, in my opinion, the best way to "optimize" for so-called omnichannel UX is to just use
some common sense.
For example, we add chapters to nearly all of our videos because we live in a world of
power skimming.
We do the same for blog posts by using a table of contents that actually floats
with you so you can jump up and down to the places you want to go.
We avoid pop-ups because marketers really don't like them and that's who we're marketing to.
We have live chat 24/5 because we understand people want to get help with our product as
soon as possible.
These experiences accumulate to how people see Ahrefs as a brand and for many,
it determines whether they want to do business with us.
Now, because common sense isn't always so common, I recommend finding ways to
validate your ideas.
You can do this by collecting user testing data, heatmap data, or user generated feedback.
For example, we have this rating system at the end of our blog posts which gives
us an idea if people liked or disliked our content.
And we do the same through live chat.
Speaking of feedback, one of the most important things that I see marketers
neglect is talking to customers.
And the reason why this is such a huge mistake is because you can't do good
marketing if you don't know exactly who you're marketing to.
By having conversations with customers, you get to know the problems they face, the needs
they have, and you can even ask selfish questions like how they found you or what made them choose
you over another company.
This is exactly why at Ahrefs, all of our content marketers spend their first 2 months in support
helping our customers.
And it really doesn't stop after 2 months.
Personally, I still read through support chats and monitor our company's Twitter mentions.
And occasionally I'll jump on an Enterprise call to get a better understanding of bigger
companies' needs.
Overall, I think it's important to learn how you can best serve different types of customers
through your marketing and it should be an ongoing process.
So if customer conversations are something you've put on the backburner, I highly recommend
sending an email or two to schedule some calls.
Alright, the next thing that I see marketers ignore time and time again is their product.
Oftentimes, digital marketers get stuck in the metrics.
We obsess over traffic, views, likes, comments, subscribers and basically anything else that
looks cute and clickbaity in a title.
And that often comes at the cost of forgetting that there's a product we should be marketing.
When your product is no longer at the center of your marketing, things start to get fuzzy
and you start chasing vanity metrics that won't drive any real value to your business.
That's why at Ahrefs, we don't just create content just for the sake of traffic.
Nearly all content we create is product-led, which ensures that our marketing efforts are
meaningful because they're centered around the thing that matters most in our company:
our product.
Now, if you want a blueprint to create product-led content so you and your team can maintain that
100% laser focus in your marketing, then you need to watch our video on product-led content
where I break down exactly how we use it to grow our revenue.
I'll see you in the next tutorial.