Relating my own discoveries and implementations to Sophia Eng’s strategies from her lesson in CXL Institute.
Vantage Point
Last week, I went over various channels that Sophia Eng, a Digital Marketing Strategist at InVision App, suggested as good starting points for digital marketers. For this particular article, I’m hoping to discuss her strategies further as it relates to how I’ve utilized it or, for any strategies that I’ve yet to implement, how I plan to do so.
A recurring theme in Eng’s lesson on CXL Institute is her recommendation that you’ll have to optimize your strategy for your specific budget and team. As a small fry, I can take my time reviewing strategies that major movers make to study what they’re doing well and what they could improve on.
Moving at a pace that I define, I can take my time looking at channels that may be underutilized by larger companies. Additionally, I can choose to focus on smaller niches that larger companies may not see as profitable enough to spend resources on. Of course, whether or not I have the budget to optimize in those channels is another question…
Still, it’s a great vantage point for me to be able to review strategies by larger companies without having a major deadline or management to answer to if I should miss any deadlines I’ve set for myself. This freedom is incredibly refreshing and allows me to run through multiple strategies as fast or slow as I need in order to answer the questions I have.
Just Socializing
Marketing across social media isn’t an “underutilized channel”. Not by a long shot. Yet, it’s still a great channel, in my opinion, for any company large or small. As a small company, I feel it’s even more impactful to be able to reach out to my community.
Some companies tend to not put too much emphasis on social media marketing (SMM) because, as Eng discusses, they feel ROI is difficult to track. This, as Eng continues, is a total myth as Google Analytics allows you to see where your traffic is coming from which allows you to track different social campaigns.
I have run a few campaigns myself across Facebook and have received various results depending on the product or goal I’m trying to push for. So far, I’ve been able to measure ROI on these campaigns pretty easily. Don’t ask me what my ROI is, though...
Social media is purely branding for your company or product. Create a great brand and you can generate tons of leads, allowing you to build and engage deeper relationships with your customers. I’ve definitely focused heavily on trying to build and perfect my brand in order to generate more organic growth.
I especially love social media marketing because it allows me to be creative and develop a coherent message for my audiences. This allows me to focus on strategy and create multiple targeted campaigns for various audiences, which has been amazing depending on the goal I had in mind. Admittingly, I’ve yet to hit a truly viral post, but I’ve definitely had a few good posts that generate multiple levels of engagement. For any company, social media marketing definitely is a great place to start off, even if just to test campaigns or content for other channels.
Knowing What to Look For
Another channel that I’ve been personally trying to educate myself on and continue to build out for my website is search engine optimization (SEO). There are tons of resources out there on SEO that can be picked up for free, honestly. I’ve done a lot of this myself so the information in Sophia’s lesson was not new to me, but did continue to build on what I’ve picked up so far.
One thing I did agree with Sophia on is that SEO is not automatic. You definitely get what you put into this channel. I’m still trying to master this strategy, though. Sophia discussed what Google looks at in order to determine whether or not your website will be successful, such as domain authority, page authority, content schedule, and popularity. To a certain extent, this seemed like basic knowledge, but the way Sophia explained it seemed to make more sense. I guess it was the connection I was missing with the random information floating around in my head.
As I mentioned in my previous article last week, I kept pausing the lesson with Sophia and jumped over to my website to work on optimization. While doing so, I found that I had random keywords such as “game” and “studio” in my SEO settings. I have no idea why I did that, but I definitely fixed it right away. I still need to do more research because I only have a rough idea of where my keywords fall in terms of rank. Still, I know I’m not trying to rank #1 in any of the keywords. I’d rather try to rank for keywords that are more inline with my company and mission statement.
One strategy in particular that I’ve found worked on both website SEO and ASO for mobile apps is to run through competitors and review their own keywords. This not only tells me what their strategy is but also how they position themselves. Which allows me to decide whether I want to compete for the same position or ensures me that the position I’ve chosen will have less competition. As I mentioned, I’m still working on SEO but I think I’ve managed to get my ASO to a much better place than it was before. Of course, I’m always open to criticism and feedback! Check out my developer page on the App Store or Google Play Store and let me know what you think!
Website Optimizations
One thing that I do often is Google myself. Not only that, I Google my company and mobile products to determine how I’m improving my SEO. I’m still trying to get better at this (I know, I’ve mentioned that several times…) but there’s always more things to learn and try out! Sophia talks further about link building and how search engines use links to determine how a page ranks in their results.
While .edu and .gov give you extra domain authority, I can’t really utilize either option for my videogame company. Still, there are other options for me, such as optimizing the content on my website, improving click through rate to improve SEO, adding keywords to my URL strings, optimizing header tags, and adding keywords to my alt-text for search engines. I actually recently implemented that last one and would be interested in finding out whether or not anyone has seen success with it.
I’ve already spent a ton of time working through my website while listening to Sophia’s lessons. It’s been pretty great so far and I’m definitely ready for the upcoming lessons. As always, stay tuned for the next articles!