What’s old seems to be new again for digital marketing in 2022.
Ten years ago, Landscape Management published my thoughts for engaging your community with social media. Those recommended tactics not only work with social media today, but any other digital platform you use to attract an audience.
- Learn from the community
- Provide your unique perspective
- Share only the best content
We’ve learned one thing about social media since those early days. What seems too good to be true usually is. The release of Facebook’s like feature, for example, was the beginning of a series of changes that influenced the user experience for everyone. This challenged businesses who had been successfully using Facebook to communicate their value and drive business growth.
Before social media marketing, we simply had social media that companies used for learning about their communities. You can expect a resurgence of related practices thanks to the growth of emerging platforms such as Discord.
You may never use Discord, a platform dominated by gamers and crypto enthusiasts, but others will come along that share its practical, community focus. Whatever happens, you’ll want to get ready by making a few changes to your website content.
Package your content to be the best
Nowadays, it’s not enough for a business to be better. To gain traction with digital marketing you must be the best, and that means picking a lane you can dominate. This can be a product or service niche, service area, or most likely, a combination of both.
Consumers often complain that nobody is listening to them. Google Reviews are an abundant source for these comments. It’s one way to learn their biggest challenges that your marketing can then address.
The key is providing comprehensive solutions and making them easily findable. Instead of spreading content across your website, take the best solutions to the most relevant customer problems to create guides.
These guides are known as hub pages. They are online resources that bring together everything a potential lead needs to know about a certain topic, thereby making them pages that are almost guaranteed to boost your SEO.
You are packaging this content so that it clearly speaks to its intended audience, your customers and anyone that fits that ideal buyer profile to attract them to your company.
Typical hub page design
Hub pages are typically titled “The Ultimate Guide to ….” Potential hub page guide examples may include:
- Outdoor kitchens
- Landscape design
- Organic lawn care
You can further niche down the focus of your guide by targeting a county, city or state, or a portion of one, such as Southwest Ohio.
The structure of the hub page guide is usually 3-5 supporting sub-themes that support the primary topic theme. You may have one, two or three paragraphs of content for each sub-theme with links to and from 3-5 blog posts from within your site. These may be earlier content that you have updated and refreshed for relevance to the hub page.
As you may have already realized, now you have a focused page with great content and upwards of a dozen links from your website. The main theme, supporting sub-themes, and inbound links all send a strong signal to Google that this is the best of the best and deserves to rank highly.
Now you are ready to share it, in whole or part. Use it to show your future customers you are the best company for their next landscaping or lawn care project.
