The digital landscape is so fragmented for businesses these days, and in-house marketers and business owners generally cannot grasp how all of these properties interact. Take a look at this graphic that shows all of the marketing technologies available in Jan 2015. Terrifying, right? So how do you explain all of this in the simplest terms possible?
Information Flow
So as a business, you are posting various bits of content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, your blog, directories, Instagram, Squidoo, Flickr and Youtube. Most businesses view all of these as being completely separate digital marketing tools, without realizing that the picture should be so much more coherent than that.
Control of Message
The only platform that you control completely is your website. This is the only platform that you have complete control over what content appears, how the thing looks and who can put their opinion forward. This makes it one of the most valuable tools in your marketing arsenal, as it encapsulates your brand and your message.
I can hear some people chiming in, “What about your blog?” In this day and age, most websites are in fact blogs and the two aren’t really separate.
So how does it all tie in together?
Think of all of your digital properties – your digital property portfolio – as a waterfall. Each of these different platforms is a level of the waterfall. Your digital traffic is the water that cascades down the levels. Traffic can easily be transferred between the different levels, but is all heading in the same direction – straight towards the pool at the bottom.
The pool at the bottom is your website. All (or most) of your posts on the different platforms should link back to the website, allowing information to flow back to the pool. I don’t mean link back to the homepage, but write content for your website which then allows you to post to various platforms and link back to the site for more information. This way you bring your traffic back to your core digital property, your deep pool of information about your business.
This does mean that your pool needs to be deep. If you have a 5 page website, there are only so many legitimate links you could build and your followers will get bored of being referred back to the same content. So make sure you add content that is legitimate, well thought out, relevant and engaging.
By making your waterfall complex, with multiple levels, and a deep, clear pool, you ensure that you will get the most out of your digital properties. We use the waterfall analogy a lot in our social media training, so contact us to learn more about it.
