There’s a sweet spot in online marketing that lies somewhere between “obnoxious” and “invisible/silent,” and that sweet spot is most commonly referred to as “relevance.” In this context, being—and staying—relevant means inserting yourself appropriately into the internet in a way that the right people (also known as “qualified leads”) will find, trust, and buy from you.
Achieving relevance should be treated like achieving any other necessary balance: constantly approach the limit of perfection, and you’ll be fine.
Although we think that piece of advice is sufficient, we’re going to hedge our bets and give you five types of relevance, also known as “things”
- Social fitness
- SEO-friendly content
- Web functionality
- Word-of-mouth
- General authenticity and accuracy
Social Fitness: Being socially fit involves more than occasionally (or even always) piggybacking off of a Twitter trending topic—such a “strategy” is ad hoc, superficial, and will guarantee you a spot among the other noise. Instead, your brand can exercise social fitness by generating and emitting content that genuinely interests your audience.
Specifically, this means refraining from scheduling a barrage of self-promotional Facebook updates, or updating more than three times a day. Break the rule, and no one will “like” you.
SEO-friendly content: While it’s not breaking news that a well-optimized site makes your brand “more Googleable,” search engine algorithms aren’t concerned merely with load time or outstanding meta data, but instead are inherently based on what humans would deem relevant. This correlation—technically beneficial as proportionately related to actually useful—implies that all of your digital content should cater to your audience, vertical, and offerings specific to your brand.
Web functionality: We’ve stressed the importance of being earnest as well as of being adaptable and generally not-broken, and we’ve yet to change our stance. If you have invalid HTML, broken links, or a site you wouldn’t consider beautiful, then your digital real estate isn’t as functional as it should be, and you could very well end up MySpacing around until you’ve lost funding, credibility, and the ability to avoid turning into a marketers’ meme.
Word-of-mouth-ness: It’s great that your brand has a hold of its internet relevance, but is this doing anything for your business? Successful online marketing should impact your bottom line if you’ve properly connected your goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics. The Holy Grail of online marketing accomplishments—aside from, say, increased sales—is offline mentions and purchases. If consumers actively seek out your brand in stores (“willingness to search”), mention it to their friends (“willingness to recommend”), you’ve earned both on- and offline loyalty.
“To thine own self be true”: Shakespeare said it, and now we have, too. Relevance is a two-way street: your digital properties need to be relevant to your audience but also to your brand. More precisely, true relevance means showcasing your brand’s products and beliefs.
Thank you once again for reading another 5 Things. This is our 15th post–you are now 75 Things smarter than you were before we met.