Keyword Research Strategies
Multi-channel marketing is essential in today’s business environment, where brands must contend with an endless sea of competing content. Since modern consumers access information through numerous channels, it makes sense to cast a wide net to ensure that you can reach them via websites, email, videos and mobile devices.
With all that said, recognizing the need for multi-channel marketing is only the beginning. To effectively engage your audience, you must adopt comprehensive keyword research strategies that are tailored to each individual channel. While certain keywords may resonate with audiences on one channel, they may be completely ineffective on other channels, due to behavior, demographics, logistics and a host of other factors.
Let’s examine some of the more popular channels in more detail, and discuss different strategies for choosing keywords for a particular medium.
Search Engines
As Google’s ever-changing algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated and intuitive, keyword science for this channel has followed suit. These days, keyword research strategies must focus on long-tail key phrases and variations that can effectively mimic user thought patterns. Marketers must also stay on top of trending keywords, so they can take advantage of timely opportunities. While SEO keyword research used to be more of a “set it and forget it” process, modern strategies demand more flexibility and agility.
Mobile Apps
When it comes to keyword research for mobile apps, things are a bit different. An app name is more than a brand; it is probably your most important keyword. As such, it should be highly targeted and very descriptive. That said, since this medium comes with strict keyword character limits, long-tail variations are generally less effective. The use of app store keywords is a critical component in the promotion of your app. In turn, it’s important to ensure discoverability by paying close attention to how relevant every potential keyword is to your customers, your app and your business. You should also pay special attention to how your competitors use each particular keyword and round off your campaign with ongoing optimization.
Social Media
Since social media is community-focused, it’s important to have a keyword strategy that taps into that environment. This is best achieved by monitoring trends that give insight into what people are discussing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The timeliness of these trends dictate a more flexible approach to keyword research for this particular channel. What works today may not work tomorrow. At the same time, since search terms can peak unexpectedly, marketers must stay vigilant, so they can quickly identify trending keyword phrases before their competitors.
Email Campaigns
First impression is critical when it comes to engaging people through email marketing. It’s not uncommon for people to delete commercial emails without even opening them. Effective keyword research must consider the split-second decision-making that happens when an email appears in a potential customer’s inbox. To craft compelling content and subject lines, you have to get your keyword strategy right well in advance. For most organizations, this will mean the difference between high conversion rates and a complete lack of exposure.
YouTube
In many ways, your keyword research for YouTube needs to be the most flexible. For this channel, it’s important to know which keyword phrases are trending, so you can create and optimize your content accordingly. Depending on your marketing goals, you may want to focus on geo-specific keyword phrases that are trending in your particular region. On the other hand, if you are shooting for widespread brand awareness, you can look for trending searches and interests from pretty much all over. If local engagement is your goal, you can go a long way by simply adding a geo location to your titles, descriptions and tags. To effectively secure hyper-local SEO traffic, however, it pays to adopt a flexible approach that can leverage trending keyword phrases to attract more viewers.
While it can take a lot of extra effort to carefully customize your keyword research based on individual marketing channels, the rewards can be striking. By tailoring your keyword science strategy to fit a particular audience and medium, you will be much more likely to see actionable results that produce a better ROI.