Generic ad copy and keyword-stuffed blog posts won’t get you far. The key to effective marketing is intentionality. Every piece of your holistic marketing strategy should be fine-tuned to target the niche of people who are most likely to convert and provide business value. A holistic marketing strategy optimized with detail is marketing worth investing in.

So what does intentionality in a holistic marketing strategy mean?

Be specific about the goals, knowledgeable about the audience, and create every bit of content with the audience and specific goals in mind.

Seeing the opportunity

Algorithmia provides a machine learning infrastructure that allows enterprises to be more successful in their machine learning efforts. They came to us because they are in a competitive market, up against companies like Amazon and Microsoft in both SEO and digital advertising. As a relatively young company, they knew they would need to be intentional in their strategy in order to succeed in that competitive space.

With their goals for organic traffic and leads in mind, we performed thorough site, keyword, and content audits in order to better understand where Algorithmia’s SEO stood. They had been producing content, but not at scale, and were missing the opportunity to increase their domain authority by targeting top-of-funnel keywords with new and optimized articles.

This kind of content shows potential customers and Google that Algorithmia is an authority on all things machine learning.

We also conducted audits of their previous ad strategies and took a deep dive into our target audiences to determine the best way to get the right people to convert on our ads.

Creating an intentional plan of action

After gathering data on their audience and previous marketing strategies, we put a strategy into action. While we did add new top-of-funnel content to the SEO strategy, we didn’t forget about users further down the funnel. We continued to create content that serves the needs of more qualified audiences as well. A holistic approach is key to intentional marketing.

As for digital advertising, we honed in on very specific job titles, such as VP of Engineering, Senior Data Engineers, etc. We did days of research to truly understand who our audience personas are on a human level. This research included spending time on sites and social media pages that our audience spends time on and gaining a thorough understanding of their roles, responsibilities, pain points, and sense of humor. This information allows us to truly connect with users by mentioning familiar problems they face and other aspects of their daily lives, making our ads feel less like ads. Once we understood those target customers better, we created ad copy messaging and design that was tailored just for them.

We chose LinkedIn as our main ad platform, since it is where those ideal customers were most likely to be found and easiest to target. LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms allow users to convert directly on LinkedIn, which provides a more direct path to conversion and simplifies the user experience. We knew that our audiences were marketing-averse and sensitive to user experience, so we were pleased to see this ad feature more than double our conversion rate.

Tracking success

Tracking the right metrics is just as important as selecting the right strategy. For Algorithmia’s SEO, we created a dashboard of every piece of content published, and tracked performance metrics on a micro scale. Because Algorithmia’s goals were tied to the success of the content we were creating, it was important that their teams could see the results of each piece of content in real-time.

The content we produced for Algorithmia has proved itself to be an evergreen source of organic traffic to the site. We spent the first 4 months creating content, and an additional 4 months building links, and within that time our content earned over 10,000 organic visits from Google.

For digital advertising, understanding the quality of each lead, rather than just the quantity, was critical to understanding the ROI. So, we made a point to personally document the quality of every single lead that came in. We made sure we knew where the greatest number of high-quality leads were coming from, so that we could fine-tune our strategy even more as we got more performance data.

When we implemented the highly detailed ad targeting for our personas, we achieved a 48% increase in qualified leads month-over-month and a 187% increase in weekly percentage of quality leads over 9 weeks.

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Consistent follow through

The final step in an intentional strategy is to consistently follow through. In marketing, you can’t just set it and forget it. You have to continually watch for changes in performance and reevaluate results.

We continuously track and monitor keyword rankings to keep up with Google’s ever-changing SERPs and continually optimize our ad targeting, always looking for new ways to connect with our audience. Another thing to keep in mind is that digital advertising audiences get fatigued quickly, requiring ad copy and creative to be refreshed often. This also allows for testing and refining the messaging and tone of the ads.

Holistic marketing strategy should have a singular goal, serving the customer. Staying on top of changes in performance will allow you to help your company shift and change with the tides of digital marketing and bring in the best results over time.

It’s not one-size fits all

Every business serves real people, not algorithms. And people want to feel understood.

Sure, you could employ a cookie-cutter digital marketing strategy that works for a few months, call it a success, and move on. But cookie-cutter strategies won’t get you results. Stay customer focused, stay holistic, stay intentional.