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Marketing Alignment

The need for Marketing Alignment with SEO Strategies for a Multi-Modal Approach

Marketing Alignment with SEO and Content is Needed for a Multi-Modal Approach

Updated 8.17.2024

A multi-modal approach demands marketing alignment with SEO strategies for everyone else involved in attaining business goals.

Success requires teams to stop building go-to-market strategies independently. Digital marketing managers, SEO consultants, and content writers don’t just solve problems; they show opportunities. They avoid problems from surfacing by being team players and valuing core alignment. Your SEO strategy should be aligned with your overall marketing plan. All optimized content performs better if you send traffic to it via multiple channels and in multiple formats, such as adding auditory content.

Keeping ahead of consumer preferences for multiple consumption formats requires a certain level of ongoing marketing research. By gaining maximum marketing, content, and SEO alignment, you may increase sales and reach your business goals. You’ll need a nuanced strategy that includes data collection, amazing content, multiple owned media types, Knowledge Graph management, integrated social media marketing, schema markup, and more.

Brands that optimize all of their digital assets for optimal connectivity with Google will come out ahead where multimodality matters. Brands that maximize the utility of multilingualism, entity identification, Google Analytics, Search Console, Schema, Google Business Profile optimization, semantic SEO strategies, and more will win big.

Let’s back up and first define what marketing alignment means.

Table of Contents

Given the introduction of the new Google Search Generative Experience, all teams involved with SEO, digital marketing, and content creation need more agility than ever.

What is Marketing Alignment?

Marketing alignment is a shared system of communication, strategy, and goals that enable marketing, SEO, content, and sales to operate as a unified organization. It will take this level of team work to win in emerging SEO strategies like showing up in new Google Search Generative Expereinces’ new SERP formats.

Success shared by aligned teams is led by one appointed person who has a very thorough knowledge of the digital marketing landscape. Knowing that annual seasons, consumer trends, competitive elements, search and user demands continually change, alignment creates the ability to execute on many different angles to deliver high-impact marketing. Team alignment producted better changes of earning visibility in “Ask a follow up” questions and People also search for featured snippets.

Ideas, strategies, and talent all play a role throughout the process of alignment between marketing, SEO, content writing, sales, product, and leadership. But if you get it wrong or cannot execute all that effort and skill can quickly be recognized for falling short. Your revenue and business future are at stake.

Sales and marketing alignment is an accessible process of communication, strategy, and goal tracking that ensures both marketing and sales teams function as a unified organization. Working in a unified manner aligns teams to deliver high-impact results, boost meaningful sales, and ultimately increase revenue.

This required level of overall management and execution must be done at a high level by your Head of Marketing. An experienced marketing director oversees and supports product content strategy development and sales teams. The director of product content strategy shares lessons learned when directing product documentation teams. The individual implementing related task does so better when they connect the dots and feel that their work is valued.

Every team member is involved in shaping and executing an aligned SEO and marketing strategy. This article will address how to integrate successful SEO with other online marketing strategies.

Align Topic Hubs to Your Business Model

Source Context informs your strategy for creating a topic hub and query network. If your Source Context lacks alignment for the Keyword Query Context, then PageRank matters little. Stick to topic entities that align with your business niche and who you are. Otherwise search engines won’t rank your off-topic web page as it doesn’t align with your audience.

SEO is best as a natural search-related business consultancy that meets people’s needs. You must avoid coming across as “stuffing keywords” here and there in an attempt to influence search engines. If your business model and marketing strategy are wrong, your chances of publishing content that is consumed keep decreasing.

You need a concrete web findable business entity, not just a website. Agile marketing strategies help you flow with how people find answers using Google Entity Search.

What is a Multi-Modal Approach?

Multi-module projects require analyzing entity identities, the co-occurrences of words, information in visual, audio, and tactile modalities. It relies on the latest research advances, topic modeling, natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and an overview of how each is being implemented on Google Search.

Google is relying more on Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to improve the customer journey across organic search, Lens, Google Maps, the Google Assistant other surfaces. MUM is multi-modal and manages vision, auditory, and language understanding simultaneously. Traditional AI models can only assess one modality of information at a time. They can take in text, images, video, or audio — but typically not all at once as MUM does.

It helps retailers sell products. Google demonstrates that MUM would understand a product image and connect it with consumers’ questions. It then surfaces a blog or product page with relevant details. [1] You can learn how Google sees your QA content and FAQ markup.

Along comes Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) and introduces the need to work on E-A-T (a brand concept to Google), as well. Today, to obtain relevant, valued content by Google, MUM, and Metaverse are just two additional examples of essential changes in search marketing. Google is continually driving new innovations such as MUM, (co-occurences of the author with relevant terms), image search, video and listen-only content in addition to text-based content.

What is an Overall Marketing Strategy?

An over-arching marketing strategy encompasses all aspects of a business’s overall plan for reaching their prospective audience and converting them into customers of their products or services. It requires a full-scale marketing strategy including the company’s core value proposition, brand footprint, data on target consumer demographics, and the high-level elements needed per niche.

A more holistic approach to your online presence may lift any brand or team into better workflows and alignment. Depending on the niche and audience, it may include multi-sensory learning. It’s easy for anyone to cherry-pick tasks they are familiar with or the most exciting things to optimize for. This often leaves other potentially more important SEO strategies on a waitlist.

Why is Marketing Alignment with SEO Important?

A repeatable model for empowering cross-functional collaboration lets managers easily engage one another using common language, thus eliminating confusion on roles, responsibilities, and expectations.

Given the saying, “there are no bad teams, only bad leaders”, digital marketing managers ultimately answer for a company’s marketing success. Most that are successful attribute it to their teams. Remember this when you try to align the marketing, sales, and customer success teams. When it comes to how well does your web presence works, it’s about overall quality.

Is it comprehensive? Consistent? Does it work for users? Does it remove buyers’ pain points? Are siloed departments working in a detached, disparate manner or in harmony? How can you extend your client’s customer community?

“The overarching problem that is most often at the root of why a business isn’t making more money is misalignment.” – Tara McMullin on Explore What Works [2]

 

Overcoming common disconnects between teams:

The following thoughts come from my personal experence and passion to see collaborative marketing yield greater client success. It starts by creating unity between:

  • Sales and marketing departments.
  • Web design/development and SEO departments.
  • Content writers and SEO strategists.
  • CEOs’ concepts and the realities implementers face.
  • Social media departments losing site of overall business goals.
  • Earned search and paid search departments.
  • Online vs offline, traditional vs non-traditional, native vs non-native.

SEO in not a standalone project. Nor is content writing, web development, social media, brand building, SERP optimization, or paid search. None should be a “siloed marketing channel”. For example, SEO intertwines with a business’s objectives and processes at every turn. Customer-based brand equity in a technologically fast-paced, connected, and competitive market has become a necessary commodity.

At times, not every individual is a team player. Sometimes you just have to move on to meet deadlines and client expectations.

Adaptive thinking to expand your marketing reach.

  • Think in terms of what provides the most value rather than working off a checklist.
  • Think in terms of what may get you lost in the weeds versus addressing tasks that make a significant difference.
  • Consider if leads are properly qualified, or prioritized, as they enter the funnel.
  • Identify which projects are most helpful to other efforts.
  • Think in terms of what creates a healthy internal and consumer-faced environment.
  • Think about what sustains the health of the company’s brand.

The Need for Marketing Alignment

The most valuable and least understood aspect of business growth is the need for marketing alignment.

The one thing that can cripple your marketing strategies more than anything else is the lack of overall alignment between everything your business does online, offline, internal, external from concept to execution to reach your target audience. B2B marketing as well as B2C marketing need content hubs with topical authority that provide proper contextual flow and a semantic content network. However, too many simply publish more content without an overarching plan for each content piece.

Planning starts with the alignment of your business goals and your consumer’s needs. It is founded on strategic market research, tried and tested strategies until you find what works best. Yet, after all that, success only truly occurs if you have the ability to execute. Digital marketing managers must then demonstrate why what worked, where, and how to take it forward.

How Marketing Leads can Build Marketing AlignmentHow Marketing Leads can Build Marketing Alignment

1. Supply Diverse Teams with Integrated Strategies.

2. Knowledge Management.

3. Training on implementing a multi-Module approach.

4. Predictive Ranking Understanding.

5. Create Digital Trails on Supportive Third-Party Platforms.

6. Prepare for the Future of Digital Data Measurement.

7. Readiness: An Always-on Mindset.

8. Focus on opportunities over fixes.

We’ll now cover each aspect more in-depth.

1. Supply Diverse Teams with Integrated Strategies

A marketing lead should stop, change, or redesign a marketing strategy as needed. Without an accurate overall perspective, what you find in the search results for a specific query is not what the searcher on the other side of the globe might see. Or even the searcher in your same neighborhood might see if their intent and search history are different.

Google’s search results are also tailored by global events, seasons, and trends. Meaning that controlling a brand’s narrative of what is shown in SERPs for a specific keyword phrase is a task often requiring day in and day out observation and improvement strategies.

With some brands already gearing up for the new metaverse branding opportunities, expanding your AR/VR technology may be pivotal to engage more customers and improve conversion rates. We already see augmented reality influencing e-Commerce. For example, Shopify now provides a new feature for product pages by offering built-in support for 3D visual models and video. Simply upload a 3D model or video directly to your product pages easily and without the need for custom code or a third-party app.

Some people might buck change if the learning curve feels overwhelming. Or it takes things out of their sphere of knowledge or control. “I like what I heard one team player say, “I’m not here to be right; I’m here to get it right!”

“Agree to win together!”

 

2. Knowledge Management

It’s a real skill to convert one’s marketing knowledge into concepts clients understand. Equally, when a project is assigned to a particular team, it is necessary for all persons involved in the outcome to have visibility into the process. Knowledge management benefits include improved teamwork, teaching newcomers, advancing sales, reviewing results, and reaching KPIs faster. Sharing valuable information and collaboration lets the knowledge that individuals gain be best utilized.

Only by understanding each business’s unique internal process for awareness and evaluation will you be able to create a truly effective marketing strategy that gets buy-in and alignment. We all know that relationally connected customers tend to become repeat customers, and repeat customers are vital to business success.

Knowledge managment involves earning and claiming a Google Knowledge Graph and knowing what it takes to gain a presense in Google Top Stories and other featured snippets. This requires exceptional team work and willingness to be flexible.

A good process for gaining marketing alignment with clients is to:

  • Provide clear options; avoid ambiguous communications.
  • Explain these options and invite discussion to help them to consider each option as needed.
  • Summarize with a recommendation.
  • Let them choose and support their choice.

Uncomfortable conversation can turn into the most valuable one. Abandoning your ideal solution for the sake of progress often comes with an openness that you don’t know everything about your client’s business or needs. When we’re willing to be vulnerable it can lead to figuring out the way forward WITH the client.

A multi-modal approach includes considering online positioning across various ways to reach your audience. To stay in front of your customers’ eyes you need to use video, audio, rich imagery, and all effective content types, in addition to text. When everyone is in the room, make the most of it. It’s hard to restage these moments. Additionally, in most markets, an effective search marketing strategy combines both paid and organic data insights. Likely, your business will need multiple avenues to compete in tighter markets.

3. Training on implementing a multi-modal approach

Everything about your brand is connected and related, and understanding that is key. It’s a challenging marketing alignment concept to grasp for most digital marketers.

A multi-modal approach includes considering online positioning across various channels to reach your audience. To stay in front of your customers’ eyes you need to use video, audio, rich imagery, and all effective content types, in addition to text. When training and everyone are in the room, make the most of it. It’s hard to restage these moments. Additionally, in most markets, an effective search marketing strategy combines both paid and organic data-insights. Likely, your business will need multiple avenues to compete in tighter markets. The best ideas come when these teams brainstorm together.

We know that buying behavior will change. The only constant is that consumers will use new technology to discover products and brands. This means that you may need to leverage one strategy over the other at a certain time. A marketing roadmap needs built-in flexibility to adapt as search and buyer patterns adjust. When you have multiple sales channels to support, choosing the best marketing stack to seamlessly integrate daily operations is crucial. It takes dedicated people on each task to get it done.

It’s a continual endeavor to identify distinctive places and formats for your messaging in relation to what your target audience wants. In essence, effective search marketing is optimizing your content and unique value proposition with buy-in at all levels.

4. Predictive Ranking Understanding

Create different thresholds that support various search intents with topical maps. Know how query processing, text classification, relationships between search queries, how to answer important questions, major and minor search intents, and how competitor analysis influences what you’ll need to invest. Local businesses will need an additional ranking strategy for local map pack inclusion.

To be findable, align with how matching search queries works to get in front of your audience. Use multiple formats to connect the way they like to hear from you. Informational content is more valuable than “placing keywords” and meets consumers’ needs early and mid-funnel. A forward-thinking approach helps to predict your audience’s needs. when everyone shares the end goal; predictions are more likely to become reality.

Structured data can parse, identify, and extract information with a high level of reliability. As the use of structured data continues to expand, the benefit of structuring information goes beyond search engine support and also provides value when analyzing web metrics for future decisions.

E-Commerce schema markup may indirectly influence ranking potential by helping the page be understood. However, page content must align with other factors. Meaning, cooperation, and alignment between content writers, web designers, SEOs, and the development team are vital. Schema may conflict with existing extensions, plugins, or other entities. So successful structured data implementation also relies on team buy-in and shared understanding. It’s important to schedule regular schema structured data audits to fix issues and find new opportunities.

5. Create Digital Trails on Supportive Third-Party Platforms

With both a business website and third-party marketplaces, you can enjoy a winning eCommerce strategy that empowers engaging your customers throughout their journey.

A good marketing lead will identify the best options to combine efforts. Third-party marketplaces are ideal for engaging customers early in the buying stage while your website is your home base with all of your products to engage returning customers. When your digital marketing strategy combines both, you are more findable. And it’s easier to engage customers in-the-moment at each stage of their journey.

Third-party platforms also permit you to meet new customers while testing marketplace receptivity and demand for your products. Channels like Instagram, eBay, TicTok, Etsy, and even Amazon help you get more familiar with market spaces, your competition, what consumers are asking, and price thresholds. It’s a rich field of marketing ideas.

There are many smart people in the broader marketing niche to delegate responsibility, and organize responsibility. Those are two of the biggest issues standing between marketing success and failure. Processes need to be set out, agreed to, and responsibility accepted in order for everything to work out well. Egos need to be set aside when teamwork and alignment are essential to create a strong digital footprint.

We like an organizational structure that allows everyone to participate and succeed. I find that alignment is easier when the priority is on client satisfaction over personal goals.

Control or personal income needs often cost the client better long-term, end results. One example is “Misalignment between marketing and sales teams costs companies an average of 10% of revenue per year”, according to marechalliance.com. Sales and Marketing Alignment: Stats and Trends for 2022 by LXA Hub further reported how sales staff often put personal goals over what is best for the business. Sharing and allocating success inspires both internal and external alignment with third parties and helps to overcome potential misalignments.

6. Prepare for the Future of Digital Data Measurement

The need is for a person or team who can scale solutions at speed.

Whether it’s Google Data Studio, Search Console, Google Analytics, or a combination of data-insight tools, what you use should help solve the unique problems a business faces. Data insights have to deliver meaningful results and performance. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Every team and modality relies on accurate data. Given the level of market change and uncertainty, as cookies and other identifiers are phased out, adaption is critical.

The future of consumer data collection is combining consented first-party data with insights from new, privacy-safe technology. Browser APIs are one replacement to close data gaps. Solutions like enhanced conversions, consent mode, conversion modeling, and data-driven attribution help businesses to respect their customers’ privacy needs while continuing measurement of the impact of your digital campaigns.

Volumes of conversations exist about cookies, privacy, and data collection as Google Analytics 4 takes over and Google Universal Analytics will sunset July 1, 2023. Big tech isn’t likely to help companies move forward, no matter what the current standing is. You need to take control of your own marketing data in order for your marketing to be effective moving forward.

Our recommendation is to move from a third-party data collection approach to a first-party strategy. A technique called server-side is best. Having a team with the ability to deal positively with the pace of change is a real plus.

Better data measurement reduced difficulty demonstrating ROI. When individuals and teams work in silos it makes demonstrating ROI harder. Think of it, how can marketing prove an asset significantly influenced reaching a goal post? These challenging tasks can obscure inefficiencies in the business and make it difficult to understand where more investment is needed.

Here, alignment ensures credit is given where it’s due. This reduces tensions between teams who may feel that one organization is not pulling its weight and ensures a more transparent view of how investments are impacting the bottom line.

Data measurement can also leverage semantic annotations to gain further insights into web analytics.

7. Readiness: An Always-on Mindset

This is a huge part of success. The ability to manage marketing transitions before, if not when needed. Recent Google publications say things like: “Learn more about the products we’re working on and how they can “help you be ready for what’s next”. Or “Learn more about what to expect…” [3].

Google states “how readiness, speed and agility have been critical for managing complexity and driving growth in these uncertain times. The value of digital transformation is linked to scaling solutions at speed. This became an important factor for our study; it differentiated the “digital leaders”.

Its research showed that digital leaders achieve three times higher revenue growth and cost savings, and have an accelerated time-to-market twice as high as companies unable to gain value from digital. These gains are only achieved by teamwork.

In the 3 Traits Digital Leaders have in Common March 21, 2022 article, Karalee Close broke leadership skills in 3 ways. [4]

  1. C-suite alignment.
  2. Build capabilities.
  3. Always-on mindset.

In my take, these qualities of a digital leader apply to marketing alignment as well. It requires teams working in tandem with an adaptive, always-on mindset to improve and scale marketing campaigns as the digital landscape changes. To prove ROI and be truly customer-centric, we constantly evolve. As the article states so well, “A cultural reset is required to get comfortable with constant pivots”. Business growth depends on timely and accurate marketing alignment.

Previously, there have been basically 2 types of marketers:

1. Generalists, like a family doctor who is trained to do a little bit of everything. They rely on referrals to a specialist to get most things done.

2. Specialists are individuals in the marketing sphere who choose a single specialty and are highly focused and skilled in that area.

Today, demand is introducing a 3rd type of marketer – the T-shaped marketer who can quickly pivot. This is an individual who can thread together all core areas of digital marketing to create a holistic approach. Experience and expertise in a few fields help to execute that plan across disparate teams. Largely, it is about people skills. The same is true for SEO managers. Data is only a tool to reach real consumers and build lasting relationships. Readiness to pivot is specially true for healthcare business types. Think of how they had to respond to service changes during COVID.

8. Focus on Opportunities over Fixes

Marketing alignment comes easier when you inspire others by demonstrating “opportunities”. Helping a client envision a clear opportunity is more compelling than fixing a wrong. It requires being educated enough to know what you are managing. This is necessary to overcome churn and move ahead with new opportunities versus just removing friction.

This approach allows the digital marketer and SEO to be expert advisors in collaboration with the client. Likewise, an SEO consultant, PPC manager, web designer, or developer should not try to mandate how the client’s business operates. Some call it servant leadership. Where respect is offered, granted, and received, it’s easier for the client to realize perceived value.

What sets good and great SEO apart occurs after the technical checklist has been completed. Once core pages are optimized and effective, and the client inquires, ‘what now?’ you can move to the creative and strategic opportunities? Marketing management and SEO teams can now strategize and advance to more critical thinking.

Once here, you can rise above information (and misinformation) about theories and best practices. Digital information overload is at risk if too mired in consuming the endless stream of help documents, articles, guides, case studies, social media messages, eBooks, courses, podcasts, videos, audios, etc. It’s an energizing atmosphere when learning becomes aligned action.

If you introduce your recommendations as key opportunities then you’ll grow as a consultant.

* Lead with a positive outlook that keeps people engaged.

To achieve marketing alignment across teams, a leader can inspire passion about the SEOs’ role in marketing, as well as each entity. We’re often sensitive souls when it comes to correction. A person’s tone, context, and approach may be saying; “you do not have the right plan, too many of the wrong investments and a weak knowledge of market opportunities”.

When participants leave one meeting with a positive outlook toward the next one, cooperation flows better. People who are inspired to be creative solve more problems. It’s much more effective than ending with relief that “this meeting is over”. Search marketing ideas multiply and get refined faster as enthusiasm to grasp an opportunity becomes contagious. Blame can easily be perceived when issues get touchy; without a good leader, it can squelch progress.

Attack the problem(s) not the person trying to solve them.

Team members need to believe that their manager is on their side as a problem solver, not a fault finder. Be astutely aware that what you say matters most to the individual who hears it. Consider every member of your participated teams in achieving digital success as more important than your clients. In the end, your clients will benefit.

* Be transparent and inspire honest communication.

Try something like, “Okay, it is clear we have several issues we can work on together to solve. You have a marketing plan idea that we can review and revamp together. You have invested interests that need to be looked at given market conditions. What else is important to you besides these issues?”

Create an atmosphere that sees issues less as mistakes and more as an opportunity to provide solutions. It encourages other team members to move past politics and feel free to share their honest opinion. This will help you gain additional internal buy-in. If you recognize and honor the SEO who get things done, they will be more willing to agree to future tasks. Make them the hero.

Replace statements like “you should…” with something like “here is an ideal opportunity to…”. It shifts conversations on the outcome, not on the past or too many details of the solution. It leads with the positive WHY of the recommendation.

Create openness for multiple different implementations – especially those solutions that can be re-applied as a possible recommendation for other projects on the client’s horizon. Decisions often come over time; you may nurture and capture this opportunity later on when more resources are available. When you break down territorial issues between SEO, paid search, social, and other teams, you can reach marketing alignment faster.

* Focus on potential value to the client’s business.

It’s important to frame your team’s recommendation(s) as an opportunity for the client. Not only does this make your recommendations more compelling, but it directly invites the freedom to express opinions and insights or barriers you may not have thought of.

Clients want to feel in control of their marketing decisions even if they have hired you to lead or consult. Good resource management actually gives them the information necessary for them to allocate resources. Demonstrate a collaborative frame of mind with the client to partner on resourcing and prioritization together.

Creative, critical thinking, practical common sense, understanding the overall context, and relevance are exciting. This demanding role needs someone who is highly functional at using their brain.

Action comes after diverse research and processing all the data insights, arguments, and viewpoints available. Out of this flows the ability to execute what’s best for clients’ brand, business, or clients. Questioning everything produces refined answers. Being optimistically skeptical is valuable. Decipher the who, what, where, when, why, and how of all input you consume. Then execute.

* Be bold with facts that influence conversions and revenue

Show marketing statistics, supportive case studies, and guidelines that adherence to produces success. Open a conversation with “I have some experience and expertise that may provide answers here. You (the client) know your context best. Let’s partner by reviewing your situation and options, and see where we can help you can gain improvement”.

It’s about building new capacities to tackle meaningful opportunities that lead to product sales.

It’s like the parable that you can give someone fish for a meal or you can teach someone how to fish and have a lifetime of meals. Rather than go for the stance of the “marketing or SEO expert” who “solves today’s problem”, consider the problem as a symptom of a process that can expand. Become a long-term marketing partner or an “SEO capacity builder” that generates multiplying success.

Factual evidence behind your recommendations is more powerful than opinion. Winning more client trust and respect often comes along with being more effective at both proposals and getting things done. A recommendation is stronger when built on facts or past successes.

Multimodality and Multilingualism Factors: Given the intersection of computer vision (CV) and NLP, businesses are challenged to build adaptable vision-language models that work in English and other languages as well. MUM is making a difference here. Every integrated SEO and marketing strategy is now forced to consider more about the interconnectedness of a business’s owned media assets, entity-based content modeling, and data exchanges.

Search engines’ recent progress on extracting fact-oriented information in addition to the new generation of transformer-based models offered by DeepMind or OpenAI align with the intent behind MUM: improving search results accuracy. This is triggering a significant shift in SEO, where success is influenced by businesses that are able to create authoritative, factual, and value-added content. MUM is impacting today’s search experience.

A Successful Multi-Modal Approach Requires Mindset Shifts

A one-strategy marketing plan or siloed teams no longer works. Marketing alignment with SEO strategies is critical for everyone envolved.

Adaption of a cultural mindset shift may be subtle but powerful. Knowing that the SEO industry, in particular, has been steeped for years around problem-solving. The very language of technical SEO professionals reveals this fundamental misalignment: audits, technical problems, fixes, and optimization. Each is truly essential but not an end in itself. When in place, and aligned with on-going opportunities, business growth and new markets are easier to obtain.

Vidographers, podcasters, social medial marketers, devs, designers, SEO and paid search teams need to see how overall alignment is vital to best serve client outcomes.

“Before the age of the internet, marketers needed to ensure that TV commercials aligned with billboards. Today, consumers expect cohesive brand experiences across channels. This includes your social media profiles, website, in-app messaging, online ads, and marketing emails. This is in addition to any billboards, commercials, and other advertising mediums.

The audience today has a near-constant exposure to new technology and innovative digital campaigns. They expect these technologies and approaches to be integrated into physical executions. Customers don’t need more technology. They want useful, practical, and valuable experiences that bring utility and value to what they’re already doing.” – Paul Talbot on Forbes [5]

 

Consider SEO scalability One of the biggest challenges enterprise companies face when developing an integrated SEO and marketing strategy is scalability. SEO consultants are incredibly smart and efficient and know how to prioritize reaching consumers on mobile devices. They know how to get things done if given the bandwidth to tackle large scale SEO campaigns.

  • Research and test new markets and content format options before investing large sums.
  • Add product features for multimodal learning if demand calls for it.
  • Research audiences’ cultural norms and content consumption patterns before targeting new buyer groups.
  • Start small and grow as your internal capacity and budget can support it.
  • Be quick to align departments and create an efficient pipeline.

A recent “The RevOps Reality Check” survey [6] discovered of 58% of B2B marketers are not at all or only somewhat confident in their organization’s ability to accurately deliver inbound leads from a marketing program to the right person. Additionally, 56% aren’t confident that their organization can properly segment their prospective database. What they are missing is alignment. Agreement across teams creates efficiencies in podcasting, video scripting, content creation, sales, social, etc.; it supports amplified marketing.

Companies are struggling to get traction because competition has reached an all-time high. Topical authority, competition in SERP space, and CPC difficulty have skyrocketed in most verticals. Additionally, the proliferation of new content means that more research, strategy, and optimization need to be behind most efforts. Isolated content and communications may only add confusion to your digital brand. By becoming more specialized and tightly aligned marketers, we can best beat the challenges of reaching segmented audiences.

To prepare for marketing’s future opportunities, businesses must update their SEO strategizes to meet the demands of a complex, agile, multimodal market. Multifaceted strategies need to replace a one-strength-focused approach. Siloed SEO, content creation, building towards brick-and-mortar sales, or solely for eCommerce purchases won’t be sufficient in the days and years to come.

Eliminating alignment barriers between digital marketing and SEO

Marketing alignment with SEO updates takes a unified team approach.

No one person, team, or data source is sufficient for businesses to rely on. The evolving marketplace inspires a willingness to prioritize uncovering what is hindering the success of marketing and SEO teams. Using structure to delegate tasks and manage expectations improves the alignment and completion process.

The August 27, 2021 B2B Marketing and Big Data – How Brands Are Optimizing Data Analytics article by Sudipta Choudhury, reports that among marketers identifying top challenges “approximately 46% said that lack of timely data to make strategic decisions”.

Additionally to enhanced customer experience and marketing campaign outcomes, they found marketers report a need to improve:

  • Gaps in expertise or skills – 41%
  • Inefficient workflows – 38%
  • Augmenting their analytics and technology usage – 17%
  • Overall marketing alignment with different teams – 11%
  • Acquiring more consumers – 14%
  • Increasing the customer lifetime value – 11%

Close strategy alignment and a multimodal approach will help to achieve these goals.

Going forward, the intersection between multimodal search, retail, and local SEO is an aspect to focus on.

We’re helping clients to stitch more pieces together because we live in a reality where both marketing and SEO questions have become more complex. To do this effectively, we need to break open the silos and adopt a layered methodology. Implementing a multi-modal approach where insights from various teams can complement and inform one another can provide a foundation for success.

Here are related helpful articles as you adapt your SEO strategies and how you manage building your knowledge graph.

SUMMARY: How Marketing Alignment can Achieve a Multi-Modular Approach

If you are questioning, “How do you create alignment?”, we can help. Hill Web Marketing is more than accustomed to the industry’s ever-changing nature. This means you won’t have to wonder if we’re staying on top of the latest user and marketing trends. Our ability to add multiple modules in one marketing/SEO plan offers you a completely seamless experience.

Call 651-206-2410 to enrich and align your digital marketing with Semantic SEO and Multimodal Search.

 

Resources:

[1] blog.google/products/search/introducing-mum/

[2] explorewhatworks.com/simple-business-make-more-money/

[3] goo.gle/3gTDXsL and http://goo.gle/3MPcUh3

[4] www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/driving-digital-transformation-in-business/

[5] www.forbes.com/sites/paultalbot/2018/07/31/a-brave-new-world-of-brand-alignment/

[6] www.demandgenreport.com/features/news-briefs/new-research-58-of-marketers-lack-confidence-in-ability-to-accurately-deliver-inbound-leads/