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In high school, my friends were getting jobs at the mall that made them miserable. I did not want to do something I hated, so I started my career at a young age as a freelance copyeditor. I quickly realized I could do more than just editing, so I added copywriting to the list of services I offered as a freelancer.
One of my clients said, “I really love your writing, but can you also make it SEO friendly?” I had absolutely no idea what that was, so I started researching SEO, took some courses and learned how to make my writing SEO-friendly. Without knowing what 360 marketing was, I unknowingly started my journey in the industry.
I am a tech fiend: I love trying every new gadget and social-media platform that emerges. I love challenging myself on these platforms and gaining new skills. As a zillenial, I was on social media and wondered if I could somehow make my skills work in that realm. I learned how to weave SEO into my social-media posts and create social-media campaigns and editorial calendars.
Related: The Top 6 Skills Every Copywriter Must Have
Assembling the team
I offered editing, copywriting, SEO optimization and social-media management services as a solo entrepreneur. I realized I had more clients than I could handle independently, so I started assembling my team of professionals with skills that complemented my own.
I created my dream team, filled with some of the most brilliant editors, copywriters, SEO experts and social-media managers that I met on social media, in school and through industry networking events. I found talented people from North America, South America and Europe who helped me make my dream business a reality. Even though we work fully remotely from different time zones, we seamlessly work together to provide our clientele with the best services. I felt unconstrained and knew that we could keep growing.
I quickly realized that building this team was one of the best decisions I’d ever made. I want to emphasize how important delegating your work and allowing experts to do what they do best is. We may feel like superhumans who can do everything ourselves, but we never have to. Several team members introduced me to new project-management software, organizational methods and wonderful social-media content ideas.
Adding additional services
As we dove into the social-media marketing space, we were inundated with requests from clients for ad services. We recognized how well ads worked with social media and decided to introduce ad services to our offerings. We initially began with just social-media ads before introducing Google and Amazon ads.
Despite an incredibly talented team, we did not have an ad expert at the time, but had clients requesting ads. We decided to hire an ads expert. Ads were similar enough in the creative process to what we were doing with organic posting, but optimizing results was more scientific. With ads, it’s essential to consider your end goal and examine every step of the ad creation process. Every ad has a different objective, such as increased reach, impressions, conversions and interactions.
Our ads strategy was taking off, but we still felt there was something missing.
Related: Here’s How to Improve Your Business’s Content Marketing
The final component: 360 marketing
I was always looking for opportunities to speak about our services. Whether it was TV appearances, podcasts or popular websites. And I realized that all those appearances were helping our SEO. “What if we offered this to our clients?” I wondered in my final 360 lightbulb moment.
I used myself and my own company as a case study that used PR to build our SEO, SEO to improve our ad performance, ads to bring more people to our social media and social media to connect with the people who heard our PR interviews. These podcasts and written features brought the work we do to life and allowed us to showcase the effectiveness of this revolutionary marketing strategy: 360 marketing.
The 360-marketing strategy weaves together various aspects of marketing to create a better business outcome than doing only one or two. Many people might not realize the connection between PR, SEO, ads and social media. PR services drastically help your SEO, as your domain authority increases when you appear on an article or podcast. Getting noticed in a PR article can lead readers to your social-media profiles, while your followers will see any podcasts or articles you share on your social-media platforms. You can use social-media ads to target followers within specific niches to advertise your products or services.
Writing and editing are the centerpiece of any 360-marketing strategy. You need excellent copy to attract and maintain followers on social media, and you need a well-structured, grammatically correct pitch to secure your podcast and article features. Your blogs need to be well-written and SEO-friendly to increase traffic to them. Essentially, you are writing for both humans and the AIs that will index your content.
If you only use one or two aspects of 360 marketing, you are doing your business a disservice; 360 marketing is all about nurturing a relationship with your audience on any platform. Any business can start implementing 360 marketing and reap the benefits. The initial implementation can be pretty straightforward — even creating a blog on which you regularly post can help your SEO and establish you as a knowledgeable authority. I highly recommend every business use 360 marketing. Your discoverability will increase, and you will be able to better engage and connect with your ideal audience for optimal growth.
Related: 6 SEO Tips To Benefit Any Business