The industrial revolution triggered a wealth of manufacturers and service providers competing for customers based on product, service and price. With advances in transportation and technology, markets became global. While many debate the ups and downs of this evolution, businesses that accept they now compete on digital content in addition to the products and services they market will have an advantage.

At Dash, we have created a digital landscape framework that focuses on three key components of digital marketing: content, referrals and social.

Content is King! 

I agree wholeheartedly when I hear the phrase "content is king".  Content is the first thing people see when they land on your website.  It needs to be well written to establish your reputation of expertise and delivering quality.  It should be web friendly to demonstrate your understanding of the web landscape and finally it needs to be optimized to attract relevant searches.  Visitors (and some search engines) will lose patience with websites that falsely attract them to irrelevant content.   

While many websites focus on delivering static core content that describes your products and services, those who excel take it a step further and help their clients along their 'customer journey'.  Delivering additional content of interest to clients, helping clients make decisions or providing self service options on-line all go along way to making a website worth visiting.  

And don't forget your partners...

Once you have great content for your website, the goal is to have more people who may be interested in the content, read it. Our digital strategies identify people that would be good consumers of the content on the site, such as colleagues, influencers, and current and future customers.  We look for partners that can create value for their audience by referring them to this new content. It has to be win-win, especially for the end reader, or this approach will quickly generate negative response.

With all of that in place, it is time to leverage the power of social. This is where the real relationships are built and nurtured.  Taking care of digital marketing effectively, will allow you more opportunity to compete on your primary products and services.