Over the years, many of us have enjoyed gaming at arcades, at our friends' houses, and more recently, online. Like digital marketing, you’ll need to start from level 1 and develop your skills and strategies to overcome your opponents. In this post, we’ll cover the key levels in your marketing journey, ranging across SEO, Paid Media, Content Marketing, and beyond.

With that out of the way, let’s play.

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Level 1: SEO Basics - Building Your Foundation

The first step in your digital marketing journey should be around your planning and strategy, several of which can be covered by your SEO basics. When starting, SEO is much like your buy phase in any competitive shooter. Ensure you have the weapons, utilities, and other gadgets needed for success.

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Key skills to master include:

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• Keyword Research: Learn what keywords your audience is searching for when trying to find your product or service. Are they generic, specific, broad, or not sure what their looking for? Your keyword research is much like the initial strategy you put in place before executing your play.

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• On-page optimisation: Ensure your page titles, meta descriptions, and headers are all optimal for both search engines and your end user. This involves including keywords that are relevant to their respective pages. Think of this as applying additional armour to yourself before you take damage from Google’s crawling bots.

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• Technical SEO: Create a strong website that can run quickly, be crawled by Google, and be mobile-friendly. Whilst this is important to be done first, it is also an ongoing job to ensure your website does not fall behind. This is similar to exploration games where you must upkeep your gear and loot, otherwise it can wear and break down

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How to level up:

Use powerful tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush or Ahrefs, which can all help with your SEO basics.

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Level 2: Paid Media Ads - Power Boosts

For this article, we will cover Paid Media in respect to Meta and Google Ads. With your basics out of the way, you can now start to get some power boosts through paid advertising. These are useful for increasing traffic and conversions, and can later turn into more developed abilities.

Key skills to master include:

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• Targeting and Bidding: With your paid campaigns, make sure you have the correct audience and bidding options. Are you going broad? Narrow? Bidding to maximise conversions? Or maybe you want maximum impressions. Treat this as swapping your abilities, based on challenges ahead.

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• Ad Copy and Creative: Your ads won’t be effective if they do not convey the right message, or have a creative that does not stop users from scrolling. Ensure you have messaging that matches your Call-to-action, creative, and landing page. Treat this as your character build, where all of your skills complement each other.

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• Budget Management: As your campaigns spend, your budget will decrease. Keep an eye out to ensure the budget is on track to its allocation, as this is akin to running out of health in the middle of a battle.

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How to level up:

Look at upskilling in Meta and Google Ads through courses and tutorials. There are many aspects and elements involved that can help you achieve your next level.

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Level 3: Content Marketing - Building Allies

Content marketing provides benefits to your business on multiple levels. It is used to help provide more information to your audience, help search engines discover and rank your keywords, as well as keep audiences on your website. Think of it as building strong allies over time.

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Key skills to master include:

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• Content Strategy: Brainstorm different topics, ideas, questions and areas that you can talk about through blog articles, videos, and other media. Develop a roadmap for when these are to be rolled out during the year, so you can be organised. Treat this activity like planning out the optimal route through a building to get the best loot.

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• Storytelling: Ensure your content is compelling and interesting, and provide value to your audience. This can be akin to your character development - it builds strong loyalty over a long period.

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• SEO-Optimised Content: When creating your content, ensure it is SEO-optimised by including keywords, including H1’s and relevant titles. Treat this activity as if you are attracting the best allies who are searching for a clan to join.

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How to level up:

Keep consistent! Publish high-quality content consistently and ensure this is used across all of your different channels to maximise reach and save you time.

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Level 4: Analytics - Checking Your Score

How do you know you're heading in the right direction? Like with most games, checking your scorecard is a great way to track progress and ensure you are not lacking in any areas.

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Key skills to master include:

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• Google Analytics: Monitor all your vital signs. Traffic, bounce rates, conversions, and more! These will all tell you how far you have progressed, and if there are any areas to improve.

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• Conversion Tracking: Conversions like form fills, button clicks and phone calls should be set up to ensure you have a greater understanding of how your users interact with your website. Treat this as additional settings you can add in the settings menu to help enhance your experience.

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• Data-Driven Decisions: With your data being set up and tracked correctly, ensure you are basing decisions around the data. If a particular part of your website is having a higher bounce rate than others, look to deploy fixes. This is akin to evaluating your character’s build, and upgrading gear that is no longer up to scratch.

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How to level up:

There are several tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar, that can help guide your strategy based on how your audience interacts with your website. See what is working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly.

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Level 5: Social Media - Expanding Your Team

Social media platforms allow your audience to hang out, connect, and interact with your brand. These are the pre-game lobbies where everyone mingles and chats before the game.

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Key skills to master include:

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• Platform-Specific Strategies: With each platform serving a different purpose, ensure your strategy and content on the respective platforms is appropriate for your audience. TikTok is great at showing short, behind-the-scenes videos about your brand, whereas LinkedIn is much more serious in tone, such as thought leadership content. Treat each platform like its own boss fight, with a different strategy.

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• Community Engagement: Reply to comments, ask questions, and foster conversation with your community. This is akin to any online game community where people want to interact and keep up with each other.

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• Paid Social Ads: Run boosted posts and paid social ads to complement your organic posting. This is a great way to reach new audiences who may not have heard about your brand. Think of this as making new friends online.

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How to level up:

Begin with your organic strategy and naturally build this. Over time, look to compliment your organic posting with paid ads, as well as automation tools such as Hootsuite to help manage your posting.

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Level 6: Email Marketing - Loyalty Points

Like with many online games, keeping your users loyal ensures players keep coming back. This is the same with email marketing, as you want to entice your users to continue using your services/purchasing your products.

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Key skills to master include:

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• Segmentation: Ensure your messaging your audience with the right information, at the right time. For example, a clothing business would start sending out messaging and promotions ahead of a promotion date, to ensure users are ready to grab a deal. This is akin to using abilities that only work on specific opponents.

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• Automation: Create workflows that will trigger based on how users interact with your website. This can include welcome emails with promotions, abandoned cart emails etc. Think of these as the NPC’s in an open-world game, going about their automatic tasks without you realising. 

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• Personalization: If a customer has purchased a specific type of product, or has personalised their interests and shared these with you, customise your emails to reflect these products. These are the bonus rewards that are given to loyal players.

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How to level up:

Multiple platforms allow you to set up automated workflows. These include Mailchimp and HubSpot to name a few. Take advantage of these tools as they can save you time, and work in the background.

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Conclusion

Now that you have followed each of the different levels, you should be equipped with the tools and knowledge to make a meaningful impact to your business through digital marketing. Just like with any game, there will be challenges and learning curves, some of which can be overcome, and some of which naturally will stop you in your tracks. If you are stuck, that’s where a digital marketing agency can really excel and take the headache away from you.

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Ready to level up your marketing? Contact us today to find out which digital marketing is best to smash your business goals.

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