Designing a Custom Link Marketing Campaign

Reviewing your strengths is a smart way to begin designing a great custom link marketing campaign for your business. Capitalize on your existing resources, determine your target audience, and develop a great campaign idea. Here’s how to do it.

Resource Assessment

A custom link marketing campaign begins with an assessment of how your company currently reaches out to customers, industry, and the media. This includes newsletters, blogs, public relations people/companies, marketing departments, and social media.

Next, have the key people in your company put together an assessment of how strong their contacts are, whether it’s email, IM, LinkenIn, Facebook, forums, or elsewhere.

Also look for anyone in your company with a strong Twitter following.

Once you have a good assessment of your resources, move on to determining your targeted audience.

Audience

Now it’s time to determine which audience to target utilizing your existing resources. Remember, what’s popular with industry insiders might not be with consumers.

Focus your attention on one specific group to increase your chances of success. The more specific, the better.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re mostly a consumer business. At the same time, the industry connections within your company are outstanding on LinkedIn, Twitter, and email.

If this is the case, rather than targeting customers you’ll want to go with something targeting your industry. That will be easier to promote with your existing resources, and would make it more likely you’d get picked up by journalists and bloggers covering your industry.

The Idea

There are several ways to develop a link marketing idea that will appeal to your targeted audience. One of my favorites is to do research on what type of content, and I use the word “content” very loosely, attracts attention in related industries.

Some tips:

• Study what has already been successful. Borrow and modify that idea to fit your industry.
• Focus on content that others will naturally want to share, or cite.
• Make note of any content (in any industry) that has attracted quality links whenever you run across it. Then, when you’re putting together a campaign, you can draw from that collection of ideas.

Keeping with the example of an industry audience, this might be:

• A survey
• Research
• In-depth analysis
• Online tool
• Smartphone application

Research?

Yes, research will require a lot of work. Link marketing isn’t easy, but the rewards of top rankings make it worth it. Companies that already have top rankings continue doing link marketing because they want to maintain those high rankings and keep the competition away.

Research could be as simple as having a statistician look for unique trends in a government database. A simple search of “government data” will get you started. You’ll be surprised at all the data on just about anything you can think of.

This is just one approach to designing a custom link marketing program for your business. Keep your mind open and other approaches will reveal themselves.

Remember, good link marketing is just good marketing.