\\ Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing
Are you a local business, startup or ecommerce brand looking to reach more people online? If yes! Then here we will give you the rundown about the most effective types of digital marketing used today.
Digital marketing enables you to deliver your marketing messaging to your ideal customers on a variety of platforms online.
We will take a closer look at the different aspects of digital marketing and how you can capitalise on each one to drive qualified traffic to your business.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the promotion of your business, brand, products, or services to your target audience on desktop, mobile, and smart TV screens. Within digital marketing, there are several channels and strategies that you can implement into your digital strategy.
You’ve got growth goals? We’ll build the roadmap.
Businesses need a data-driven vision. More importantly, they need a clear, action-packed game plan. We partner with you to strategize, prioritize, link up cross-channel insights, and, ultimately, grow.
Types of digital marketing
Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of different strategies and tactics that you can use to amplify your company’s reach and, in turn, increase your ROI. Depending on your business industry & audience demographic, different strategies will be more or less successful for you.
PPC
If you are looking to spend money to reach your audience quicker, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a type of digital marketing that involves paying for every user who clicks on one of your ads. It won’t simply be a case of spending X and reaching your ideal customer – there are still some barriers to ensuring your ad is served in the first place. Google determines this using factors like the quality of the ad, the relevancy of the keywords, and the maximum bid value you’re willing to pay.
PPC campaigns usually lead a viewer to complete an action, which may be a transactional one but could also be signing up for a newsletter. This is a cheap and effective way of getting conversions.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
This area of digital marketing helps your business show up in search engine results pages (SERPs) by using relevant keywords in content. With a number of signals that Google looks for in your content, they will help your website rank higher, maximizing your visibility.
SEO is a great way to gain organic traffic as you won’t be paying for each click but requires time and effort to create engaging content. It is all about the quality of your content, which is key to attracting traffic, as well as factors such as mobile-friendliness.
Search Engine Marketing
SEM or Search Engine Marketing has the same goal as SEO above – get your website at the top of the search engine results page, or SERP. However, instead of using keywords to optimize your website’s placement on the SERP organically, Search Engine Marketing is paid advertising and it guarantees that your website will earn top billing on the SERP when potential customers search for keywords.
Social Media Marketing
Social media offers another free way to gain organic traffic for your business. Building communities across your social accounts and then posting content can help to increase your brand visibility and will strengthen the connection your audience has with your brand, leading to more conversions.
Social media platforms offer built-in engagement statistics, letting you know how well you are reaching your audience, and which interactions are the most successful for your business. You can then change your strategy to focus on the most profitable interactions, such as shares or total clicks to your website.
Email marketing
An older but still highly effective method of engaging with your audience. Email marketing can be used to promote deals or highlight specific content for your audience.
This method involves utilising an opt-in list to build your email marketing list, which also allows you to segment your audience delivering specific messaging and content to specific parts of your audience. Email marketing can also be automated to schedule email campaigns to meet your customer’s needs more effectively by targeting customers at specific times and days.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of educating potential customers about a product or service that is on offer from a business rather than trying to directly sell a product or service. While there’s definitely some overlap in terms of the subject of content marketing and traditional marketing, the goals are very different.
The goal of content marketing is to inform consumers about the purpose and value of a product or business with little investment in turning leads into sales.
While content marketing is valuable, the results may take longer to transpire than other paid methods of digital marketing.
Customers are interested in learning how products work and why they’re worthwhile. Excellent educational content positions you and your company as a reliable, trustworthy source of information, which will increase customers and overall sales when combined with other forms of digital marketing.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you pay someone else to promote your products/services. An example of this would be paying an online influencer to promote your product on their social media to their followers, which brings attention to your brand that you may not have otherwise had.
You’ve got growth goals? We’ll build the roadmap.
Businesses need a data-driven vision. More importantly, they need a clear, action-packed game plan. We partner with you to strategize, prioritize, link up cross-channel insights, and, ultimately, grow.
Who Can Benefit From a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing strategies are for everyone who owns a business on and offline! Whether your business is small, mainly offline and focused on footfall, or provides a service rather than a product, there is a digital marketing strategy that can benefit your business.
Small Businesses
Small businesses can benefit highly from implementing a digital marketing strategy. Using tools like social media marketing and email marketing significantly broadens the reach of your marketing without having to spend a lot of money.
Digital marketing also allows small businesses to focus their marketing efforts on specific geographic regions and market demographics, meaning the likelihood of conversion is much higher than with unfocused marketing.
Mid-size Businesses
Like small businesses, mid-size companies are often looking for ways to get the most effective advertising for the least amount of money and have the ability to scale their marketing as the company grows. Mid size companies also may operate from several locations, digital marketing makes it easy to adjust the messaging, demographics, or location of your marketing for each unique store.
Separate locations can compare metrics to see what’s working well and what they can improve to better reach their target market. Effective web design is essential for mid-size companies, who want to drive traffic to their site for customers to learn more about their business.
Large Corporations
Large corporations are often trying to reach potential customers all over the country or globally. Digital marketing makes it easy to adjust strategies based on the different needs of each target region.
With the likes of content marketing and affiliate marketing, large corporations can use their brand in the position of an expert, making the customer more likely to trust and purchase from the company.
Traditional Shops & Businesses
It may initially seem counter intuitive for your local shops to have any sort of digital marketing strategy to increase their brand awareness, but using smaller digital components like email marketing and SEO can vastly improve a store’s sales.
Most people will turn to Google before heading out to find a specific product or service – many people search online for reviews or the best deals. If you get yourself a small website and optimize your content to your target demographic directly online, your potential customers can find your shop.
You’ve got growth goals? We’ll build the roadmap.
Businesses need a data-driven vision. More importantly, they need a clear, action-packed game plan. We partner with you to strategize, prioritize, link up cross-channel insights, and, ultimately, grow.
Setting goals and determining your budget
Depending on your business, you will have a specific set of goals in mind. This could be to drive clicks and traffic, increase conversions, or perhaps you are trying to reach a certain ROI.
When determining your digital marketing budget, it is crucial to identify who you are marketing towards. Once you’ve done this, you can choose a strategy that helps you reach that specific audience who are more likely to purchase from or engage with your company.
Speaking to your sales and data departments can help you tailor your digital marketing strategy using statistics, helping you know which channels you should invest in to maximise your ROI.
Where is a Digital Marketing Strategy most Effective?
The efficacy of your digital marketing strategy depends on several factors like industry, location, customer base, and the goals of your digital marketing strategy. However, some strategies tend to produce higher results than others.
SEO
SEO returns strong results for most companies that choose to use it over time with some investment in management of keywords and rankings.
Most consumers, when looking for a product or service, begin their search by using a search engine and optimising your content to earn views from potential customers will return more conversions.
PPC
Pay-per-click marketing’s success rate follows the same logic as SEO. Every time a customer finds your website through PPC advertising, your chances of converting a new customer and making a sale increase.
The cost is minimal, particularly if clicks lead to sales. High SERP rankings are also a great way to build brand awareness and recognition, which PPC is great at providing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a great tool for engaging potential new customers with your company or brand. Since content marketing is often interactive and educational, it’s a great way to build rapport and trust with new people. Content marketing ties closely with both SEO and PPC strategies. You can use SEO and PPC to direct clients to your content when they search for information related to your brand, company, product, or service.
Social Media Marketing
Like content marketing, social media marketing often focuses on building brand awareness rather than closing sales. Social media marketing is a great space to share content marketing, customer reviews, product photos, and company updates.
Many companies choose to use social media to host giveaways or other interactive events that draw potential customers in. Finally, brand enthusiasts sometimes share pictures of products or services on their own pages, which expands the reach for your company with no additional work from you.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a fantastic method for engaging with current or past customers. Send special deals, coupons, or promotions via email with easy in-text links to take your customers to specific landing pages related to their interests.
You can personalise emails to your customers, including the recipient’s name, interests, past products they’ve purchased, and suggestions for products they might like. Additionally, you can link to your website and social media pages.
You might have noticed that all the most effective strategies share commonalities. SEO and PPC both use search engine technology to connect potential customers to your content. Social media marketing and email marketing can link potential customers back to content and your website. Digital marketing strategies that use several, interrelated forms of digital marketing are much more likely to gain traction than those that focus on one or a few disparate strategies.