Digital marketing or online marketing can be broken down into a number of different types. For example, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), Social media marketing or Email marketing. We’re going to break down the five most common forms of Digital Marketing. What are their benefits, what you need to know, and how you can use them together to build a cohesive digital strategy.
You may already know that having an online presence is essential in today’s business world, but you might not know how to create that online presence. Digital marketing encompasses many different tactics and strategies that can help you reach customers through the web, email, and social media. But with so many options out there, which one should you choose? The five most common digital marketing strategies are outlined below.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a term you may not be familiar with but will have definitely heard around the office. When people talk about SEO they’re talking about getting your website optimized so that when someone searches for you, a search engine, usually Google, can find you easily.
Your organic ranking is the priority in which your website is regarded by a search engine. A high organic ranking and your website will be regarded better and placed higher in the search results. Less than 6% of people click through to the second page of search results, so it’s essential that your website ranks high, ideally first.
There’s a huge number of things that back the algorithms to decide your SEO ranking. The good news is there are things we can do to improve the ranking. Internal links, external links, a fast page loading time, mobile optimization, and relevant content. This all takes time, but more importantly, it’s ongoing, you can’t take a year off of optimization, it’s something that needs to be worked into a regular maintenance schedule.
Thankfully, we have tools that help us in this process. Programmes like SEM Rush and Google Search Console can make a daunting task like SEO manageable.
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is any instance where we post an ad to a platform and are then charged for every click the ad receives. PPC operates in a number of places you’ll be working in, like Facebook, Google Search, and Google Display.
When we’re talking about Google search ads, keyword choice is critical. First of all - your keywords need to be relevant, make sure you’re not choosing popular keywords that are not relavant to you business just to get traffic.
Then you need to work out what you’re willing to spend per click - PPC works on a bidding system, so websites will bid against each other until one of them wins the bid, then this ad is displayed. After initial tests, you should have a general idea of what bidding on that keyword will cost you. If this is too high - you may want to cool off using this keyword. Ideally, you’ll strike the balance between relevant and low-cost. The more people bidding on the word - the higher the price will be.
Which leads us to over-spending - it’s easy to overspend with PPC. A good rule of thumb here would be to do some work around your ROI - Return On Investment. If say, one purchase on your website generally costs $15, you don’t want to be spending $14 per click. Take the time to work out the value of a conversion, and then work back from there.
Lastly, make sure the links are heading to the right destination, and that your website is ready and optimized to receive them (See SEO above).
This one you’ll likely know all about. It’s hard to live a life away from social media in this day and age. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn: all built on algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves.
Social Media exists to generate traffic, reach new audiences, and you guessed it, get social. Here we have the opportunity to connect to people who might never have seen our brand otherwise, drive huge amounts of interested viewers to our websites, but perhaps most importantly, start, generate, and engage in conversations with your community.
One of the innate but hard to quantify benefits of Social Media Marketing is brand awareness. Everything you do on social media will strengthen your brand positioning, the more people that see your brand, the more likely they are to recall you, and hopefully, consider you. The difficult part is knowing how well your brand is regarded and how far it is really spreading. A metric used across social media reporting is reach. This is as close as we get to knowing how widely your brand is being received.
Running campaigns that are specifc to driving traffic to your website are huge on social media. Almost 60% of the global population is on at least one social media platform, and the average daily use is around two hours. There’s never been a more densely available audience. This audience is always looking for fresh, interesting content. If you were fishing, you might use a huge net to capture a massive area, this is what traffic campaigns are all about, getting a massive volume of people (usually a cold audience) to your site.
With all that traffic now at your site, you can focus on conversions. Conversion campaigns are all about quality not quantity. We create conversion campaigns so that the ads are seen by people who are already likely to convert with your product or service (a warm audience). Targeting is crucial when building conversion campaigns, because we want to fine-tune exactly what makes a person likely to convert for you, and then amplify that out to as many people as we can.
The last Social Media aspect we’re going to talk about is community management. This is mostly organic, but you will need to engage with the interactions that happen on your ads. If people ask questions, you will need to answer them. If people post supportive comments, you will need to like and reply to them. But you will also have to navigate negative comments, respond to bad reviews, and remove spam when it appears.
We touched upon content earlier in our SEO section, but we want to dig down into what great content is, why you need it, and how you can build content that works for you.
Content is a chance to showcase your values, your advice, your expertise, and a chance for you to give back to your community. Great content is engaging, quality, and most importantly, it adds value to your audience. Whatever that value is can change, it would be tips and tricks, it could be the solution to a problem, or it could simply just be educational.
Content matters for two reasons, the first is that it shows your willingness to invest in helping your audience, this, in turn, builds authenticity. Once you make that initial point of contact with your audience, they will begin their journey to trusting you. While you’re setting out to provide content with no strings, the eventual hope is that you’ll become the go-to expert of all things relating to your business. This trust will translate into conversions if you continue to keep up your commitment to offering value to your community.
The second reason content is important and simple - the more quality content on your website, the more keywords, the more relevant value - the better you’ll rank with your organic SEO.
The very best content targets the audience you want to speak to, you’ve done your research, you know their problems, and your expertise is going to help them. A good rule here is only say something if it’s worth saying. Offer real solutions, concrete help.
Email marketing was our first ever step into the world of Digital Marketing. A tool that was once for sharing cute dog pictures, has evolved into a marketing form that has defied expectations and is still alive all these years later.
The EDM is something that usually takes more time and care to curate than a quick social media campaign. You should have a brand tone set for emails that may be different from the way you communicate on social, for instance, most companies reserve their most professional tone for EDMs, but that doesn’t mean your brand has to.
It is pretty standard to use software to send out bulk emails - as your personal email will likely get flagged as spam, or simply clog up your mailbox. If your business has a CRM that likely has a mailing system built in. If not, you can always use something like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. One of the best things about using software like this, is the ability to track how many opens the email has, what buttons they clicked in the email, how long they spent reading the email, and more.
EDMs are usually hot-lead generators. If someone is on your mailing list, it implies that they’re already a warm lead, interested in your business. EDMs go a long way to converting those people into customers.
Only send an email if it’s worth sending. You’ve got to acknowledge that someone’s inbox is sacred and you’ve been given access to it, but you can also be blocked from it. If you waste people’s time by sending emails that don’t contain any relevant, valuable, or useful information, your unsubscribe rates will soar.
You should only be bulk sending to emails that you have the consent to send to. Each time someone ticks the ‘Keep me updated’ button or subscribes to a mailing list, they’re consenting to being sent emails from you. You can also purchase email lists from companies provided they have the authority to pass them on.
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