Digital marketing is a powerful way to connect with potential customers and build brand awareness. It’s a broad term that covers many different digital marketing tools, but they all have one thing in common, they help you reach your audience online. We can use a combination of many different digital techniques, but here are some of the most important ones you should know about.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation (SEO), a form of digital marketing is the art and science of improving website visibility in search engine results pages. This can be done in a number of ways, including the use of keywords relevant to your business throughout website content. Additionally, SEO can be improved by making sure that your website is easy for Google to crawl when it visits pages on your site.
There are so many factors that work towards great SEO. The number of steps will often make it difficult for businesses, especially those without a digital marketing agency or full-time SEO-focused employee.
Here are some of the SEO factors:
A secure website (https)
- Desktop and mobile page speed (shrink image file sizes to improve loading speed)
- Mobile responsiveness (are the breakpoints set for mobile phone screens?)
- Domain authority (improved by backlinking)
- Optimised content (adding keywords, images, internal links, external links etc)
- Technical SEO (metadata, header tags, alt tags and schema markup)
- Inbound, outbound and internal links
- Social signals (sharing content on social media)
- Business listings (Google My Business, Facebook, Yellow Pages etc)
What Are The Benefits of SEO?
The core benefit of SEO when implementing digital marketing is increasing your organic website traffic. This is traffic that you’ve paid for in time and effort rather than monetary methods such as pay per click.
Featuring on page one of a search engine result is crucial. Almost all organic website traffic must come through either page one or two. Most consumers will not reach page three so if your website doesn’t exist on page one or two then it is likely to lose out to competitor websites.
Additionally, the more people that visit your site, the more leads, sales or enquiries you’ll achieve.
What Are Some Downsides of SEO?
Well, there are no downsides to SEO. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing then this could cause problems down the line. If your website is built poorly from day one then the process of rebuilding it to a good standard will take longer.
- Content could need to be rewritten with SEO in mind.
- Filling technical SEO, alt/header tags and optimising images could take a lot of time.
- Page URL slugs may need altering, therefore setting up 301 redirects.
- Altering existing page structure or page breaks for mobile responsiveness.
Important to stress, it’s never too late to start focusing on digital marketing or search engine optimisation.
For a very basic SEO test, visit one of these websites and see how you could improve your SERP ranking:
Social Media
Social media, another key form of digital marketing, is a great place to promote your business and connect with new customers. If you’re not already using social media, it’s important to set up profiles for your business across the major platforms.
Make sure that the messaging on these profiles is consistent with your website and other digital marketing materials.
You can also use social media to promote your blog content (which improves SEO) as well as the products or services you offer. You can share posts from other content creators who are writing about topics related to what you do. If you use this method then only share content from brands that have different audiences than yours. This is called ‘content curation’. The core benefit of social media is that it is completely free to set up and use!
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is a form of online advertising that is paid for each time a user clicks on the ad. The advertiser will only pay when the consumer clicks on the ad. Once the ad is clicked, the consumer is then taken to a landing page that is relevant to the clicked advertisement.
In order to use PPC digital marketing effectively, you need to understand what keywords target consumers use when they search for your products or services. You can then create ads and pay for ad space based on those keywords.
Bidding strategies that you can use for your PPC campaigns:
- Target Cost per Acquisition (the amount spent per sale)
- Target Return on Ad Spend (every £1 spent we want £3 back)
- Manual Cost per Click (the cost per click segmented by keyword)
- Target Impression Share % (impression share vs competitor websites)
- Maximise Clicks (targetting any/every click possible for that keyword)
Blog Content
Blog content is a valuable and inexpensive way to build trust with your customers. This allows you to communicate answers to your customer’s FAQs. You can use blog posts to share important information about your products or services which will help you improve the customer experience on your website.
It’s also important to know that blog content can help you rank higher in search engines like Google. Making sure that your content is high-quality and relevant to what people are searching for will give you an advantage over competitors who aren’t creating engaging blog posts.
Lastly, blogging has been shown to increase traffic to websites by as much as 55%. If you want more people to visit your site, then create some helpful blog posts.
Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending promotional emails to your customers and potential customers. It can help you build a relationship with your audience, keep them informed about what’s going on with your business and increase sales by attracting new customers.
While it has traditionally been used for promoting products or services online, email marketing can also be used to promote non-commercial information such as news and events. It’s a great way to build relationships with your customers and get them to take action.
Email marketing is a popular and effective way to connect with customers. It’s easy to use and inexpensive, especially when you find the right tool for you. Here is a couple we have used in the past:
Conclusion
There are many ways to market your business online, but it’s important to know what each one can do for you. You should also make sure that you have a plan in place before investing any money or time into any type of digital marketing campaign. The ultimate goal should always be to generate more sales leads so that your business can grow.
