Digital marketing is an essential part of growing modern businesses online. It uses highly effective internet resources to change how customers view your brand in order to get an action from them.
Digital marketing also allows you to better pinpoint goals and objectives, such as acquiring more customers or generating more sales. To help focus these goals, funnels are set up and continually monitored and adapted to achieve highly profitable results.
There are 5 basic outlets of digital marketing that every business should be aware of and utilise. I would like to go over what each one does and what challenges you may face when using them.
1. SEO
This is probably the most well known aspect of digital marketing. Everyone is familiar with the term but they may not know the full extent of how important it is. Other outlets of digital marketing can also be tied to this in some way.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It relates to the ranking of your website on Google or Bing (and any other search engine). Your SEO score can be influenced in a number of ways:
- LINKING
Your internal links, external links and backlinks play a huge part in your placement on search engine results. Having a good content strategy is a great way of attaining all 3.
- AUTHORITY
Building upon your vertical content by producing new, relevant, engaging material will steadily grow your website’s authority, leading to a higher SEO score.
- PAGE SPEED
This can be affected in a number of ways. For example, if you are including large pictures in your posts and pages they will need to be compressed as much as possible to decrease loading times. Search engines reward higher scores to pages that load quickly. If your pages aren’t loading within 2.5 seconds, you are running the risk of visitors clicking away: ‘A two second delay in load time resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%.’
- ENGAGEMENT
Engagement also relates to UX (user experience) on your website. This covers ‘session times’ and ‘bounce rates’ (there are other factors too). The higher your bounce rate, the lower your SEO score will be. Monitoring session times through Google Analytics will give an indication of what is working and what needs altering. If your website and content is engaging and informative, the longer people will stay.
- READABILITY
Search engines actually score your content’s readability. It takes into account headings, subheadings, grammar and punctuation, and also the length of your paragraphs. You will need to have excellent content that appeases SEO hurdles and your customers too.
- TECHNICAL SEO
To show up higher on organic searches you will have to utilise the right keywords (or key-phrases) into the content you post – you should also include those keywords in your alt-text and meta-data. Having a master list of keywords will help in every aspect of your content planning.
- SOCIAL SIGNALLING
This drifts into ‘engagement’ slightly, but there is an unsurprising correlation between shared posts and higher SEO scores:
- OPTIMISATION (MOBILE)
Search engines also take mobile optimisation into account when scoring your pages and posts. Whatever you are creating, it is always important to check how it looks on a mobile before publishing; especially when considering that ‘mobile searches account for over 54% of all web traffic worldwide’.
As you can see, some of these elements bleed into one another, which is why it is so important to think about all of them together when polishing your SEO score.
2. CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways of growing your online presence (and authority) organically. It is there to attract, engage and retain your customers. Instead of asking for a hard sale, content marketing is used to inform your readers – letting them come to the conclusion that you are the best solution to their problem.
Blogs are 63% more likely to influence a purchase than magazines.
Whatever form of content you are creating, it is important that it appeals to your target customer and stays within your business’ ‘core offerings’. It should always be well researched and written and clearly show your vertical knowledge. Ideally, you will want your readers to end up on your website, where they’re one step closer to a conversion.
The challenges that come with content marketing are generally down to quality. If the content produced is not to a high standard then you will more likely create a negative impact.
Having a trusted copywriter on hand who can produce effective content will help take away the stress of having to create it yourself. It is worth remembering that even with a copywriter’s fee, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, making its ROI significantly higher.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Having a social media page that can promote your content and abilities is a must for any business. This isn’t news to you! However, it may interest you to know that:
54% of social media browsers use a social media platform to research a product.
Social media is one of the most effective ways of gaining more AWARENESS to your brand. It also attracts new and existing customers into your digital marketing funnels, thereby generating more traffic, leads and sales.
The challenges that come with social media marketing are more noticeable for businesses that rely too heavily on it. The new privacy laws mean that the information you collect through social media platforms will be limited. You are still better off having your own list of contacts, acquired naturally on a website that is controlled by YOU!
4. EMAIL MARKETING
This form of digital marketing is now becoming a necessity for all modern businesses: ‘77% of organisations have seen an increase in email engagement rates during 2021’. As most of us have been working from home more, this is not a surprising statistic. It is also worth noting that:
84% of survey respondents from B2B organizations express they’ve included email as a marketing tactic, primarily because of its high ROI.
Emails are one of the most profitable aspects of digital marketing. It directly communicates with customers who have shown an interest in your brand and what you offer. It is also a proven way of retaining existing customers.
The main challenges that come with email marketing are TIME and ATTENTION.
Replying to each individual who signs up on your website is very time consuming, so it is worthwhile making use of a decent CRM (customer relationship management) that allows you to organise and automate your emails. A CRM will also allow you to including brand elements and buttons in your emails that will get you more clicks from readers.
More importantly, before your emails are opened, your readers must be intrigued and gripped by the TITLE. Getting a copywriter to write your email campaigns ensures that you have the best chance of getting your emails read.
5. PPC
PPC digital marketing refers to paid ads on either social media or search engines – you have no doubt seen them in your latest search online.
This is a great way to get more traffic to your website or social media page QUICKLY. Unlike ‘organic’ growth, PPC ads draw in higher numbers of traffic in a shorter amount of time: ‘PPC ads can boost brand awareness by 80%’.
Having said that, it is still vital that you grow your online presence organically. A website that is filled with well informed content is far more convincing than ads. It may take longer to achieve the same result, but is far less costly.
Having a well thought out ad-campaign (and content to follow) is vital. Without this, you may risk spending a lot of money with little results. Remember, there will still be a period of trial and error before your ads start to take full effect.
A big challenge with PPC ads is also competition. Keywords that are highly sought after will cost you more money to use.
GROWING YOUR BRAND ONLINE
Together, these 5 aspects of digital marketing will give highly profitable results for your business. That is why having people who can plan and build your marketing funnels – and also create the content to fill it – is now an important step for your business.
A digital marketing funnel without a good copywriter is like an engine without oil. Get your customers moving in the right direction with words that sell.
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