How to Make Digital Marketing Work For Your Business?
Marketing used to be about advertising in newspapers, on billboards, or via leaflets. Now our customers are shopping and doing business online, so that’s where marketing needs to focus its attention. In this article the OYM team considers ‘what is digital marketing?’ and what are the techniques that are most successful for reaching online shoppers?
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing prioritises the creation of ‘engagement’ with leads. An ad will draw attention to your product or service, but digital marketing seeks to make a relationship, be of value, and convert leads into customers. You may choose any, all or some of the following to carry out your digital marketing:
Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
In the UK we spend, on average, a quarter of each day, or just over 4 hours, online. That’s a lot of time for marketers to grab your attention, especially if you’re looking for a distraction. Digital marketing doesn’t sell aggressively, it makes a relationship with you. And once it has your attention, its aim is to provide you with valuable resources that will persuade you to become a loyal customer.
3 Ways Digital Marketing Benefits Businesses
- Understanding Your Customers. Knowing why your customers search online for products, and how they search is key to online selling. You learn these things from talking to them, finding out what problems your products solve for them, and how they want to buy from you.
- Differentiating From Competitors. It’s easy to learn from your competitors online and find ways to differentiate your offering. Digital marketing is flexible enough to allow you to try out new approaches and see whether they produce results. If not, you can try something else.
- You Can Measure the Success of Digital Marketing. It’s now possible to track specific goals on a marketing campaign or measure the effect of a marketing strategy on website traffic and conversions. Best of all, the data generated by digital marketing offers ongoing information about what works best with your customers.
4 Examples of Digital Marketing
The question ‘what is digital marketing?’ should perhaps be posed slightly differently as, ‘what is digital marketing doing?’. In the following examples, we take a look at how digital marketing works to develop relationships with online shoppers and persuade them to buy from you.
Search Engine Marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) uses a number of marketing tools to make your website ‘search engine ready’. A website that has not been search engine optimised has no chance of being found by online searchers, so SEO is absolutely critical to a business’ online visibility and conversions.
- Technical SEO. This defines the ways in which your website is optimised for digital marketing. The architecture of the site is designed to enable Google bots to read it easily, and all pages are indexed. Loading is optimised to make it fast for users, and the look and feel of site is made equivalent no matter what device you’re using.
- On-page SEO. This form of optimisation concentrates on the content. Much emphasis is placed on researching the keywords that are appropriate to your product. Keywords are the search queries used by your customers; if you can align page titles, for example, with high volume keywords, you will become much easier to find on Google.
Content Marketing
What kind of content would your customers value? If you’re able to answer this question authoritatively, you’re in a great position to generate value-driven content marketing. This is made up of a range of products that generate brand awareness, drives traffic to your website, creates new leads and converts them into customers.
Content marketing is about creating assets that customers value in the form of:
- Blog posts – answering customer questions, providing brand news, or offering product related guidance.
- E-books – on specialist areas, related to your product.
- Newsletters – sent regularly to subscribers.
- Whitepapers – industry related, specialist reports or studies.
- Infographics – offering data in a visual format.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Most digital marketing is ‘free’, although it requires time and resources to create it. A notable exception is pay-per-click advertising. This is because PPC ads offer prime positions on Google, YouTube, and social media, and they target shoppers who are searching for your product. You pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
A PPC campaign is quick to set up, and it starts to generate traffic for your website fast. Businesses usually employ PPC where they’re running a promotion or introducing a new product. Ads show on the channel where your customers search for your product, in the geographical area where your business operates. Once your ad goes live, it generates detailed data that can be used to tweak keywords in order to target customers better.
Social Media Marketing
Are your customers using social media to search for your products? Social media marketing provides the opportunity to increase awareness of your brand, build conversations around your product, and drive more traffic to your site. You need real commitment to build a successful online community around your brand, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. But if social media is where your customers are, you need to be talking to them.
About Outsource Your Marketing
What is digital marketing? It’s how you keep a conversation going with your customers. A recent research study by Salesforce found that 66% of customers were sick of being treated as consumers; they want a personalised experienced with the brands they buy from. Digital marketing makes this individualised experience a possibility, right from the start of the customer journey.
Digital marketing is an amazing opportunity for the growth of your brand, and it’s largely free. The major investment required is time – because marketing online requires an ongoing commitment every day. If your business can’t spare that time right now, perhaps we could be the right solution for you. OYM is a UK-based, network of marketing specialists who can plan and carry out your digital marketing campaign, starting today.
