As the old saying goes, if you’re not online… you’re nowhere. 

Okay, maybe I made that up, but to be honest, it’s actually pretty true in this day and age. The reality is that people spend twice as much time online as they did 12 years ago. That’s a massive jump by any standards!

Of course this has created a massively valuable opportunity for business’ to pump their products and services to consumers, whether this be through eCommerce platforms or online marketing efforts. 

And this is where ‘digital marketing’ steps in. Digital marketing is an umbrella term that basically refers to anything a business does that publicises, advertises, markets, exposes or communicates their brand message, products or services online. 

Let’s go through and have a little look at a few of the many different facets of digital marketing. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising your website through content, user experience and and mobile optimisation so that it ‘ranks’ better on Google. The higher your Google ranking, the closer to the top your website will be when people search for keywords relating to your business. This, in turn, increases the ‘organic’ (or free) traffic being driven to your website. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and developing pieces of online content (such as blog articles, downloadable eBooks, infographics and whitepapers) to increase the authority of your brand, educate your audience, engage with your audience, and eventually lead them to the conversion of your choice. Whether this conversion is sales, email sign-up or social media engagement, content marketing is a great way to get there. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves using social media channels (such as Facebook, Instagram,Twitter and Pinterest) to promote your product or service and communicate with your audience. 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC refers to ‘Pay-Per-Click’, a form of internet advertising where buyers essentially pay for each time their advertisement is clicked on in a search engine by a potential customer. Businesses can bid for for the placement of their ad in a search engine when someone searches for particular keywords. Everytime the ad is clicked, the business has to pay a small fee for the visit to their website. If PPC is done right it can work amazingly well, as the profit should massively outweigh the cost of the click if you’re bidding on the right keywords. For example, if a click costs you $7 but results in a $400 sale – you’re winning!

A lot of time and research goes into developing effective PPC campaigns, like researching the right keywords to bid on, to organising the keywords appropriately, to then developing the pages that people land on (called ‘landing pages’, ironically) so that they are optimised for user experience and conversion. 

This is only a tiny taster of the strategies that can be implemented when developing a digital marketing campaign, but I hope it’s set you off on the right foot. I’ll be delving more into each of these strategies in future blog posts. In the meantime, if you’re interested in seeing what the amazing world of digital marketing could do for your business, contact me – we’d love to have a coffee with you!