Digital Marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as websites, search engines (Google etc), social media, email and apps. In this guide we will walk you through a range of advertising options which will allow your company to increase sales online. As ever if you have any questions please feel free to ask us on our Facebook or Twitter accounts, or contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
Paid Search
Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is the ads at the top of your page when you search for some on Google or other searches engines. As well as this, you can also have paid ads on social media websites and also banner ads which will be shown on other websites (I have added in some pictures below to show you what these look like).
The great thing about pay-per-click (PPC) is that you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, that means that they are ideally interested in your products or services. You can tweak and refine paid ads as you get more data back and therefore make them cheaper and more cost effective as you go.
Although is you stop paying for this then all of your ads will switch off, they are a great way to get sales and leads as soon as your website launches or you are looking to increase sales quickly. We recommend that you use PPC ads in conjunction with SEO (more about that below) as you can use PPC ads to gain leads and data, whilst your SEO campaign is working to get you long-term results.
Search Engine Optimisation
Although search engine optimisation (SEO) is quite a complex subject you can break it down into content, technical set-up, and the authority of your website (how many quality links it has coming to it). SEO is on-going and needs constant work in order to maintain page one rankings as competition is always trying to outdo you.
Also, more people are likely to click on organic results (this is the term people use for search engines results which are not paid) than paid ads, so it is worth the investment.
We recommend that you give 6 months for SEO to take full effect as it’s a time-consuming process of ensuring that your website increases it’s trust slowly and step-by-step.
Some SEO Stats… 67% of all the clicks are from the first 5 listings on a search results page and 71% of searches resulted in a page one Google organic click. So from these stats, you know that SEO can have a positive long term benefit to your company.
Content Marketing
We have found that content is a huge part of search engines understanding what a given page is about. The more useful and valuable content a page has the more trust search engines will have, the longer people will spend on your website and the more likely other websites will link to it. However it is all about value – so rather than make a short post, make one large post all about a certain subject – although it takes time and effort it is much more worthwhile writing a 10,000 word article over a 1,000 word article (perhaps you shouldn’t do this all of the time, but if you want SEO results, longer content usually ranks higher than shorter content).
What I would recommend is that you stick to posting at least once a week, it helps build awareness of your company, it gives you something to post on your social media profiles and it helps keep your website fresh.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media marketing is a great way to communicate directly with people on a platform which they use daily to discover, research, and educate themselves about a brand before making a purchase decision. You don’t just want to be posting all sales messages, but a combination of engaging posts, sales, videos and images – be creative and try different things, social media is all about a personal relationship so respond quickly to messages and ensure that you are friendly and polite in everything that you do.
Email Marketing
Although email marketing is quite an old (in internet years anyway) for of marketing it’s still a vital form of marketing and something which still works even with all of the other forms of marketing already mentioned. Just think about how many times you have checked your emails today and you’ll understand why it’s still vitally important.
In order to be successful with email marketing you need to produce engaging, relevant, informative, and entertaining newsletters – this all comes down to time, do you have the time to do this or are you out working on your business and look for new leads? Or do you have a few hours spare every week to concentrate on this? Perhaps speaking to any agency may help? Look at what is best and speak to people about how best to go forward.
Mobile App Marketing
Most people’s phones are stuck to people’s hands – so this is a great opportunity to utilise this audience. However, this is probably a more advanced form of marketing, as it takes some effort and cost to build an app and launch it. By 2021 it is estimated that the UK app economy will be worth about £83bn, and the average in-app spend of £3.50 per hour per person in the UK will rise to £8.35 an hour in the next five years, the analytics company App Annie predicts, so we can see what a large market this will be if you have the funds to build one and market it.
If you have any questions please feel free to ask us on our Facebook or Twitter accounts, or contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
Next, we will be discussing Local SEO and how it can help your business get more business from your local area.
