Digital Marketing from the start (Part 2) aims to continue where we left of by explaining in simple terms what a few more digital disciplines are and the role they can play for your business.
This article will focus on what social media marketing is and how best to utilise the space. It will also focus on the role content has in digital marketing and why it often has the biggest of build ups. Finally, this article will touch on affiliate marketing and how a simple concept drives billions of pounds of revenue each year!
Social Media Marketing
Firstly, when we talk about social media we are talking about any web property that allows and encourages peer-to-peer communication. You would have to have been living under a rock for the last ten years to somehow have avoided this revolution and the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and many others in this space. It has long been the challenge of online marketeers to understand how they can take advantage of these hubs of activity.
At Clicksmith we believe that social channels should be used as a platform to engage, communicate and better understand your target audience. Social channels allow you to target at a previously unprecedented level through both paid and organic postings. If you know what your target user likes, wants, needs and engages with, you can use social targeting to make sure it is your company fulfilling this desire. As a platform for your content there are few better ones, and utilising social referrals (likes and shares) can ensure that your company is getting substantial exposure within your target market.
Content Marketing
If there is any word in the digital marketing world that is used more than content, then this author would be shocked! You will know doubt hear the following: “Content is King”, “Content is the future”, “Content is… “. Content, content, content! The truth of the matter is actually more simple then people think; content is simply marketing.
Creating online content is all about producing engaging, original and customer-specific marketing material that in return can take your online business to a new level.
A successful content marketing campaign can offer a world of riches to an online property or business. Content drives organic traffic: paid traffic, brand traffic, referral traffic and direct traffic. Aside from website traffic, a strong content campaign will increase your brand awareness, brand trust and authority.
High-quality content marketing can drive direct response sales and leads, as well as helping to build data on your target audience. We haven’t yet mentioned the most common benefit: aiding SEO. Content used to gain links from authoritative publishers and websites. Often a company will simply produce an engaging piece of content that they will hope will be published on a third-party website in return for an inbound link, thus increasing the authority of the linked page.(See Part One for more information on SEOs.)
Affiliate Marketing
This was a last-minute addition to the digital marketing overview, but it is in truth difficult to ignore the £16.5bn-worth of revenue generated from the channel last year alone.
In its essence affiliate/performance marketing is perhaps the simplest and most logical form of digital advertising. You only pay the advertiser if they generate a conversion (sale/lead/whatever you choose). The advertiser is known as an affiliate and they have links on their sites which send traffic through to the merchants, known as the advertiser.
Each customer journey is tracked from the initial click to the end conversion, allowing the advertiser to pay for each conversion they receive. Typically, in e-commerce it is a percentage of the total sale amount, or a fixed fee for a lead in B2B situations. There are a number of different types of affiliates in operation including cashback, voucher codes, comparison sites, email senders and search.
This concludes part 2 of digital marketing from the start series. The idea is to give an overview of what is out there for all businesses in the form of digital marketing. This obviously only scrapes the surface, so if you want to find out any more about these opportunities or any others that you may have heard about, don’t hesitate to get in touch.