An overview of the main components of digital marketing and how they might be able to help your business.
We are not crazy enough to claim that digital is the only way to market, but we do think it can play a major part in how people get their message across to potential customers, even within more traditional industries where it is yet to be fully utilised. This article (Part 1) aims to give a top-line overview of what is included within the digital marketing artillery and how it is typically utilised.
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO as it is known (if you are in the know) is all about optimising your website and the content of your website so that it can be found on a search engine. SEO has evolved in recent years and is not the dark art it was once considered. Google (other search engines are available) have made it very clear in recent years that websites will be ranked and displayed based on the relevance and authority it has on any given search term. Various updates have been released by Google in the last few years and are normally named after small birds or lazy bears (Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird), but in general they have all tackled these simple rules; your site must be original, engaging and authoritative.
Pay Per Click
PPC is based on the premise that you pay a third-party for traffic being sent to your website; you pay per click. The most common form is through the search channel (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu), where a website may pay to be at the top of the search results for a pre-determined search term. These search adverts are easy to spot as they will have an orange “AD” symbol next to them. PPC allows websites that don’t have high organic rankings to “jump the queue” to be at the top, thus vastly increasing the chances of a click. PPC is widely used and forms the vast majority of Google’s enormous revenue. PPC campaigns are managed within Google AdWords and often websites will drive 1,000’s of clicks across 1,000’s of different keywords. How much you pay per click depends on how much you bid (i.e. how much you are prepared to pay for a click) and your quality score within your AdWords account (simply how relevant Google considers your ad to be).
We all know what email is, we get enough of them! Utilising email as a marketing technique can be incredibly powerful for a business. It can act as a way of communicating with your current customer base, or a way of selling to an entirely new audience. Email marketing allows you to target a specific audience and deliver a message that will engage them. Getting the balance between adding value to your customer’s day and simply bombarding your database with email after email is the challenge, and one that is often done badly.
This is just part one of our digital marketing overview. In the next blog we will be looking at Social, Retargeting and Content. If you would like to know how your business might be able to benefit from any of the disciplines mentioned above, then please get in touch with Clicksmith.