Digital marketing has become one of the most crucial elements in marketing and advertising. As the world has slowly gone digital, customers are turning more to online sources to find their desired products and services.
The problem that most companies face is that they simply do not know how digital marketing works and how it can effectively be used for brand awareness. While traditional methods are still crucial for many companies, digital marketing has proven to be an efficient and cost-effective way of reaching and converting new customers.
We thought we would take a look at digital marketing as a whole. Why it is not just a once off task, and how you can scale your business using these online resources. So, let’s get started.
How Effective is Your Website?
Whether you are an eCommerce company or not, your website is your calling card for your company. Your website has several functions for your customer. It is a sales tool, it is a brand representative, and it provides your customer with the necessary information about your company that they will need.
But, it also helps you reach audiences that you might not have been able to reach before. This is where SEO comes in, and why it is so important to get it right. Google will crawl your site, picking up various elements to understand where to categorise you and where to rank you.
So, you will need to have the right keywords appearing several times on each page. Say you are an air charter service, for example. The words “air charter” need to appear several times (not too many) and need to be strategically placed on the site for Google to know where to place you.
SEO also entails various other elements such as link building, your site’s load speed being optimised and your sitemap appearing for Google to crawl it. But, once your SEO is completed and each page is being found and categorised by Google, you can start promoting it for it to start ranking higher and higher in the search results.
What Are You Doing to Promote Your Website?
Now, many companies are under the very false assumption that when you have optimised your SEO, your digital marketing efforts end there. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, this is where it just starts.
Now, you have a shiny new website with all the right words in the right places and your SEO audit has come up with some great results. Now it is time to actually start working on getting your website moving higher and higher up the search rankings.
In order to do this, you will need to start putting some money behind these keywords and start taking out some paid ads. Think about it, you are competing with hundreds of similar companies and competitors who are all vying for that top space on the search result. So, naturally, they have started putting money behind the keywords which they want to be found for. The higher their budget for certain words, the higher they rank.
Companies globally will put a budget behind a number of keywords and ads monthly so that they can pop out at the top when a customer searches those phrases. So, let’s use the air charter example again.
Words like “air charter”, “business travel” and “private charters” will be great examples of phrases and keywords that your customers will be searching for. But don’t make this up. Do regular keyword research to make sure that you are targeting the right words.
You can then put money behind these keywords so that Google can start ranking you in the top results of the search engine. When you do this keyword research, you will be able to see what your competitors are bidding on. In many cases, companies will put a higher amount than them to outrank them.
They will also bid on their competitors’ names so that they can appear higher than them when a potential customer searches for them. Try it out. Search for your insurance company, for example, and see how many other companies are bidding for their name.
How Are You Reaching Your Audience?
Now, apart from organic traffic being fed to your site thanks to the keywords and paid ads, how else are you generating traffic? These two elements are simply not enough. You will need to be making use of social media, mailers and partnerships to extend the reach of your brand.
The best way to do this is by continuously creating content. Whether you are creating campaigns, posts or educational blogs, you increase your chances of being seen by your targeted audience by placing content in various places.
So, work out a great content calendar where you can schedule your ideas for the upcoming month. Write educational and informative blog posts and articles (yes, like this one). Share that on your social media and send it to your database through your mailers.
You can also send these great blog posts to media sites and create partnerships. Not only will these be seen by their audiences and get more eyes on your company, but the back links will do wonders for your SEO.
Keep an eye on what posts are working well on your site and which posts are getting a lot of engagement on social media. You can then put money behind the more successful posts and reach an audience beyond your followers and fans. Social promotion allows you to choose an audience and target a sponsored post at their news feeds. So, anyone who is already interested in your types of products or services will see your post popping up, even if they do not follow you. It is a highly effective way of increasing brand awareness, heightening your engagement rates and driving traffic to your site. You just need to be willing to put some budget behind it.
Last Thoughts
Digital marketing is a long-term game with an ever-increasing ROI. Once you start getting the basics right, it is simply a matter of continuous effort and work being put in to make sure that you are constantly generating content. You will also need to make sure that you are willing to put some money behind your efforts. We understand that the process can be complicated and resource- intensive. That is why we are in a position to help you streamline your digital marketing efforts. We have the right expertise and resources at hand to help you create, post and promote the right content to drive qualified traffic to your site. So, speak to us today and let us show you what digital marketing can do for your brand.
