We live in an age where everyone is connected 24/7. Where almost everyone owns a smartphone and spends an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their phones. So it’s a must to have a digital marketing strategy in place that meets your clients and customers where they are at and guides them successfully through the marketing funnel.
Below are the basics of digital marketing explained. Use these terms to inform and fuel your current and future digital marketing strategy.
What is Digital Marketing?
In a nutshell, digital marketing is a term that encompasses all forms of marketing and engagement done through digital channels. The purpose of online marketing is to make it easier for potential leads to find your business online. It also aids in attracting quality leads, these are people who return again and again in order to make use of your product or service.
We can divide digital marketing into a few absolute categories:
Your website
You need a website if you have any hopes of getting your business online. This is the first step in going digital. Secondly, you need to make sure that your website ticks the following five boxes for the best optimisation.
- Your website must be able to load fast, preferably within three to five seconds.
- It must be secure for users, showing HTTPS in the web address bar and not HTTP.
- It must be optimised for mobile.
- The layout of your website needs to be user friendly, in other words, provide a good user experience.
- Lastly, it needs to be optimised for SEO. People need to be able to find your site easily.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
As mentioned above, people need to find your site easily. Most likely through a search engine like Google. Search engine marketing (SEM) is a mixture of different marketing techniques and approaches that are applied in an effort to get your business to feature on the top or near the top of search engine results for particular keywords.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a branch of SEM which involves the updating and tweaking of a website’s code and content to rank higher in organic search results. Search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google all use search crawlers that scan web pages to make sense of what they are about so that they can provide the searcher with the best results for their search query.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
This is a broad term for paid ads online. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is designed so that you only pay money when someone clicks on your ad. Hence the term, “pay per click”. Paid search ads are the most commonly used type of online ad and they can be identified clearly as ads at the top of the page in the search results. These ads are generated when a user searches for a certain set of keywords.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a technique that is used to follow the user with an ad that they have taken an interest in, by visiting a website and clicking on it. It works by taking a few lines of code from a retargeting partner, for example, Google Ads and dropping an anonymous cookie in the user’s browser. The cookie then stores bits of information that it uses to track the different site visits. The ad then appears on the next website that the user visits, reminding them of the ad that they just clicked, providing a higher retention rate.
Email Marketing
This is quite self-explanatory and is exactly what it sounds like, various marketing materials sent through email. It works by collecting as many email addresses and phone numbers as possible. Possible ways of doing this include getting a person to sign up to your mailing list or them downloading a helpful piece of content from your website. Their personal information then gets entered into an automated system that then automatically sends pre-planned messages (emails and/or SMSes) to a long list of recipients.
Social Media Marketing
This too is quite self-explanatory, as it is any marketing done via social media platforms. It is worth noting that organic reach on social media is at an all-time low currently due to algorithms and the rising use of the platforms to promote many businesses. So when you choose to use social media as a platform to market your business, make it worth your while and supplement your efforts with paid social media ads in order to get noticed.
