What is Digital Marketing?

As more and more people use the internet, the way we shop has changed – meaning traditional offline marketing isn’t as effective as it once was. With the internet being so accessible and always available, digital marketing can make sure your business is in the right place all of the time.

Methods of digital marketing

There are many different types of digital marketing but most fall into these 11 categories:

• SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
• PPC (Pay-per-click)
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing (also known as influencer)
• Viral Marketing
• Radio Advertising
• TV Advertising
• Mobile Advertising

Many of the biggest companies around the world use the majority of these methods. Smaller businesses can benefit from just using a few of these services suited to their needs, goals and budget. Creating a marketing strategy and outlining these is a great foundation to start mapping your digital future. A major benefit of digital marketing is that it is easily measurable in real-time.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing refers to both SEO and PPC. Bringing traffic to your website through a search engine is not as easy as it once was. Using SEO and PPC together works to bring in traffic through both paid (PPC) and unpaid (SEO – organic) means. Unpaid doesn’t mean SEO is a method without a cost, see below.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of enhancing the content of your website to follow the guidelines set out by search engines such as Google and Bing. These search engines have a series of ‘checks’ that work out how your website should rank for a search query. These are set out in pre-determined algorithms, allowing a search engine to quickly sort out content in less than a second.

When done correctly, SEO is the key to ranking on the first page in the organic set of results and an essential part of attracting more visitors to your website via search engines. Although you will see an initial bounce in SERP from implementing SEO procedures, this should be viewed as a mid-long term method and reviewed periodically. SEO is an on-going strategy with the simple philosophy of ‘the more time you have to invest in it, the more positive the results will be.’

How Do Boost SEO Plans Work?

We determine how you perform against your competitors through keyword research, ranking analysis and looking at the on-page ranking factors of your website.

We then build an SEO strategy with monthly, quarterly and annual goals to review. Once the strategy is in place, we then begin by optimising your website and the content on it to help make it more understandable by search engines. We’ll also start an internal and external link building campaign to add structure to your website and build quality relational links that are relevant. These help the search engine crawl bots collate data from page to page and website to website before indexing it in their search results. We also look at ways your content can be given more exposure. Part of content optimisation is enhancing it through Schema – a coding language that seeks to get an in-depth understanding of your content set up together by major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). This helps categorise your content and enhance user experience.

Once work has been carried out, we then provide monthly reports that show your top performing keywords, top performing pages, site visitors and much more. This data allows us to look at areas of your website we can improve and how a better user experience for the site visitor can be attained.

PPC

PPC is a form of advertising on search engines by paid means. PPC advertising requires money to move to the top of a search engines results – whereas with SEO, time to produce quality content is the key. These advertised spaces on Google are a maximum of 3 at the top and 3 at the bottom, with the organic SEO results sandwiched in the middle.

It’s called Pay-Per-Click because it is exactly that – your account is charged each time your advertisement link is clicked. The cost of each click is determined by the quality of your website and the selected keywords in your campaign. If competition for the keyword is high, the CPC (cost-per-click) increases. You can set daily budgets for your campaign – once the budget is reached your advert will be removed until your budget is next available.

Keyword research is cost-effective before launching a campaign – You can use Google AdWords to identify the keywords and their costs before launching a campaign. We can help you find successful keywords that do not charge as much as the mainstream words and yield similar search volumes collectively for a prolonged and successful campaign.

Social Media Management

Social Media Management (SMM) is a great way to increase brand awareness, website traffic and boost sales. There is no doubt that having a social media page that you use regularly can generate a wide audience for your business.

Social media also helps you interact with your customers in a more humanised way. Naturally, this makes your brand more likeable and lead to a more positive result in sales. With social media being an environment where a comment, like and share is almost at reaction-like speed, it can only improve your conversion rates and website traffic.

Social media engagement also has SEO benefits and has been proven to increase brand loyalty.

Content Creation Is Key To Digital Marketing

The phrase ‘content is king’ is used a lot in SEO – this is because it is the most important factor behind SEO. At very least, the written content should consist of a catchy title, an enticing introduction, a detailed body with logical points and related questions and a conclusion that clarifies your post.

SEO factors in more than just the written text in your page content. Aside from the main body of text, the main things a search engine looks at are meta data, heading tags, Schema, internal and external links, URL slug, images, page speed and social sharing before archiving in their search rankings.

Below is a downloadable helpsheet to follow when writing a blog post.

That just about covers the methods of digital marketing available and a brief introduction to our services. If you would like to discuss the digital marketing options available to your business, please contact us.