Digital Marketing
How can Digital Marketing help your business?
Today’s world is an exciting and intriguing time for digital marketing. It’s never before offered so much freedom and potential to help business owners in successfully marketing their businesses.
There’s a multitude of impressive tools and techniques that have developed from the continuous evolution of modern tech. The reasons below will highlight to you that a well planned digital marketing strategy is certainly a cost-effective and invaluable technique for businesses of all sizes, looking to grow in a globally connected, ever-growing world.
Many business owners assume marketing is an expensive game dominated by bigger corporates and multi-nationals with dedicated in-house teams, running expensive campaigns. This is where digital marketing shines as it can provide impressive results on minimal budget if planned correctly.
The key to successful digital marketing is not only ensuring your business is effectively marketed to the 3 billion users on the Internet, but also simultaneously promoting the brand through combining various forms of digital media.
Take a quick look at SOZO’s modern digital marketing strategy infographic below that shows you multiple forms of digital marketing tools and techniques used by a specialist agency.
Clicks-and-Mortar
Your website is at the Heart of digital marketing. Always think of your website exactly as you would your shop front, but to all online users. You want it to be as professional, intriguing, inviting and as engaging as you would a physical bricks-and-mortar store.
To maximise return on investment (ROI) from your digital marketing strategy, it’s essential to continuously review and develop your website to strive for the highest possible conversion rate. Your website is crucial because it’s the foundation of your digital marketing strategy and plays an integral part in the success of your business online.
How can Digital Marketing help your business?
Digital Marketing can track every pound spent with accurate ROI.
If your website is the Heart, analytics is the Head of digital marketing. Many forms of traditional marketing (Broadcast, Print, Billboard etc.), make it very hard to pinpoint relevant data and return on investment, and therefore what works and what doesn’t for your business.
Analytics tools provide sophisticated data that is highly measurable and easily analysed with tools such as Google Analytics. This data can show exactly which strategy is most cost-effective for your expenditure, and which is providing the highest revenue, ROI, sales, leads and more. Data can also be used to find weaknesses in your website or marketing which can then be addressed via A/B testing of new ideas.
Digital Marketing can provide fast revenue generation.
Certain tools can create immediate results and highly relevant and targeted traffic, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. This is a tool that enables you to show specifically tailored ads online to relevant target consumers when they search your specific keywords in a search engine, but the beauty is – you only pay the search engine if the searcher clicks your ad.
You can set budget controls for flexibility and reach your target consumers at the right time. High traffic doesn’t mean high profit though. PPC can provide instant results, but it’s competitive and can be expensive if not setup and managed correctly. A lot of people have wasted a lot of money on Google Ads trying to run it themselves with little experience and a poor understanding.
Digital Marketing can deliver free results.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO marketing is a more long term, but essential strategy for acquiring ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ traffic, which comes from consumers clicking the ads shown below PPC ads on the search engine results page (SERP). They’re easily identified as the ads not containing the green ‘Ad’ symbol shown below.
Unlike PPC, this is free traffic gained from search engines through optimising your website in a variety of ways to make it ‘search engine friendly’ with an aim to position as high as possible in the search results for your targeted keyword phrases. There are literally hundreds of ranking factors in Google’s algorithm used to rank websites, which take into consideration the content of the website, usability, page speed and technical aspects, to name but a few! There will of course be costs involved in hiring an SEO professional to audit and ensure your website is as search engine friendly as possible (both initially and ongoing), but the benefits of this investment can be extremely rewarding in the long-term.
Content is king for organic search ranking efforts, and producing relevant, new and useful content for your website can have a big impact on your website ranking. It’s a continuous, complex and ever evolving process but a professional SEO expert can help your business maximise conversion rates from your search engine traffic; turning users into customers and visits into sales and leads.
Digital Marketing caters for multiple devices.
It’s essential for businesses to create a seamless experience across all devices. GB adult smartphone ownership now stands at 75% and mobile devices have become a way of life in many countries. Digital marketing can create targeted campaigns relevant to the appropriate device and demographics, reaching the right consumers at the right time on the right device, influencing purchasing decision and increasing conversion rates. The importance of a fully optimised website is crucial here as people are five times more likely to leave a mobile site that isn’t mobile-friendly and nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds!
Digital Marketing helps create a loyal customer base.
Digital marketing provides 24/7 targeted marketing. Millions of consumers use the Internet and social media at all hours; they can shop, check reviews and have regular interaction with brands and their advocates. Delivering in real time gives a great opportunity to build brand reputation and recognition, while developing a loyal customer base rewarding you with more conversions.
Digital Marketing can make you local, globally.
Local focused SME’s must start thinking global more! Global distribution and logistics is becoming much easier and more widely available to businesses of all sizes. All the marketplaces in the world are becoming more easily accessible each day, opening up access to millions of new and potential customers.
Due to online capabilities and consumers and brands connecting worldwide, targeting similar people with similar tastes and similar needs all over the world is much easier, and an otherwise local campaign can easily reach consumers on a global scale with appropriate digital marketing strategies.
Summary
The Internet is a powerful tool that provides endless opportunities for businesses and consumers to engage with one another. Effectively utilising its strengths and capitalising on the possibilities is what makes digital marketing so important in today’s business world. There are a number of unique tools and techniques used by marketers that help businesses increase traffic, conversion rates and ROI, regardless of company size and budget. The ease in which digital marketing can be now be analysed helps even the newest and smallest businesses compete neck-and-neck against the well-established and larger ones.
Looking for a digital agency to become your long-term partner to help your business succeed online?
Well say hello then!