What is Digital Marketing?
For starters, the question ‘What is Digital Marketing?’ is posed in the incorrect way, if you want to find out what it is and how it works, you should be asking ‘How can I use Digital Marketing?’ because in a practical sense, it’s a selection of tools rather than a concept.
It’s a term that has been thrown around a lot especially in 2019, and will continue to be now we’re in 2020. It’s one of those terms that explains both everything and nothing in one single swipe. As new businesses begin, and existing businesses want to grow & expand, there is a stepping stone to overcome in taking that jump to the next level, this is where Digital Marketing slots in.
Whether you’re a new, small or established business, this entire article is still very relevant to you, the only real difference is the scale of which you can take it to at this current time.
Now that’s out of the way, 3 key pillars of Digital Marketing, shall we get started?
What is Digital Marketing?
“Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies..” – Wikipedia
There are dozens in not hundreds of ways you can market yourself, your service or your product in the modern day, but we’re just going to focus on the main ones, the ones that have a proven track record and the ones used by the biggest companies in the world on a daily basis.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is exactly what it sounds like.
Every time you make a search on any major search engine, there is an incredibly quick process that is carried out. The words in your search query are analysed and the algorithm asks itself 4 very important questions before showing you your results.
- “Which website is most relevant to this search?”
- “Who has the best content on their website that links to this?”
- “Who’s website can I trust the most?”
- “Which website have lots of people been on recently linked to this?”
In terms of longevity, this is probably one of the most crucial aspects of Digital Marketing. Everyone wants to be on page 1 of Google, Yahoo & Bing but it’s not as simple as couple of button presses, it’s a process. Taking Google as an example, you need to tick a substantial amount of boxes to climb up the Google rankings, let alone get on page 1.
To name a few, your website needs to be responsive, your website needs to be easily navigated through and crawlable by Google bots, your website needs to have on-page optimisation which ties in with the images you’re using & the content you have on your website. You need to have fresh content that has been created with purpose & get people to stay on your website once they’re there. So although this is a cornerstone of Digital Marketing, it can also be the trickiest as it combines multiple aspects, but this is where you call in the professionals.
This is step 1 of understanding the question: ‘What is Digital Marketing?’
The higher you appear, the more people that discover you, simple. If you’re sitting back and thinking about this and want a website health check to get more of an idea about the current state of your website, press here to get started.
Social Media
Whether you like it or not, social media is the lifeblood of the 21st century, and a key factor in the question of: ‘What is Digital Marketing?’
Doesn’t matter if you’re browsing Facebook at home, liking your friends picture on Instagram on your lunch break or tweeting that celebrity you fancy for the 34th time on your commute home, social media is an absolute monster of a presence. There are lots of social media platforms all of which are suited for other things, this depends entirely on your industry.
For example, If you’re a B2B business, then LinkedIn is a much better platform for this as it’s a platform created and developed specifically for companies and professional people.
Another good example of this is if you’re a B2C company, using Facebook as the location to focus your content and advertising is much more beneficial as you can specifically target the people you want to and is the most popular social media platform in the world.
You can market yourself on social media in many different ways, if you’re looking at a clean slate with no likes, no followers and no interest, each of the major social media platforms has an Ad platform. Where you can skip that awkward phase of talking to next to no-one, and get likes and traffic from people who you’re hoping to sell yourself too with ads branded with your message.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads
Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/en/a/get-started.html
Instagram: https://business.instagram.com/advertising/
LinkedIn: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads
If you’re lucky enough to have pages already in place with a good enough following to start engaging with, you can start to create informative/creative/funny content all with the underlying purpose of driving traffic to your website.
The big factor here is: ‘Is my content good enough to get people talking?’
It’s not all about getting people to click your links, it’s about looking at the bigger picture and starting to build a community of like-minded people. If you engage and understand with the people you have, you’ll grow a better understanding of how you can improve and make yourself more appealing.
Seeing more people clicking through when you’re running some kind of promotion? Run more.
Not getting a lot of engagement on a certain type of post? Change it.
Noticing people are clicking through to your website but not converting? Give them incentives.
The second step to understanding: ‘What is Digital Marketing?’
(We absolutely boss social media for our clients, and we’ve helped elevate the click through rate of some clients by as much as 55% in comparison to before we’ve got involved.)
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Email is the old workhorse of Digital Marketing thats been around for decades. Some people claim it’s a ‘dead format’ but we couldn’t disagree more.
Email is absolutely booming and is still such an incredible tool for generating leads and helping build meaningful connections with your clients. We can’t stress enough how important it is to nurture a client you’ve had in the past, as you’ll only be encouraging the possibility of a lifetime customer.
It’s estimated that there are 269 billion emails sent every single day. If that’s a ‘dead format’ then I don’t understand how somebody comes to that conclusion. In the hands of somebody who knows what they’re doing, with a programme like Mailchimp, you can create clean, bespoke artwork that then gets sent out to a pre-specified list of people. These emails can be promotional, a sale to entice people to shop in your store. They can be informative, to give people valuable insight on a topic. They can be even be humorous, with the intention of being funny and more sharable, while still getting who you are across to those its being sent too.
There is no real limit with where you can take it, thats why we love it.
Assuming you don’t have an email database, you can start to build this a few different ways. The first one is relatively simple, and is collecting emails from people you have sold to/are selling too. If you’re an e-commerce site and a customer goes through the site to make a purchase, it’s likely that they will have to either log in or make an account, which you can then set an email field as a required field in the sign up form, simple.
Secondly is to have an incentive front and centre, whether this is pushed through social media or placed front and centre somewhere on your website, if you offer to give something for perhaps free or even a reduced fee, that can be the difference between somebody signing up to your newsletter.
‘Sign up to our newsletter and receive 20% off your first order.’ is a fantastic example of this and works absolute wonders if you’re getting a decent enough amount of traffic.
I have worked with dozens of clients on multiple email platforms to help businesses engage and make more money than they ever did through their email channels. If you think you’d be interested in this, get in touch with us, here and he can wave his wand and work his magic-ey magic.
These are just three key pillars, and we hope we’ve helped you at least begin to be able to answer that all important question ‘What is digital marketing?’
If you happen to be interested in Paid Ad’s/Google Ad’s we have a really simple guide on this and how it works, here.
To summarise, digital marketing is the modern day method of getting a business new customers. This is something we’ve done for long enough, and in doing so have helped businesses both small and large take that step they may not of even known was possible.
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