Digital Marketing. It is a buzzword that gets loosely thrown around nowadays due to how hugely popular and impressive anything related to technology is.
But what exactly is Digital Marketing? Digital Marketing encompasses a wide scope of tools, ranging from Search Engine Optimization to Pay Per Click. It essentially refers to marketing via digital means. In this article, we will be covering 5 of the most effective digital marketing techniques that can elevate your business to the next level.
The average time spent by a person on the internet in the world is 6 hours and 42 minutes.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Life has been made so much easier for us since the creation of search engines. Searching for things online is a huge part of our lives to the point where terms like “Googling” or “Google” became verbs in the dictionary.
This shows how frequently and conveniently we search for things in our daily lives, reinforcing why it is integral for businesses to incorporate and manage their SEO as part of their digital marketing activities. By definition, SEO refers to getting traffic from organic or natural search results on search engines, which basically refers to the unpaid traffic that your website gets from users who happen to be searching for content within your domain.
Statistics have shown that 60% of the clicks go to the top three websites in the search results and a staggering 93% of all traffic come directly from a search engine. It is therefore of paramount importance that businesses use software like Ahrefs or Moz to help them with understanding the keywords that their users use in searching for the content relevant to their business.
Having a good grasp of the users’ behavior when they do their searching has helped businesses. Take the case of TechSpace IT Services for example. By changing up and increasing the quality of content that the site was providing coupled with proper keyword research and website optimization, the company gained results in the form of an 839% growth in traffic volume, with over 30 keywords appearing on the first page of a google search.
Want to learn more about how to effectively use SEO to boost your business’ search engine results? Read our quick, 9 steps simple beginners’ guide on SEO here.
2. Search Engine Marketing
SEO refers to the organic unpaid traffic that businesses get from users via a search engine. Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) is kind of like the premium paid version of SEO.
This technique is usually done by companies through platforms like Google AdWords where companies bid against each other to appear at the top of the users’ search results. They will pay Google based on the keywords that they want and as a result will appear as a top search result when users search for that particular keyword.
For this technique to work effectively, a company must be able to identify the keywords that its intended target audience would search with. By identifying these keywords, they would then be able to appear at the top of their desired target audience’s search engine results, consequently giving them more traffic and possibly conversions. For some help to kickstart the process of identifying these keywords, company could use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.
While this technique may seem very convenient and somewhat foolproof as it immediately helps boost your company all the way up to the top, it is an expensive technique to execute especially when your company is a small company trying to compete with bigger companies. Therefore, it isn’t recommended for a start up to be using such a technique, unless they operate in a niche field.
3. Social Media Marketing
Let’s face it, in this day and age a large proportion of us cannot imagine life without social media. The stats on social media reflects that too. At least half the population of the people in the world are online (3.5 billion) and of that 3.5billion, 66% of them are on Facebook! The potential for engagement on social media platforms cannot be overlooked and must be capitalized by businesses who are looking for opportunities to seek out new potential new customers.
Social Media Marketing is the promoting of your business’s product through social networking platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or even more recently trendy ones like TikTok. The goal of social media marketing is to engage with your target audience through conversations. The greatest benefit of social media is how it can bring about exponential gains as consumers can share products or businesses they like with their friends, helping businesses experience more growth than expected.
Successful Social Media Marketing does not rely solely on how interesting or popular the business’s products and services are. It could also be due to the kind of content that they are producing on their social media platforms. Take for example, Wendy’s, an American fast food chain’s Twitter account. They’ve amassed a following of 3.4million followers which is close to Mcdonald’s, an arguably more internationally renowned brand’s following of 3.6million followers. The content that Wendy’s Twitter produces are content that appeals to their target demographic of young adults and teenagers. They put out tweets that are entertaining and humorous and at the same time, make use of online memes to help connect them with their audience. Wendy’s Twitter page also regularly engage in hilarious conversations with their customers. The authenticity and personality of your business’s social media presence is crucial in ensuring success in the field of Social Media Marketing.
4. Content Marketing
People are more likely to be engaged and take an interest in your business if you are able to put out quality content that they enjoy. Content marketing essentially refers to attracting customers by publishing and creating free, relevant content that piques their interests.
There are many ways to execute a content marketing strategy due to the myriad of possible content that could be published by businesses. Examples are things like: Instructional Videos, Memes, Photos, Entertaining Videos. The possibilities are endless when it comes to content marketing.
One great example of how content marketing could help spark interest in a brand is the example of BlendTec. Blenders sound like a very ordinary product with nothing too special to rave about when marketing such a product. I mean, after all what other uses can a Blender have other than to make some good ole’ strawberry milkshakes and fruit juices right? BlendTec would however, beg to differ. BlendTec had an extremely successful viral YouTube campaign “Will It Blend” to promote their blenders. The premise of the show is basically the company experimenting to see if random objects like the iPad, the XBOX 360 and even diamonds could be blended when put through their BlendTec blender. This, coupled with their use of a goofy looking professor as the face of the show, helped skyrocket them into internet virality. The show garnered more than 10 million total views and its channel currently has a subscriber count of 876,000. By delivering entertaining and creative content, BlendTec successfully propelled their brand to becoming one of the most popular blender brands in the world.
As proven by BlendTec, content marketing is only limited and bound by your creativity!
5. Email Marketing
The common misconception about this strategy is that most consumers take e-mail advertising as spam. Afterall, who actually bothers reading advertising emails and not discard them right? It has however been proven that email marketing is an effective channel for reaching out to consumers and converting them. In 2018, the average return on investments that companies gain from email marketing amounted to $32 per every dollar spent. This is a drop from the figure of $38 per dollar spent in 2015. While this may indicate a declining trend and strength of the email marketing strategy, businesses who want to create a good first impression or retain its customers must still know how to effectively capture their audiences with the email channel.
82% of consumers will open a “welcome email” and 59% of marketers citing email as their biggest source of ROI.
Retention and capturing the audiences’ attention through email is crucial as figures have shown that on average, 82% of consumers will open a “welcome email” and 59% of marketers citing email as their biggest source of ROI.
If you’re still not convinced of the power of email marketing yet, look at the case of Vin Bin, a wine and cheese retailer’s email marketing success story. Vin Bin freshened up their email marketing strategy by sending out their newsletter via email to its customers. By sending out relevant content that their target audience is interested in through emails, they’ve seen returns of 5 times more subscribers to their e-newsletter and growth of their sales altogether.
Email marketing might be seeing a declining trend in terms of ROI, but with the right content to capture your target audiences, it can still prove to be one of the most effective digital marketing strategies
Up Up and Away!
Hopefully this article helps you understand how some of the digital marketing strategies are able to help take businesses to the next level. If you require further help in developing a marketing plan for your company, feel free to drop by our home page and request for a FREE (yes, you read that right!) SEO audit.
If you’re still not convinced that going digital is the way to go as opposed to sticking to traditional marketing means, just know that a Hootsuite report revealed that the average time spent by a person on the internet in the world is 6 hours and 42 minutes. This is a marginally large proportion of 27% of their life in a year! Ready to capture that 27% of their life? Continue reading to find out how…
