Digital marketing is the umbrella term for all marketing that is done through the internet and on an electronic device. Its main channels are search engines, social media, email, and other websites.
Why is digital marketing important?
Digital marketing opens companies up to a wider pool of people than through traditional methods, and it also targets this wider pool better than traditional marketing, too.
- You can solely target those likely to buy the product or service
With traditional methods like magazine and TV ads, you have much less of an idea of who is going to be seeing your advertisement outside of certain demographic analyses such as typical readership/viewership.
Digital marketing allows you to target a highly-specific audience and send them personalised, high-converting marketing messages. This is seen on features on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, which reveal an audience’s age, gender, location, and interests. There are also pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts you can make to serve ads to those who have already shown an interest in what you’re selling.
Digital marketing allows you to thoroughly research a target market, identify a customer avatar, and refine your marketing strategy all before even showing off any wares.
- It’s quantifiable, versatile, and more cost effective than traditional marketing
You may also be interested in Digital marketing errors your construction company needs to avoid
DM allows you to track campaigns regularly and edit your spending on certain channels if they’re not producing high returns on investment. This is a major advantage over traditional marketing which costs just as much to you regardless of conversion success.
The ability to swap and change where your marketing money is being spent is another advantage that digital marketing has over traditional methods. Digital marketing strategies allow you to continuously pivot and ensure that no money is wasted on channels that don’t perform well.
Similarly, digital marketing provides avenues for comprehensive analysis of all the metrics and data that matters the most to your company – whether this be impressions, shares, views, or bounce rate – all in real time.
This information helps the marketer prioritise which channels to spend more or less time on. For example, if you can see that only a small amount of web traffic comes from organic searches then you know that some efforts in SEO are needed to improve that number.
With digital marketing, you can see the patterns of behaviour that a potential customer exhibits before they go to make a purchase, which means you can make educated moves on how to convert them and seal the deal.
- Digital marketing puts smaller businesses on an even playing field with bigger players
There are very few ways in which a SME can compete with major rival companies that have marketing money up to their eyeballs, but the beauty of the internet is that it doesn’t care who you are as long as you play by its rules. This is especially true for SEO ranking on search engines like Google which ranks websites based on reader-friendly, relevant content and trustworthy backlinks – I call this the SEO-cracy!
The Different Faces of Digital Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO involves ensuring that a website is optimised in a way that it is placed on the highest ‘ranks’ of search engines thereby increasing the amount of free, organic traffic that your site receives.
When referring to SEO, the only search engine that marketers look to cater towards is Google due to its colossal 90% grip on the market
SEO is a tough beast to tackle and is often done so with different approaches, both on and away from the site, these are called: onpage SEO, off page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO is the traditional form of website optimisation that focuses on the content within the site. Keywords planted within the site tells Google’s algorithm what it is about and thereby ranking it higher on the search engine results page (SERPs).
Off-page SEO is most things which improve SEO that happens outside of the site itself. A major part of off-page SEO is ‘inbound’ links (also known as ‘backlinks’) that come from other sites that give ‘authority’ to your site in the eyes of Google so it knows that you’re a trustworthy site to visit, ranking you higher within SERPs. The main way this is done is through writing ‘guest posting’ on other sites and including backlinks back to your own site.
Technical SEO involves the backdoor parts of the website – the site’s coding, image size, metadata – everything that increases the website’s loading speed, because a quick loading speed is a crucial factor in Google ranking.
You may also be interested in Digital Marketing Trends You Need to Look Out for in 2021
- Content Marketing
Seen as one of the most important practice in digital marketing, content marketing is creating content (editorial or multimedia) to generate organic interest from an audience which then translates to brand awareness and traffic growth, and lead generation.
Blog posts are the most popular form of content marketing; they are long-form articles on a certain topic within a company website which helps you demonstrate your expertise within your sector whilst also generating organic search traffic to the site, which then translates into more opportunities for converting web visitors into sales leads.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is simply promoting your brand and content on social media channels to drive traffic and generate further leads for the business. The channels most commonly used with social media marketing are:
- Snapchat
You may also be interested in Digital Marketing and Social Media
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is another popular digital marketing method which involves having an ad of your company posted by a publisher, which you then pay every time your ad is clicked on. One of the most common kinds of PPC is Google Ads, whereby you pay Google to place your advert at the top of their search engine results page at the price per click of the ad. Other PPC channels include paid social media ads on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
- Automatic Marketing
This refers more to the services and processes that a digital marketer uses to automate basic marketing tasks like email newsletters, social media post scheduling, lead-nurturing and campaign tracking.
Framework Marketing are a national digital marketing agency rooted firmly in the construction industry that helps construction companies grow further than they could ever imagine. Interested in knowing more? Get in touch here!
To read the latest Framework Marketing blog post, click here.
