Like traditional marketing, digital marketing has many avenues and platforms that can be used to grow your business.
Social Media
Not just for uploading pictures of your breakfast or reading conspiracy theories in the comments section of news articles.
Social media is an extremely effective way to market your business to a huge audience.
So much so that 97% of digital consumers have used social media in the past month, with more than half of them using it specifically to research products.
Whether it’s; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn or whatever the next big thing is in the social media world, advertising on these platforms is a great way of improving your business success.
You can either focus on organic social media or paid social media. Depending on your goals, budget and target audience you might choose to create a social media strategy that uses one or both of these approaches
Paid social media advertising will typically charge you per 1000 impressions (CPM).
This means that regardless of customer interaction with your ads, so long as the ads appear on somebody’s screen, you will be charged.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click, commonly abbreviated to PPC is a digital marketing method which involves paying a third party platform every time that a user clicks on your link or ad.
This is mostly used when advertising on search engines such as Google and Bing.
You essentially enter a bidding war against your competitors for keywords and phrases.
This will then determine where you rank on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
75% of people won’t click past the first page on a search engine, so your ranking is very important for when it comes to standing out against your competition.
On average for every £1 spent on Google, £2 will be earned. That’s an average return on investment of 200%.
This is mainly down to the fact that you are advertising to people who are actively searching for your product/service which increases the likelihood of a completed purchase.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, like PPC is a method of trying to place your website at the top of a SERP.
Unlike PPC however, this is done without paying for clicks, or organically as it’s known in the digital marketing business.
This is done by integrating keywords into your content. These will be the words that are the most commonly associated with your product/service.
The more effective and natural these keywords are used, the higher in the SERP your website will chart.
The main benefit of SEO is that it is almost entirely organic and the effects compound so will continue to deliver results for your business in the future.
Using third-party software such as Google Analytics or Search Console is essential to effectively keep track of performance. Often businesses will use a combination of SEO and PPC to attract new customers.
Email Marketing
Good old-fashioned email.
It’s been around longer than all of the newer and more fashionable platforms and will probably be here long after them.
With over 4 billion email users worldwide, emails can be an extremely effective form of digital marketing.
The ROI on a well-executed email campaign can be staggering with a return of £42 on every £1 spent.
This can be a great way of organically distributing content and even messaging those who have abandoned their online shopping carts in order to encourage them to complete the transaction.
Some studies even suggest that email marketing is 40x more effective than social media digital marketing when it comes to customer acquisition.
