What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a set of strategies that can help raise your business’ online profile and bring in customers. It includes elements such as your website, blogs, social media, emails and various forms of paid online advertising. If you want to get ahead, it’s important to use a combination of digital marketing techniques to attract customers, built strong relationships with them and motivate them to spend month with you. Here are 5 steps to get you started:
Step 1
Make sure your website is great
All your digital marketing activities will aim to bring people to your website so it’s important your website it up to the job. Does it give the right impression? Does it have a strong ‘call to action’ to prompt people to take the next step in the sales process? Does it make it easy for people to get in touch and/or make a purchase? It’s also a good idea to make sure it’s full of useful, interesting articles geared to your customers’ interests.
Step 2
Do your search engine optimisation (SEO)
SEO is all about making sure your site comes high in the search results when someone searches for words related to your products or services. There are multiple tricks for making sure search engines rank your site favourably, and many of these centre around creating quality content that contains the keywords people are likely to be search for. Read this article to find out more about how to get your SEO right.
Step 3
Invest in some search engine marketing (SEM)
SEM is another important companion to SEO. Using Google AdWords or Bing Ads you can pay to make sure your website shows up high in the results when someone searches for your product or services – this is commonly known as ‘pay per click’ advertising because you pay when someone clicks through to your website. You’ll need to decide on a budget and keep a close eye on how your SEM efforts are working in order to adjust them accordingly.
Step 4
Get busy on social media
Social media is a powerful way to bring people to your website. Research which social media platforms your potential customers are using and make sure you post regularly on these, especially with posts that will encourage people to visit your site. However, make sure your posts are also interesting, informative and engaging – nobody wants an endless stream of obvious sales pitches. Interact with your followers: ask them questions (this could be useful research), run competitions and respond to their comments. You can also boost your presence with paid advertising on social networks.
Step 5
Don’t forget your email marketing
Email marketing has been shown to produce a higher return on investment (ROI) than any other type of marketing, so encourage people to sign up to your newsletters and keep them up to date and engaged with your products through regular friendly, chatty emails. These should include offers and other marketing activities, such as introducing a new range of products at a special discount.
