Digital Marketing Matures
At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising and promotion delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, video, and mobile apps. While this term covers a wide range of marketing activities, the most common types are:
SEO: Simply put, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing the content, technical set-up, and reach of your website so that your pages appear at the top of search engine results for a specific set of keyword terms. Ultimately, the goal is to attract visitors to your website when they search for products, services, or information related to your business. It enforces the need for a well-constructed and easy-to-use website that offers valuable and engaging content.
Content Marketing: By now you have probably heard the expression, “Content is king!” What this means is that great content should drive your digital marketing activities.
- It is a key pillar of modern SEO.
- It helps you get noticed on social media.
- It provides something of value to offer customers in emails and paid search ads.
Creating clever content that is not just promotional in nature, but also educates and inspires, is a tough order, but it’s well worth the effort. It should be so relevant to your audience that it helps them see you as trustworthy and a valuable source of information. On top of that, resourceful content makes it less likely that they will tune you out.
Social Media Marketing: Today, it’s much more than sending out cat videos and posting selfies on social media. People rely on social networks to discover, research, and educate themselves about a product or a brand before engaging with an organization. For businesses, it’s more than just posting on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Content makes the difference.
The reason to grow your social media audience is to create more peer-to-peer sharing opportunities. The more your audience wants to engage with your content, the more likely it is that they will want to share it. This ultimately leads to them becoming a customer and hopefully influences their friends to become customers, too.
Email Marketing: Email has been around for more than two decades, and it’s still the quickest and most direct way to reach customers with critical information. This requires an up-to-date mailing list and making sure email content is engaging, informative, and entertaining. E-mail marketing services are quite sophisticated these days and cost-effective. To succeed, your marketing emails must be:
- Trustworthy
- Relevant
- Conversational
- Coordinated across channels
- Strategic
Mobile Marketing
As mobile devices have become a big part of our lives, it’s important to understand how to effectively communicate on this unique and extremely personal channel. This makes marketing on mobile incredibly important, but requires that it also is very nuanced. From Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) to in-app marketing, there are many ways to market on mobile devices; so, finding the right method for your particular business is key. Beyond the mechanisms to deliver your message, you also need to think about coordination of your marketing across digital channels and make sure mobile is part of that mix.
Video
Because there’s been a growth explosion in video on social media in recent years, it’s important to consider this as part of your marketing mix. In some instances, you can use your phone to shoot short videos; however, pre-planned professional videos often offer the most reliable content. Upfront costs for these can be expensive, but video content can be repurposed for use on your website, in direct marketing, and on many platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Views of branded video content increased 99% on YouTube and 258% on Facebook between 2016 and 2017, and since then, video has become even more popular. On Twitter, a video Tweet is 6 times more likely to be retweeted than a photo Tweet. If you haven’t taken a closer look at the power of video on social media, you’re in for a surprise. The numbers are big…..and growing.
Paid Search
Every business wants to be in the top spot on the first page of searches, but that just won’t happen through organic search. Paid search will get you there. Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is typically the “sponsored result” on the top or side of a search engine results page (SERP). You only pay when your ad is clicked. You can tailor your PPC ads to appear when specific search terms are entered, creating ads that are targeted to a particular audience. PPC ads are flexible, very visible, and effective for many different types of organizations. As contextual advertisements, they appear only when a person is searching for a particular keyword or term. Key to success is selecting key words that people use to search your business and your competitors.
