Growing your Business with Digital Marketing
TV ads, radio ads, road side ads, posters and cold calls - these are yesterday's marketing strategies.
As you might have noticed, things have changed rapidly in the last decade or so, with technology creeping into every single part of our lives, both personal and professional hemispheres.
In the world of business, things have escalated dramatically – in a predominantly good way. Technology has been adapted across all business fields and departments, making it easier for small, medium and big companies to scale their sales, optimise their operations, reduce spending and risks, increase safety for its staff, as well as improving overall logistics fluidity and delivery of products or services.
Technology has changed the way we do our Marketing.
With the powers of internet and the bundle of online sales methods that we call “Digital Marketing”, businesses can now reach more customers, faster, further and cheaper than ever before by incorporating the use of various software to create content or autmotise their sales processes and data bases, platforms where they can reach clients (i.e.: social media), platforms where they can drive clients and traffic to (website, landing pages), chat boxes or chat bots that can address clients’ inquiries, email campaigns to personalise offers and messages, and of course – keywords that makes their websites more reachable for clients searching for information, products or services that are relevant to them.
All of these approaches (or marketing channels) are part of what today is called “Digital Marketing”.
So how can you we use Digital Marketing to scale your Business?
Like previously mentioned, there are multiple approaches, or channels, that you can take to help your business thrive in the digital world. One of the first challenges is to understand what each channel does and where it is appropriate to use.
To determine what marketing channels you should deploy, it is important to understand the nature of your business field and it’s local (or international if you’re multi-national enterprise) market.
A marketing executive should do its due diligence and research to know their audience (potential clients), identify their competitors, and understand any legal, social or environmental implications to their nature of business or marketing methods.
This is part of the initial research, which is the second step of any marketing strategy, the first being setting up their goals.
So once you have determined these two first phases, the next phase is to build your business’ presence online.
The Website or Landing Page
The first step to make when building your business’ online presence is to do just that – create a website or a landing page.
The difference between the two is that a website can contain multiple pages (including landing pages), whereas a landing page is a page specifically built to drive traffic to, for a specific purpose. Some businesses have a one page website, which is a landing page.
The website is like the physical location of your company (store, office), which contains information about your business, represents the business colours, message and personality, as well as exposing the products and services that are to be purchased by your visitors.
The typical website will contain a Homepage (which is usually the main landing page), an About page where you input information about your company, a Contact page or section/form on other pages, a Services/Products page and, ideally, a blog page where you update your website with more information about your company, products, services or topics of interest for your audience.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website (or landing page) to be found on search engines, such as Google or Bing, in order to be accessed by potential clients.
Remember, most people won’t know your business exists, so when they go to Google, they will write down what are called “keywords” – words that are relevant to their search and to the products/services they are after. In the most simplistic way to understand the SEO process, think adding keywords that your audience may search for, into your website’s text content this is where the Blog page can be become useful in the long term.
However, please note – making your website appear on the first results page of a search engine (also referred to as SERPs – search engine result pages) is way more difficult that it may first appear, as placing and using keywords is a creative process – one in which you must create useful content for your audience that also contains the relevant keywords.
Now, why is this so important? Well, here are a couple of piece of data that may prove very insightful:
- Search engines drive 93% of website traffic
- 97% of clicked websites are among the top 3-4 from the first search result page
- 90% of U.S. searches are conducted using Google
- 46% of searchers are seeking local information
- 70% of customers prefer to learn about products through content
- 47% of buyers look at three to five pieces of content before initiating conversations with businesses
A good SEO game will eventually increase your websites search engine ranking (how close it is to the top of the first result page), and as a result, it will increase the amount of organic (free) traffic that is driven towards your website, as well as the amount of conversions you achieve.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media is one of the most powerful Digital Marketing channels, because, quite obviously, many people use it for a significant amount of their daily time.
- Over 4 billion people currently use social media worldwide.
- The average person has 8.6 social media accounts in 2020.
- Globally, the average time a person spends on social media a day is 2 hours 24 minutes.
Before adding your business on social media platforms, it is important to consider what type of business your are operating and what type of customers your are targeting. For instance, if you are a B2B company (business to business – your clients are other businesses) then your ideal social media platforms would be LinkedIn or Twitter, or any other business/professional oriented platform. Conversely, if your business is B2C (business to consumer, regular people are your customers) then the ideal platforms would be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Pinterest.
There are many business that sell to both individual consumers and companies, meaning that they are both B2B and B2C – these business may want to make use of a combination of the previously mentioned platforms.
Finally, one other aspect to be considerate of – build your social media pages and presence with quality content and grow your following before you start advertising. Many people will not trust a company that doesn’t have a significant following, engagement and content on their platforms.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Once you acquire your clients email address, you then have the opportunity to contact them individually a present your value proposition.
A legal consideration – the way you collect information from others on the internet MUST be done in accordance to the current GDPR norms and in a transparent consensual way, meaning that the individual must be aware of their email address being collected, and deliberately accepting this action.
Various platforms called CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems such as MailChimp, can help you store your leads/customers information for better email targeting. This will allow you to personalise your message, pitch or value proposition to your customers based on the information you have about them – their needs/wants/interest, location, demographics or behaviours.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Also referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay Per Click (PPC) is the costly relative of the free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) approach.
Whilst with SEO you have to input relevant keywords onto your website so it improves its ranking, with PPC (or SEM) you pay search engines like Google for your website to appear on top of the first SERP, when specific keywords (that you bid for) are being searched.
Remember, PPC is a quite complex marketing channel and requires digital marketing expertise to achieve proper results without overspending or being outbid by your competitors.
If you would like to know more about how to use Digital Marketing to uplift your business and generate leads and sales online, feel free to contact us.