by samDigital marketing is a subset of traditional marketing. It promotes your brand or products using digital channels such as the internet, emails and mobile phones, as opposed to more traditional media such as print, radio, TV or billboards. Finding new customers is the main aim of digital marketing. It has the advantage over traditional marketing techniques because online programs such as Google Analytics exist which enable you to analyse your marketing campaigns in real time. This is far faster than any non-digital technique.
We have already discussed the digital marketing strategies of SEO, PPC, CRO, SMO and ORM in this series. In this overview of digital marketing, we will summarise their key points and discuss how they are inextricably interlinked and how a great campaign cannot have one without the others.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process which aims to improve the position of your website in organic search engine results. One of the ways it does this is by utilising keywords. Search providers use software called “spiders” or “crawlers” to spot keywords on your website. This data is used to decide on the relevance of your site in searches. There is a good way to include keywords: write informative, interesting content for your site or linked blog which just happens to contain your required keywords. Tags, title pages and the coding for pictures are also perfectly reasonable places to put keywords. A less useful way to include keywords is keyword stuffing, which is putting keywords on your site which are not naturally worked into content. Google gives the following examples of keyword stuffing:
• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural
Another way that SEO increases your organic rankings is through link-building. This is the process of getting links to your site from other sites. Search engines use links in two main ways: to discover new sites and to decide how trustworthy your site is. The trustworthiness of your site is directly correlated with the quality of the sites that have linked to you.
There are two types of “good” links: editorial links where other sites link to you without you needing to do anything, and manual outreach links where you contact sites in the same or similar business to you and ask them to link to you. Examples of bad links include links from spam sites, and links from places that you cannot vouch for, such as unmoderated blog posts and user profile pages.
Social media optimisation (SMO) is a type of SEO. It involves engaging in social media in order to increase your organic search ratings. The aim is to develop highly active social media accounts with a large audience, where you post content and links from your sites in order to draw users there, and where you post content that is unique to social media in order to broaden your audience.
Images are very useful for social media optimisation, as they catch people’s eyes faster than text. It is also vital to communicate with others in your area – reblog their posts on Twitter, for example, and reply to their tweets. This will bring your name and brand to a wider audience and can be seen as a different way to build links. A bad way to perform social media optimisation is to put links on your sites to inactive social media accounts. No-one listen to silence for long! Although it is very helpful to have accounts on several different social media sites, they should be active! Don’t just create lots of accounts and fill them with links to your site.
Online Reputation Management is maximising your positive presence on the internet while minimising any negative discussions. It is vital for all businesses to ensure that someone Googling their brand or company name will not be inundated with negativity. A study showed that 91{06e29518e582b1cc2da09f8f2ea316dadc41c520023bcca83a4deb5e6ad0a3c6} of people don’t read past the first page of Google search results, so getting a clean page one is very important. This can be achieved by SEO: boosting yourself up the search engine rankings will drop the bad stuff downwards! Social media can both help solve and help create the problem: a negative tweet with a large number of retweets may be your reputation crisis, but upping your positive involvement in social media via SMO tactics will go a long way to pushing it out of the picture. Engaging with the negative comment or review is a controversial topic and it may be left to someone impartial such as an agency.
The most important point to remember about managing your online reputation is that if you only start doing it when you have been bombed by something negative, you are starting too late. You should begin monitoring your online presence as soon as you can, using a program such as Google Alerts.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a type of paid advertising through which you can influence your website’s standing in paid search results. You would sign up to a service such as Google’s free AdWords program and set up your campaign there. Every time a user clicks on your advert, you pay your search engine a small fee. You advert would be placed at the top or to the right of the organic results (Please see the PPC blog for a visual of this).
In order to ascertain the top spot on the advertising areas, AdWords gives every advert a quality score. The score depends on factors such as picking great keywords, the amount you pay Google, and the quality of your landing page. It is vital to have a well-presented page which gives the user all the information that they need. Users consider speed and ease of use to be vital in their choices, so won’t take kindly to being directed to a homepage and having to do the navigation themselves. You are also likely to lose potential customers if your website is not optimised for the main browsers or mobile phones.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) uses an analytics program such as Google Analytics to find out how your site is affecting a variable you find important. This is usually sales. The overall aim is to find the alteration to your current site which brings the highest conversion rate. It is an excellent way of getting your ROI, since you are increasing the number of people who buy from your site, not the number who visit it. Therefore CRO can be performed without any accompanying SEO or PPC.
The first step of CRO is discovering your current conversion rate using Google Analytics. Next you would look at other factors given to you by Google Analytics, such as bounce rate. These would help you to discover potential flaws in your site. Whether you want to make a big change like an entire page redesign or just change the size of the call to action button, all these changes can be made and tested simultaneously with the original version, and the results seen on Google Analytics. It is very important to test these factors out for yourself and not to copy other businesses. Every website and advert is different and what worked for them may not work for you. Their conversion optimisation may not have been carried out rigorously, and therefore their result may not be genuine.
Everything’s related
Your SEO has pushed you onto the first page of Google (or your PPC has already got you there), but you aren’t getting as many sales as you think you should be. Doing CRO will improve this situation. You’ve got a large number of sales happening, but what’s your brand loyalty like? Engaging in SMO will increase your customers’ loyalty because they will start personally relating to your businesses. You should have been doing reputation management from the start, but if your increased visibility thanks to your SMO kicks up something negative, then you can swoop in and ameliorate the situation with ORM.
So, digital marketing is the interweaving of these and other strategies in order to find and retain new customers, and promote your brand. It is often carried out by specialised digital marketing agencies, but individuals and businesses can also handle their own if they wish.
Thanks for reading What Is Digital Marketing? Please let us know your opinions on the article, or on SMO as a whole.
What is Digital Marketing? is part 6 of our “What Is …?” series. This series gives the reader a brief introduction to the basics of digital marketing. Check out the rest of the series for information on SEO, PPC, CRO, ORM and SMO with more to come.
Error: Contact form not found.