Business Digital Marketing 101

You are a business owner or manager faced with running your business on a day to day basis, and also with the challenging task of meeting sales goals, creating marketing plans and managing growth (hopefully).

It’s not surprising that businesses turn to outside marketing agencies for help. After all, you are good at what you do – providing a service or selling a product, but that doesn’t prepare you for success in digital marketing.

While many marketing teams focus their articles and blog posts on making themselves appear like digital ninjas – primarily to impress other marketers – we’re interested only in educating our potential clients and business leaders.

Keeping with that focus, here are 3 hugely important things to know about digital marketing…

What is digital marketing?

You can consider digital marketing to include basically any marketing that can be performed using your computer and the internet.

That includes:

  • Your Website
  • Email & Email Marketing
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Paid Ads (on search and display networks)
  • Social Media
  • Social Media Paid Ads
  • Content (technically part of SEO, it deserves its own mention)
  • PR

Which are the Most Effective Digital Marketing Channels:

This is a great question. I know, because I wrote it.

The essential digital marketing truth is that all are effective to some degree and for different purposes. Let me just outline those below…

Your Website – this serves 2 primary purposes – to acquire traffic that converts to leads and to convey your brand – who you are, what you do and why you exist.

Email & Email Marketing – I included email because there should be some element of marketing in your email signature – at least full content info, a logo, perhaps a tagline. Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools available – its cheap, it can lead to new sales and it keeps you top of mind.

Search Engine Optimization – this allows your website pages to be found by people searching Google using keyword phrases that match your products & services. SEO is essential for some business, less so for others, but if a potential client is searching for you, why wouldn’t you want to be found?

Paid Ads – This is about the fastest possible way to generate leads. You bid on Google for certain keyword phrases, when someone types in those phrases, your ad pops up. When someone clicks on (not sees, but clicks on) your ad, they go to your website and somewhere between 2-5% of those visitors become leads. You can start today and have leads tomorrow.

Social Media – primarily for B2C businesses or any business that might want to establish a positive local image – social media outlets like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc are great ways to promote products, services, events, your people, positive things you do in the community, recruit potential employees and generally have a free media source you control.

Social Media Paid Ads  – most business can utilize Facebook ads for lead generation, especially services based business and ecommerce websites. You can reach very finely targeted demographics and the cost is often much lower than paid search on Google (though also less effective in most cases)

Content – have interesting and informative stuff on your website. This is a great way to draw in new potential clients who search a topic on Google then come to your site. It also allows you to establish yourself as a leader in your industry and to build a solid brand.

PR – there are zillions of sites looking for content in every possible niche. Send them press releases touting your new services, product, how you save your clients money, interesting articles, next years predictions for your industry, etc, etc.

Why Business Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

There’s really two reasons – the businesses have tried to do digital marketing on their own or they recognize there is no way they are qualified to make sound decisions about budget, strategy and execution without the help of someone who does this stuff for a living. Digital marketing is complex and 95% of the time you’re marketing dollar will be spent more effectively if you engage the right, knowledgeable outside help.

 

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