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With cyberspace becoming more and more prevalent, businesses need to be implementing digital marketing if they hope to connect with the right audiences. Search engines, social media, and online shopping are probably the 3 most common uses for the internet – how do we find online shops? By searching for them on Google, or coming across them on social media platforms – these are big examples of digital marketing. TechQuarters, an IT services company London-based businesses have been partnering with for over a decade, attributes a lot of their success with customers to a strong digital marketing strategy. Below are some of the key digital marketing practices that businesses should be adopting.
Social Media
Social Media has become a massive part of a lot of people’s lives. There was a time when browsing the internet and talking to people online was a niche activity; fast forward a little over a decade or so, and nearly half of the global population is using social media.
Social media has drastically changed most people’s behavior online. We love to share information about ourselves – what kinds of restaurants we like, what brands and labels we prefer, what our hobbies and interests are, what movies and TV shows we watch. What is more, social media makes it easier for people to find like-minded individuals with similar interests. What does this all mean for businesses? It means you can tap into a treasure trove of consumer information, and easily access whole communities of people who might be interested in your product or service.
Businesses that have an active social media presence are statistically more likely to succeed in the long term. This is why social media should be a factored into your digital marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
The internet is the culmination of human knowledge. Virtually every piece of information, knowledge, and wisdom that humanity has created can be found on the internet – that’s a heck of a lot of information, almost too much to sift through? Not with a search engine. It’s purpose is specifically to make searching through the vast library of information that is the internet as user-friendly as possible.
With search engines being the first port of call for most users wishing to look for something on the internet, and considering most users don’t look beyond the first page of search engine results, it is in your business’ best interests to show up high on the list of search engine results. This is the foundation of search engine optimization – techniques to get your business at the top of search engine results.
This should be another core aspect of your business’ digital marketing strategy.
PPC
Showing up high on search engine results is arguably one of the most valuable outcomes of a good digital marketing strategy – and doing this organically with SEO has a range of benefits; including it being more cost effective, offers better brand credibility, and results in a higher conversion rate. However, SEO is also a long-term effort, so it takes a little while to see some real benefits.
The solution for getting good short-term search traffic is PPC. This stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it basically means paying to show your website or brand in a high spot on a search engine – when you do this, the link to your business will be listed as an ad. You might be wondering why anybody would do PPC when, with a little more time, you can achieve the same outcome for free?
The answer to that comes from the way search engines work. In order to bring up relevant results, search engines match keywords in search queries (the questions and phrases users enter into a search engine) with keywords in the content of a webpage. Due to how diverse search queries are, and the fact that every user will search with slightly different language, there are lots of keywords out there. Some keywords have more traffic (i.e. more people search for them) and so they are more valuable. Some keywords may be more valuable than others, but that doesn’t mean the keywords with less traffic are less valuable.
Combining SEO and PPC enables you to target more keywords – for example, you might choose to target high-value keywords (ones with lots of search traffic) with PPC, garnering you good short term traffic; at the same time, you can put in the time with SEO, targeting slightly lower-value keywords. In other words, PPC gives you a short-term return on monetary investments, and SEO gives you a long-term return on time investments – balancing the two can help you get good results without spending too much money.
