What’s the best digital marketing technique?

A huge misconception in our industry is that more is more, and when it comes to digital marketing specifically, you couldn’t be more wrong. The world of online sales is getting more and more over saturated by the day, which means that your digital marketing strategy needs to be as effective as possible. We are huge advocates of less is more in digital marketing, honing in on two or three techniques and establishing your authority in these domains is what will drive your revenue through the roof this year.

Digital marketing is the term given to describe all efforts of marketing that involve internet usage or an electronic device. Examples of digital marketing channels are listed throughout this blog post.

It sounds cliche, but there are virtually limitless possibilities with digital marketing, it’s a completely agile solution to acquiring high-quality new business. In comparison to the traditional marketing techniques such as billboard advertisements and leaflets, digital marketing has a much better, proven success rate. It offers businesses the chance to advertise to a wider, more varied audience for much cheaper with no geographical limitations.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website for the search engine results page (SERPs). It refers to only organic search traffic generated naturally from a range of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

72% of online marketers describe SEO as their most effective SEO tactic, so why would you not optimise your website for search engines. Your target market is conducting millions of searches every single day, so to make sure you can be found is a fundamental marketing step.

Increased traffic

You will be sure to see an increase in traffic and awareness to your online business, should the SEO be of high standards.

Higher quality traffic

SEO is one of the favourites due to its tendency to draw in very high quality, relevant traffic. E-commerce store owners love SEO as it usually attracts paying customers into their funnels.

Increased competition

It’s not just your target customers that are going to become aware of your business, it’s also going to be your direct competition. This is a real negative as they can effectively watch your every last move and undercut your offers etc.

Outgrowing your facilities

Whilst every business owners dream is to grow a multi million pound corporation, sometimes businesses don’t have the infrastructure to deal with such a sudden growth nor do they have the financials to back re developing staffing structures and offices, which means the traffic coming from the SEO can’t all be dealt with, and your competitors will end up with the lead.

Performance marketing, otherwise known as pay-per click, is a form of online advertisement for which marketer will pay once a certain outcome or result has been achieved. It’s because of this that it appeals to businesses, as everything is recorded, measured and tracked. Examples of performance marketing platforms are: Google Adwords, Facebook & Instagram Advertisements etc.

If we told you that 46% of the internet users in 2019 didn’t know the differences between an organic or paid listing would you start investing in paid ads? More than $10B annually goes into paid advertising by huge corporations worldwide, which means it must be worthwhile, right?

You have total control

One of the best things about PPC is the fact that the marketer, or the business owner has total control over the entire project, unlike SEO which heavily relies on Google's unpredictable algorithms. Businesses tend to opt for PPC due to the immense amount of control you have over it.

Measurable & trackable

All performance marketing is measurable & trackable which is great for any marketing department being able to present this to the directors who are solely focused on the pounds, shillings and pence aspect.

Complexity

One of the major drawbacks to paid advertisement is the complexity of the set-up and maintenance. It’s really important that your campaign is set-up properly as your budget is open to be billed automatically. Performance marketing platforms such as Google will serve ads and spend budgets depending on the demand for the ad. If you aren’t careful then you could end up blowing lots of your budgets.

Not for small budgets

Speaking from experience, smaller budgets don’t work as effectively as that what a larger budget would do. It also depends on the competitiveness of your keywords and search volumes for the specific search term.

Content marketing is a marketing technique that involves the production and distribution of videos, blogs, social media posts. It’s often a marketing technique that businesses tend to so naturally, without even realising. Content marketing, in general, has always been around, right from the world war’s when leaders would use propaganda to get troops to sign up.

Some of the most effective content marketers in the world are actively using Instagram on a daily basis to generate millions of pounds in revenue, an example would be internet marketing genius Gary-Vaynerchuck. Every single day Gary is uploading content around his passion, entrepreneurship.

Organic audiences

As opposed to the audiences that a performance marketing based strategy might draw in, content marketing will attract the higher quality more relevant customers. This is really important especially if your product is a high ticket one.

Easily used in conjunction with other marketing efforts

You can easily run performance marketing ads right to your content to increase the exposure or speed up the results overall, you could also run an email marketing campaign directly to your blog to opt for a more personalised approach to your content marketing.

Setting yourself apart

Unless you class yourself as a very creative person with a depth of experience in your niche, I wouldn’t go near content marketing. It’s imperative that you know exactly what you’re talking about as well as being able to create compelling content on a daily basis without running out of ideas.

Results aren't always instantly monetary

Content can often contribute to building a following which then aids your ability to sell your products over time, and with this you can attract the one time window shoppers who aren’t ever going to get involved with your business but rather spectate on your success. The monetary side of content marketing will come in due course, but never usually immediately although possible.

Email marketing refers to the act of sending an electronic communication, usually in a large quantity to your customers or other businesses to achieve a certain outcome such as signing a prospect up to a new gym. In the most simple terms, any business communication via email is considered email marketing.

Personalisation

Contacting a customer through their email is a personalisation marketing technique, this is because they are the only person who can access the email which means they know you’ve specifically sent it to them. There are software out there now such as Mail-chimp which allow you to take your personalisation even further by adding in the first and last name even when sending a grouped email. Personalised marketing has, time and time again proven successful.

Improved customer relationships

Nurturing your customers through email is a cool way to build up brand advocates and also utilise your customers to get reviews through emails.

Spam filters

If you’re not an expert email marketer, and you don’t know the fine line between spam and not spam, you could find yourself struggling to yield a result. It’s obvious that if your email gets flagged as spam, then your prospect or customer isn’t going to read it or maybe even receive it.

Design issues

Email design sometimes suffers from non-responsive designs, software such as Mail-chimp will allow you to see the mobile version before sending, it’s not a huge issue if you know how to fix it but it can cause minor issues in terms of distributing your marketing.

Targeted advertisement is exactly what it sounds like, ads that are targeted to a certain group of people or a person based on date entry points and demographics such as their interests, likes, age and gender. They are associated often with Facebook and Instagram due to the fact that you will search something and then be served with hundreds of ads for what you searched in that same day

Acts as a reminder

If a customer was genuinely distracted from your website, for example they may have had to turn down the oven, then the targeted ads are a great reminder for the customer to continue to make the purchase.

Improved brand reach & awareness

Due to the repetition of the adverts being shown over and over again, your brand will automatically become more well known and your ads will become memorable. It’s important that you switch your ads up from time to time to avoid customers becoming bored.

It can be annoying for the customer & invasion of privacy

Eventually, the customer may block your ads from showing as they may feel as though they are being harassed to make a purchase.

Landing pages are becoming a more and more popular method of marketing, in-particular for lead generation. We've produced an entire blog going through the depths of what a landing page actually is and how you can optimise it for leads so check that out here.

In summary, we think that the most effective important digital marketing techniques are search engine optimisation (SEO), Email marketing and your own website as they work particularly well together, they are very cost effective and also they are reliable.

Here are some useful reference links:

https://mikekhorev.com/

https://www.smartinsights.com/

https://blog.markgrwth.com/

https://neilpatel.com/what-is-digital-marketing/

https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com

https://junto.digital/blog/seo-stats/

https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/