How Digital Marketing Could Benefit Your Business

Digital marketing can help any business, you will have heard those words at one point or another from members of staff, clients or even advertising agencies. But as much as you want to utilise the power of the online world you need to ask yourself: how does it specifically benefit in your field of expertise?

For starters, there is no point jumping two footed into digital marketing and there are options available before even considering what each solution could offer to your business. Also, you need to strategically think about what you want to achieve from it before starting any campaign.

Your own website, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Email and Email Marketing, PPC (known as Pay-Per-Click or Paid Search) and Social Media are all forms of digital marketing that are likely to be on your radar. Which one’s work for the industry you are in, and which are best suited to your type of sales or service offered?

Understanding types of Digital Marketing

Getting a solid understanding of the process of each form of digital marketing will help you decide what is best for your business. Learning what works and what doesn’t for similar companies will also give you a stronger hand when it comes to forming that all important strategy.

One thing that has little need for consideration is a website. Every company and business should have one as a front door to your services. The same applies to social media, which has grown in importance beyond anyone’s wildest expectations over the last decade. Not every form of social media will be applicable to your business, but having Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Snapchat, Google+ and Pinterest pages are worth considering, if only for brand exposure, while your very own YouTube channel opens up opportunities to reach new customers in a world in which online video is becoming king.

While the website and social media accounts are key, it is what you use in conjunction with this to make the most out of your campaign. This is where it all comes down to the nitty gritty of digital marketing and where the real strategists win over those who make bad decisions and investments in advertising.

Do you opt to use email marketing as your choice to grow the business using a customer list or base that you have gathered, targeting users specifically with offers and special deals? Do you put your efforts into SEO and ensuring your business ranks highly organically in search engines for the key search terms that mean most to your company? Or do you spend on PPC advertising to jump the queue and get to the top of the rankings via sponsored or paid-for listings?

There is no right answer. It will all depend on what you want to achieve, how quickly you want to achieve it and, of course, how much you have budgeted for as part of your digital marketing strategy.

What form of Digital Marketing suits your business?

What type of business service do you provide? Are you a shop, sell goods or offer a retail facility? Do you provide a service, be it manufacturing or professional? Are you involved in education or educational products? Whatever pigeon hole your company falls within, it is likely that some digital marketing will suit significantly better than others.

Let’s take a retail business as an example. If that’s the area you are involved in, it is all about selling your products. For that, you need to be at the top – or certainly towards the top – of search engine rankings. Whether that is as a whole or for specific products is entirely your choice, but the end goal is that you want to be seen first by potential customers searching for the types of things you sell. A website or online shop is crucial, as is social media and email marketing if you have a mailing list. Get those offers out to your customers. SEO on the site will always be beneficial, but if you’re hoping to sell quick and fast then a PPC campaign might well suit you better to instantly reach the right customers. You just need to set aside a budget. If your products are more long-term creations, SEO is probably a better option. The one thing to remember, however, is not to just throw endless funds at PPC for a search term alone. Get that landing page singing and dancing with some solid SEO too. The paid search advertising will be beneficial to long-term rankings, but only if you supplement it by producing a page that customers will want to return to time and time again.

If you are a service provider, on the other hand, a PPC campaign might well prove to be the wrong route to go down. Not always, but it can be a case of wasting money for little gain. You might be a landscape gardener, for example, and want to be sitting prominently in a search engine for someone searching for a landscaper in your area. You may be a solicitor wanting to detail your services, pricing structure and what you can do for a potential customer. More often than not, companies like this are best served getting a clean, crisp, fast-loading and easy to navigate website. And it should provide all the necessary information and most importantly sell yourselves as the best choice in your field. Couple that with the use of good SEO practices, developing a list of the key terms that you want people to find you for, and boosting the positions in which you rank when someone Google’s what you do. You will have spent your marketing budget wisely without the need for potentially expensive paid search campaigns. You can supplement such a focus on SEO by also developing and using social media channels and email marketing too.

Don’t waste money on Digital Marketing

As alluded to above, it is very important not to waste money frivolously on digital marketing. If you opt to go down a PPC route, you can potentially fritter away serious money if you are chasing the wrong terms, or extremely competitive ones in which the pay-per-click fee is substantial. If you are going to trial PPC, do so with a small budget and target relatively cheap terms, often referred to as low hanging fruit.

You might think you see better results for something like PPC because the figures are there in front of you. How much you have spent, how much each click was, how many customers actually clicked through from a search engine or social media link. Don’t get carried away just because there is something measurable to quantify spend against.

A social media channel might produce just as good results without the same kind of spend, while SEO is essentially immeasurable in terms of actual figures but can be quantified by improvements in ranking positions. That will have a knock on effect on traffic levels to your site, but you don’t get results that you can say did A or generated X sales. SEO is a much more long-term strategy to undertake.

It’s important you consider what you want to achieve before going head-on into a digital marketing strategy. Cash is king, so don’t just spend for the sake of spending. No single company, even the biggest like Amazon or Apple, get everything right all the time. So you are going to make mistakes along the way with your digital marketing. Learn from your mistakes, but more importantly don’t overspend or just advertise everything and hope something sticks. Be smart and it will reap rewards.

If you would like to find out more about how digital marketing could benefit your business, or to start planning a digital marketing campaign, then why not get in touch with TRON Media today. TRON Media are a leading digital marketing agency offering various services including SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Website Design, Email Marketing and more. You can get in touch by using our Contact Form, by emailing us at: [email protected], or by calling us on 020 3006 6889 Discover the effectiveness of TRON Media’s digital marketing services today…