What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is the process of promoting your business through electronic outlets. Before diving in this “Pay to Play” world, we highly suggest getting a unique and strong website design, powerful and to the point content, as well as branded and cohesive social media platforms. We live in a digital age making it crucial to track success. A reporting engine can be weaved within each of these platforms to make sure you’re getting full insight of how they are doing. This gives digital marketers the opportunity to best define their audience and from there, make sure the content is working to their benefit. Completely understanding what exactly is being viewed, how often, response rates and direct purchases being made helps establish a legitimate game plan to begin the digital marketing journey.
Over the past several years, there’s been a major shift in the B2B researcher demographic. In 2012, there was an even mix across age groups. In 2014, 18- to 34-year-olds accounted for almost half of all researchers, an increase of 70%. It’s mandatory to take into account millennials’ familiarity with the digital world and how this influences the kind of content and media channels they are using.
The Duties of Digital Marketing
(in no particular order)
Strong Website Design & Mobile Friendly
An easy to navigate and mobile friendly website establishes your credibility, brand and overall performance as a whole. If the user experience from a potential buyers end is lacking, odds are that you lost that consumer. Working with the appropriate team or design platform is crucial to your digital marketing campaign. Did you know that 94% of first impressions are design related? Mobile optimization is a must because of the smart phone dependent world we live in due to so many people living “on the go”. Test your website and see how you score with Google here.
Powerful Text & Video Content
Copywriting is the art and science of strategically delivering and placing words that get people to take a particular form of action. This is content emitted through online outlets and is used for the purpose of advertising or marketing. It’s helpful to implement short sentences, use a passive tone and make sure the readability level is up to par to experience a successful outcome. It’s also important to make sure your Flesch Score is textually understandable and at a level that will keep visitors on your page longer. Improving your rank on search engines is the end goal and this is done by blogging and being transparent in your communication and copywriting efforts. When it comes to videos, what exactly is keeping their attention? Videos about certain products are at the top of the list- followed by how-to’s and professional reviews.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, or natural search results. There are many levels of SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link directly to you on the web. The goal is to rank higher on search engines and your SEO strategy is the key to that success. Every business is unique and with that being said, every business has to track different kinds of metrics. Tracking data about rankings, referrals, and links is what ultimately helps understand your progress in the long run. An example of this tracking mechanism is your referral traffic. These are the visitors that come from direct links on other websites straight to yours.
Social Media
Social media outlets have made their way to the tip top of the marketing chain. It’s crucial to build an audience on these platforms by creative and thoughtful posts. Each platform is tailored to a certain demographic meaning research must be involved to determine whom your audience is and what exactly they will respond to. This is a method of trial and error but your audience will help in creating a successful campaign. For example, if you are wanting to create an instant viral effect for news or an important update, Twitter is the way to go due to its live nature. Many businesses post 6 to 7 times a day and about 3 to 4 times on the weekends! Facebook, home to more than 1.4 billion active users, can be a powerful distribution channel to generate leads. Instagram, one of the world’s largest photo-sharing and video-sharing app, is heavily relied on visual content. LinkedIn is tailored towards daily business-oriented articles that are customized for each user and heavily used by the decision makers. Knowing what your competitors are doing will enhance the efforts on your end, so be sure to do a competitive analysis. This includes their engagement, traffic sources, referring sites, organic keywords, paid keywords and even their social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
Analytics
Google Analytics is the ultimate life-saver. It helps you organize, gather, analyze, and report on all the things your customers do. Understanding the results and how they are making an impact helps with your company’s decisions and marketing ideas. It’s important to know what’s successful, what’s not successful and what you can do to change it or benefit your success. This information helps you completely understand your business and narrow down your target demographic. Data is growing 44 times more over the next decade making it crucial to get started right away. If a business is already utilizing these tools by effectively collecting, analyzing, and managing this data, they are the ones who will be in first place competitively by the time it takes off.
Advertising
Once we have gathered everything about your competitor through our competitive analysis, we can create a cohesive plan to begin our advertising campaign. It’s smart to start by utilizing unsaturated markets, which means a more cost effective “cost-per-click”. We’ll use multiple platforms based on the results from our analytics – like social media outlets that are doing well. Each of the previous elements mentioned will give us insight on what to do and how much money to spend. Depending on the competition and most utilized strategy- this will determine our ultimate game plan. If your advertising agency doesn’t offer you a competitive analysis before starting, then they are not doing their job. These are extremely helpful because you can utilize what is working for your competitors while finding opportunities for you to capitalize on. After acting on these opportunities, you’re already taking steps in the right direction. Did you know that 28% of marketers have reduced their traditional advertising budget to fund more digital marketing? This number is only expected to grow over the next several years. In fact, video advertising spend is expected to grow 14.77 billion in 2019!
At Tru Advertising, our Digital Marketing Team can help your business stand out amongst the competition. These digital marketing steps are of great importance when beginning to develop your advertising and marketing strategy. We will put you on the path towards success with our marketing and advertising expertise and most importantly, we can research how much your competition is spending on online video, banner and pay-per-click advertising. Contact us today to get an idea of where your opportunity lies.
