Digital marketing is marketing your business online, and in today’s day and age that is a must for any business that plans to survive.
Digital marketing can include email marketing, social media marketing and marketing on websites.
Common tools to begin to increase your online presence include:
Your business website.
Social media pages.
Pay-per-click advertising.
Written content like blog posts and testimonials.
Images like logos, infographics, and product shots.
What is SMO & Why Should You care?
SMO stands for social media optimization which in layman’s terms means using social media to increase awareness of your product, brand or business by using multiple media outlets to generate publicity. You may already have an Instagram, Facebook and Twitter account for your business but are you strategically creating and augmenting your social media strategy to connect with your clients?
SMO allows you to:
Strengthen your brand.
Become more visible.
Connect with your audience.
Social media allows your business to reach a wider audience than ever before:
Instagram has more than 800 million monthly active users.
Facebook has 2.27 billion monthly active users.
Twitter has over 69 million users in the U.S.
Snapchat has 186 million daily active users.
Pinterest has 125 million users in the U.S.
However, according to some findings, 28 percent of brands feel that their lack of knowledge and strategy is hindering their business growth in the digital realm. With the right digital marketing strategy you can target anyone, anywhere.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Put simply, SEO is the umbrella term for the things done to increase the visibility of your site in search engines. Why does SEO matter to your business? If done successfully, SEO puts your website where it’s most important: the top of the Google search. The numbers don’t lie. Being at the top of a Google search (or any search engine for that matter) is not only desirable but crucial to more visibility, trust, and ultimately more traffic directly to you!
To break it down, think of it this way. When someone goes to Google to search for just about any topic, business, or location, the users are clicking the sites as follows:
#1 Position: 33%
#2 Position: 18%
#3 Position: 10%
#4 Position: 8%
#5 Position: 5%
This means that less than 5% of users are scrolling down and clicking on a website that isn’t top 5 or higher. Ranking on the Internet is important!
Attracting customers is the way to grow your business. By utilizing SEO in your marketing plan, you are actively working to show up as the number one website for a user’s search. Your business will not only gain exposure and traffic, but SEO provides the means to actually market to users who were already looking for the products and services that your business provides to begin with!
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
What is PPC?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising strategy in which you only pay when people click on your ad. When you see an ad at the top of your Google page, that business only pays Google when someone clicks on it.
What are some types of PPC?
Google AdWords might be the most popular, it allows your to run ads on the search results and on private websites, but other search engines like Bing have their own version of PPC. Social media platforms also offer PPC advertising models.
How do I use PCC to grow my business?
First your need to create a campaign. Will the campaign revolve around a new product? A special sale? Then you need to create an ad group related to your campaign and find keywords related to it as Google will use those keywords to determine where to place your ad. You’ll also want to curate the text within your ad to entice people to click on it. Finally, you’ll want to have a professional looking website so that when people click on your ad they are not turned away by webpage that looks like it was created in 1999.
PCC can be overwhelming for any small business owner but you don’t have to venture on this journey alone. A professional and experienced team can prevent you from losing money.