Digital marketing is something that every business needs to stay viable in a growing online and virtual world. Here is how the right combination of various digital marketing techniques — specifically, paid and organic techniques — will benefit your business and help it remain viable.
Short Term vs. Long Term Trends of Digital Marketing
No business can survive on one type of digital marketing. For this reason, marketers today infuse a variety of both short-term and long-term marketing techniques to see results. Short term techniques such as social media mentions (specifically on Twitter and Instagram), coupons & other discounts, and PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns are infused with long term techniques such as SEO optimization, content marketing (posting daily content) and syndicated articles to create a revenue-generating website –this article will be discussing a combination of both.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important things you can do before you begin any sort of digital marketing plan. Moz had the perfect way of describing how to do keyword research, “Figure out what your customers want, and write things that cater to them”.
Creating Relevant Content
Once you’ve identified the correct keywords for your site, you’ll need to create a good combination of the following types of content:
- Video content: Including videos for YouTube
- Blog posts: Need to be at least 300 words, with at least 85 percent original content as determined by Copyscape and complete with subheadings (often indicated by a “h2” HTML tag) that contain keywords
- Photo content: Needs to be original and contain your keywords in the ALT tags of the post
Ranking high in Google searches will depend on how much original content you have and how much you consistently create content that’s exciting and relevant to your audience. Bear in mind that you need to release your content in cycles; alternate between photos, videos and blog posts.
Paid Techniques Paired With Organic Techniques
Besides having relevant organic content, it’s also important to invest in paid digital marketing techniques. Let’s take a look at some of the best-known, and valuable, paid digital marketing techniques that will benefit your business.
Advertisements
Many of these advertisements are performance-based. For example, with Google AdWords and with Facebook Ads, you will only pay when people click through your ad. In order to optimize your conversions, that is, turn your visitors into paying customers, put the links toward a page that has a call to action (for example, “Buy now!” or “Subscribe to our newsletter”).
Social Media
Using a combination of sponsored posts (such as Instagram ads), properly crafted Tweets, and other forms of targeted social communication, you can engage your followers to discuss various topics of interest. You can also craft ads based on trending topics or on your followers’ interests.
A properly executed social media campaign that tackles all outlets appropriately will generate leads and, ultimately, conversions for your website.
Improving Conversion Rates
Some business owners complain that there’s no measurement of success for Internet marketing campaigns, but in reality, the biggest measurement of the success of a digital marketing campaign is the conversion rate (the number of website visitors that become your customers). Remember that a “customer” isn’t necessarily someone that buys something from your website (this is especially true if you have a service-based website, such as one for a restaurant or a consulting firm). Rather, a “customer” can simply refer to someone who enters his/her information on the site.
Finally, but certainly no less importantly, when tailoring your Google AdWords, Bing Advertising, or social media ads, make sure that the link goes to the landing page where potential customers need to enter their information in order to continue browsing the website.