It can be hard to pick where to start when developing a digital marketing strategy, especially if you are a small business owner that has just started your digital transition. Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. The strategy chosen should help to supplement the weaknesses your company may face, be it in budget or manpower, and it should help to amplify your company’s strengths so that your online reach is amplified.
How you proceed with your digital marketing strategy is another question that frequently plagues any company looking to differentiate itself from its competitors online. Read on to find out which strategies would be the best to support digital marketing, promote company growth, and engage their audiences effectively online.
What are your options?
Here’s a summary of the most relevant digital marketing strategies:
1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEM is important because so many consumers are researching and shopping for products online, and a higher ranking on SERPs is crucial in increasing a company’s reach. In SEM, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for companies to spend their marketing budgets, and this is commonly referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
Pay-per-click ads work on the basis of keywords. PPC services like Adwords will give different search terms and phrases a value, based on how common they are and how many people want to use them in adverts. Your PPC ad will mimic the look of a real, or ‘organic’ search result. But the key to it is that it contains the keyword or phrase that you bid for. Whatever price was fixed when you bid, that is the price you pay each time the ad is clicked.
SEM is also a good investment for companies since customers who are personally searching for a product are probably more likely to become paying customers, compared to someone that sees your ad on social media but might not have the intent to purchase that product at the time of viewing.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the technique to get pages to rank higher on search engines. Since search is one of the main and most organic ways consumers discover content and products online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in website traffic.
In Google and other search engines, what you see on the top of SERPs with a tag that says “Ad” are paid advertisements and would fall under SEM, whereas everything else that is not tagged with “Ad” are organic and is considered as SEO.
3 core metrics that search engines evaluate to determine the quality of a site and its ranking are:
Links: If your page has more embedded links, then it counts towards ranking higher. This could be seen as a vote of confidence from other websites (for the simple reason that one would not choose to link articles of poor quality to their sites), and this sort of user affirmation is appreciated.
Content: Search engines also analyse the content of a web page to determine if it would be relevant for a given search query, therefore, it is important to include trending keywords in your content pieces!
Page structure: The HTML code of a web page impacts a search engine’s ability to evaluate a page, so do include relevant keywords in the title, URL, and headers of the page to make sure it is crawlable
3. Social Media Marketing
A term that is self-explanatory, social media marketing is marketing campaigns done on social media, and might be the most basic understanding of what digital marketing is. Choose the social media platform that is most suited to the nature of your products or services.
Through promotional campaigns, targeted ads, and content pieces, the main aim of social media marketing is to grow your following in order to gain more business. These sites also offer quality data insights about the demographics of your audience, so use that to your advantage when strategising for the next campaign.
4. Content marketing
While all the previous methods leverage on marketing your products and services to customers, content marketing focuses on creating valuable, supplementary content that enhance your customers’ experience with your products. Maybe this would come in a product aftercare guide, or industry trends for consumers to follow.
The mode of content is also up to your creative direction, be it videos, infographics or long-form blog posts. These help you to build a loyal consumer base that visits your website for content that serves a purpose in their lives. When they consume the content and share it on their own socials, it helps you to create buzz and drive traffic to your sites.
5. Email Marketing
You might have increased your presence on social media, but email marketing allows you to directly interact with your consumer base. It provides value to consumers by keeping them up to date with the happenings of your company, allowing them to feel included and valued as a consumer to your brand.
Having an email list means you can stay in touch with your followers independently of any changing algorithms, and also allows you to stay relevant to existing customers/clients. Email marketing is also far less demanding than other digital marketing options thanks to the fact that it can be easily automated.
To sum up,
there are many digital marketing options available for any kind of company in any kind of industry. Now that you have a general idea of the types of strategies out there, consider the scale of reach you are aiming for, your budget and resources, and your business’ main audience when choosing a digital marketing strategy to implement.
If you need help defining your digital marketing strategy and how to implement an integrated approach, you can reach out to cmoCre8, an established digital marketing consultancy based in Singapore who can assist you with these services.
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