Author Bio: Michael is the founder and director of MR.SEO, and has worked in digital marketing for over a decade.
After gaining experience across digital PR and content marketing, Michael decided to focus his career on search engine optimisation (SEO), where he managed projects for some of the UK’s largest ecommerce retailers in an agency environment.
He later went in-house for the UK’s fastest-growing travel agency, helping maximise growth across SEO and conversion rate optimisation (CRO). His passion for all things digital saw him embark upon his own journey in 2019 when he founded his digital marketing agency.
Setting up and maintaining a successful business has to be a bespoke, personal experience. No two businesses are the same, and that’s no different when it comes to which form of digital marketing will generate the best results. Here are four forms of digital marketing that you can be used separately or together depending on what your business might benefit from.
PPC
PPC or Pay Per Click is a hugely popular digital marketing strategy that promotes your site to visitors depending on what they search for. This is essentially a way of buying your business both visibility and traffic.
This all sounds great, but the higher the search volume, the higher the price. This means if you business is in a highly competitive market such as ‘men’s jeans’, you’re going to have to pay a pretty penny to be promoted within the search.
When it comes to all digital marketing in general, it’s important to weigh up the ROI of your strategy. In other words, if your business is paying £3 for a click, but the click results in a £300 sale, then PPC is clearly a good strategy for your digital marketing campaign.
Social media
Another option is to look at a social media campaign. Social media marketing can be a great way to raise brand awareness, increase visibility and generate traffic to your site. The main way to do this are by generating branded content that is more likely to be shared.
You should also push for content that invites interaction. People are more likely to watch a video about your product than read a block of text explaining what it does. Polls are also great interactive posts that encourage engagement and can be spread around easily, creating visibility for your brand.
Finally, consider in your strategy a competition, maybe to win one of your products. If plenty of people share and enter the competition, it wont only drive your social visibility but also product awareness. For more inspiration on some of the best examples of social media campaigns, read Hootsuite’s article about what you can learn from each of them.
SEO
When done right, SEO is the most successful way of generating organic traffic to your site. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a marketing strategy of building your presence in online search engines and ranking your brand, product or service higher on them.
SEO campaigns are often long term strategies due to the nature of Googles ranking systems and the gradual building of your domain authority. Most SEO strategies, especially for smaller local businesses will consist of things like keyword optimisation and google my business development. For more details on how you can maximise your local SEO, read out handy Guide To Local SEO here.
SEO campaigns can also consist of external link building, internal web development changes such as removing site errors from important pages or just simply adjusting your title tags, H1s and meta descriptions to maximise your chance of ranking higher.
As up to 53% of website traffic comes through organic search, SEO is a must for any digital campaign. There are so many statistics that might shock you into pushing SEO to the forefront of your digital marketing campaign.
To really maximise your SEO potential, it’s definitely investing in a ROI driven SEO agency. By investing in an ROI driven company, you’re much more likely to see fantastic rates at a faster pace than attempting SEO on your own.
CRO
CRO or Conversion rate optimization is the practice of raising your conversion rate by directing visitors to your site towards specific places or into specific actions like buying a product, downloading a PDF, or completing a contact form.
Although CRO is often used to make small improvements, the longer-term strategy surrounding CRO is to optimise your entire marketing process- making everything work smoother and as inviting as possible for the potential customer. It goes without saying that the more optimized your marketing and locations that you are driving traffic to, the higher your conversion rate.
CRO and SEO can definitely work hand in hand together when it comes to conversions. One without the other often means an ineffective marketing campaign. For example, if your site gets a huge amount of visitors from your SEO campaign but very few conversions, that means there is something on your site that directly impacts customers making a purchase. Vice versa to this, your CRO might be fantastic, easy and inviting for the customer to complete an action, but there is no traffic being driven to your site due to a lack of an SEO campaign.
In conclusion, take some time to evaluate which of these marketing strategies will benefit your business the most. For some businesses, it might be worth implementing all of these practices to really maximise your results. For others, a social media campaign might struggle to hit your target audience for example.
To really understand which digital marketing branch your business should go down, you can speak to a digital marketing expert today at our digital marketing agency in Essex. We can also work out which campaigns will work hand in hand together to achieve the most effective results. This also then allows you to spend more focus on other digital marketing aspects or aspects of your business in general.
