What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the promotion of brands and digital assets across multiple channels, including search engines, social media, online content and paid advertising, to achieve business goals and fuel online growth.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practice of increasing website traffic through organic search results. Google is the big target, accounting for 85% of UK search engine traffic. Bing is the second biggest with a 10% market share.

For SEO to achieve meaningful results, it needs to be concerned not only with increasing the quantity of traffic, but also the quality of traffic. Keyword targeting is crucial to this process and most SEO strategies fail because of poor targeting.

A well thought out, clearly defined SEO strategy can achieve a x10, x20 or even a x100 return on investment. The 3 keys to success are following Google guidelines, measuring results, and producing better content than your competition.

Facts & Figures

35%

The top 5 results in Google account for 68% of web traffic and the number 1 result gets 35% of clicks (Smart Insights)

SEO

"The more you work into the long-tail, the greater the proportion of purely organic SERPs'.”

Digital Marketing

"Digital marketing is any form of marketing that exists online."

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing practices that are digital, including SEO, PPC, social media and content marketing.

Every business that operates online needs a digital marketing strategy, and it’s the job of the marketing department (or your digital marketing agency) to create this strategy, roll it out, and make sure it achieves a return on investment.

Facts & Figures

13x

Companies that prioritise marketing efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI (Hubspot)

PPC Advertising

PPC, or pay-per-click, is the practice of increasing the quality of website traffic through paid search results. The aim is to achieve a return on investment after deducting all costs, including product expenses, ad spend and PPC management fees.

Because there are so many costs leading up to people clicking a paid ad, it is absolutely essential that you only show up for keywords that are profitable. You pay-per-click so you need to understand ad spend, profit and conversion rates.

A properly set up PPC campaign can achieve significant returns on investment (x300 returns are not uncommon) but only when the campaign is well managed.

Facts & Figures

$1

Businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads (Google)

PPC Advertising

“Google conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.”

Content Marketing

“Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.”

Content Marketing

Content marketing involves the creation, distribution, promotion and measurement of content. It is a strategic and creative approach to content production, where every piece of content has a purpose and a KPI to measure it against.

Content types include articles, blog posts, brochures, whitepapers, web pages, infographics, images, gifs, videos and much more. The types of content your business should produce depends on your audience and market segment

Content marketing is dismissed by many businesses as something inherently complex, but nothing could be simpler than giving your audience value with content and measuring that value with analytics and conversion tracking.

Facts & Figures

71%

The top goals of content marketing are generating high-quality leads (75%) and attracting more traffic to a site (71%) (SEMrush)

Social Media

Social media marketing involves creating and sharing content on social media platforms, measuring engagement levels, and building a community or following that drives increased brand recognition and fuels business growth.

Social media campaigns can be organic or paid. Organic campaigns are concerned with sharing updates to the world. Paid campaigns are concerned with generating clicks, likes and interactions through social advertisements.

Traditional social platforms include LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Influencer platforms include Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Each platform has its own audience and there are digital marketers who specialise in specific platforms.

Facts & Figures

1.3 million

1.3 million new users join social media every day — that’s 15.5 users every second (Hootsuite)

Social Media

“People Building an image and identity for themselves."

What can I expect from a digital marketing agency?

"Best practices for investing in integrated digital media and technology to fuel business growth."

Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy

The best way to create a winning digital marketing strategy is to partner with a digital marketing agency that knows what it’s doing.

Before you do this, you need to be aware of a few things. The first is your business and marketing objectives. The second is how you will measure results and calculate the real ROI of all your digital marketing activities.

Most digital marketing strategies that fail do so because resources are allocated to the wrong places. Prime examples include investment in PPC when SEO would be better, and investment in social media when content marketing would be better.

Your digital marketing strategy will answer all these questions. Here’s how to make one:

  • Determine your goals
  • Map out your sales funnel
  • Create customer personas
  • Identify the best areas of investment
  • Put in place measurement tools
  • Assign resources to activities
  • Hire a digital marketing agency
Facts & Figures

45%

45% of businesses say they don’t have a digital marketing strategy, but they are doing digital marketing anyway (Smart insights)

Wrapping up

Digital marketing is absolutely essential for every online business’s success. A good digital marketing strategy should earn £2 back for every £1 spent and many strategies achieve returns that are several times this amount.

Whether your aim is to increase brand awareness, increase web traffic or increase sales, enquiries and conversions, digital marketing helps you do it. Social media, content, SEO, PPC and inbound marketing are investments worth making.