What Is Digital Marketing?
Why should I use it to market my business?
Digital marketing as a term covers so much, but in summary it is using the opportunities presented by social media, email marketing web marketing and other related digital services to promote and grow your business.
There are three key elements to digital marketing that apply to all businesses.
- Social Media Marketing
- E-Mail / Messaging Marketing and
- Web marketing.
There are then additional digital marketing opportunities that are business specific. For instance, if you sell products, you should consider being on Amazon, if you are running a hotel or B&B then you want to be on room booking websites such as booking.com.
The digital world is expanding all the time and you can now include other forms of digital marketing, such as podcasting too.
One of the benefits of digital marketing is that you have access to very detailed analytics, so it is easy to see how well your digital marketing activities are working.
Social Media Marketing
There are a vast number of social media platforms available, and they are growing and evolving all the time.
The big four has now become the big five, so you need to be looking at which of these social media platforms you should be on:
- Twitter / X
- TikTok
You don’t have to be on them all, but you should be on at least one of them.
There are a wide range of other sites that can be used for marketing too.
YouTube can be considered a social media platform too.
E-Mail Marketing
In recent years email marketing has become much maligned due to its mis-use, but it is still a really important way to promote your company and the goods and services you offer to existing customers, to remind them of all the goods and services you offer and to make them aware of new goods and services.
In recent times new forms of messaging have become available, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, that allow you to send messages to contacts in a similar way to using EMail.
Web Marketing
Every business should have a web presence of some sort, so you have a chance of being found when somebody does a search for your goods or services in a search engine.
This can be in the form of a pre-built platform such as Etsy, Shopify or Wix, or you can have your own website.
There are lots of different ways to build a website but the most common website development tool, often called a Content Management System (CMS) is WordPress.
Whichever website presence you choose, you will need to consider some of the following if you want your website to be found:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Google Business Profiles / Local SEO
- Google Ads
- Website optimisation
Content
Content is a key part of any digital marketing.
You should have a content creation strategy about the topics you will create content about, where you are going to use that content and what format that content will take.
You need to consider:
- Where you will get ideas from
- How to create your content
- What key words and phrases you should include (especially for your website content)
- What type of content you are going to create.
It can be a challenge to find time to create content for small businesses, so finding time to create content needs to be planned.
Paid v organic digital marketing
Social media platforms and search engines have an option to pay for adverts, or you can create content and hope it is optimised well enough for it to appear to enough of your potential customers to make it worthwhile.
It all comes down to what you can afford to give up – money for paid marketing or time for organic marketing.
Analytics
Every platform will have analytics available for your activities, but you may need to do some work to configure the analytics tools to get the best results.
Put time aside to check your analytics on a regular basis. Do more of what is working well and less of what isn’t.
Here to help
If you’re looking for help with your digital marketing then check out the wide range of digital marketing services we offer, or get in touch as we’re always happy to have an initial chat about Digital Marketing.