Customer PortalWe are in the digital age. Marketing your business online will only become more important. Digital marketing is a rising trend in the newest media space, the internet. We all know digital marketing is a vital part of almost every business these days, but what is even considered digital marketing and where do you start?
Gaining a presence online might involve a lot more work than you think. Sure, Digital marketing and the internet have been around for years now. It’s not just the usual marketing you think of every day though. It’s not just pop-up advertisements and ads during the video you watch online. Digital marketing really is an umbrella term for many of the tools and tactics driving a customer to making a purchase online, getting them to visit your site or general online branding.
What is considered digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a vast and broad area of work. There are many different aspects of digital marketing and they all have to work together. Everything from website design to content creation to back end analytics goes into digital marketing. Let’s run down a few of the many important aspects of marketing online:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Having a good website is important and people need to be able to find it. SEO is another broad umbrella term in the vast and confusing space of vague terms to define your business’s online efforts. It’s important to not get confused with the wording. Just focus on how each aspect can help your business. Basically, SEO helps your website rank higher in organic search results so you’re more likely to get traffic and get your visitors to complete the goal you want on your site. The next two categories are important aspects of SEO to highlight.
Website Design
Digital marketing doesn’t work unless your website is impressive. This includes the actual look of the site, but also how easy it is to navigate around. The design and the actual content on the page should work together to make your website easy to read and navigate.
Content Creation
This involves the content that is on your website and all of your other owned media. Owned media includes blogs, videos and social media platforms. All the content should work together to inform or persuade your audience to complete the action you want them to.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
The advertisements at the top of your search engine can be a good way to drive traffic. Research by searchengineland.com showed a higher click-thru-rate and lower cost-per-click when SEO and PPC were used together. It’s possible you could gain customers and lower cost on your paid search campaign if you put some focus into both tactics. Common types of paid search platforms include Google AdWords and Bing Ads.
Branding
Branding can be integrated into all of your digital efforts – and it should be. You’re online branding should also be consistent with your offline branding. Having a recognizable brand through the use of logos and fonts can help acquire and retain customers.
Analytics
Analytics isn’t directly related to marketing your business online, but it’s one of the most important. The best thing about digital marketing, besides the majority of people using the internet, is that it is the easiest platform to measure results. You can know exactly how many people read something, visit a page or even why they bought a product. A good digital marketing campaign always has accurate analytics.
Where do you start?
The first step is deciding on what you do well and what you need to work on. Don’t waste your time on something you already do well. Focus on what you need. Much of digital marketing takes time and resources. Most likely, your creative mind doesn’t have the skills as an analytical mind and vice versa. It takes a whole team of specialists to have a well-rounded digital marketing plan.
Twin State has an experienced full-service team to help you with anything you need. You can contact our team for any questions you have or help you need. Our team is always ready to help! Our goal here was to give you a broad overview of digital marketing as a whole. Next month we’ll focus on exactly what search engine optimization is along with what search engine marketing is.
