What is Digital Marketing?
Learn how a digital agency through digital marketing can help you grow your brand.
What is Digital Marketing?
The digital landscape is an incredibly congested arena, with a multitude of brands contesting for attention in a sea of noise across advertising and media. This has given rise to digital marketing services, assisting brands to cut through the noise and getting the attention they need. Achieving a greater online presence, by leveraging a plethora of channels and media such as social media, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, organic search engine results, or content marketing can drive your target audience to your site, web store or other pages, thus increasing the likely number of customers.
The traditional process often outlined by marketers is described as the ‘conversion funnel’. This funnel trickles audience members down from a broad audience at the widest part (the first step), which is known as the awareness stage, nurturing them through each stage until they become a customer. The awareness stage is important as once a consumer has seen your ad, whether it’s through paid advertising or on a search engine, the more likely they are to take any action on your brand such as re-visit your site. This is known as the middle part of the funnel or the ‘consideration’ stage. By building brand affinity, connecting and engaging with your audience (together with a bit of help from CRO) you’re able to guide your customer all the way to purchase. This is the lower end of the funnel known as ‘preference’ and ‘purchase’.
Ensuring your brand has a solid digital marketing strategy is paramount. By using a mix of advertising, search engine optimisation and content marketing to reach your audience at each stage, you increase the likelihood of converting a user to a full paying customer.
Most common Digital Marketing Services
SEO
You may have heard of this acronym banded around the digital marketing space and often wondered what it’s meant and how it is used. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It entails certain techniques and manipulation in order to organically rank your site higher in the SERP (search engine results page). The higher up you are on the SERP the better visibility your brand will have, therefore driving unpaid traffic to your site. To rank in the top 3 requires hard work and is competitive, however, not impossible. A number of techniques can be used such as link-building, site auditing, improving site speed, keyword targeting, content writing and generally improving the quality of the site, ensuring full optimisation and sites built for search engines.
PPC or Pay Per Click
On the flip side to SEO you have PPC or Pay-Per-Click. While SEO involves no ad spend, PPC costs a fee payable to search engines. This fee is charged every time their adverts are clicked, hence ‘pay-per-click’, allowing brands and businesses to bid in an auction-style system for the top spots. There are two main ad format variants involved with PPC, one that appears in the SERP and the other that appear in the form of banner ads on web pages. You can tailor the targeting to appear in your ideal customers’ SERPs or web pages with the most popular platforms being Google ads and Bing ads.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing involves utilising writing and creativity to market a service or product in a slightly more indirect way but still maintaining relevance. In other words, content marketing beholds the production and sharing of relevant content with the goal of securing an audience or business objective. Content, in this case, can take on many forms such as video, images, infographics, articles, blogs, social media posts and many more. This content is then split across two pillars, onsite and offsite. Onsite content includes articles on your site, whilst offsite could involve a video posted on social media. The main use of content marketing is to build brand affinity with both current and potential customers, encouraging the consumer to engage with or react to the content.
Digital TV (TV Advertising) or Connected TV (YouTube, Amazon Video & more)
People consume media very differently and broadcast TV is no exception. With the rise of VOD and streaming services, consumers now prefer watching on-demand rather than live. This new habit opens up a new world of targeting opportunities based on people’s interests and service of choice rather than simple demographics, channels and shows affinity. And TV today is not a television. It’s rather a screen for the many devices, digital services and apps. For a brand seeking to build awareness or even direct response, digital tv is the way to move forward and leap ahead of the competition. Services like Sky AdSmart, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Hulu and others allow targeting your audience the same way that other platforms like social media allows. And that’s the potential, to target consumers when it matters the most without wastage by layering data sets and interests such as income, buying behaviour, interests and more that broadcast tv does not allow.
Audio Ads & Digital Radio: Spotify, Pandora and Podcasts.
Digital audio advertising is one of the fastest-growing digital channels and the reason is quite simple. This type of advertising format is present in more and more different environments and moments such as smart speakers, tv, your car, in mobile while commuting, during activities such as sports or cooking. It’s no surprise that this form of digital marketing is being used by more and more brands to build awareness and engage with audiences. The same holds true for podcast advertising. Today it is possible to dynamically insert audio ads in podcasts instead of simple podcast product placement, sponsorship or endorsement.
Social Media: organic (content) and paid (paid social).
Social media marketing can be done organically or through paid ads. Using paid social media enables brands to put their messaging and digital ads in front of the desired audience regardless of their page following. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, TikTok, Pinterest and others track a wide range of demographic and interest data of their users. This data can then be used by paid social media managers to ensure a brand’s ad is seen by the audience more likely to be interested in it. Organic social involves content creation, management and ultimately posting on your social pages for free. It allows brands to showcase their products or services to an engaged community. Social media marketing also plays an important role in retaining loyal customers and working as a customer service platform to easily respond to queries and complaints which is a critical part of audience retention.