By Oswaldo Ledesma | March 15th, 2021.
The constant and abundant innovations in technology have created many new ways to communicate with your customers and deliver better messages that express your brand's value and the solutions you provide.
Digital Marketing covers a wide range of options to use, among tools and platforms, like websites, social media, email campaigns, search engines, blogs, podcasts, text/chat messaging…You name it! If it's online and helps you to accomplish your marketing goals, it most likely can be used as part of a Multichannel Strategy.
Whether you do your own marketing for your business or hire an in-house or out-house marketer, the following Digital Marketing terms are important to understand if you really want to make a difference.
1. SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is basically appearing as one of the top results when people look for your website on Google or another search engine.
The process of optimizing your website with good keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, content, internal links, and more, is what makes your website rank higher when people lookup for information that relates to your activities.
SEO in other words is telling a search engine that you have the best possible results to offer when someone does a web search.
Bear in mind that SEO is an ongoing process that requires time, patience, and maintenance to keep your website alive and growing, take it one step at a time until you get the expected outcome.
2. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a content creation approach designed to attract, engage, and convert your potential customers, and retain the customers you already have.
This type of strategic marketing resembles the process of the Design Thinking method, this means that you need to center your content on your target market and the interests that are the most valuable and relevant to them.
Start by empathizing and creating your buyer persona, define what you want to communicate, produce your content, and validate how much value it delivers, adapt your strategy constantly according to the results you get.
Content Marketing needs consistency and content that is highly valuable and relevant to your target market, use all the information you collect over time to better understand the circles of interests that best fit your customers.
3. Measurement / Analytics
You might have heard before that it is hard to improve something you can't measure, and when it comes to Digital Marketing it becomes extremely important to measure what you do to understand how you can do it better.
Every social media platform and most other online platforms offer you analytics, which means that they collect data and information from every action performed to transform it into measurable results.
Analytics help you to understand how your business is performing online, to discover potential new opportunities and relationships, make better decisions for the future, and set a pattern that could better predict the outcomes of your strategies.
If you are not familiar with the type of analytics your social media offers, you should definitely book an hour of your day to sit down and explore all the wonders that math and numbers have for you. Page likes, reach, engagement, followers, views, amount of time someone spends on your website, the countries they visit from, etc. The results and information you get from your analytics are meant to be a tool for progress and success.
4. PPC / SEM
Let's break down the concepts first.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing, refers to all the activities that aim to improve how fast and easy a website can be found in a search engine, e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
PPC: Stands for Pay-Per-Click and is a way to advertise your website online in a search engine.
The most important part of any PPC or SEM activity that you take is the set of keywords you use to position your website.
Ask some of your current or potential customers for the exact words they use when they type a question in a search engine trying to find what you sell and also do the exercise yourself, if your sell balloons and candles, then probably some good keywords are “birthday party items” or “birthday shop”, you get the idea, think about the words, questions and phrases that a person may use to look for what you're offering, and before you pay anything to any search engine make sure you use those keywords to drive traffic to your website.
As a point of reference, in a PPC strategy, you only have to pay for the clicks that actually drive traffic to your website, and what you determine constitutes a conversion for your business.
5. Social Media Campaigns
Digital Campaigns, in contrast with other campaigns that conventional marketing offers, focus on the people and the interests that a group of people has, when you create a Social Media Campaign you have to deeply understand who your target audience is and what they like, and how they interact with information online.
Before creating a Social Media Campaign make sure you take the time to create an avatar of the person you're trying to communicate with, write down what you think they like, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the brands they like, and interact with, the cities where they might be located and the type of content they might likely respond to.
Every detail counts no matter how silly it might seem at the beginning, understand that if you don't know who you're talking to then you won't have the tools to create a message that resonates and drives action to your digital campaign.
Finally, when you're ready to create your campaign with the proper creatives, take the time to select the options that best suit your target audience, don't hurry, and don't feel overwhelmed, the process is not difficult but you have to give it your undivided attention if you do it patiently and with the proper concentration the results will for sure pay off.