Digital marketing is becoming the most important way for businesses to gain new customers. There are many reasons for this. First of all, the audience on the Internet is large, engaged, and willing to try out new products and services based on advertising. For another, digital marketing is much more than just advertising- there are many ways to use the Internet to connect with customers that don't involve any ads at all. Digital marketing is a very different beast from traditional marketing, but with the right background information it is easy to take advantage of this technological tookit to increase sales and revenue. Mastering digital marketing is a powerful way to boost your ROI for just about any business.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the art of designing a webpage so that it appears higher on Google searches for relevant keywords. For you, those keywords would be closely related to your business, so that with good SEO, when someone searches for what you provide, your company's website appears near the top. This is extremely valuable because customers are more likely to click on a link that is higher on the results page. Google uses a specific algorithm to rank websites when it decides which ones to put at the top of a results page, and SEO is all about tailoring your website to make that algorithm happy. Ranking higher has a strong ROI because it increases how many page visits you get.
Link Building
One of the best forms of SEO is link building. When other websites link to your website, you appear higher on results pages as long as those sites linking to you are legitimate. That's because Google believes that if other sites link to you, then you must be a good source. Some unscrupulous people try to buy links to artificially pump up their ranking, but Google can spot that easily. One great way to build links is a company blog. If you write good content for the blog, then it will attract links organically. With a little bit of time investment, your content will cause your website's ranking to increase.
Local Advertising with Google
Google rewards entities that have Google+ accounts with higher rankings. If you create one for your business, then you will increase your exposure to the audience of people with their own Google+ accounts. There is also another benefit: Google+ has a feature called Places that acts similarly to Yelp reviews: it is a way for locals to find your business, read about it, and write reviews or leave feedback. Google+ accounts are easy to create and don't require much effort to stay active, so building one and connecting it to your business is a surefire way to get the nod from Google's algorithm while also increasing your chances of attracting interested local customers. The more interested and connected a person is when they first visit your site, the more likely they are to become paying customers. Remember, the goal is not just to get people to visit, but to convert them to loyal customers.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
While digital marketing has many different ways to generate ROI, it also contains the old standby: advertising. The "pay per click" or PPC system is a way of buying ads in which you only pay for the ads once a viewer actually clicks on them and goes on to visit your website. If the ad loads up and someone looks at it without clicking, you pay nothing. That is far more control than you would get with traditional ads and can really boost your ROI, because you are effectively only paying for leads. The nice thing about buying online ads is that it is much easier to track how well they are performing because they generate a lot of data. Google Adwords is a typical PPC product that you can use to serve your ads, but there are several different ways to do it.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is already large and important, and it is growing. If you want to capitalise on your marketing effort and get the most bang for your buck, then you need to immerse yourself in digital marketing tools. We here at Quantum are digital marketing experts who can help you with anything you need. Drop by and see what we can do for you- it could change the way you do business.
