The internet is a crowded place for businesses; you need a clear digital marketing strategy to ensure that your business’ voice is being heard over your competitors online.

Staying on top of digital marketing trends successfully will not only keep you ahead of competition, but it will increase your brand’s visibility to your target audience and ultimately drive more traffic to your website increasing sales and revenue.

A small investment of time into the following areas of digital marketing could lead to a growth in sales and profit:

1) Engage in the right channel for your business

Depending on the size of a business and the audience you’re targeting, the digital marketing tactics that are best suited will vary. Organisations with a large market will need to cover all of the following tactics, smaller and newer ones will benefit from focussing on two or three in order to make the best use of more limited resources.

SEO

The aim of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to rank as highly as possible in organic (not paid for) search engine rankings, most importantly Google. SEO has the ability to significantly improve your digital marketing as it can drive more people to your website when searching for services or products your business provides, simply because your business will rank higher on Google. How do you do it? Unfortunately, there’s no ‘one answer’ to improving your SEO but having a well-developed website, creating engaging content and generating links from other relevant websites will all boost your rankings.

To get started, make sure that all of your most important pages are well written, highly detailed and unique to your website. Also, ensure that they are linked to prominently from your homepage so that they are easy to find.

Content marketing

Creating valuable, current and quality content is the key to nailing this tactic. Whether your content is a video, an infographic or a how-to guide, it needs to be based on strong and reliable research data to get the engagement you want. Google favours quality content because it’s what users want and expect from the websites they visit. If your website doesn’t engage them and at worst, makes them feel like they can’t trust you or your products, then they will never become customers.

Digital PR

Digital PR and content marketing come hand in hand. You should be looking to improve your digital PR through building relationships with relevant journalists and bloggers, for example by offering a 24 hour exclusive to a national publication. An essential way to grow digital PR is to create link-worthy content; gather groundbreaking research and data or get comment from a high-profile and industry-relevant professional.

Social media marketing

Social media is no longer an optional tactic for businesses. To be able to compete and grow in your market, being active and engaging on social is a key part of any digital marketing strategy. If your brand is currently spread out over three or four social media platforms, take the time to research the social platform your target audience are most active on and focus on growing your presence in one or two places. Using social media scheduling sites such as Hootsuite to schedule posts ahead of time will support time management, too. Also remember that many potential customers will check out your social channels to see if you are a real business and occasionally look for customer support too. Even if a certain channel isn’t for you, make sure it has up to date company contact details and looks professional.

PPC

PPC, which stands for pay-per-click, is a tactic where you only pay for an ad when it’s clicked. When setting out a PPC strategy, make sure you have a clear objective of what you want to advertise at the forefront of your mind. By making keywords as precise as possible, you’re able to keep a summary of your product or service specific and enticing. Social advertising can also boost your online presence; three million brands use Facebook to advertise, so don’t let them get ahead of you! In 2016, local search ads on Maps were introduced, designed to drive consumers to local businesses when searching for places to eat and shop. If you haven’t got on this wagon yet, now is the time to work out whether this could be useful to you.

2) Track & evaluate your progress

Including SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely) objectives in your digital marketing strategy will make the process of tracking and evaluating more effective. If your strategy objectives don’t meet this criteria, tracking and evaluating progress won’t be as useful; set these out before anything else and this step will be a lot more straight-forward.

So you’ve got your digital marketing strategy in place, but how do you know if it’s working? Using tools such as Google Analytics, a set of measurements that tracks your website and social media performance, will show visitor insights including how they interact with your sites, browsing time, clicks on different pages etc. This will show you elements of your strategy to focus on and grow. Twitter and Facebook both have their own set of social analytics that track your engagement and visibility, including peak times which digital marketers can learn from to adapt posting times to fit in with when audiences are most likely to engage and respond.

If your website and social channels are receiving high volumes of traffic and engagement but this isn’t reflecting in your volume of sales, then it might be time to check your analytics for the audience your content is reaching. It’s not all about the amount of engagement, it’s about who your content is reaching; if your Facebook analytics are saying your likes are mostly from middle-aged women but your target audience is men, consider a re-evaluation of your strategy.

3) Attend conferences and events

Want to get you and your business’ name out there more? Start networking whilst hearing about the latest industry trends and new thinking. As well as mingling with experienced digital marketing professionals, events are also your chance for people to put a face to your name, adding a level of trust to your business. First impressions count - make yours worth it!

Even if you’ve not yet attended a digital marketing conference, you might have seen live tweets followed by the conference’s hashtag floating around twitter with quotes and comments from the speakers. That right there is how digital marketers can stay current - they hear the latest ideas and innovations straight from the source. Tweeting throughout will also increase your visibility to industry folk who aren’t at the event.

 

By Paddy Moogan, co-founder of Aira

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

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