Digital marketing can be overwhelming and confusing to new and small businesses. You often don’t know where to start or what marketing channel or channels to choose. In this article, I will walk you through the top three digital marketing channels used and explain how they can benefit your business.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO marketing is the process of ranking your website for keywords that drive traffic organically on the major search engines such As Google and Bing. I wouldn’t consider other search engines they currently don’t provide enough traffic to worry about them.
SEO is somewhat technical and consists of three elements. You have onsite, offsite and site speed optimization. The parts all play essential roles in increasing your websites keyword rankings. I could go into technical details of SEO, but it would bore you and make this article extremely long.
Search engine optimization is excellent once you have rankings because, unlike other digital marketing techniques, you don’t pay for each click to your site or lead generated. Plus, the conversation rates are much higher for this type of marketing than other channels. SEO is great for any business because not only does it drive traffic but also creates brand recognition and will work as long you can find keywords with substantial search volume.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
PPC is great for small businesses; it permits you to drive traffic quickly to your site. Also allows you to budget your marketing expenses. PPC is a bid-based system that you pay each time your ad is clicked on. Two of the most popular sites for pay-per-click marketing is Google with their Adwords platform and Facebook. PPC can get pricey depending on the competition for a particular keyword.
What great about PPC is fast to setup. You can easily track results and use demographic information to target specific clientele. This is why I would recommend pay-per-click on the local level since you can target cities that you want your ads displayed. One last cool feature is you can set your ads to remarket to people that visited your site before. This feature is fantastic because it increases your conversion rate and helps with brand recognition and retention.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the oldest form of digital marketing. It has grown over the years from receiving unsolicited messages to permission-based marketing. I personally only recommend doing op-in email marketing. The main reason why is the conversion rates are a lot higher for this type of marketing. Secondly, most platforms that small businesses can afford to use to design and send emails and newsletters require this form of marketing.
As a marketer, I would tell a new or small business to use email marketing for brand retention among your current customers. I state this because most small businesses will not have substantial enough permission-based list that will be needed to boost your sales. So if you focus on creating campaigns geared at current clients, you will have much more success until you can build your list up.
