What is Digital Marketing
In a nutshell, digital marketing is advertising your product or services online through platforms like Google and social media outlets. All of which are paid for. Traditionally businesses used to rely on marketing through TV, radio, magazines, billboards and events. However as more an more people head online, the growth of digital advertising has rocketed. So naturally business owners have had to take the same route and drive sales online.
It’s all good and well having a website but if you can’t drive direct traffic to your site then you need to make you’re seen on google. There’s many ways to do this, one of which is to make sure your website is fully search engine optimised (SEO) and ticks all of google’s recommended criteria. Google updates these on a regular basis, so it’s something you must keep on top of. Second option to push your site to the forefront would be to invest in Google advertising.
Google Advertising
Google offers many different forms of advertising and you can tailor different adverts to your needs. One of the key results companies want out of these campaigns is to appear at the top of google for various search queries. These can be achieved with some of following.
- Performance max campaigns – Access all channels (a mixture of the below) from one campaign and it will be optimised automatically to drive the best performance. Here you can choose several headlines, descriptions and images and google will piece together and test various combinations. The best performing will be shown the most.
- Display Advertising – Visually engaging adverts which include images, gifs or videos with strong call to action tags.
- Shopping Campaigns – Product listings that are ideal if you’re a retailer looking to sell your product inventory. Shopping ads appear on search results and the Google Shopping tab.
- Video Campaigns – Use video ads to make people aware of your brand or consider buying your product. These would appear on Youtube and other sites.
- App Campaigns – Drive installs, engagements and signups for your app on mobile devices.
- Remarking Campaigns – Customise your ad campaigns for those who visited your website and didn’t complete a conversion – purchase an item, fill in a contact form, etc.
Here’s some great features that let you really customise your adverts…
- Reach – You can target consumers beyond Google search results and appear on other websites and apps.
- Target Audience – You can narrow down your target audience by location, age, sex and interests.
- Time – Be specific and only show your adverts on certain days of the week or time of day.
- Budget – You can set budgets for your advert campaign and set the number of days each one runs for. Different adverts can run simultaneously with different key messages or offers.
Did you know that you can hold advertising spots on your own website through Google Adsense and google will pay you per click or impression.
Some examples below of adverts appearing at the top of search results, shopping campaign, display ad (images on other sites).
Social Media Advertising
Paid for social media advertising or ‘sponsored’ posts can be used to amplify your organic content or used to create new sale leads or increase brand awareness. Like google you can target different demographics etc and reach a broader audience.
You really need to know your audience and create content or ads that will help you drive traffic to your website from your social accounts. Not all of the below will be suitable for your business.
It’s surprising to know that a lot of companies don’t actually know their ‘ideal customer’ and they waste money marketing to everyone. It really pays off to know this information and use this to target your campaigns.
Social Media accounts worth investing in…
- Facebook & Instagram (these are now combined and can be set up together) – An allrounder
- Linkedin – Great for business to business (B2B) marketing
- TikTok – This one is pretty niche and is worth researching further to see if your ideal customer uses this
- Pinterest – Ideal for the creative market
- Snapchat – Suitable for the younger demographic
