With the trend of working remotely continuing to grow and without signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future, leveraging a digital marketing company has a number of benefits to help your business navigate a changing landscape.
In prior decades, an organization would spend a significant amount of capital on billboards, whitepapers, offices, etc. to enhance their marketing strategy. With more users working remotely, this highlights now more than ever that it’s time to go all-in on your digital marketing strategy as remaining visible in the next 10 years will look much different than it did in the previous 10 years.
This post will focus on 4 of the different aspects that a digital marketing company will focus on in order to drive value throughout your overall digital marketing strategy.
Implement Paid Digital Ads
Earlier we discussed how a company might use a billboard or whitepapers to promote their business; that will change as more organizations focus on allocating advertising dollars to digital advertising.
Digital marketing ads will provide options for voice, text, and visual advertising; The only difference is that it’s now done online in order to effectively reach your audience.
A significant benefit of digital advertising is that it allows your business to start seeing results immediately assuming that the digital ads are deployed and improved upon correctly.
To better understand the immediate impact that digital ads can have on your business, here’s a small example of a client who was just getting started with building their online presence that was yet to implement SEO.
At the bottom of the chart, you’re seeing 5 users/day that are visiting the website. After getting their ads approved within Google Ads, you see an immediate jump to 155+ sessions/day.
Granted, the company allocated a decent budget to get to that point, but by spending some $$ they were immediately able to grow their traffic over 860% (yes, 860%+).
With these statistics, you can probably already guess that digital ads can get expensive and you’ll want to strive to strike as much value out of the ads as you can to increase your return on investment.
Effective monitoring of ads + enhancements on what needs to be improved = effective digital ad spend
Enhanced Search Engine Optimization
While digital advertising will quickly drive users to your website and allow you to remain visible online (when created effectively, of course), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will work to accomplish both of those tasks without eating away at your marketing budget.
According to one of the industry leading SEO software companies, Moz, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
Organic results drive real value here as it distinguishes between paid advertising, and establishing authority for your product or services via SEO.
In other words, with enough money in your marketing budget, any company can be visible on the first pages of a search engine by just bidding enough $$ on the appropriate keywords (for simplicity, think of keywords as what best describes your product or service).
Although this is also impactful, you can ultimately gain a competitive advantage by no longer having to invest in as much paid advertising once you begin to rank higher within the organic results.
There is also what we’ll call a ‘user-bias’ where your audience is much less likely to click on a search result that they know is promoted.
In 2018 SparkToro stated that for every 38.5 clicks on organic results, there were only 3.4 clicks on a paid search result.
To further highlight why SEO is important, we’re in an era where the consumer is able to do the majority of their research on their own before they reach out to a company to buy a solution.
Impactful SEO ensures that when the user does reach out, it’s with intent to purchase because your organization has proven (via their website which we’ll get to next) to offer that solution and have authority within your specified industry.
SEO may take longer to implement than paid advertising, but it shows year after year to produce better business results for those that remain consistent with it.
Website Development
There are over 3.5 billion web searches per day on the internet. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those searches are directing users to a website given that there are other channels out there such as social media, but the majority of that traffic is pulling websites and delivering them within the search results.
With a staggering number like 3.5 billion searches (this will only continue to increase as home devices such as Alexa, Google Home, & Siri make voice search even more convenient), you’ll want to ensure that:
- You’re giving a good first impression of your business via your website
- You’re given the opportunity to give a first impression in the first place by showing up in search engines
You can expect a digital marketing company to place a significant focus on developing your website and providing a better user-experience for your audience while they interact with that website.
It’s important to keep in mind that as you run paid digital advertisements, enhance SEO, and deploy email marketing campaigns that ultimately you’re striving to drive more traffic to your website.
A website that is easy to navigate regardless of end-user device and informs on how a challenge can be solved will ultimately convert traffic into paying customers.
Tools such as SEMrush are used to perform site audits. These audits run analyzers on your website, help you identify issues, and then implement actionable steps to address those issues for better visibility.
Within your website, a digital marketing company will strive to enhance:
- Site speed
- User navigation
- SEO
- Visualisation
- Clear messaging to meet your business goals
Deploy Email Marketing
With all of the work that was put into your other digital channels, email marketing remains one of the top marketing channels when it comes to staying in front of your desired audience.
The main reasons it’s still effective are because:
- It’s still a main form of communication among businesses
- Emails allow you to communicate directly with your target prospects and customers
- It’s relatively inexpensive when choosing the appropriate tools
For all of those reasons it’s still effective, also are the reasons that email marketing has continuously gotten more challenging to execute with no sign of getting easier.
That doesn’t however mean you should ignore it as a channel of lead generation, it just means that you need to strive for more quality email prospects, and of course quality emails. If you’re just getting started on your email marketing campaign then it’s important to have a strategy in place and a digital marketing company will help greatly in this arena.
You may want to take a stab at your email marketing campaigns on your own and that’s fine as well. The most effective email campaigns are those that utilize a combination of personalization and automation.
Here’s an example of the logic that a digital marketing company might deploy to automate your emails based on the action a user takes.
This level of automation enables you to send customized emails, reengage contacts that aren’t responsive, and send your internal team automatic updates as to what’s going on with the campaign (via Slack messaging in this example).
Tie it All Together
The 4 aspects of digital advertising, search engine optimization, website development, and email marketing perform best when they’re implemented and deployed together.
By enhancing all 4 aspects and appropriately tracking the analytics behind what is working well and what has room for improvement, you enable data driven decision making within your organization that will set your current campaign, and surely future campaigns up for success.
Contact us to let us know how this has worked for your or if you’re interested in an audit of your current digital practices to further enhance your digital strategy.
Gary McConnell Co-founded Rubicom Digital in 2019 with a goal of providing digital marketing consulting services in the B2B space.
Gary continues to serve as the Marketing Director of a Data Center-focused IT Provider, VirtuIT Systems.