A beginner's guide to Digital Marketing

No one expects your digital marketing to be perfect from day one, but it helps if you understand the basics before you throw yourself into the deep end. It is not enough to just have a digital presence: to grow your business you now need to optimise your digital marketing strategy. 

No digital marketing campaign should be without these key components; here's how to build a strong foundation based on sound strategy and effective practice.

1. Develop great content

To attract users and keep them interested, you must regularly create and post interesting content. Content is the hook that will bring your target market to your brand so start with who they are and what they want, their challenges and the questions they are asking. Write content that addresses their concerns, write to be the solution to their problem.

Search engine optimisation (SEO). You've heard of it, but what is it? Basically, search engines rank pages and websites based on how relevant they are to the keywords used by the searcher. SEO seeks to ensure that your page is picked up and ranks highly for those relevant search terms.

SEO and content marketing are deeply intertwined. It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. Use the vernacular of your target market, not industry jargon. They need to be able to find you using their language, after all.

On that note, identifying valuable long-tail keywords is important to create great content. The long tail may include some of the least sought-after keywords in your industry or for your type of business, but they are incredibly valuable if used well. These are the three to four keywords that are very specific to whatever your business is selling. Use content marketing to leverage their power: write several different posts or resources with different angles using a set of consistent long-tail keywords.

The higher quality content you create, the more likely your visitors will stay on your site. You can repurpose content on the same topic by turning it into a blog post or an infographic to add further value.

2. Build links

SEO is more than just matching keywords in the search bar to keywords in content, there's another side to it that doesn't happen on your site. Search engines, particularly Google, look kindly upon websites that prove themselves to be high quality, defined as those that are genuinely useful destinations for website visitors.

This means the more people who link to your site from outside of it, the better quality it appears to Google. External link-building is therefore really important to increase your ranking. The key here is to have content that other sites want to link to; by other websites endorsing your content, your organisation demonstrates authority and legitimacy, both qualities which are important to Google.

3. Visual content has high appeal

A majority of the content published online is visual, and we see image and video content continuing to grow. Visual content is more appealing than text because the brain can process images faster, so people remember more of what they see compared to what they read. It is also what audiences predominantly share on social media. 

Video content now accounts for 74% of all online traffic, so there is no question about its value. Consider visual imagery and videos as part of your content strategy to draw people into your brand story.

Visual content may attract eyeballs, but you need to make sure it works for SEO too. The best way to leverage visual content for SEO is to ensure the meta tags – the information about the content of images – contain keywords. Forgetting meta tags on imagery is a typical oversight that’s quickly fixed. For video, transcriptions with specific keywords can boost its search ranking.

4. Look for active, engaged users

Different audiences play in different parts of the web so it's essential to conduct research into your target market: on which platform they are active and with what kind of content they will engage.

For example, in my business Impress!ve Digital, we have identified Facebook Messenger as an incredibly powerful tool. There are currently 1.3 billion active users and Messenger campaigns deliver extremely high clickthrough rates (CTRs). It can also provide a way for your business to begin a conversation with your target audience.

Messenger campaigns can be tailored based on who you want to target. These types of campaigns tend to be successful when done well and are comparable to an email campaign. Marketing expert Neil Patel shared an example where one of his Facebook Messenger campaigns saw an 88% open rate and a 56% clickthrough rate (CTR). Users are more likely to engage with your brand if you're targeting your offer and succinct with your language. You have plenty of tools at your disposal to create a very specific audience that will increase the chances of them becoming customers.

Digital marketing is built on a foundation of knowing who your target market is and crafting content addressed at meeting their needs so they can find you. The better you are at this, the more likely it is your visitors and followers will spread the word. In an ideal world we'd all go viral and sell lots of product, but in the meantime let's start with getting the basics right.

If you'd like to discuss the contents of this article further or ask questions about your current digital marketing strategy, please contact me on [email protected]