PROSPECTOR 101: Breaking down Digital Marketing

Over the past four weeks we broke down digital marketing into four small subsections:?

• Content marketing
• Search engine optimisation
• Search engine marketing
• Social media marketing

Here we’ve put them all together to help you learn four different parts of digital marketing, as well as some basic steps to set up different types of digital marketing campaigns

Content marketing has become a crucial tactic in a business’ toolbox for campaigns, engaging its target audience with high quality, practical, and relevant content that matters to them. It can cover a wide array of different forms, including blogs, newsletters, emails, videos and social media posts, interacting with both new and existing customers with the aim to build relationships to keep your brand at the front of their minds.

Since 2010, content marketing has seen significant growth in usage, with businesses using it for both B2B and B2C marketing and in 2021, roughly 24% of marketers were aiming to increase their spending on content/email marketing. This growth can be attributed to the strong performance of content marketing in creating relationships, with businesses that use content marketing bringing in three times as many leads as businesses that don’t, while costing 62% less than traditional marketing.

The 101 of a successful content marketing campaign generally involves these ten steps:

1. Establish your goals
2. Define your target audience
3. Research your competitors
4. Complete topic and keyword research
5. Review your existing content?
6. Devise your content strategy
7. Plan your resources
8. Plan your production timeline
9. Create, publish and promote your content
10. Monitor and refine your content

Through the development of this content marketing campaign, it often becomes a snowball effect for the next one, rather than being a single task, where each campaign allows the relationships between you and your target audience to evolve, building loyalty and trust.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website easily findable, more relevant, and popular for users’ queries on popular search engines such as Google and Bing. To achieve this popularity, search engines recommend including the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions and schema markup (a code that you place on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users).

SEO is often grouped into three different categories:

?? On-page SEO ?? Off-page SEO ?? Technical SEO

????-???????? ?????? is optimising a webpage to target a specific search query and rank high on search engines, and generally involves activities like keyword research, content creation, and keyword optimization.

??????-???????? ?????? is used to build the reputation of a webpage by linking it with other quality websites, helping search engines to trust the content on the site as well as increasing the reputation and reliability of the web page.

?????????????????? ?????? is about creating a strong user experience on the website, with upgrades such as adding mobile-friendliness, increasing site speed, adding indexation and improving crawlability (where search engine ‘crawlers’ can read and follow links in your site’s content).

Here are nine steps that can be used to create a successful SEO strategy:

1. Creating a list of keywords
2. Analysing different search engines' first pages
3. Look to create something different from the pack
4. Add a hook
5. Devise your content strategy
6. Optimise for on-page SEO
7. Optimise for search intent
8. Focus on content design
9. Aiming to continuously improve and update content

With search engines generally being the first step someone will take when looking for a product or service, SEO has now become one of the most important steps a business can take to stand out from the pack.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a paid form of internet marketing that aims to promote and increase the visibility of a website on search engine result pages (SERPs) such as Google and Bing. With search engines generally being the first step someone will take when looking for a product or service, SEM can help a business stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace and goes hand-in-hand with search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEM is seen as a very effective marketing tool, with the ability to create an immediate impact as it appears on SERPs straight after the campaign is launched. SEM also gives a business the significant luxury of being able to define its target audience further, create filters based on locations, age, interests, habits and more, as well as an easy-to-track ROI.

Here are is an example of seven steps that can be used to create a successful SEM campaign:

1. Define an effective strategy
2. Choose the best keyword phrases
3. Optimise your site for organic search through SEO
4. Begin link building from other websites used by your target audience
5. Manage an ROI-driven paid search campaign
6. Check your ranking on search engines’ business pages e.g. Google My Business?
7. Review and measure the impact of your campaign

With search engine usage now a part of everyone's daily lives, SEM has become one of the most important steps a business can undertake for its digital marketing strategy. With the SEM strategy in place, how does your sales team achieve the goal of increasing sales and overall growth for the company?

Social media marketing (SMM) is the process of creating content for a social media platform that a business will use for promoting its products and/or services, building a community with its target audience, and driving traffic to its business. The content used can include posts, images, videos and blogs. Some of the popular social media sites include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Snapchat.

Every platform has its own unique set of guidelines for posting content and can bring with them its own strengths and weaknesses, requiring a unique approach and strategy for each platform. A blog post may be ideal for one platform, whereas on another, a simple image may reach and engage a much wider audience. Because of this, an important part of a SMM strategy is to identify the target audience and create content accordingly.

Some of the most beneficial reasons to utilise SMM include building brand awareness, generating leads and boosting conversions, building and fostering relationships with customers, and researching and learning from competitors.

A basic social media strategy will generally include the following steps:

1. Research your buyer personas and audience.
2. Determine which social platforms you’ll market on.
3. Establish your most important metrics and KPIs.
4. Get to know your competition.
5. Create unique and engaging content.
6. Organize a schedule for your posts.

Once the SMM strategy and campaign have been launched, keeping track of the social media metrics will help to determine whether or not it has been successful. Examples of these metrics include engagement, reach, followers, impressions, video views, profile visits, mentions, tags reposts and shares.

Trying to keep up with the latest digital marketing news, trends and campaigns can be a monumental task. Prospector updates businesses on the latest digital marketing campaigns and who to reach out to in order to achieve positive business growth.