Digital marketing is marketing your product or service using technology, so this could be through the internet or via email or even using mobile phones. Digital Marketing is different from your usual paper based marketing but both marketing techniques need to work together hand in hand or your over all marketing may not work as well as it should.
One of the real benefits of digital marketing is that it is easy to measure and get statistics for and find out just how well your digital marketing is actually working for your company. These statistics tell you things like home many people were on your website and how they got to your website. One of the best website statistics counters is google analytics.
The main ways to use digital marketing are:
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Pay Per Click
- Link building
- Email Marketing
- Article writing and Blogging
- Social Media Marketing
For more information on Digital Marketing please view our Digital Marketing service
Digital Marketing – Search Engine Optimisation – SEO
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is one of the first things that a digital marketing company will usually talk to you about and how to improve your Search Engine Ranking for an organic google search.
There are 2 different types of results that search engines produce the first is your organic search engine result which shows up 10 results that show the most relevant then important websites for the key term that you searched for, the second type of result that search engines produce is results that you pay for. The one thing that every company wants to do is get good results in the organic search for a relevant key term for their company.
How to get found using Organic SEO?
To know how to be found for organic SEO results you first need to have an idea of how google and other search engines works, indexes and crawls your website. Organic SEO does not just happen it can take a lot of time and effort to get your website well positioned in a top search result.
We will mainly concentrate on Google and how it works for Organic SEO as it has the largest share of the UK search market at almost 70% of all searches happening using a google search tool or bar.
The way that google works is rather simple to start off with, It first rates each site due to relevance to a search term so you could have 100 relevant sites being found, then google ranks each site by importance, so the websites that google thinks are the most relevant and most important will appear at the top for your search. The hard part is trying to figure out the over 200 ranking factors that a search engine like google uses to index your website when it is crawling the site.
There are some simple key factors in getting your websites organic SEO working for you make sure your title of the website is relevant to the page that it is on and contains the vital key terms that you want to be found for also make sure that your content is also relevant on the same page and contains your vital key terms and make sure that you have inbound links that contain the key terms also. These are a few simple rules that can make a big difference to your Organic SEO.
It is suggested that each page on your website should have a minimum of 400 words of key content.
Digital Marketing – Pay Per Click – PPC
Pay per click is as its name suggests you pay every time someone clicks on the link to your website. PPC can be a fantastic way to get your company name out there quickly for search terms that your company is not being found for, it can also help you gauge the market potential for a search term before you start on your Organic SEO for that key term. Its also a good way to get your company name out there for a new product quickly before anyone else gets found for it.
The great thing about pay per click is that you can measure everything that happens such as how much it costs per click, how many people are clicking on your link, where the traffic is coming from & how relevant a search term is.
If you are being found for both pay per click and Organic SEO that will increase your chances of a potential client going to your website and buying your product or service as it increases the confidence of the potential buyer that you are the right company for the job.
Digital Marketing – Link Building
Link Building is quite simple it is about building links to and from your website so that you create a network of incoming and out going links around your website. There are 2 main kinds of links that google is really concerned about for your website and they are internal links and external links.
What are internal links?
These are links that got to relevant pages on your website from other pages on your website. So if you have a page about Digital Marketing on your website and you talk about it on another page make sure you link the text digital marketing to your digital marketing page. This is called a relevant internal link and they are liked by google.
Google currently ranks internal links differently now as there are so many website with header links and footer links. Header links are considered your main navigation so they get a higher rank and they usually appear within the first 50 words on your website and the footer links get a lower rank these days as so many website are starting to use them, how ever they are still useful as they act like a site map for your website. A lot of important weight is placed on the internal links that are within your main content so it is important to also have internal links to relevant pages in your main content on your page.
What are external links?
External links are links that either go to a page on your website from another website or it is a link that goes to another website from your website. What every person wants for there website is to have a range of external links coming into their website all with relevant key terms attached to them so that they help your website get promoted more in google for the key term.
If a lot of website like to one of your pages with the key term digital marketing then google will see that web page to be more important for that key term, so it will start to promote the website above other website that are seen to be less important in googles search algorithm.
It can be also worth while linking your website to other website that you feel are important or relevant to what you are talking about.
Digital Marketing – Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a good digital marketing tool as it is 100% measurable marketing. You need to run good email marketing campaigns to capture your audience within the first few seconds or they will just delete the email without reading it.
One of the main problems with email marketing is that your emails can be put straight into the spam folders of your potential customers or if you are sending out to many emails from your own server then you can get your server black listed which is never a good thing. It is always worth while looking at mail clients such as Campaign Monitor as there servers run on the appropriate networks so they don’t get black listed and they also have less problems with the emails getting placed into customers junk boxes.
There are also other mail clients out there and it is just finding the one that fits your company best. The only one that I have found to offer a 100% free offer but with a little advert at the bottom of your email is mail chimp.
Once your audience has your email that you sent to them you need them to want to click through the email and onto your website. The best sort of way to do that is to give out an offer that they cant refuse.
There are really 2 different ways of using your email marketing and that is to give people updates on what your company is doing or to send them offers that your company has on right now.
Digital Marketing – Article Writing / Blogging
Article Writing and Blogging is an area that tends to get overlooked for digital marketing as it is an area that can take a little more time to do but it is also an are if done well can produce a lot of positive results for your website, products and services.
What is Article Writing and Blogging?
It is about communicating to others your thoughts or what is going on such as a special offer for your company to other people via article websites, press release websites, ezine website, your own blog and other peoples blogs. It is basically contributing to a network of articles so that people can read them or find out about something and they have a link back to your website for that relevant topic so that people know where the original source came from and they know where to look if they want to find out more about it.
This area tends to tie into social networking also as you write an article you can also post it onto your facebook or twitter page to let more people know about it and in turn they might want to let more people know about it or even make a comment on the article itself.
One of the best ways to get your article recognised it to give away a little free information that catches peoples interest and makes them want to know a little more about your company.
Digital Marketing – Social Media Marketing – SMM
Social Media Marketing is one of the new marketing terms as social media has grown larger companies have seen that it is also a fantastic marketing platform to grab your target audience.
The biggest social media sites are of course twitter and facebook. They are both used in different ways and both target a different type of audience. Facebook is your customer to customer relationship or business to customer relationship, while twitter is really a holding or meeting place for everything as it is used and targeted by all different types. Both of them have a different style of how you can use them, facebook is a little more personal, easier to use and communicate on, while twitter you can only make 140 character comments like sending a text message, and these tend to go out to everyone so that anyone can see what you are saying and talk to you and follow your twitter feed.
If you are looking for a more business to business social media platform them the biggest one out there is linkedin. Linkedin is really a place for business owners to talk to one another and recommend one another. On linkedin you cant just connect with any user you need to know the person first before they will connect with yourself.
Ikon Digital – Digital Marketing
Technorati Tags: digital marketing, link building, organic seo, search engine optimisation, seo tips
Weather in Glasgow on Wikipedia
What Wikipedia says about the Glasgow Weather Climate: “Winters are normally chilly, damp, and overcast, with a January mean of 4.0 °C (39.2 °F), though lows sometimes fall below freezing. Clear or dry days are rare. Snow occurs but rarely lies in the city centre. The spring months (March to May) are generally mild. Many of Glasgow’s trees and plants begin to flower at this time of the year and parks and gardens are filled with spring colours. The summer months (June to September) can vary considerably between mild and wet weather or warm and sunny. The warmest month is usually July, with average highs near 20 °C (68 °F). Autumns are cool to mild, with increasing dampness. Extremes range from -20 to 31.2 °C (-4 to 88 °F), the latter occurring 4 August 1975.”