The Rise of Digital Marketing
Over the 21st century, a series of technological developments have created a massive digital audience. However, it wasn’t until Google revolutionised the search engine and developed tools like AdWords and created advanced ranking algorithms that marketers began to see the true potential of digital marketing. It opened up the door to targeted marketing and various forms of inbound marketing that were not previously accessible.
Then came the rise of big data and the tracking of consumers’ online activity, enabling companies to track patterns in human behaviour and create more precise marketing efforts. The most recent development has been the rise in smartphones as the primary use for internet access. Allowing businesses to reach consumers more precisely and for longer periods of time.
Digital Marketing Tools
Digital marketing is not just a one-way approach and there are various different platforms and tools that can be used to implement your marketing strategy.
SEO
93% of online activities start on a search engine and there are 3.5 billion searches per day, meaning SEO is critical in ensuring you tap into this huge market and your website is highly visible. There are many considerations to take into account when you’re looking to improve website visibility. Some of the key ones being keyword analysis, rank checking and backlink analysis. SEO allows a business to harness a huge audience and pull in the most relevant individuals as people are already searching for a problem and this just ensures you are top of the list to solve it. Alongside this, search traffic has the highest rate of conversion for websites.
Social Media
Social Media Marketing is becoming ever increasingly more popular and social networks are now a substantial part of marketing strategies. Social Media is one of the most cost-efficient methods to increase brands visibility. However, it is important to note that it is not just a one-way platform designed to advertise a new product/offering; it can also be used to interact with customers as a form of customer service that will inevitably improve brand loyalty. Take for example our client Imageco’s Twitter page; each tweet leads to a conversation or links to the website enabling potential customers to engage with the business.
A marketing tool that could be useful in improving your social media platform is Wyng. This tool focuses on garnering engagement and even has an analytics dashboard that monitors performance.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is now one of the most highly used forms of inbound marketing. It allows you to attract and engage customers with relevant content that is valuable to them. Content marketing allows you to drive conversation and research has shown that companies who create consistent content, experience 6x higher conversion rates.
To ensure your content is up to date on recent trends it would be worth using multiple content curation tools such as Feedly or Scoop.it, as they will enable you to keep up with your competition and ensure you have a say on major talking points in your industry.
Digital PR
It’s important to not only produce content for your website but also produce articles and blogs that can be published on social media or in industry-specific magazines to reach as much of your target audience as possible and create backlinks to your site. A great example of this would be our client Hark who not only creates informative articles for their website but regularly produces content for industry-specific magazines such as IoT for All.
What does the future hold?
Digital Marketing is consistently evolving, and new trends are always entering the market. For example, a new trend that is expected to grow in the near future is micro-moments which are intent-driven moment of decision making such as “I want to buy”. A company must harness these moments and meet customers’ needs within these timeframes.
AI is another technological trend that is expected to transform digital marketing. It will allow companies to anticipate future patterns of customers’ needs based on collected data. Enabling companies to pre-empt their needs and create highly relevant offerings.
A strong digital marketing strategy doesn’t just happen overnight, however when executed correctly it greatly improves your level of customer engagement and conversion rates. If you would like advice on creating your digital marketing strategy then get in touch with a member of our team.