The birth of Digital Marketing:

Marketing has seen a significant transition from traditional offline to online marketing. Practically all businesses have an online presence in 2018. Businesses that have not recognized this trend of digital/online advertising, really need to adopt one fast! We are in a digital era today, every people we see walks around with a phone, tablet, laptop etc and there is no surprise to find out why digital marketing has over powered traditional offline one. Let us take a look why digital marketing will change your business promotion forever.

One shall learn the latest skills which are needed: It is great to learn something new, but even greater if it can be a business generating force. Approximately 1 in 5 people have shifted to digital advertising because of its cost effectiveness and potential to reach a large amount of audience globally.

Mistakes will not cost you: Make a faulty banner for a hoarding space, you will lose your money on corrections, printing charges and advertising space rent. Digital marketing is all about trial and errors. More errors you make, more better you will be at it. Even the big players in the game do make mistakes when they try something new.

Be unique and you shall be rewarded: Not following the standard norms of marketing and exploring your creativity to the fullest, you can attract business by innovating strategies like never before. You shall be rewarded for doing things differently and people will follow you.

Budget friendly: Many strategies in digital marketing are practically organic. You only require to pay for your website designing which is very nominal and or using pay-per-click campaigns which you can select as per your budget. The main strategy revolves around advertising your brand with good content and optimization all over the internet. Invest in skills and not promotions.

Satisfaction guaranteed: Digital marketing is a number game. Every strategy is measured before improvising. Many tools provide you with various graphs which shows visitors to your website, clicks on your website, location of the visitors, what device they use to get to you and much more. Everything is measured and satisfying to watch how your efforts make a change to your advertising strategy. Unlike traditional offline marketing, getting daily or monthly realtime statistics is easy with digital marketing.

Verticals in digital marketing you need to acquire skills for: The term “digital marketing” comprises of various verticals like:

• Website development
• Content writing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Pay-per-click campaigns
• AdSense, affiliate marketing
• Blogging
• Article writing and submissions
• Google analytics
• E-commerce
• Mobile advertising

In today’s time, not being online is detrimental to the growth of your business. In fact, your business can’t expand unless it has reached over the internet. However, reaching online is just the beginning or it’s just a stepping stone to realize your true potential. There is a lot more to be done after that as well as only then can your business expect to grow and expand. You need to have a proper marketing plan in mind so that you could leverage digital channels in a perfect manner. Your ad campaigns need to effective so that users can get your brand messages easily.

All this is not possible unless you have some expert or an agency to help you out with this marketing task. In short, you need to benefit from an agency and its vast market experience in realizing your digital marketing goals with ease. A top agency will help you get a suitable digital marketing strategy so that your business, its products and services can reach to the audience in an easy manner. It will bring you measurable results whereas important data related to the customers is gathered and tracked. You will know who is visiting your website and who is switching away.

More so, an experienced agency gives you real data and information in regard to the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Similarly, your business will be marketed in channels that are rich in prospects and where users are more likely to need you products or services. Which means, the reach of your business will be boosted and you will get a bigger and wider audience to cater. Your ads will be run in different channels so that prospects can be tapped from as many places as possible. It’s the efficiency of the ad/s that will decide the fate of your business.

More so, hiring a top agency for your digital marketing means you get speed to convey your brand ideas and messages with your audience. Similarly, your business sets up a real-time engagement with the target. Which means, you get to converse with the audience, listen to their tastes and preferences, get their reviews and feedback and plan accordingly to serve them in a better manner. All this is done without investing too much as digital marketing is largely an affordable form of advertising. You won’t spend beyond a bare minimum and whatever is spent can be tracked in real-time.

In addition, a top digital marketing agency understands your business fully and knows which channels to market it. It helps bring a competitive edge to your business and this is how your marketing goals are achieved. You should however take care in hiring an agency for your marketing purposes as not all of them can deliver quality. You need to trust only those that have helped brands reach to their audience more effectively and see a boost to the sales and revenue. This is how a business grows and expands and fulfils its goals.

Digital Marketing just characterized is the new age online marketing that involves uniting with the potential consumers in an approachable and convenient way, engaging with them in an effective and enhanced manner. It’s a win-win situation for both the marketer who can develop the consciousness of his business and the consumer who can be benefitted from the most up to date social media techniques.

The increased awareness and usage of the online platform has made marketers to focus their efforts on building long-term brand commitment as opposed to short-term conversions. The dynamic marketing environment is gaining momentum and the new digital culture offers open doors for retailers willing to reconsider how they work together.

The entire world has become a Global community which is connected mere by a touch of a button or a click of mouse. Be it Facebook, Google who have been in the forefront for their consistent engagement with consumers on a regular basis for their various new initiatives or the e-commerce sites like Flipkart, Amazon, Jabong, Myntra which redefined the whole shopping experience, Digital Marketing have evolved as it has gained tremendous momentum in the contemporary marketing environment.

Digital Marketing as it exists today entails specific techniques to reach out to their target audiences.

Content Marketing – the brand need to reach out to the relevant audience with crisp, specific and relevant information. The content can be presented to the consumers in diverse forms -Blogs, articles, new posts with the required key messages for them.

A strong digital marketing strategy will involve the various forums like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn to leverage the brand’s presence.

Mobile Marketing – with the advent of smartphones, the customer can now access specific and relevant information on-the-go. With more and more consumers spending maximum time on their smart phones the mobile applications have proved to be a boon to the marketers. By understanding their needs through customer-check in tools like Facebook or data provided by AdWords and GPS, the brands now comprehend the customer’s desires, their behavior, what she wants and so forth.

Display Advertising or banners on the website next to the content helps the advertisers build their online vicinity, increase the their online presence, achieve their showcasing objective, commute leads, advance new items or occasional offers/advancements.

E-mail marketing – one of the earliest forms of digital marketing, the personailsed information with the apt targeted messages can be shared with the consumers.

Search Engine Optimisation – this is to ensure the visibility of the brand’s website amongst the top search results. The different SEO methods include on-site technical analysis, substance creation, blogging and external link establishment.

Pay per click marketing- a technique where the online advertisers have to pay the Internet publishers fee for advertisements which appear above or to the right of the ‘organic’ search results. The advertiser bids on the keywords and the publisher sets a fixed pay per click rate on a single website or a network of websites.

Digital media’s significance cannot be explained better, as Bill Gates, Founder, Microsoft explains it in his own words:

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

—ends—

A startup business lacks big budgets for advertising purposes. On the other hand, they don’t have the resources as well. Hence, these businesses find it difficult to compete against the big boys in the industry. In fact, a startup has only big ideas and hard work to compete with the big businesses in the niche. A small business needs to compete for space in a sector where new companies are launched almost on a daily basis – which means a startup business has to undergo so many obstacles to carve out a niche of their own. In fact, they need to tackle all these challenges to succeed in the market.

The constantly changing behaviour of the customer also needs to be taken into consideration when operating a startup. If not, it is difficult to deliver what the target audience is expecting from your business. In fact, a startup business needs to survive in a market where some players spend millions of dollars on marketing their products and services. Being a startup among millions of other startups is not a pleasing situation at all. That is where digital marketing comes in handy. It helps a startup business make its presence felt in a highly competitive marketing environment. With the presence of the internet, a shoestring budget won’t prevent a startup business from realizing its goals and objectives in the long run.

Since startups don’t have the budget to implement traditional marketing campaigns, they have no other option but to leverage digital marketing to their advantage. In fact, digital marketing comprises of four major techniques such as SEO, PPC, Reputation Management, and Ad Display. The most important benefit of digital marketing is the traffic increase and online exposure that a startup business gets. It helps a startup build a strong relationship with its customer base and improve the brand in the process – which means a startup brand is spread across the internet at an extremely affordable cost.

Digital marketing helps a new business set up a two-way communication with its customer base. The marketing campaign is planned so that the branding message reaches a wide sector of users on the internet. You can use both paid and organic marketing methods to meet the short and long-term goals of your startup business effortlessly. Digital marketing differs from single-channel traditional marketing due to its impacts reaching multiple channels in quick time. This is achieved by capitalizing on the latest technology of automation. All actions taken in this regard is well-coordinated and personalized compared to the traditional marketing methods.

A reliable digital marketing team will help promote your brand across multiple digital platforms to take your brand to the next level in a short period. Digital marketing methods such as social, mobile, content marketing, and email marketing help a business understands their customers better. With measurable results to easily gauge the success or failure of a campaign, a startup can easily amend the strategies they use to improve the chances of success and reduce the chances of failure. That is why digital marketing is considered one of the best marketing strategies for a startups.

Digital marketing, the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media, differs from traditional marketing as it uses channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t – typically in real time.

Computerized advertisers screen things like what is being seen, how frequently and for to what extent, deals transformations, what content works and doesn’t work, and so on. While the Internet is, maybe, the station most intently connected with advanced advertising, others incorporate remote content informing, versatile texting, portable applications, podcasts, electronic bulletins, computerized TV and radio channels, and so forth.

Actually, individuals invest twice as much energy online as they used to 12 years prior. And keeping in mind that we say it a great deal, the way individuals shop and purchase truly has changed, which means disconnected promoting isn’t as compelling as it used to be.

Promoting has dependably been tied in with associating with your gathering of people in the correct place and at the opportune time. Today, that implies that you have to meet them where they are as of now investing energy: in the web.

Digital Marketing can also be defined as, “any form of marketing that exists online”.

The utilization of the Internet and other advanced media and innovation to help ‘present day advertising’ has offered ascend to a stupefying scope of marks and language made by the two scholastics and experts. It has been called digital marketing, Internet marketing, e-marketing and web marketing and these option terms have differed through time.

In light of the current verbal confrontation about the utilization of the term ‘computerized promoting’, we figured it is helpful to bind precisely what advanced means through a definition. Do definitions make a difference? We figure they do, since especially inside an association or between a business and its customers we require clearness to help the objectives and exercises that help Digital Transformation.

The meaning of digital marketing can be developed to clarify that, advanced promoting incorporates overseeing diverse types of online organization nearness and existences, for example, organization sites, portable applications and web-based social networking organization pages. This is in conjunction with online interchanges methods including any semblance of internet searcher promoting; web-based social networking showcasing, web based publicizing, email advertising and association courses of action with different sites. These systems are utilized to help the destinations of getting new clients and giving administrations to existing clients that assistance build up the client relationship through E-CRM and showcasing robotization. In any case, for computerized showcasing to be fruitful, there is as yet a need for combination of these strategies with customary media, for example, print, TV and post office based mail as a major aspect of multichannel promoting correspondences.

The part of digital stages in supporting coordinated multichannel showcasing is a critical segment some portion of advanced advertising, yet is frequently disregarded. From various perspectives, this features that it is so imperative to separate storehouses amongst ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ promoting divisions. Online channels can likewise be figured out how to help the entire purchasing process from pre-deal to deal to post-deal and further advancement of client connections.

Why digital marketing is essential

Digital media is pervasive to the point that customers approach data whenever and wherever they need it. Gone are the days when the messages individuals got about your items or administrations originated from you and comprised of just what you needed them to know. Digital media is a regularly developing wellspring of diversion, news, shopping and social communication, and customers are currently presented not simply to what your organization says in regards to your image, yet what the media, companions, relatives, peers, and so on., are stating also. Furthermore, they will probably trust them than you. Individuals need brands they can trust, organizations that know them, correspondences that are customized and pertinent, and offers custom-made to their necessities and inclinations.

The 5Ds of digital marketing

To comprehend the significance of digital marketing to the eventual fate of advertising in any business, it’s useful to consider what group of onlookers connections we have to comprehend and oversee. Digital marketing today is about numerous a greater number of sorts of crowd connection than site or email… It includes overseeing and saddling these ‘5Ds of Digital’ that have been characterized in the prologue to the most recent refresh to my Digital Marketing: Strategy, Planning and Implementation book. The 5Ds for which we have to survey customer reception of when and how our business can organize their utilization are:

1. Digital devices – our audiences interact with businesses using smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, TVs and gaming devices

2. Digital platforms – most interactions on these devices are through a browser or apps from the major platforms or services, that’s Facebook (and Instagram), Google (and YouTube), Twitter and LinkedIn

3. Digital media – different paid, owned and earned communications channels for reaching and engaging audiences including advertising, email and messaging, search engines and social networks

4. Digital data – the insight businesses collect about their audience profiles and their interactions with businesses, which now needs to be protected by law in most countries

5. Digital technology – the marketing technology or martech stack that businesses use to create interactive experiences from websites and mobile apps to in-store kiosks and email campaigns

There is no denying the fact that the future of marketing is digital. While many business owners know of digital marketing, many of them don’t know how to go about it. The few that execute it, do it the wrong way. To help you out, here are marketing tips that will help you succeed:

Make use of social media

Almost everyone is using social media platforms: Facebook, Linkedln, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Google+. By properly making use the platforms you will not only save much of your marketing budget, you will also have the ability of reaching millions of your target customers.

To be successful on social media you need to be regular and consistent. There is no way you will build a voice if you post once a week or a month.

While it’s recommended that you post regularly, you shouldn’t over do it. Social media experts recommend that you should post 5 times a day on Twitter, 5-10 times a week on Facebook, and once a day on Google+ and Linkedln.

When posting, remember that it’s not about you-it’s about your customers and followers. Many businesses make the mistake of posting only promotional products. This will not only head you to nowhere, it will also result to loss of followers (potential customers).

The best way of going about it is mixing valuable information (that adds value to your followers) and a little bit of promotional information. Remember: to keep your followers you need to provide value.

Create high quality content

Mediocre content has no place in digital marketing. In addition to being valuable, the content also needs to be unique. This calls for you to provide information that your competitors are providing.

The current trends have been the use of videos, animations and inforgraphics. Ensure that they are of high quality and different. If you can’t produce them yourself, hire a professional to help you out.

You can hire an agency to help you out, but if you are strapped for cash, use freelance sites such as Elance, Fiverr and freelancer. These sites have plenty of talented professionals that will give you great content at affordable prices.

Conclusion

As mentioned, digital marketing is the future and you need to start learning the ropes now. Heed the above tips and you will definitely be a marketing success. If you are busy and don’t have time to undertake marketing yourself, hire a professional to help you out.

Marketing strategy plays a very imperative role in whirling a business into a successful brand. There exists a massive demand in terms of digital marketing platform in past few years but now with the advent of Digital Marketing Services, the problem has vanished as many businesses are opting for digital marketing to reach their audience. A well-reputed and professional digital marketing company takes the responsibility of doing marketing and advertising your business products and services so that you can rest in peace. Business that is new must make use of these services so as to get high returns on investment. No other services assures to bring same results like digital marketing as only these services promises to offer guaranteed results in few months.

The Common Services Offered

Most of the services consist of social media marketing, email marketing, digital advertising, content marketing, search engine optimization, influencer marketing, digital marketing and conversion rate optimization. These services are quite useful in growth as well as expansion of your business. These services are quite useful in today’s business compared to the conventional means of marketing. However, these services are quite useful in promoting the business.

Tips For Hiring The Most Compatible Company

· In order to hire the best, carry out detailed research on their familiarity, practices, team of marketers, previous projects and many others. By doing so, you can come to a conclusion whether to hire them or not.

· Always check for the reputation of the firm because there are numerous digital marketing campaigns scattered all over the internet. Firms that are highly reputed would have undergone challenges and difficulties in serving their customers. You must pick up highly experienced and reputed online services for your business needs.

· Compare the cost with others so that you can finalize for the best service in reasonable rate.

· Enquire about their tools and techniques so that you can get digital marketing as per the latest trends.

Benefits

· High Quality Service: Choosing a proficient company will assure for top-quality service. A professional company will develop and implement efficient marketing techniques for your business. They usually have well trained and skilled professionals who work with full commitment and dedication for the successful marketing strategies depending upon the requirements of the customers and their business.

· Hit The Targeted Audience: By incorporating the right strategies for your business, you are sure to get benefit from wider range of prospective and potential customers. None of the business can reap success without targeted audience so it is essential to create marketing depending upon their necessities.

· Cost-Effective: Outsourcing your business marketing services to a cost-effective company will reduce your burden as well as save money from employing team of in-house marketers. Usually they have specialists who have several years of experience in marketing field. However, they will offer a detailed plan on your marketing cost in advance so that you can do everything in progress without worrying about money.

What is digital marketing?

Today nearly 80% of all the media that we consume come through digital channels. Massive internet usage and digital media has given rise to a new marketing concept called Digital Marketing. It is a broad area and considered to be the future of business development.

Digital Marketing is the most commonly used term for online marketing and it has several advantages over traditional offline marketing. With the help internet and mobile devices customer these days have access to information from anywhere in the world. Marketers these days use digital tactics to attract and convert audiences online.

This new age marketing methods helps to gain good reputation which is essential for a business to survive. It is the best way to reach out to your targeted audience. With the help of digital marketing one can reach many customers at a very little marketing budget. Unlike traditional methods you can measure the success of digital marketing campaigns with the help of analytical tools. Ever year more and more marketers put aside traditional marketing and focus on this approach. Successful marketing campaigns can be accomplished by integrating traditional methods with the digital marketing techniques.

Common methods of digital marketing

Email Marketing

This is one of the commonly used methods of online marketing. Email marketing enhances business communication, cost effective and Eco-friendly. By this method a message could be sent to a group of people by the use of electronic mail.

It is an efficient way to stay connected with your audience while promoting your business and also one of the easiest ways to reach your target audience.

Search Engine Optimization

It is an organic way of optimizing your online content to improve the ranking of your website on the search engine.

There are a lot of factors involved in ranking of a website such as title, keywords, relevance etc. SEO helps to ensure that your site is accessible and improve the chances of being found by the search engine. It is classified into two types on page and off page optimization. On page optimization is achieved through careful distribution of keywords and the quality of content on your site. Off page optimization involves factors that are beyond the control of your website. The primary goal of link building is to get other websites links to yours to improve SEO.

Search Engine Marketing

When someone searches for information or a keyword, SEM makes sure that your site appears at the top of search engine results. It uses a variety of techniques which helps the search engine to deliver your site to the web searchers.

One must clearly understand SEO before using SEM. It is one of the most efficient ways to spread your business across in this competitive world. Some of the components of SEM are ad auction, bid and quality score. Your maximum bid for a keyword with a great quality score determines your ad position.

Pay Per Click

The fastest way to reach your target audience can be achieved through P P C campaigns. You pay each time when someone clicks on your ad. For example, if you pay 1 rupee per click and when 1000 people click your ad it will cost you 1000 rupees. Based on the CTR (click through rate) the performance of you ad campaign is determined. It generates faster results by targeting the right people at the right time and at the right place. Since it costs money it is suitable for businesses that sell product/services.

Social Media Marketing

The process of marketing through various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is known as Social Media Marketing. The primary objective of SMM is to produce content on social media that help an organization to increase brand awareness and customer reach. In social media companies can share content to achieve marketing goals.

Display Advertising

It is a form of conveying a message with elements like images, logos, graphics, audio or video to communicate to the target audience. Also known as banner ads, it gives a unique opportunity to re-target the ideal audience. You can also display ads to people based on their search behavior. Generally, display ads are seen alongside on search engines such as yahoo, Bing and Google.

Content Marketing

This type of marketing is done by creating and sharing free content to attract new prospects and retain existing customers. Informative content is shared in the form of articles, videos, info graphics etc. It helps in building strong relationships with your audience by providing them with relevant high quality contents. Your business goal should be aligned with content strategy to gain critical success.

How a fresher would benefit from digital marketing?

In digital world, online marketing is essential for running a successful business. Marketers these days are adapting from traditional to digital approach.

Digital marketing provide small businesses with resources to perform sales and marketing that were previously available only for large companies. It ensures the survival of online businesses. Today, brands are putting more focus on digital marketing than ever before. Digital marketing skills are in serious demand and provide a unique competitive edge for one’s career. It offers great opportunities around the world. There is a wide range of digital marketing roles which include jobs related to social media as well. It also provides a variety of opportunities to start your own career as an Entrepreneur. There are lots of benefits that digital marketing professionals can look forward in upcoming years. More companies embrace digital marketing as their primary marketing strategy which creates a plenty of job opportunities for freshers. The future of digital marketing seems to be very bright at the moment.

In the last decade, the reliance on the Internet has certainly changed the way in which business is conducted. It is clear to most business owners that without an online presence, your business is truly missing out on a majority of marketing, advertising, and success. Nowadays, anyone who is anyone maintains their own blog, social media platform, and of course a website. If you are a business owner and you do not have a website, you are neglecting to market yourself in the most effective way. That is why it is critical for every business to not only build a site for themselves, but also reinforce its presence through digital marketing.

What is digital marketing? And, how/why is this kind of advertising so important to a business? Let’s consider these important elements of online strategizing:

What is digital marketing?

In its very essence, this kind of advertising conjoins the promotion and advertising in an online platform. The basic principles, values, ad tactics of traditional marketing are still at the core of this innovative phase, there is a seemingly more insightful guise into the consumer behavior and target demographic. This digital promotion possesses all kinds of internet marketing, however it focuses on digital media. SEO is only one kind of digital marketing tactic.

The way in which digital promotion is enforced is another interesting property. Various sources can be utilized to promote products and services of a business, including websites, mobile devices, instant messages, and SMS among many others. In addition, the digital nature of this kind of marketing is regarded as one of the most cost effective means of advertising.

Two kinds:

Push digital marketing: Just as the name suggests, push marketing is projected to push the advertising information directly toward the target clientele. Often times, marketers will initiate the push marketing through email, RSS, or SMS, truly targeting the receiver or clientele with a personalized message. This means is also powerful in that it is easy to track, monitor, and measure the relative efficacy of the marketing.

Pull digital marketing: The pull method of marketing is aimed at garnering customers to come to you. The marketing for this means will be communicated to compel the individual to make a call to action or come visit your business. The most obvious or pervasive example is a web page, website, or any other Internet based medium. While this means of digital advertising is not as easy to personalize or track, it is still effective and powerful nonetheless.

In order to find the best digital marketing agency, first, we need to understand “what is digital marketing”, “will digital marketing benefit your business” and answer the question “how do I get more leads for my business?” – which should be the purpose of any marketing.

What is a Digital Marketing Agency?

The dictionary definition of Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. So simple to summarise in one sentence, yet it can be a complicated process to get right and to ensure that all of your digital marketing is working together, not as silo activities. This is where the expertise and experience of the best digital marketing agencies can be hugely beneficial.

Traditional advertising, newspapers and paper directories, such as Yellow Pages, are increasingly less effective for businesses. Whilst a few years ago people would go to a computer to search for a product or service, nowadays people are connected to the internet all day, every day and “live online”. Looking for information, a product or service is as quick and simple as searching on a laptop or computer at work or picking up their mobile telephone or tablet. Digital marketing focuses on getting your information, products and services in front of people when they are looking online. The best digital agencies understand the buying process of your products and services and ensure that your information is prominent to the potential customer at the appropriate time. In the digital marketing world, the various stages of the buying process i.e. research, consideration and purchase are called “micro-moments” and the very best digital marketing agency will present the relevant information, service or product at the targeted time in the buying process.

Whilst some digital marketing agencies will also create and manage traditional advertising or business marketing, such as newspaper advertising, specialist digital marketing agencies will concentrate on online marketing as opposed to “marketing companies” who commonly concentrate on TV, radio and print marketing.

Regardless if your business is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), digital marketing can be a fast, often instant, and reliable way of getting leads into your business and driving up revenue. The very best digital marketing agencies will manage all of the digital advertising based on return on investment (ROI) ensuring the leads generated are at a cost that makes business sense and increases profit levels. Digital marketing will benefit your business and answers the question “how do I get more leads for my business”?

Digital marketing, sometimes referred to as website marketing, can be broken down into a number of important features and services:

SEO Services

Search engine optimisation, most commonly abbreviated to “SEO”, is the process of getting your website found on search engines like Google when people make a search relevant to your business, services or products.

Regardless if your website is e-Commerce or selling services it will drive leads and sales into your business if it is found for the search terms people use (often referred to as “keywords”) to look for them in Google.

SEO requires experience and understanding of how Google reads your website. What messages and information you want Google to read for a webpage or website and knowing where to place that information so search engines can find it. A good SEO company will have a proven track record of ranking websites high in the search results.

SEO works best when the proven methods of obtaining rankings are applied in conjunction with latest trends that are driving traffic. An example of this is the “near me” phenomenon, which has seen a 150% growth in the last 12 months, where mobile phone users are adding “near me” to their search query i.e. “SEO Company near me”. These customers are looking to buy and buy from a local service or product supplier.

Although SEO can be a stand-alone service, it is most effective when combined with PPC, social media and reputation marketing. SEO is also the cornerstone of effective PPC, social media and reputation management campaigns.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click (PPC) often referred to as “Google Advertising” or “online advertising” is where you position adverts at the top of the search results for specific search terms. These search terms can be the words people use when in the “research” phase of making a purchase or targeted at the “buying keywords” when potential customers are looking to buy.

Although your advert, depending on your budget, can be shown every time a search is made, you only pay when an internet user clicks on your advert and is taken to your website or calls you direct from the search results page meaning you only pay when you get a click from a potential customer hence the name for this form of marketing of Pay Per Click (often abbreviated to PPC).

How much you pay for each click is determined by a few factors. The “cost per click” (abbreviated to CPC) is determined by the quality and relevancy of the advert to the search term being used and the relevancy of the page on your website that the potential customer land on. These factors contribute to your overall “quality score”. The higher your quality score, the less you pay per click and less you pay per lead into your business.

In the UK, Google has the vast majority of search traffic and most of your budget should be placed their, however, you will not want to miss the smaller, yet still considerable potential for customers from search engines like Microsoft’s Bing platform, and a small part of the budget should be allocated to other search engines. Also, the very best PPC management companies will also discuss spreading your PPC budget over a number of campaigns aimed at different parts of the customer journey. A small part of the budget should be allocated to the research stage of the buying process when people are using broad search terms to find information, a small part of the budget when people are searching for yours, your competitors or market leaders company name. The majority of the budget when potential customers are using search terms directly related to making a purchase and lastly, a small part of the budget to re-market (show your advertising to people who have shown an interest in your services or products by visiting your website) to capture and drive up conversions from the customers previously advertised too.

The best PPC Agency will be a Google Premier Partner. A Google Premier Partner status indicates that the company has a proven track record in delivering high-quality campaigns, which generate good competitive/low CPC’s and deliver high and positive ROI’s. The very best PPC agency will have a robust PPC management process in place to quickly react and capitalise on changes in the PPC campaigns of your competitors.

Unlike SEO, that can take some time to be fully effective, Pay Per Click is instant in the fact that as soon as your campaigns are live they can be generating leads for your business.

PPC is highly effective when carried out in unison with SEO. A well-optimised website will improve the quality score of your Google advertising campaigns resulting in a reduced “cost per click” meaning you get more leads for your budget.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are now legitimate places for a business to attract leads. Facebook has over 38 MILLION active and regular users in the UK and the number is anticipated to rise to over 42 MILLION by 2020. Regardless if your business sells to consumers or other businesses, your potential customers are on Facebook and using it often.

Facebook is excellent at raising awareness during the customers “research” stage, reminding them of your services or products during the “consideration” stage and putting your specific products in front of potential customers at the “buying” stage. With such a large audience and the flexibility to target customers throughout the buying process, Facebook can be a good avenue to generate leads and sales and to deliver a great return on investment.

A good digital marketing agency will have a proven track record in delivering highly effective Facebook advertising campaigns. The very best digital marketing agencies will be able to demonstrate the conversion rate and cost per lead of your social media marketing.

Again, social media marketing and specifically Facebook marketing can be carried out as a stand-alone activity however it works so much better when combined with SEO and/or PPC. When a potential customer visits your website their computer is marked as having visited. This then allows you to target the user of that computer, who has shown an interest in your products or services.

Reputation Management

When considering making a purchase, a potential customer will scour the internet to find feedback and reviews from previous customers. Your online marketing and sales can live or die by the reviews for your business, services or products. Ensuring that positive reviews are easy to find and that any negative feedback is managed well, can be a huge benefit to your conversion rate.

Digital marketing companies call this “reputation management” or “online reputation management” however, in reality, it is creating systems to generate customer reviews and customer feedback ensuing positive customer satisfaction is captured and easy to find for potential customers.

Many businesses are concerned with allowing the public the ability to openly provide feedback. You cannot please all of the people all of the time, and companies worry that a bad review will have a negative impact on their business. Firstly, if someone is determined to leave a bad review for your business they will find a platform to do so and there are 1000’s of platforms to choose from. It is better to have control of where customers are encouraged to leave a review. Secondly, a poor or bad review, if managed well, can be a positive for your business. Engaging with a bad review highlights that you care about feedback and subsequently, you care about your customers. One well managed bad review can be as good for your business ten good reviews.

A good digital marketing company will use one of the handful of recognised review platform and provide the tools and means of allowing you to capture, manage and respond to customer reviews.