Digital marketing is so much more than knowing how to Instagram and send email dumps to un-curated client lists. In fact, it’s not that at all. Instead, it’s the carefully planned digital strategy that focusses on getting in front of the eyes of your future clients, guiding them through multiple strategic platforms and handing them directly to your website as quality leads ready to be lifelong, loyal customers.
We are a leading digital marketing consultants in Newcastle with a focus on planning, strategy and real-life outcomes. Our service is unique and aims for long term success, not quick, vanity metrics without substance ('likes' are nice, but even social media platforms don't believe in them anymore).
We find your customer, lead them to you and then continue to nurture their experience through multiple proven digital marketing avenues to keep them happy before, during and after their purchasing experience. Our approach results in tangible bottom-line rewards, with short and long term success at top of mind.
From your social media marketing, email campaigns, content marketing or search advertising, this is all your digital marketing activity. It also includes assets, like website or video, and avenues such as advertising or SEO.
Digital marketing is a mixture of a lot of different activities, platforms, concepts and strategies that find out who your customer is, where they are, how to reach them, how they want to be reached, and guide them to your website for you to convert into lifelong, happy customers.
Think about your own activity online when you are looking for a goods or service you need. You might Google what is available in your local area, or type 'best' at the beginning to find out what others recommend. If you don't quite find what you're after, or decide to wait on a decision, you'll probably notice that ads for what you are looking for start popping up on your social media or Google pages. If you've given your details over, you'll also notice some specifically chosen valuable content arrive in your inbox that can help refine your decision making.
Depending on your digital experience with a business determines if you forge ahead with them or not. When you experience a positive, helpful digital journey, that is good digital marketing at play.
Here is generally what you need to ensure you've got a successful digital marketing strategy:
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Conversion Rate Optimisation
4. Email Marketing
6. Paid Social Media Advertising
These pillars, working in perfect harmony together, will give you the very best shot of having a higher rate of genuine customers or leads, and significantly less low-grade leads. Digital marketing seeks out the exact people looking for you, and guides them to your website, ready to go.
At last count, 88% of the Australian population (so about 14 million people) are active internet users, increasing year on year, and 69% of them are active social media uses. All are spending and average of five hours a day online.
Now, all of them aren't searching for your product or service, and they're not searching for a product or service that whole time. The numbers speak more to the current consumer habits of seeking information, products and services; they speak to the percentage of your customers or future customers who are being guided to you via digital means. It's at least over half, on average, despite your industry.
The downside to this is that the internet is a noisy space of competitors vying for the same customer base. The upshot of it, if you have a clear, concise and curated digital strategy that incorporates SEO, PPC, social media advertising, Google advertising (formerly Adwords) and quality content, you are instead finding your ideal customer and bringing them directly to you. Think of digital marketing as placing a siren on the heads of quality customers who genuinely seek your product or service; we can find them quickly using digital marketing data and guide them to your website.
Once on your website, we use strategy to keep them there longer, navigate to other pages or return to the site for further consideration.
Digital marketing allows you to identify exactly who you want to speak to, finding those people, rolling out carefully curated content via organic and paid means and ensure your business nestles into their consciousness positively until they are ready to make a decision or make contact. Their positive and helpful digital journey to you sets them up to be a quality lead who will be ready for a transition into being a lifelong, loyal customer.
When a user is searching in Google, it's usually to help them solve a problem or answer a question. Blogs are an excellent way to answer multiple questions and solve multiple problems applicable to your business in an organic, value-adding and digestible way.
For example, a digital agency's page will list for the search ‘SEO Newcastle’, but a blog with relevant content will give them added value and answer their follow-up search question ‘How do I start with SEO’.
Quality content is king, and blogs play a big role in ensuring you're keeping up with competitor digital activity, and the preferred experience by users. Throwing keywords into a one big block of text without properly thinking about what you future customer really wants to know (and subsequently, by finding it on your website, building solid trust with your business), is not going to work. Google is very clever and will know if your blog content is not of a high quality, but will push your page further up the listing if it is.
If you want to be in the search engine ranking running and gain the trust of customers, you need good content and blogs are an effective way of ensuring this.
Dabbling in a bit of Pay per click (PPC), making some SEO tweaks, sending out a handful of EDMs, a few social and Google ads and posting pretty regularly on social media will likely see a few improvements in the metrics of each of these areas independent of each other. However, you'll likely find the metrics with most improvement are vanity metrics (likes, comments and even click through – if time spent after the click is minimal).
A holistic digital marketing strategy that integrates SEO, PPC, social media marketing, paid advertising and EDMs (to name a few) in a carefully crafted lead nurture tactic (bringing genuine, quality customers to your website) is where things get a little trickier. It is not impossible to do this yourself, but it is hard and very time consuming. If vanity metrics are your ultimate goal, you can certainly handle it. However, if your ultimate goal is significant increase in your leads/customers, greater brand awareness and setting yourself up as an industry leader in the digital space (where over 70% of the population reside daily), it is incredibly difficult to balance the roll out of this level of strategy while running a separate business.
That's why we're in the business of carrying your digital marketing, so you don't have to.
First and foremost, you need to consider your customers. Regardless of the latest trends in digital marketing, the strategies that other people are deploying, or the budget you have, your aim is to appeal to the people who will be buying your products or service. To consistently delight them is to have a successful digital marketing strategy.
How you get there is different for everyone, and a number of factors need to be considered to ensure you’re meeting them how and where they want to be met, and offering them what they’re looking for, at the time they’re looking for it.
With this pillar thought constantly present, then it’s time to consider the reality of your capabilities. Some hurdles to reaching your audience in the most optimal ways available could be:
An old or slow website
Budget restrictions
No website
No customer data
No or low current digital presence
A strategy is a carefully crafted pathway that works with what you have and leveraging it to its fullest potential, and growing your digital presence from there, fulfilling both digital and bottom line goals along the way.
Types of digital marketing are always iterating; it is not a stagnant list because digital itself (and the platforms and capabilities within it) are not stagnant. However, broadly speaking, there are main types of digital marketing that most strategies will include in some way.
Search Engine Marketing: We create a strategy designed, at least in part, to increase your position and visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) through paid means.
Social Media Marketing: We use social media platforms to support a strategy that often centres on brand awareness and customer connection and communication, but can also be used for multiple goals including direct conversions and traffic to your website.
Content Marketing: We use content to attract, delight, engage and retain your customers and clients on your website, navigating them through their path as a buyer in a positive and helpful way. Content marketing also folds into Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and earned, owned and paid media.
Email Marketing: We use your existing email database, or create and build upon an email database to support an ongoing connection with your future, past and loyal customers and clients. It is used for anything from promotional materials, to industry news and updates for your business.
Marketing in general has always been the means to meeting your ideal customers and clients in the spaces they frequent, while they’re in the right mindset to receive information on your services. (There’s a reason shopping centre hecklers and door-to-door sales get a bad rep - it’s an uncomfortable customer experience). Digital marketing is a sign of the times. Regardless of the industry you're in, the majority of your customer base is present online, in some way. Digital marketing can sometimes be the only place you’re truly going to affect change to your business traction.
Digital marketing also has an ability to follow data that is unlike any other form of marketing. There is very little guess work in finding out the buying habits, navigation habits and preferences of your customers: we can see it in their social media engagement practices, what they’re searching in search engines, and how they navigate (or leave) websites.
Digital marketing offers you a marketing strategy deeply embedded in accurate information about your customer base, and potential customer base, and can greet them there, in ways they will happily, eagerly accept.
