The world of digital marketing services are constantly changing and evolving. New platforms, strategies, and techniques are being developed every day to help businesses get more customers. But with so much information out there, it can be hard to know which services will work best for your business.

Digital marketing is one of the most effective strategies for reaching new customers, but it is often misunderstood by small businesses.

The emergence of the digital world has fundamentally changed how people shop and buy. Offline marketing is being replaced by more effective channels such as online digital marketing.

There are so many options for digital marketing services that it can quickly become an overwhelming and confusing subject to tackle.

It is not uncommon for a business owner who wants to grow their business to try all of the various digital marketing services but then be left wondering which ones were most effective for them. Digital marketing should also be a long-term strategy, not just something you do once or twice.

However, this article will attempt to shed some light on the best types of digital marketing services your small business could use today.

What is digital marketing?

Digital Marketing includes all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses nowadays use digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective clients.

Digital Marketing helps you reach a larger audience than you could through traditional methods and targets your prospects who are most likely to purchase your products or services.

Digital advertising is more cost-effective than traditional advertising methods because it can be updated in real-time, with less production expense.

Before going in-depth, allow us to discuss four ways why Digital marketing is essential.

1. Specific targets – Traditional media, such as TV, billboards and magazines, does not provide total control over the audience. Beyond a specific demographic range, you have no way of determining if the target market is seeing your ads or not.

Digital marketing allows you to identify and target a particular audience, and send that audience personalised, customised, high-converting marketing messages.

You may opt to use social media’s targeting features to show social media ads to a specific audience based on the preferred variables such as age, gender, location, interests, networks, or behaviours. Otherwise, you might even want to use Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to serve advertisements to users interested in your products and services or those who have searched specific keywords that relate to your industry.

Using digital marketing, you can conduct research to find your target audience and refine your strategy to reach the people most likely to buy. Digital marketing helps you market different sub-groups within your customer base depending on what they need.

2. Cost efficiency than traditional marketing – Digital marketing enables you to track campaigns daily and minimise the amount of money you spend on channels that do not produce high ROI.

With digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. Perhaps rather than paying PPC campaigns that are not likely to be applicable for your business. You may choose to spend money on design services to create high-converting social media content such as Instagram posts or Facebook materials.

Marketing that takes place digitally allows you to pivot your campaign direction without having the risk of wasting money on channels that don’t prove effective.

3. Digital marketing lets you play on par with big players – As a small business owner, it is difficult to compete with large corporations that have millions invested in nationwide advertisements and marketing campaigns. Fortunately, you can employ digital marketing tactics as an alternative.

Additionally, social media enables you to reach new audiences through influencer marketing. Many people do not follow big brands on social media but do follow influencers and interact with them every day. These influencers provide content that is related to the companies they like while showcasing their products and services.

Search engines do not care which is the biggest brand. Instead, it prioritises content that resonates best with the target audience.

4. Digital marketing is measurable – Digital marketing can give you a comprehensive, start to end view of all the analytics and metrics that your business needs and that matters – which includes impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page.

This is one of the most significant benefits of digital marketing. Although print advertising can be helpful for specific goals, its most crucial disadvantage is the lack of tracking.

Unlike most offline efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate and access results in real-time. Placing an advertisement on traditional media makes it difficult for you to determine how many people flipped and saw your ads or how many people had paid attention when your commercial was aired.

There is no easy way to measure whether or not traditional advertising campaigns lead to a sale.

On the other hand, Digital marketing allows you to measure ROI from the following:

Website traffic – In digital marketing, you will be able to see the exact number of people who have viewed your website, from the home page to its inner content pages, in real-time by using analytics software.

Analytics can help you monitor what channels drive traffic to your website, how they get there and if they visit any pages before leaving.

For example, if only 10% of your website traffic comes from organic search, it would make sense that you should invest more time and resources into improving the content.

Offline marketing is more challenging to track than digital marketing. Digital Marketing makes it possible to analyse customer behaviour before they convert into customers, which allows you to make informed decisions about how best to attract sales.

Content performance and lead generation – Traditional printed content such as brochures and whitepapers are challenging to track. How do you know your readers received your message? You are entirely blind to how many people received your print or threw it straight into the trash.

How about your brochure published on your website, now you may measure how many viewed the page and collect details from those who downloaded it using lead generating forms. Not only do you have a straightforward measurement of your content, but you have gained qualified leads that you can use for follow-up email marketing campaigns.

Attribution modelling – An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business.

This is called attribution modelling, and it allows you to identify who in your marketing audience is more likely to buy products. It will enable entrepreneurs/companies to make smarter decisions about which parts of their marketing strategy deserve more attention and need better coordination.

A strong connection between marketing and sales is significant. According to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment.

Improving the customer’s journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies would likely reflect positively on your business.

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What are some popular forms of digital marketing?

Here is a quick tour around the world of Digital Marketing and the channels that coincide with them. On the top of the list. We have;

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This is the process of using your content to optimise your website rank.

With 80% of shoppers starting their product research online, promoting your website for maximum visibility in search engine results is essential. There are several ways to approach SEO to generate qualified traffic to your website.

On-page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all content “on the page” when viewing the website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages.

Off-page SEO: When looking to optimise your website, you must focus on inbound links as well. These “backlinks” are the number of publishers who link to you and their relative authority. Networking with other publishers, writing guest posts for them and generating attention outside of your website can help you gain backlinks that could improve how high up on SERPs (search engine result pages) your site appears.

Technical SEO: This type of SEO focused on the backend of your website and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data and CSS file optimisation are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading speed – which is an essential ranking factor in the eyes of search engines.

Content marketing

You may have her of the term in passing; it means creating and promoting content assets to generate brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy includes:

Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company blog can help you promote your expertise in the industry and generate organic search traffic that ultimately allows you to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.

E-books and whitepapers: A long-form content that helps further educate website visitors. This allows you to exchange content for a reader’s contact information, generating leads for your company.

Infographic: Images and graphics are more enjoyable for some website visitors. Infographics can help visualise concepts your viewers want to learn about.

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Social media marketing

Although less than one-third of businesses use social media, it is heavily influential in user purchases. Nearly three-quarters of people research products via social media while spending an average of 30% of their internet time on these sites.

Social media can be used as a promotional tool to increase brand awareness, drive traffic and generate leads. Popular platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In and Snapchat.

Social media marketing enables businesses to build brand trust. It also ensures authenticity and makes it easy for people to stay up-to-date on what is happening at your company.

Pay per click (PPC)

Advertisements on Google are among the most affordable, providing an average of $8 ROI for every dollar spent.

PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place.

Paid ads on Facebook – Here, users can pay to customise a video image post or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the news feeds of people that match your business’s audience.

Twitter ads campaigns – You can pay to place multiple posts and profile badges on the news feeds of a specific audience. This could be website traffic, followers, tweet engagement, or app downloads.

Sponsored messages on LinkedIn – You pay a fee to send messages to specific members of the LinkedIn network based on their industry and background.

Affiliate marketing

This type is performance-based advertising wherein you will be receiving commissions for promoting someone else’s product or services on your website.

Affiliate marketing programs usually pay you a percentage of the sales price or clicks. When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will receive a commission if certain conditions are met.

For example, if you created an affiliate program for the Amazon Associates program on your website to promote products in your niche, and a visitor clicked on your link generated from one of your articles about holiday shopping tips and placed an order of £100 or more. You would receive a nice chunk of that sale as affiliate commission.

Automation marketing

This refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations.

Email newsletters: Email automation doesn’t just allow you to send emails to your subscribers automatically. It can also help you shrink and expand your list of contacts as needed, so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.

Social media post scheduler: To grow your business’s presence on social media, you need to post frequently. Making a manual post is a bit of a rowdy process. Social media scheduling tools post and push your content to your social media platforms allowing you to spend more time on content strategy.

Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating leads and converting them as customers can be a tedious process. You may automate that process by sending tips, specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria.

Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns may include tons of people, email, content, webpages, phone calls and more. With marketing automation, you may sort everything you work on by the campaign it is serving then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress.

Email marketing

Email marketing is designed to help the business grow its customer base and market the latest about its products and services. Email marketing remains one of the most popular and effective digital marketing strategies that continue to be essential for online business growth.

Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, and direct people toward the business’s website.

Types of the email you might want to consider sending in as email marketing campaigns can include; blog subscription newsletters, follow-up emails to website visitors, customer welcome emails, holiday promotion and loyalty programs.

Online PR

Digital public relations is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites.

The idea is to manage your online reputation by creating and improving your presence on the internet to suit your business needs.

PR agencies are usually divided into several departments: creative, account management, strategy, media relations and public engagement. To secure an organised PR campaign for your business, you need someone who will coordinate each department so they can work well together to achieve the most success possible.

Social media networking is one of the other ways to do it yourself for free (or very affordably).

Inbound marketing

This is a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. In other words, inbound marketing is a set of strategies and techniques that focus on attracting customers through content and encouraging them to take the next step toward conversion.

To illustrate, if you are a local plumber looking for digital marketing services for your business, you may run an ad about the best plumbers in town. You can use paid web traffic or social media posts to drive people towards your website so that they can book appointments with you instead of your competition.

That’s how to attract potential customers. To keep visitors engaged until they make purchases, marketers will create blog posts related to products and services in their niche. It allows them to be found via organic search results or internet searches done by prospective clients who have already become interested in your business.

Outreach marketing

Also known as influencer or referral marketing, this type of marketing allows businesses to reach out to influential people who can help get their name out there in exchange for compensation.

This can be done through email newsletters that are sent out through various services like MailChimp. Social media platforms are another great way to connect with people.

Are you ready to try digital marketing?

Today’s small and medium-sized businesses have more options at their disposal than ever before. With the internet, you can market your business almost anywhere in the world with just a few clicks; from home, if that’s where you want to be.

It is up to every business owner to decide what platform they will use for their digital marketing campaigns and how much time and resources should be invested into each channel.

Sanders Design offers a competitive advantage to small to medium-sized businesses by providing branding, graphic design and website design services.

We have been in business since 2004 and have worked with clients from all over the world. Sanders Design has a process that will help your business get ahead of the game by creating lead-generating landing pages and SEO WordPress ecommerce websites.

If you would like to discuss your plans, please send me an email or call on the number 01872 222299.

Which Digital Marketing Services Are Best for Small Businesses?