Digital marketing has evolved a lot since it first appeared around three decades ago. Over the years we’ve seen technology become a crucial part of day to day activity, and as a result, the growth of digital marketing has run in parallel to this. Think about it, computers have developed from bulky desktops to slimline laptops, this has led to the emergence of tablets, smart phones and more recently, wearable tech such as smart watches. All this advancement in such a small amount of time has unsurprisingly had an impact on the way businesses and organisations market themselves. And those who haven’t moved with the times ultimately ran the risk of being left behind.
With digital marketing and the technology associated with it continuing to change and evolve, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Trust us, it’s not uncommon to not know what way to turn when it comes to digital marketing and ingraining it into your business strategy.
So, when we speak about digital marketing, what do we actually mean.
As a leading digital marketing agency in Essex, we get asked time and time again how digital marketing can help grow a business.
At the end of the day, if it’s implemented effectively, digital marketing can play a powerful role in your marketing strategy and help you achieve your business goals and objectives. However, you need to ensure that the tactics you are using, and the budget you’re spending, aligns with who you are targeting and what your end goal is… otherwise you could end up with money down the drain and no ROI!
The team at Squarestar Digital are experts in all things digital… whether it’s getting your website to rank organically via tactical SEO, driving leads through strategic PPC and paid search, engaging with customers through creative social media campaigns, or even getting a brand new website altogether, all these tactics (whether used together or separately), can help take your business to new levels.
The first thing to consider when thinking about how digital marketing can help grow your business, is nail what your objectives are. What do you want to achieve? A few ideas surrounding this could be:
- Drive more traffic to your website in order to get more enquiries through
- Connect more with a specific audience to help raise brand awareness
- Launch a new product or service to the market
- Secure more sales
Once you know what your goal is, it makes it much easier to decide what digital marketing tactics to invest in. We’ll outline what tactics work best for different objectives below.
Objective 1: Growing brand awareness and fostering brand loyalty online
We all know the old saying, never judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to digital marketing, we advise the exact opposite!
Perhaps you’re new to the game and want to engage with potential customers and clients. Number one rule is to make sure your brand is accessible and engaging to your target audience. An important aspect of this is to ensure your online presence showcases who you are, what you do, and why someone would want to engage with you.
An easy way of achieving this is through a well designed, user experience led website – something that the team at Squarestar Digital are experts in. Whether you opt for a simple brochure style design which highlights information about you effectively, or you need a more complex ecommerce website, nowadays a company’s website is basically the front cover of their book. You’ve got to make sure it looks aesthetically appealing for your target audience, easy to navigate and has the ability for people to easily contact you on it.
Next on the list of tactics to improve your brand awareness is social media. From growing your platforms organically through to investing in social media paid advertising campaigns, its important to remember that you need to be sharing content which is consistent with your brand and provides your audience with something they would be interested in. If you are looking for web design Essex then please do get in touch with our dedicated team!
Objective 2: Driving leads and securing sales
Is your goal to have a positive impact on the bottom line? Are you seeking to increase leads and convert more sales? If so, digital marketing in the form of paid advertising could be the answer.
If used correctly, Pay Per Click, or PPC for short can be an effective way to increase traffic to your website which in turn leads to more sales. Once again, we go back to the word ‘strategy’. Before you set up any PPC campaigns or paid ad campaigns, it’s important that you have some kind of strategy behind you. Consider your competitors, what search terms people are using, and think about whether your website is fit for purpose. For example, it may be worthwhile investigating whether specific landing pages on your site could help convert more leads, or thinking about whether there is a certain location you need to be targeting.
With any Google Ads management, it’s important that you do not take a scattergun approach, as often this can lead to poor ROI. This is why we’d always suggest speaking to an expert to ensure that you get the best possible results from your PPC campaign.
Objective 3: Drive traffic to the website
Increasing traffic to your website combines the aspects of raising brand awareness with securing leads and driving increased sales. As mentioned, your website is the front cover to your business, but if people aren’t finding your website, how can you be sure that it’s actually serving its purpose?
PPC can help achieve this, but Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short), can help build this organically. Through the use of keywords tactically placed throughout the content and copy on your website, you can help make your website rank higher when people search certain terms on a search engine.
There are simple ways you can achieve this, e.g. through thinking about the kind of words your target audience is likely to search, or by securing back links on other websites, however utilising the expertise of digital marketing experts can help ensure that your SEO really does have an impact on your website traffic.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how digital marketing can help grow your business, why not get in touch with the team at Squarestar Digital today. As a leading digital marketing agency in Essex, we’d be happy to help!
