Digital marketing is of vital importance to anyone who is operating a business, or who needs to convey their message to their desired audience. It is a diverse topic and to understand it, you may find it helpful to simplify things. First, let’s start by breaking it down into two types; outbound and inbound.
With outbound marketing you are pushing your message out to your target audience in an effort to increase awareness. You try to rapidly spread the word about your product or service, and create awareness about it. This can be done in a number of ways, including paid ads on display networks, and through social networks to name a few.
With inbound marketing, you are trying to draw your audience in to your content, as it is something they are already interested in. This can be done with creative content on your website, resulting in “organic” traffic from search engines, paid campaigns which drive traffic to your site, and also through email subscriptions, blogs and the like.
Digital marketing traffic is often looked at by the types of media channels your audience comes through. Paid media includes services that you pay for, usually in the form of advertisements in search engine results, social media advertising or display networks. Owned media is essentially the properties that you own and control, such as your blog or website. Earned media is free and is generated by consumers who have either read your blog, or used your products and services and they have had a good experience and want to tell others about it. These are your brand advocates and they are invaluable.
There are many aspects involved and tools employed in developing a digital marketing strategy. Depending on the type of business or organization, and your goals, the strategy will vary greatly. There is no magic switch that guarantees quick and lasting success, regardless of what others may state. Successful digital marketing takes time, planning and constant measurement of analytics, and key performance indicators to determine which strategies are working to deliver on your goals. WebDynamics will work with you to develop a digital marketing strategy and help you analyze results and make adjustments accordingly.
To begin, we’ll usually take a look at your competition. We’ll see what keywords they rank for, what sites link to them and the quality of those backlinks, their social media presence, and the quality of their web presence. We’ll compare those findings with your own current web presence. From there we can begin to set some achievable goals. We make sure you are properly set up with all of the tools for reporting so we can measure your success. Many might say, “I already have analytics installed on my site”, but if analytics isn’t connected to your other services, and if you don’t have goals and reporting set up properly, analytics may not be doing what you need it to do so you can make informed decisions.
This is just the beginning of the journey, and from this point the strategy will vary depending on your organizations type and goals. We want you to succeed and would love to take this journey with you. We’ll be covering more about this topic in some future blog posts on our Tech Talk blog page. Stay tuned.
Robert Wilson – Certified Digital Marketing Professional