Digital Marketing is usually split into 4 main channels. To successfully employ digital marketing to help your business grow, you normally need a strategy that encompasses 2 or more of the channels below. Here is an explanation of how the 4 categories work and what you need to look out for.

Jump to: Social Media Advertising | SEO | PPC | Content Marketing

Social media advertising usually includes the use of channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn. With over 17 million users in Australia and 2.7 billion active users worldwide, Facebook advertising should be a part of most digital marketing strategies.

The average social media user would have posted some information about their date of birth, marital status, family members, and on top of that, they would also have liked certain posts and pages. This allows social media giants, like Facebook, to get a very good understanding of what each of its members likes and are more likely to purchase.

Now, imagine if you were running an advertising campaign to sell a new flea treatment for dogs. Through social media advertising, we can target those advertisements to be displayed only to an audience who has previously engaged with posts involving dogs, or are a part of a Facebook group that is canine-related, and are over the age of 17 (because most people younger than that would not be involved in the buying decision for flea treatment for dogs), and only in the geographic areas where the product is available for purchase. Only digital marketing can give you this incredible targeting capability to ensure that your advertising budget is not being wasted on the wrong audience!

If the campaign has been professionally set up with tracking pixels (small pieces of code that are embedded in certain webpages), detailed analytics data will become available. Through the analytics, we will also be able to determine the demographics, days, and times of the audience that most actively engages with the advertisements which will help us to further tailor the campaign for the best returns. That is why digital marketing campaigns can significantly outperform more traditional methods of promotion.

When a potential customer has viewed your product, it is often necessary to reach out to them a few times more times before they will complete the purchase decision and Social Media Advertising has the power to do that by following up with advertisements of the very product that they have expressed an interest in.

Results are monitored through analytics data that include metrics such as Cost Per Landing Page View (this tells you how much you have spent on ads versus how many people actually clicked on the ad and ended up on the webpage that you were trying to drive traffic to) and Cost Per Result (this is a measurement of how much you have spent on ads versus how many people ended up on the webpage you were driving them to and actually completed a purchase). These are some of the metrics that Marketing Samurais will present and explain to you at the end of your campaign so that you will truly know if your money was well spent and we call this evidence-based marketing.

With so many variables, it is natural for every digital marketing agency to have their own style or strategy and while there are a lot of digital marketing courses available, it is only through a lot of experience, that a good agency will know what formula will work best for your particular product, service or campaign.

The effects of a Social Media Advertising campaign are immediate (compared to SEO) and is a great way to kick-start a digital marketing campaign.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of increasing your website traffic by visitors from your target market and is an integral part of every digital marketing strategy.

A website without SEO would be the equivalent of inventing a great new product but not telling anyone about it – it will just sit there until the occasional passerby might take a look at it. A website with good SEO, on the other hand, has the ability to grow your business at a phenomenal rate and reach customers that are way beyond geographical and other boundaries. That is why SEO is an essential part of doing business online today.

A successful SEO campaign places your website in the sweet spot of organic search results, which will drive traffic to your website.

There is a major difference between SEO and Social Media Advertising. SEO places your advertisement or offering in front of the potential customer when they are searching for the product or service that you provide. This usually means that they are already looking for a solution to a problem that they have identified, or they are ready to make a purchase. Reaching your potential customers at this precise point in time significantly increases your chances of completing a sale.

Social Media Advertising, on the other hand, pushes your advertisement out to your target market without them having to search for you. This audience is not in the same phase of the buying cycle as those who are already actively searching on Google. You are targeting an audience that needs to be educated about the existence of your product or service to solve a problem that they have, but, are not thinking about at that precise moment.

SEO can also take some time before meaningful results can be seen (usually between 6 to 12 months to take full effect) while Social Media Advertising has an immediate effect. That is why they each have their own application and can work together synergistically.

A complete exercise in SEO can be broken down into 3 major parts – keyword research, on-page SEO and an external element.

Keyword research is the first step in SEO. Determining which keywords you should target is not just a matter of picking the words that you think best describes your product or service. It involves research to see what competitors are targeting and what keywords actual customers are using. One of the objectives of this exercise is to identify keywords that customers are using frequently, but, are in the less competitive categories when it comes to what competitors are targeting. Targeting these keywords usually translates to better results, quicker.

On-page SEO is the internal element and it involves getting the design and content of your website right, as well as optimising the page load speed. Research shows that 40% of site visitors will abandon a webpage that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

On-page SEO also examines non-visible elements such as meta tags, meta images and more. These are content that are visible in the source code of your webpage that Google and other search engines will see, but, are not visible to site visitors. Some of these elements that are usually not visible can also appear when your website is shared by users, hence the reason it must be taken into consideration, and must be designed correctly.

The objective of on-page SEO is to create a perfect relationship between the website’s content and coding, with search engine algorithms, so that they favour your website, and rank you at the top of their results page.

The last part requires digital marketing services that work with elements that are external to your website. A common but powerful one is link building via other websites or directories. This means creating links from external websites (preferably the ones that are related in topic to your own website and have authority on the subject) back to a page on your website.

These are some examples of what has to be done in an SEO exercise. Last but not least, Google Analytics must be set up correctly in the correct places to be able to provide you with meaningful data to measure how changes that have been implemented by your digital marketing agency have influenced your results.

PPC is short for Pay-Per-Click advertising and the most common one is Google AdWords. This is where you are only charged whenever a user clicks on your advertisement. Your advertisements will appear when the keywords that you have selected are entered by the user into their Google search engine.

The easiest way to explain PPC is that it is the same as SEO but you have to pay for it. It is like SEO because your advertisement will only appear when a user searches for your keywords. This means that, like SEO, the potential customer is already looking for a solution to a problem that they have, or they are ready to make a purchase. As such, PPC tends to have a relatively high conversion rate. A conversion is where the site visitor becomes a customer because they have completed the purchase of your product or service or have become a lead for you by signing up and giving you their details.

Where it differs from SEO is that its effects are immediate. You do not have to wait to climb to the first page like SEO – you will get there almost instantly if you have allocated a sufficient budget to it. However, it also means that your boosted visibility will disappear as soon as the campaign stops.

It is very well suited to certain types of businesses. For example, if you have a new business and it is the type where your products or services are required in an emergency, i.e. clinics and plumbers, using PPC will ensure that you come up on the first search engine results page when the potential customer searches for a clinic or plumber that services their suburb or area. This is just one example and there are many other scenarios where PPC can be very effective as part of a whole digital marketing strategy.

Content marketing is a very different strategy to the other areas that we have covered in this website. It is not about promoting your product or service directly. It is about providing useful information that is helpful to your target audience so that they become aware of and show loyalty to your brand.

The monthly emails from your real estate agent that tell you the state of the market and if the prices in your suburb have been rising or declining is a good example of this. Free recipe e-books from a food manufacturer which is downloadable after completing a subscription form is another example. Or sometimes, they are just blogs and webpages with useful tips for your customers.

It doesn’t even always have to relate to what you are selling – it is about what your target audience is interested in. Your goal is to make their life a little better and your reward is loyalty and an engaged customer base, which will ultimately come back to you in the form of increased website traffic, sales, revenue or leads.

Another way to capitalise on content marketing is to educate your customer base on more applications or uses for your product or service. This can also lead to an increase in sales as a result of increased consumption or utilisation.

Successful content marketing can also boost your SEO by making you an authoritative resource for certain topics or keywords.

Through content marketing, you can educate your target audience on what features the perfect solution to their problem should have. Of course, it would be fantastic if you can then demonstrate how your product or service has all of those very features!

A good digital marketing agency guide or help you to prepare the correct content, with words picked out from the keyword research stage, to ensure that it is working in synergy with the rest of your digital marketing strategy.

Having good content to share is not enough. It must reach your target audience so once again, the overall digital marketing strategy must also include means to promote and push this content out to the marketplace via SEO, PPC and / or Social Media Advertising.

Thank you for persevering to the end of this webpage! You can’t say that one of the strategies above is better than the other. They need to work in unison to ensure that there are no holes in your overall strategy and that your chances of making a sale are maximised.

We hope that this has given you a much better understanding of digital marketing and how we can help you to grow your business. As you can see, we don’t believe in the hard sell. We know we are good from our track record, we promise to work hard for you, we want to educate and empower you, and we want to use our knowledge and experience to help you achieve great success.