Full digital marketing guide to help you maximize your company’s marketing efforts to reach and grow your target markets. Leveraging the factors of digital marketing will generate qualified new leads and keep your brand in front of your target market.

8 Factors in Digital Marketing:

1. Organic (SEO)
2. Pay-Per-Click (SEM)
3. Content Marketing
4. Email Marketing
5. Marketing Analytics
6. Lead Generation
7. Conversion Optimization
8. Social Media Marketing

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the terminology used to determine your likelihood of being found on google.  The question you must ask yourself is; Is my website being found on Google?

Factors for SEO:

1. Quality Content
2. Backend Coding – Tags, Meta Descriptions, Alt Text, etc.
3. Page Speed
4. Responsiveness
5. User Experience
6. Internal and External Linking
7. Etc.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click or ppc, refers to your advertisement spending on various online avenues.  This can include social media, Amazon, and various search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Starting out it is smart to focus on only Google as it has roughly 87% of all online searches. 

Types of pay-per-click (ppc)

1. Display Ads
2. Retargeting Ads
3. Search Ads
4. Dynamic Ads
5. Social Media
6. Google Shopping

Understanding your business and its customers will allow you to target specific PPC campaigns for the highest return.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the idea of providing value to your customers by giving away free knowledge.  Providing information about your business, how it works, what customers can expect, and alternatives builds trust.  When customers are then ready to make a buying decision this established trust results in conversions. 

Additionally, content marketing helps to build your website authority.  Improving how search engines rank your website and building internal linking.  Content marketing is something that is never finished and requires consistent development.  Lastly it helps your website rank for new keywords improving your odds of being found on search engines.

Examples of Content Marketing

1. Website Content, Blogs, Articles
2. Webinars
3. Social Media Posts
4. Case Studies
5. Video Development

Email Marketing

Email marketing supports brand recognition.  It helps you reach new customers and customers within your sales funnel.  Automation software allows you to create dynamic email campaigns customizing your message to each individual.  Studies show higher open, click through rate, and conversions when your email campaign is customized.

1. Segmentation is crucial to create a successful email campaign.  This allows you to send customers information/deals they are interested in.  Ex. If you sell clothing and you have two types of customers, formal and informal, you want to make sure that you have a different email campaign for each type of customer.  Sending the wrong message can result in turning that customer off of your brand.
2. Newsletters are a great way to start off your email marketing strategies.  These can be monthly, quarterly, or yearly depending on how big of a customer base you’re starting off with.  Let your customers know what is going on within your customer and provide value with deals or key take-away.

Marketing Analytics

Being able to understand and make actionable decisions is crucial.  Digital marketing analytics is the collection of website traffic and behavior of key performance indicators or KPI.  Most website applies Google Analytics to their website allowing them to see a wide variety of information.  Understanding this information and utilizes helps your company make sure they are targeting the right customer.

Google Analytics Metrics

1. Geography, understand where your customers are searching you from
2. Gender, are your customers male or female
3. Age, what is the age range of your customers
4. Traffic channel, how are they finding your website
5. Visitor behavior, time of day, pages visited, time on website

Ex.  Your company offers a medical service and you have an physical office location.  You can look at your website traffic and your PPC campaign traffic to make sure you are putting your time, energy, and money in the right place.

1. Geography, with a physical location, you want to make sure all your visitors are within driving range
2. Gender, If your office is an OBGYN you would want to make sure your PPC campaigns are not bringing in men
3. Age, If your office works on removing wrinkles and old age you want to make sure you’re not generating traffic under the age of 40
4. Traffic Channel, If all of your traffic is coming from PPC, you might want to focus on creating more organic traffic for a more stable business model
5. Visitor Behavior, If your website traffic is quickly leaving your website or not visiting other pages you might have to change your design/flow of your website

Key Performance Indicators

1. Conversions can be a target amount of time on your website, visiting so many pages, filling out a form, making a call, etc.  Conversions vary from company to company depending on where you see value.
2. Click-Through-Rate, The percentage of individuals that see your postings (impression) and click into your website.  This metric is most commonly used for PPC campaigns.
3. Bounce Rate, is the percentage of individuals who visit your website and leave before making a conversion or visiting another page.  Most industry standards accept bounce rates between 40% – 60%.  Some individuals go to your website to find a way to contact you, click on the link mistakenly, or quickly realize it is not the information they are looking for.

Lead Generation

How are you creating leads?  Are you capturing data from your new and existing customers?  Understanding how your business can create new leads will ensure your efforts are not wasted. 

Creating Lead Generation:

1. Free Webinars, bring in potential customers
2. Free case studies, everyone wants to find something relatable.  Knowing another company or individual already went through their issue and found success helps them to make the buying decision
3. Product Launch, providing free product and discounted products during a product launch gets your products and brand out there to new customers
4. Social Media, providing display ads and creating visually pleasing designs is crucial.  Lead generation on social media is less about content and more about images.
5. Landing Pages, Creating very specific landing pages for PPC campaigns will help create a very specific message for your targeted keywords

Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization is the process of making alterations, testing variations to improve conversion rates.

How to optimize conversions

1. A/B Test landing pages.  Direct the same ad campaign to two or more landing pages with a variation of formats, content, visuals, etc allows you to test the performance.  After a large enough sample size select the landing page that will be utilized moving forward.
2. Single-purpose per page.  The number one mistake you can make with optimizing your landing pages is providing too much information and not making the conversion goal simple.

Social Media Marketing

Is your company ideal for social media?  Most business to business (B2B) companies can’t leverage social media like a business to consumer (B2C) company.  Understand your business and determine if Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc are right for your company and brand.

Steps to utilize social media marketing:

1. Determine relevant social media avenues
2. Build a following
3. Network
4. Post – Drive traffic to your page and website

A well-developed digital marketing plan takes advantage of all factors. Plan appropriately for the short, medium, and long term as a digital marketing plan is always developing and changing. Alterations are required on a regular basis to maximize results.