Basic Digital Marketing

 SEO is getting started on a journey that goes beyond simply writing blog after blog, re-coding a website, or embedding certain strategies on a web page. SEO comes with many questions and as a bit of an introduction to the subject, we hope to address some of them here.

What is SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about designing and marketing a website with the focus of getting its pages ranked on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. When a site’s pages rank high on Google, it usually equates to more visitors. Whenever someone searches for a keyword related to the information on your site, they will see your brand, click it, and with that comes the opportunity to inform, sell, promote, and share what you have to offer.

 Analyzing page views for any website with healthy flows of traffic will reveal that some visitors will arrive to your page beginning at your home page while others will find you through a landing page. There are some differences to both that are worth noting for web designers, digital marketers, and small business owners. By knowing how to maximize the potential of these differences, you help to boost conversions, get a higher return, and produce a better result.

Every digital marketing campaign should come with a landing page. This page’s only goal is to convert a user from ‘visitor’ to ‘customer’. A landing page does this by incorporating actionable buttons and keeping the focus on conversion. A landing page lives and dies by its conversion rate. Images, text, and structure is all based around this. Think a captivating headline, a high resolution image, a list of advantages or benefits to your offer, and a highlighted call to action. This is the basic anatomy of a landing page. When done correctly, you should see that needle move.

 The #1 factor that determines the success of an SEO marketing campaign is content. With this in mind, the days of low-rent, keyword-rich content are long gone. To be successful within the SEO game, a site’s content marketing strategy needs to be focused on quality above all else.

Search engines have changed algorithms a lot in the past decade and they will continue to for the foreseeable future. Content quality is one of the only factors that has remained consistent throughout all of these changes.

Google has done great at providing to web designers an arsenal of business-friendly digital marketing tools. Though Google Analytics is highly recommended, it’s also one of the obvious ones. If you want to go beyond Google Analytics and see what else Google has to offer, consider any of the following tools to help craft the perfect digital marketing strategy for your website.

Google Correlate

Correlate tracks search trends over an extended period of time. See how keywords interact with one another during certain events, track keywords over time, and/or identify keyword opportunities during certain times of year. Correlate also allows a user to build charts and graphs related to keyword trends which is quite useful for those needing to make a digital marketing presentation to stakeholders.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot of potential in application across various digital marketing channels. When it comes to email marketing, AI has the potential to release more relevant content, to target one’s email offers better, to trigger optimized email releases. There are already different applications that can take over these components of email marketing. For entrepreneurs, small business website owners, and email marketing enthusiasts, getting in on AI early may help in achieve more success.

SEO strategies pumped up in time for eCommerce sales days can generate big ROI. The most successful of these campaigns are known to increase revenues before and after sales events as well.

For some, more than 50 percent of a company’s annual revenues can be generated from specific sales days and events throughout the year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two shining examples of sales days that generate millions of dollars for key brands.

Today’s social media crowd is a more diverse bunch age-wise than ever. If you don’t think baby boomers are heavily involved in social media platforms like Facebook, you’re wrong. Despite the fact that so much of the advertising and marketing on video sites like YouTube target younger people, the older crowd is there with money to spend and time on their hands. For brands targeting older audiences, using video marketing is a recommended move in 2018.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a web marketing strategy that fixates on getting your website ranked number one across search engines like Google and Bing. By zeroing in on specific keywords, successfully build for yourself an online presence with real momentum. As fancy as digital marketing strategies are, you need to have some technical aspects of web design prepped and optimized to truly maximize the opportunity.

Schema markup tags

Schema markup data is used by search engines to determine how relevant content on a web page is to the keywords being searched for. Though search engines will crawl your web page on their own, having schema markup tags makes the process easier and increases the likelihood that it will appear in front of a relevant audience. Though markup does not affect search engine placement, it does impact the accuracy of your site to the search term.

Facebook can be a pretty mysterious social media platform for new business accounts. It’s regularly undergoing updates and algorithm changes. In the past decade, due to these algorithm changes, it’s gotten increasingly difficult for small businesses to successfully launch non-paid Facebook marketing campaigns.

Even reaching one’s own followers can prove to be a huge challenge. Though it was once promoted as an ‘organic social media platform’, Facebook is anything but these days. If you’re noticing that your posts are barely reaching an audience, you’re not alone. The average Facebook page in 2018 boasts an organic reach of only 2.6 percent.

Buying fake followers to elevate your social media account is something so many influencers and businesses have either done or considered. Considering the consequences though, we’re confident in saying that buying fake followers on social media is just a bad idea. Any business who gets involved in social media marketing does so expecting success. Building the largest platform and maximizing engagement is the dream. Even with high quality content and consistency in posting schedule though, success in social media is not guaranteed. In these moments, it can seem extremely tempting to buy likes, followers, and shares. Here’s why we think you should hold off!

Google, Bing, and similar search engines are used every day. They still account for a sizeable chunk of any digital marketing budget, even in the face of other marketing channels growing exponentially.

The opportunity to generate traffic via search engines is key to business success. By developing content that is high quality and consistent in its messaging, this helps your website in ranking high on search engines. By nabbing a high ranking, this maximizes exposure and allows potential customers to easily find your website. The latest insights into web marketing, trends in search engine optimization, and consumer behaviour all highlight key ranking factors to keep in mind.

For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the biggest search engine in the world, Google. They use hundreds of different ranking factors in their algorithm to determine where a website places.

Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to bring together various marketing channels, such as social media and content marketing, in a bid to derive revenues and increase engagement.

Corporate brands and small businesses alike are engaging with video marketing on sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and more. There are a variety of different things that can be done with video marketing and no shortage of opportunities, either. Choose from posting how-to instructionals to promoting new sales, introducing new customers to your brand, an entertainment-based product that relates back to your brand, interviews with management or ambassadors, testimonials, and/or examples from your portfolio. For those that don’t know where to start, consider Instagram where there are more than 1 billion monthly users, Facebook which has more than 2 billion monthly users, and YouTube which boasts 1.8 billion users every month.

New and existing business owners are beaten over the head every day with the advantages of digital marketing. Sometimes though, digital marketing has actually been a bad thing for some businesses. It’s easy for a company to make all kinds of promises about boosting company’s growth and yet, so much more difficult to deliver on these claims. If digital marketing has done you wrong in the past or if you have concerns about hiring a digital marketing agency, keep this list in mind. Browse below for a quick recap of 4 things digital marketing may get wrong about your business.

Tech-savvy under-30 millennials come with a number of stereotypes attached to their name, such as being ‘cheap’, shopping online, and being constantly engaged in their smartphones. This aside, if a brand wishes to market to millennials, it takes looking beyond these myths and digging into the facts of marketing to millennials.

The facts are that millennials are considered to be the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Approximately 50 percent of them have attended or graduated from college or university. They are the first generation to have grown up in and around household computers, the Internet, and technology. In most cases, you may see millennials willing to spend more than previous generations on seemingly casual purchases, outspending other generations significantly. Any brand inexperienced with marketing to millennials can start with these 4 key strategies.

Using apps on your smartphone, tablet, and computer to monitor digital marketing campaigns is a smart idea. Instantly tap into real-time data and see whether a strategy is working or not. If a digital marketing strategy is working, great! If not, you’ll have the insights to change it. Though some apps might claim to automate marketing campaigns, that’s not what we’re trying to do with apps. In large part, digital marketing is not something to be automated. That said, apps can be used to provide better monitoring and to maximize a strategy while it’s working.

App 1 – ‘Seriate’ for the Instagram-specific user

If your digital marketing strategy does not involve Instagram, consider skipping this one. For those that do use Instagram, it’s a highly competitive environment. As one of the most popular social media platforms out there, Instagram is not so easy to use particularly from desktops. ‘Seriate’ is an app that allows an Instagram user to create posts, schedule posts, and make posts across multiple accounts at the same time. The automation capability of Seriate makes it easy to coordinate an Instagram marketing campaign. Sort and repost based on hashtags, geographic location, or set up likes, follows, and direct messages, and automate it all!

eCommerce success in Canada, the US, and internationally is hard to achieve with big players like Amazon already dominating this space and more corporate retail names moving in. If you’re selling eCommerce product in any category, your success depends on you being very, very good at what you do. If you haven’t already, we recommend hiring a digital eCommerce marketing company to ensure you receive the support and guidance you need to succeed.

Using a multi-channel sales approach is often what works best for start-up eCommerce brands. Tap into as many possible relevant streams as you can to advertise product. Ensure the online shopping experience is strong and seamless, and that no matter how a visitor gets to your site, that they find everything they’re looking for and more. Don’t make promises you can’t keep and be clear about shipping info, delivery time, and any customer service-related contact info.

Digital marketing has made some pretty sizeable shifts on a near annual basis. For example, in the last few years alone, mobile has become the largest spending category of digital marketing, more than half of people are now using voice search regularly, social media marketing has become the go-to strategy for business-to-consumer marketing, and LinkedIn has established itself as the top marketing channel for business-to-business marketing. As consumer behaviour changes so must the digital marketing strategies we use.

Should you hire an SEO expert for your business – this is an important question. SEO is a highly competitive marketing category. After all, consumers are so much more likely to click on the first or second Google search result than those further down the page. The competition is strong for those placements. According to some estimates, the first search result gets as much as 47 percent of all clicks and the first three results total get up to 60 percent of total clicks.

When entrepreneurs and small business start with SEO, a lot of them make an attempt of it on their own. Despite this, it takes years of experience and experimenting to get one’s SEO skills just right. As algorithms change annually, expertise is not easily won. Even with the tremendous amount of SEO courses and tools out there, expertise is not necessarily going to come. For this reason, there comes a point where most small business owners acknowledge that they might need an SEO marketing expert to help them get the results for their business that they can’t get for themselves.

 Word-of-mouth has always been a very persuasive marketing technique. Throughout the years as marketing trends have come and gone, a recommendation from someone we trust is still tremendously influential.

Today, social media and communication tech via the Internet has meant more connection between human beings. In response, this has given rise to YouTubers, bloggers, and influencers – categories of people that never existed prior. By partnering with relevant influencers in these areas and others, there’s the potential to tap into word-of-mouth marketing in a very contemporary way.

 As organic traffic algorithms have changed drastically in the past decade, it’s harder than ever to get social media content in front of the people you want. Though paid social media marketing is one option, if there are organic opportunities to monetize, these can be equally fruitful. As sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube continue to change the way they monetize and spread marketing messages, it’s up to us to ultimately adapt.

If one believes social media is about creating momentum in conversation, one of the best places we suggest starting is on Facebook. Bringing together the best features of Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, and more platforms, Facebook is a great place to post video, photos, graphics, and text. By putting together a high quality Facebook post that can then be transferred and shared across other social media platforms, this provides a good hub to work from.

 Long-term social media marketing strategies focus on consistent effort equating to growth. Though content and consistency seems like a simple formula for social media success, it can still take time and effort to see real results.

For an experienced social media marketing agency like Unlimited Exposure, we’ve helped social media accounts grow and establish large followings over time. Through releasing of high quality content consistently across a schedule, this forms the basis for the social media marketing strategies we use to generate results.

 Social media marketing can have a number of goals. Creating consistent momentum and generating leads through creative, engaging content is at the heart of this category of marketing. The luckiest may be able to tap into a viral post while the unluckiest struggle to find ways to lift dead social media posts. Needless to say, even the best of social media marketers sometimes can’t get their strategies off the ground and make mistakes.

Insisting every post is promotional

While every post is going to promote your brand, if the content of each post is purely promotional, that’s a huge turn off. Remember, social media is all about creating connection in shares and conversation. Sometimes, this means posting neutral, non-promotional posts, which could be news, tips, or how-to’s. Balance promotional posts with neutral posts. In the end, you’ll win over more customers and create more engagement.

 For those with a digital marketing plan that does not already have some form of live event plan included, evidence shows you might want to re-consider. Live events is a great advertising method to establish sense of urgency in consumers to buy.

Any business can throw a live event and it doesn’t need to be a massive extravaganza either. It can be something as simple as a 24-hour eCommerce sale. Research shows this can heavily boost your digital marketing and better connect your brand with consumers.

The amount of data one can procure from Google Analytics is extremely helpful in determining whether a content marketing strategy is working or not. Needless to say, if you’re looking to improve your content marketing efforts, programs like Google Analytics is precisely where you want to look. There are many ways to get quality data from these programs that allow you to understand how users are engaging with one’s marketing.

Though organic search on social media is less ineffective than perhaps ever before, organic search across Google and other search engines is still a strong way to generate traffic. Getting a top search engine ranking is key to this however it’s something not easily accomplishable.

 Augmented intelligence (AI) is going to elevate brands to heights they’ve never seen before. Though many brands have not tapped into AI yet, there are some amazing opportunities just around the corner. Here are some marketing challenges that we’ve seen a lot of brands eventually run into that we believe could be resolved using AI.

Customers who are not supporting your business in all the ways they can be.

Sometimes customers are not made aware of the different ways they can support your business. Augmented intelligence may be able to help in improving digital content response rates by determining the best keywords and areas to place ads. AI can be leveraged in this way by acknowledging and analyzing the way ads are being placed, their performance, and how they are being seen. Though most brands don’t have the opportunity to work AI like this quite yet, we hope to see the technology continue to develop in the next few years.