What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, simply explained, is using digital channels and technology to advertise and promote products and services to a target audience. As a digital marketing agency, Sprint Digital focuses on the online channels most suited to promote your business to get the best results out of your budget and time.
Types of Digital Marketing
When you think of digital marketing, you may make the jump to pay-per click ads (or PPC). While this is an excellent and efficient type of digital marketing, there are so many more strategies and platforms available. Here are just a few:
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of optimising your website to rank higher on organic search engine results for your most important keywords. In a strategy similar to what drives paid Google Ads, our goal would be to appear for certain keywords when someone searches them; for example, ‘Hotel Dublin’ would be important for a hotel in Dublin.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an excellent way to not only be found by potential customers, but to help them and establish yourself as a thought leader in your field too! Creating valuable and relevant content on your website helps relevant customer find your website by improving your SEO metrics, and helps establishing your business as an ‘authority’ and trustworthy source. Different types of content marketing include blogging, video creation, articles, downloadable sources and much more.
Email Marketing
An email marketing strategy is an excellent way of keeping in touch with existing and potential customers. Not only does it allow you a quick, affordable and direct way to get in touch, your customers actively sign up to it, making them more open to receiving your message. Email marketing, while you play to a smaller audience than you do in many other areas of digital, is one of the most effective platforms a digital marketer can use.
Social Media Marketing
Your social media channels allow you to speak directly to your potential customers – inspiring them, making them laugh, and building a connection to your brand. Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram allow your customers to view different aspects of your business. Brands create and share content, run ads, and interact with users to build brand awareness, create customer loyalty, and drive website traffic.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC allows us to target a potential customer in so many ways. Whether we are using a keyword strategy such as search engine marketing – “Hey Google, find me hotels in Dublin” – or an interest-based search such as Facebook marketing (for example, showing your ads to users who have an interest in hotels in Dublin), PPC has you covered.
An excellent feature of pay-per-click advertising is that we can clearly see the results, unlike with traditional marketing. You’ll never know how many people read your billboard, but we can see how many people clicked, saw, and interacted with our digital ad. Within PPC there are so many channels and different types of ads that we can show, with new channels and tactics being added so often that it’s hard to keep up!
Digital Marketing Helps Your Business Grow
Compared to traditional marketing such as print, TV, or radio advertising, the key differences in digital are its affordability but also its traceability.
Digital marketing campaigns often require significantly lower budgets than traditional investments, while offering the potential to reach a much more targeted audience. When we use traditional advertising such as TV or print, we can often only estimate their effectiveness – did we see an increase in sales or enquiries in the time following the ad?
Digital marketing, in many cases, allows us to get real-time analytics provided by platforms that offer invaluable insights into the performance of campaigns. With this instant, data-driven approach, we can edit and tweak campaigns as needed to get the best results.
We can also conduct A/B tests by using a small budget to run two campaigns side by side and then deciding where our budget is better spent. If none of them hit the benchmarks we want, no problem – let’s try something else.
Digital marketing allows us to talk directly to our target audience unlike traditional advertising, where we are speaking at our audience. Our audience and users can interact directly with our ads and give us valuable insights to what is important to them.
Multichannel Digital Marketing Campaigns
Great ideas should be shared more than once. With digital marketing, we can share the same message across multiple channels. As a business, this adds value to you as it lets you to get the most out of your assets and ideas. Let’s say that you have an excellent offer available just for the month of August – how can you promote it? You can:
- Add it to your website, perhaps creating a custom landing page
- Email your customer list about the offer
- Post organically on all your social media channels about it
- Create a targeted, paid social media campaign to expand your reach to new audiences
- Reach people searching for your products and services on Google with a search campaign to tell them about your offer
All this helps you get the most from your budget, target a very specific audience that you want to show the offer, and most importantly, see if anyone purchased your offer. Using remarketing techniques, we can show the offer again to users who may have been on your website and missed it – or even show them something better.
How to Get Started with Digital Marketing for Your Business
Getting started with digital marketing is an exciting step in your business journey! Before investing in digital marketing, it’s important to know a few things:
- What are your goals for digital marketing? Is your aim to purely get more sales or leads, or do you want more people to know who you are?
- Is your website up to date? Your website is the online home of your business and it’s important that it is easy to use, accessible, and represents your business well.
- Who is your target audience? Before we start spending your budget, who do you think is most likely to find your business useful?
As an experienced digital marketing agency, Sprint Digital would be delighted to help you on your digital marketing journey. No matter what your experience level is with digital marketing, get in touch with us today.
