Digital Marketing

But organic SEO should work hand-in-hand with Pay-per-click. A well optimised page, with good content and good calls-to-action will also perform better as a Pay-per-click landing page and make your digital marketing budget go further.

With Google Adwords as the example, a more relevant page with good content, will have a better ‘Quality Score’ when used as an Adwords landing page for that topic. That higher Quality Score means Google will reward you with a lower Cost-per-click, freeing up more of your budget and giving you a better return on your investment.

In order for a page to work well organically, the subject of the page has to be clear to the search engines and be helpful to the user. That kind of clear and useful content will also pay dividends outside of organic digital marketing.

A good organic landing page will also save you a lot of money on your Pay-per-click campaigns and on your digital marketing budget. Furthermore, well optimised content that ranks organically means you don’t have to be reliant on the Pay-per-click model.

If your Pay-per-click campaigns return a net profit for you, you might assume they’re being well run. But how do you know? Are they wasteful? Could they be generating a lot more enquiries than they do at present, or maybe generate less enquiries, but much higher value ones.

This is where Pay-per-click management come is. I, Martin, manage the Pay-per-click technicians and account managers. I understand well enough what it is they do, to scrutinise their work and see where it might be improved. I can’t b fobbed off and I can explain what they are doing to you. In the same way, I will convey what it is you need from them in terms of results. What they consider a ‘conversion’ is often not what they consider a conversion.

Crucially for the Pay-per-click account managers, I make sure the have the in-page content, the insight into your business and the competitor and keyword research they need in order to do a better job.

So, if ou’re not sure what you’re paying for, need a second opinion or an introduction to a new supplier, I can take the pain away.

If you want to record your calls we can do that, as well as learn more about your conversions from those calls. Perhaps we need to larn more about your customers to improve the performance of your Pay-per-click campaigns? There are lots of options out there and we will help to integrate them into your website and make sense of them for you.

Good data and it’s availabiliy is a huge advantage you can have over your competitors. ach month, it can give us insight and ideas of how we can do better.

This can be done first of all by making sure that you have the right content on your website. Then, you want to make the most of Google’s map listings to ensure you come up in those type of search engine results. One great tool for managing your local search engine results of Google My Businss… It’s easy to set up, takes little maintenance and once set up correctly, with a little instruction, you can do it yourself.

The first stage is to find out what your online marketing exercise are at present, and what they do for you.

From that base-line, we can decide what is achieveable withe the budget we have. Those goals help us to decide what channels we will engage with and what the individual little steps along the way will be.

At the end of the planning stage, we’ll have a clear plan and we’ll know who we’ll want to be involved in the delivery of your digital marketing exercises. And crucialy, those tasks will be executed by specialists, based on solid research and tracked in order to quantify the success or otherwise of the process. With good reporting and tracking, this process is continually refined to give you more return for your invstment of time and money.

Therefore there should be a strategy that includes what has been learned from keyword and competitor research. You want to use the language your customers use in relation to your products and services and be on the platforms they use.

The effectiveness of social media for your business will depend on what it is you offer and what social media plaforms your target audience regularly use. You also need to consider how receptive they will be to you on Social Media. Are you going to try and sell to them, or just raise brand awareness?

If you provide a service that is particularly immotive, related to something people love or care about personall and talk about onlin to their social network, then Social media is a must. For example, those of us with pets lov talking about them and posting pictures of them. So, if you run a vets practice, your customers will be talking about you on-line at some point. You want to be part of that conversation. You want to be there when someone says great things about you and there to answer any negative comments also.

If however, you provice the type of service that peopl don’t get so excited about, for example accounting services, then it’s a different challenge alltogether.

That’s were the real expertise comes in… Understanding the following: What are the best platforms for your business? What is the right message? What type of engagement do we want? How wil we measure it’s success?

As will all web-related content, if you can make it visually appealing, people are far more likely to pay attention. So design needs to play a part. Infographics, portraits of the person posting, simple icons… anything to give your posts a visual hook and remind people of what they’ve seen. We all thik in visual images and without them, we struggle to remember what we’ve seen or heard. And in an increasingly crowded space, social media posts absolutely have to stand out.

Everyone has heard of Mail Chimp and is familiar with the concept. Lots of CRM systems now have email marketing functionality now also, though the dedicated email campaign platforms tend to do a better job.

The benefit of using email marketing functionality built in to your CRM is the access to your customer dataase and sales funnel processes. But there are ways to get the best of both worlds. Email templates can be exported from one to the other as can the database, or a section of the database you wish to send to.

It needs to be relevant to the recipient and it needs to be visually interesting enough to grab their attention very quickly. So the template design for your campaigns needs to look great and shouldn’t be held back by the limitations of your CRM’s template builder. If you can’t get a decent looking template out of say, Zoho, then build it in Mail Chimp and import it.

One of the big benefits of email marketing is the knowledge you already have about the recipient.

Lets suppose you’re sending out a campaign to existing customers, and you sell craft beer…

You should know the customer’s name, what part of the country they live in and what beer they like. That’s a lot of information to be starting with. It means it can be personalised and you an not only remind they that you sell somethng they love, beer, but also introduce them to other beers they might not have thought of buying. Cross-sell the bitter drinker some porters or amber ales in the winter months. Push the light, golden, hopppy stuff when summer approaches. Or you might target customers by region, with news of beers local to them.

You get my point. I like beer!

But the thing that really helps make email marketing succeed is the reporting. You can see real-time data showing the delivery, opening, deletion, click-throughs etc of your camaign as soon as it’s been sent out. This data helps you refine the process each time you send an email campaign and improve your conversion rates.

The next logical step, once you have your campaigns designed, database in place and have run some tst campaigns, is to add some automation. Send campaigns automatically, triggered by the recipient’s interaction with your website or other campaigns. For instance, if someone fills out a contact form on your website, that action should add them to a mailing list and send them an innitial email campaign. if they click on one of the products within it, that might triger another email campaign in a weeks time, introducing another product.

And the beauty is, it’s low cost and very trackable.

Good quality backlinks and link building services benfit the organic rankings of your website.

It’s worth noting that link building is only really worth engaging in once you have the fundamental SEO elements in place; good content and in-page optimisation.

Once you have pages ranking for the keywords you are targeting, and have perhaps seen those search engine rankings plateau, it might be time to plan a link building exercise, executed over a six month or so period.

It’s perhaps easier to understand what constitutes bad link building, before we move onto the good link building practices..

Bad backlinking services include the following, though it’s worth noting, these did work at some point in the past… just not in 2020:

• Anything on Fiverr – you get what yu pay for, and Fiverr is cheap and a waste of money
• Private Blog Networks, known as (PBNs) – these stopped being effective for link building in 2017 when Google put their foot down
• Paid Guest Posts – simply because they go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you swill get penalised instead of rewarded
• Push Button backlinks – which include any you can buy in bulk and you’ll definitely get pealised for having spammy backlinks
• Press Releases – most press release distribution services are ‘no-folloed and as such. have no benefit.

And so here are some examples of good backlinking:

• Help a Reporter Out (HARO) – where you bcome th source of a story for journalists

• Content Marketing Agencies – that’s all they do and so do it well

• Blogger Outreach Services – they find bloggers who are suited to you, contact them and following up

• SEO Agency – can be expensive as part of a package, rather than using a specialist

• Guest Posting Services – they find the blogs, negotiate rates, write the posts and get them published

• PR Agencies – provides more than the backlinking service and helps raise your profile with newsworthy content
• Inforgraphics Agency – they come up with a topic and create visual content – or just hire a graphic designer.