What is Digital Marketing?

SEO

Digital Marketing is a ubiquitous term across the internet, but what does this actually mean. Essentially, any marketing that utilises an electronic device to convey a promotional message or advert whilst measuring its impact on the consumer. The term ‘digital marketing’ also refers to any marketing campaign that uses avenues such as computers, tablets, phones or any other device.

From online videos and adverts to search engine optimisation and social media posts, digital marketing encompasses a wide net, but the main goal is to increase your online presence and visibility in a measurable way. Having a strong internet presence can ultimately lead to more consumers discovering your website or products and eventually increasing your sales from consumers.

But whilst digital marketing may seem straightforward and easy to execute, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. One of the most important tools within digital marketing is called search engine optimisation (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a marketing tool that essentially lists a webpage on search engines, depending on the page’s attractiveness. By this, SEO has been called both an art and a science. It’s considered a science because SEO requires you to research and combine various contributing factors to achieve the highest possible search engine ranking; this includes, but is not limited to, the quality of your content, how mobile user-friendly it is as well as the level of user engagement you receive.

The use of these varying factors makes SEO a science whilst the unpredictability involved in securing a decent search engine ranking makes it an art. Unfortunately, there is no consistent method or practice in securing a decent search engine rank; the best possible approach is constant hard work, monitoring your website or specific pages and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Sherbet Donkey Media excels in an honest and diligent approach to SEO ranking and understand the challenges of the market. Nothing happens overnight and we guarantee to work hard to achieve the best possible rankings for you. Please do not hesitate to enquire about our services if you’re interested in working with us.

Types of Digital Marketing

Social Media Marketing

One of the most common types of digital marketing is social media marketing. This encourages user and consumers to engage and discuss online, driving online traffic to your website or brand. The most popular platform for this is usually Facebook, but also includes other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. More recently, there has been an increase on other platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok.

Social media marketing is one of the most popular methods because it actively gains attention through user participation and all of the aforementioned platforms offer built-in tools to manage and track metrics. These tools help to better understand your audience and helps you to learn what works as well as having the ability to target more specific users.

Depending on your goals and strategy, it is sometimes better to just encourage users to engage in dialogue and interaction first to discuss your brand. This can often lead to more long-term success by embedding your brand within the social media market.

Here at Sherbet Donkey Media, we offer a wide array of social media packages to help engage with your consumers in a more personable way. If you’d like to learn more about what we offer, please contact us.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is heavily tied to what we’ve already discussed – SEO. The concept of content marketing is to provide valuable and enticing content for your target audience in the form of written material.

This differs from other forms of marketing and advertising as it tends to offer free information rather than a specific service or product. Today, consumers tend to expect businesses and companies to produce content that is helpful, informative, and entertaining in order to keep them engaged.

However, this approach can be difficult as the content needs to have the ability to rank high within search engine results – utilised using keywords – whilst also being coherent and, as stated, engaging.

While content marketing can be effective, it can also be tricky. If done well, users will ideally read the material, share the content on social media platforms or other avenues and therefore interact with your company or brand further.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has seemingly been around since the inception of the internet. The idea of this is straightforward: you send an email, whether that’s a newsletter, offer or another promotional message with the prospect of the recipient to click and open it.

However, for email marketing to effectively work, you must make sure that the email is even warranted, and the recipient has opted in to receive emails. You must therefore make sure that the content of the email is clearly outlined what it is (for example, a newsletter) as well as personalising the content so it doesn’t come off as generic. Some brands and companies use your name from the data they have on record to achieve this level of individualisation.

Essentially, you would want your email marketing campaign to be seen as worthwhile and valued, rather than just a bland blanket email blast.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a common method to drive online traffic to your website via adverts that people can click on. This can be done by posting an ad on a specific platform, such as Instagram, and getting the user to move to your site. If a user clicks on your ad, this is only half the battle – it’s important that your get the user to stay on your site.

This net step is known as conversions; by getting them to complete an action of some kind, such as signing up to your newsletter or making a purchase, a conversion can be transactional or non-transactional.

The target conversions are determined by you and what you’re hoping to achieve with this form of marketing, but this can all be tracked, as previously mentioned, usually through the specific platforms you’re using for your marketing campaign.

Keywords

While digital marketing is a combination of various factors, such as creating attractive and effective pages and content or SEO, one of the most important tools however are keywords.

Keywords are essentially what users and consumers will use in a search engine and in order to drive traffic to your webpages, it’s important that you utilise certain keywords to do so. This will increase your search engine ranking and ideally, customer engagement with your site. Keywords are occasionally broken down into three common categories: navigation, information, and transaction.

A navigational keyword is when a user might type into a search engine, for example, “LinkedIn”, in order to reach linkedin.com. An information keyword is when a user wants to discover certain information. For example, a user may type “dog breeds” who are looking for a specific type; this kind of search would tend to lead to articles or pages that would have this information and use this keyword throughout their content.

Finally, a transaction keyword is one that suggests that the user is looking to make a purchase. A clear indicator of this are words like “buy” or listing a specific place. For example, someone who might type “mini golf Birmingham” are clearly looking for a specific service in their local area.

It’s important to utilise a range of keywords but to also not dilute your keyword pool with a too broad approach.