Digital marketing is an essential part of any business’s overall marketing strategy today. Businesses large and small are continuing to invest more of their marketing budget in digital and looking at ways to maximise their budget to deliver the highest possible return on investment (ROI).
Many of the world’s leading brands are innovators when it comes to digital marketing. They often have large budgets and huge teams dedicated to their digital marketing efforts, however, this is not to stop small businesses from taking inspiration from the work being carried out by huge multi-national brands.
Digital marketing has many channels and below we have highlighted some of the most popular channels when it comes to delivering ROI. We have also highlighted examples of the work being carried out by leading brands – examples that you can copy for your own business and hopefully deliver strong returns.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Underpinning many digital marketing strategies is SEO. Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website for keywords that are highly relevant to your business. Typically SEO focuses on two key areas: technical and content.
Your website is often the first point of contact a prospective customer has with your brand and it is important to deliver a great experience. This means your website needs to be fast loading, needs to be accessible on all devices and the content needs to be easy to find.
It also means your content must add value and answer the questions that people are asking in search in the most depth.
Big brand example: Amazon is one of the best examples of big brands that continue to invest in SEO. They were an early adopter of SEO and today they compete with Google when it comes to people searching for products. They are very technical-focused with their SEO efforts, deploying schema structured data markup across all their products as well as leveraging user-generated content in the form of customer reviews.
Content Marketing
Closely related to SEO is content marketing. Content marketing is the process of creating content that meets the needs of searchers looking for information in search engines such as Google.
The internet is saturated with content from brands big and small, not to mention individual bloggers, forums, video content, images and more. This means that you need to be strategic about your content marketing efforts and make sure you are targeting the keywords and topics that are most likely to yield the best possible ROI for your business.
Identifying topics that are highly relevant to your audience and where you can showcase expertise, authority and trust will give you the best possible chance of ranking well for terms relating to those topics, helping to drive organic traffic, raise brand awareness and ultimately to drive sales and revenue.
Big brand example: Betway online casino and sports betting showcase their expertise by creating content by leading experts on their site. They publish tips, interviews with leading sports stars and sporting event previews to help to inform their customers and give them more information about the events they are likely to be betting on. In this way, they not only add some serious value to their customers but also tick all of Google’s boxes when it comes to showcasing expertise, authority and trust.
Social Media
Social media has become an extremely important part of any digital marketing strategy and with the rapid growth of social media platforms, businesses have more choices than ever when it comes to reaching their target audience.
For many businesses, the challenge is ensuring they are focusing on the social media platforms that are most likely to reach their target audience. There is no point in a business whose target audience is men aged 40+ targeting them through TikTok for example. Equally, there is little point in a business whose target audience is Gen Z’ers focusing on LinkedIn as their primary social media platform.
Managing your social media profiles takes time and expertise. Responding to comments and direct messages is time-consuming and also needs to be consistent. Your social media platforms can often be the gateway to your brand and customers are using social media as the first form of customer service. They expect businesses to be available 24/7 and if you don’t have the resources to manage your platforms like that, make sure you focus on the ones you do have time to manage properly.
Big brand example: Online retailer Boohoo is considered one the best in the business when it comes to social media. Boohoo’s social media strategy has always been integral to its success, with influencer endorsements enabling the brand to target and engage a young audience on Instagram in particular (where it now has 13m followers). Alongside favourite influencers, Boohoo cleverly engages its audience with its fun, relatable, and pop-culture-fuelled content, which is always delivered with its similarly friendly and laid-back tone of voice.
Summary
Investing in SEO, content marketing, and social media doesn’t have to cost the earth. Many of the examples we have listed above can be carried out in-house at fairly low costs. Of course, you may choose to supplement your efforts by investing in experts. An SEO agency, for example, can help to identify technical issues with your website and devise an action plan to tackle those issues.
You may also choose to outreach your content marketing efforts to attract external links to your website and drive up your overall authority.
It is also getting harder for brands to appear organically in social media feeds to man invest in paid social advertising to boost their reach and specifically target their content to people that are most likely to be interested in their products and services.
Digital marketing doesn’t mean big budgets, however, it does mean being strategic. To maximise your budget, focus on the areas of digital marketing that are likely to yield the biggest return on investment.
