What Is Digital Marketing? - Digital Marketing Agency | Oxford

Digital marketing refers to the marketing of products or services via digital channels such as social media, email, website, search engines, mobile apps and pay-per-click advertising.

As more and more people spend time on the Internet browsing for and purchasing items, offline advertising has become less effective, and it’s now it’s imperative for businesses to reach their audience online.

Many business assets fall under the umbrella of digital marketing, including:

Website
Social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.)
Branding (logos, fonts, etc.)
Ebooks and online brochures/leaflets
Infographics
Reports and whitepapers
PR, reviews and other online coverage
Interactive tools and apps, etc.

All of these assets can be harnessed and used to their full potential to market your business through the following digital methods and technologies:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – optimising your website to rank higher in search engines and gain a larger portion of organic traffic.

Social media marketing – promoting your brand and message through social media to drive awareness, traffic and conversions for your business.

Content marketing – creating and developing a content strategy for promoting your brand and generating traffic growth.

Inbound marketing – using online methods to attract visitors, convert them and persuade them to return later on for repeat business.

Email marketing – reaching your customers via email to promote your website, new products/services, offers, discounts, and events.

Pay-per-click advertising – using publishers such as Google AdWords to set up ad campaigns that will drive traffic to your website every time one of your ads is clicked.

Affiliate marketing – performance-based advertising where you receive a commission (usually a percentage figure) for promoting and selling another business’s products or services.

Online PR – gaining reviews, and writing content such as blog posts to build your presence online.

Mobile marketing – since October 2016, over 50% of web pages are now loaded on mobile phone devices, surpassing desktop and laptop computers. This means it’s more important than ever to make sure your website is responsive so it displays correctly on mobile devices such as phones and tablets, and tweaking your user experience (such as lead generation forms) so that it’s as hassle-free as possible.

What are the benefits of digital marketing and will it work for my business?

One of the greatest benefits of carrying out digital marketing is that results and return on investment can be measured quickly and accurately. Here are just some examples of how this can be done:

Website traffic – analytics software such as Google Analytics allows you to see exactly how many people have visited each page of your website, where they are located, what device they used, how long they spent looking at the page, and much more.

This sort of information can help you assess where you need to invest your marketing efforts, eg. if only 5% of traffic is coming from social media, then you may wish to spend time building up your brand through Facebook, Twitter, etc.

You can also look for patterns in your user’s behaviour, and how you can help them complete the customer journey more quickly and efficiently through your website. Overall, this is much more effective than offline advertising such as in newspapers, magazines or brochure drops, as you have no idea how many people actually looked at your ad and took action on it.

Content performance – by publishing brochures and other content online, you can track how many people are downloading it and collect contact details for those who do by using forms. This gives you an idea of how many visitors are actually engaging with your content and allows you to generate good quality leads through your website.

Sales funnel – your digital marketing strategy can help you identify patterns in the way customers research and buy your products/services. This means you can see which parts of your strategy need to be worked on, and how you might improve the efficiency of your sales funnel to generate more profit.

How much budget do I need for digital marketing and when am I likely to see results?

Your budget for digital marketing not only depends on what you can realistically afford to spend, but exactly how many different avenues you wish to pursue as part of your strategy.

If you already have your website set up, then methods such as SEO and content creation will not require a significant amount of monetary input. The heavier expenses start if you wish to set up pay-per-click advertising, social media campaigns and buying email lists. Your spend will ultimately hinge on how much visibility and brand awareness you want to gain as part of your marketing and advertising.

To save money in the long term, it’s worth spending as much time as possible building up your organic traffic, which is free and can be very profitable for your business should you be able to rank within the top three results on search engines for highly relevant and competitive keywords.

To help with this, we offer competitive and affordable SEO packages on a monthly basis, which means you can improve the SEO for your website without being tied in to a long-term contract.

The length of time it takes to see results again depends on what elements of your digital marketing strategy you choose to focus on. High quality content creation to attract the right visitors may take up to six months before you start to see the benefits, but other avenues such as pay-per-click advertising and social media yield results much more quickly. Again, focusing on achieving higher rankings in search engines for free, organic traffic, as well as building up your social media channels for referrals there, are the best options for long term success.

I want my business to work on our digital marketing strategy – how can you help us?

Nightingale Marketing covers a whole range of digital marketing services, so whatever you are aiming to work on and improve, we can help you achieve it.