Where to Invest Your Money to Grow Your Business: Digital Marketing Edition
Welcome to 2020, where 84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising and 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying. If you’re a business owner who provides a product or service and you’re not investing in Digital Marketing, you should be.
There are multiple digital strategies to choose from and where you invest your budget will, of course, depend on your goals. If your goal is growth (brand awareness, increase sales, even a larger staff) Intuitive Digital has some guidance on which Digital Marketing avenues you should invest in to grow your business this year.
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Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, is the process of increasing the visibility of your website on search engines like Google and Bing. Like any strategy, SEO starts by defining your goals. If your goals are content related, like getting users to your website or readers on your blog, SEO is what you need.
Whatever your goal, if you want to be competitive online you will need to implement SEO into your tool belt. SEO practices include researching keywords for relevancy and competitiveness, writing and editing content to match your company’s voice and optimizing content for readability and keyword strength and that’s just the start. It’s true that SEO is a slow, long-term strategy but given time to run, it will prove it’s worth. SEO is one of the most valuable tools in the digital marketplace.
Paid Search
If Digital Marketing was Star Wars, SEO would be Luke Skywalker and Paid Search would be Han Solo. SEO is like Luke, in that there is a light and a dark side and a bit of mystery involved in your results. You can work for 6 months writing content around a keyword, and not even get to the first page of the search engine results.
However, paid search is the Han of this analogy because without it, you may never get to the top spot (or defeat Darth Vader). In PPC, is more aggressive and straight forward. If you can build and optimize your account properly, you are almost guaranteed a spot at the top of the search results, instantly. Moreover, paid search platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads are structured in a way that shows your business exclusively to people who are looking for goods/services like yours. Incorporating a paid search strategy can be the added boost that your business need to expand its online growth. So if your goals are to grow sales and brand awareness, PPC is the way to go.
Paid Social
Organic reach on social media platforms just isn’t what it used to be, with an increase in “click-bate” posts and Facebook’s new algorithm update, organic efforts will have to shift to accommodate. Regardless paid social remains a cost-effective strategy for business looking to expand their growth.
Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter provide an opportunity to advertise to your Target Audience where they are already spending their time. Paid social can help you target your ads to the right people, with their demographic targeting, interest based audiences and retargeting capabilities.
For some businesses there is nothing more effective than a Facebook campaign, not only do you choose the creative (with much more room for copy than Adwords) but depending on your marketing objective you can choose to pay when someone clicks your ad, watches a certain percentage of your video ad OR you can pay per 1,000 impressions. This is great for brand awareness.
Website Design and Optimizations
The argument for website design and optimization is simple: What’s the point in setting up any strategy which drives traffic to a website that people can’t figure out how to find what they’re looking for? If your website is hard to navigate, poorly designed, running slowly, not mobile friendly, or all of the above, your business will suffer. There are elements of an effective web design but optimizations and maintenance should be done monthly.
The Main Takeaway
Everyone has heard the phrase “You have to spend money to make money.” But the trick for business owners is knowing how to invest that money in strategies that will show a return on investment. Instead of just “spending”, your marketing investments should effectively serve your marketing goals and ultimately grow your business. If you would like to learn more about an integrated digital marketing strategy drop us a note at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.
