4 basic digital marketing terms every website owner should know

Almost every day, I am approached by Companies that have difficulty with sales, These companies often have a great product with a great pricing system, a decent to good looking website (with special attention paid to their (UI) User Interface and (UX) User Experience), most of these companies do not have a solid online reputation or a good digital marketing strategy (winging their digital marketing) and most often fail to understand how to digitally market or drive traffic to their websites.

While most companies do not have the privilege of having Apple and Coca-Cola’s branding, there are certain steps and tools they can use to drive sales and traffic to their websites without having to break their budget.

Content marketing (sharing your trade secrets)

Having a content rich website is important if you want to make sure your brand is effectively recognised by the search engines, this often means having to share some industry tips and tricks (and possibly some of your trade secrets) with your online audience. Yes, sharing your trade secrets (not all of them) does direct a lot of traffic and potential customers to your website.

Content marketing means basically building a strong brand reputation by becoming a knowledge provider (examples include sending out newsletters to subscribed members, running blogs within your existing website, Press releases, articles).

This is ideal for companies that provide services but it is also quite important for some companies that provide products to do so as well. One of the latest forms of marketing which arguably falls under content marketing is branding content, this would mean appearing as a consultant on a Television or radio show, not to advertise your company, but to offer expert advice on matters related to what you do (This is often seen on “Buyers Guide” on DStv’s Ignition channel, whereby representatives of car dealerships come on the show and join the talk show hosts in providing invaluable advice to people who would like to buy new and second-hand cars within their budgets)

Benefits of content marketing include:

• Reduces the need for paid search advertising by attracting your target audience to your website.
• By allowing people to link to your content, it increases your Google ranking which in turn increases your online brand visibility which basically means you become more popular on the internet.
• Encourages people to share your content with their friends and people they follow which in turn creates an interesting referral system (thus increasing the traffic to your website).

  Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

  As important as Search Engine Optimisation is for your website (Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing act as catalysts to help your customers find you on the internet have adopted search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to ensure your website, landing pages, etc. are being listed in these search results) Search Engine Marketing, which includes PPC (Pay Per Click) methods allows you to appear on the paid links section of Google results (which is on the far right column in your search results), although this is surpassed by Search Engine Optimisation, it is a very important tool to drive traffic to your website, which can help you kick-off early traffic to your site.
  Benefits of Search Engine Optimisation:

  • It places you at the top of all search buzzword (words you select to link your website to on search engines) related searches.

  Social Media Optimisation (SMO)

  In this day and age, it is crucial for a company to build and maintain a great online brand or reputation in order to build brand loyalty, Social media has become a catalyst for such by providing a platform to easily interact and ‘bond’ with your target audience on a more social basis, Social Media creates a bridge between a customer and the company that has never been possible before, this also allows the company to have a much leaner marketing budget ( a lot of companies nowadays shy away from television and radio adverts and focus the majority of their marketing budget on digital marketing and building a social brand.

  Social Media Optimisation is the optimisation of your social media channels and platforms to effectively engage with your target audience and drive sales to your website. These platforms have always included (depending on the nature of the business) Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and have since increased, now including Path, Instagram, tumblr, SnapChat and Whatsapp.

  Recently, services like Mention — which allows you to monitor your brand activity on the internet (what people are saying about your brand, analytics and statistics of your brand popularity as well as export the data) — have started to crop up. These services are making it increasingly easy for you to monitor your brand online.

  Benefits of Social Media Optimisation include:

  • It is an affordable form of marketing, paying as little as R12.00 per day for Facebook promotions.
  • Improves the way you engage with your customers, thus building brand loyalty.
  • Builds brand credibility.
  • It has the ability to go viral when your information is constantly picked up, shared and retweeted.

  Social media integration
  As part of what’s mentioned Content Marketing (CM) as well as under Search Engine Optimisation (SMO), The content created on your blogs, press releases and newsletters needs to be easily accessible and shared on social media by your online audience, Social Media Integration allows your audience to seamlessly share your website content on their social media and also helps you build a Uniform social media front across all platforms, with services like AddThis allowing you to add social media share buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.) to your website. This makes it so easy for your online audience to share your content with all their friends or follow your company’s online blog.

  Other Social Media Integration tools include IFTTT and Hootsuite allow you to strategically build social sharing recipes that will unify all your social media channels, although these are not recommended if you are not fully aware of their functionalities and capabilities, it really doesn’t hurt to play around with them and also build simple recipes and take it from there.

  A strategic digital marketing strategy is very important, running digital marketing campaigns without a strategy is like driving a car with no fuel gauge and speedometer, if you do not have a great digital marketing team, consult a digital agency