Digital Marketing: Connecting Your Business With Customers Online

Introduction

Digital marketing covers the ways businesses use digital channels to reach, communicate with and develop relationships with customers.

For small and medium-sized businesses, it can provide access to audiences that would once have required substantial advertising budgets. A website, search engines, email, social media and useful content can all help a business become more visible and attract potential customers.

The challenge is not finding digital marketing opportunities. It is deciding which ones are appropriate for the business and making them work together.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of online channels and digital technology to promote a business, its products or its services.

It can include activities such as:

• search engine optimisation (SEO)
• content marketing
• social media
• email marketing
• online advertising
• local search
• video and other digital content
• website and conversion optimisation

These activities can be used individually, but they are generally more effective when they support a common objective.

A useful article found through Google, for example, might introduce someone to a business. That visitor might subsequently join an email list, follow the business on social media or eventually make an enquiry.

Start With Your Business Objectives

Digital marketing should not begin with a particular channel.

Creating a social media account, starting an email newsletter or publishing articles only makes sense when there is a reason for doing it.

The starting point should be the objective.

A business might want to generate more enquiries, increase local visibility, sell products online, attract repeat customers or become better known within a particular market.

Once the objective is clear, it becomes easier to determine which digital marketing activities could help achieve it.

Understand Who You Are Trying to Reach

Effective marketing also requires an understanding of the audience.

Who are your potential customers? What problems are they trying to solve? Where do they look for information? What questions do they ask before making a decision?

Different customers may also be at different stages of that decision.

Someone searching for general information may not yet be ready to buy. Another person searching for a particular service in their local area may have much stronger commercial intent.

Digital marketing can provide appropriate information and routes through the website for both.

Use the Right Digital Channels

Businesses do not need to use every available marketing channel.

Search engine optimisation may be particularly valuable when potential customers actively search for a product or service. Social media may help a business reach and engage a particular community. Email can maintain relationships with people who have already shown an interest.

Content can support all of these activities by providing useful information that can be found through search, shared through social media and distributed by email.

The appropriate combination will depend on the business, its customers, available resources and objectives.

Your Website Should Be at the Centre

For many businesses, the website should sit at the centre of their digital marketing activity.

Social networks, search engines and advertising platforms can introduce people to the business, but the website provides an environment the organisation controls.

It can explain products and services, demonstrate expertise, answer questions, provide evidence and give visitors a clear way to take the next step.

Generating more traffic has limited value if visitors arrive at a website and cannot easily understand what the business offers or what they should do next.

Measure Results, Not Just Activity

Digital marketing provides access to a large amount of data, but not every measurement is equally useful.

Website visits, search impressions, social followers and email opens can provide useful information, but they need to be considered in relation to the business objective.

If the objective is generating enquiries, the important question is ultimately whether marketing activity contributes to those enquiries.

Regular measurement helps businesses identify what is working, what needs improvement and where time or money is being wasted.

Digital Marketing as Part of Your Digital Strategy

Digital marketing is an important component of digital strategy, but the two are not the same.

Digital marketing concentrates primarily on reaching and communicating with customers. Digital strategy considers the wider use of digital technology across the organisation, including customer experience, data, processes and technology.

Connecting the two helps ensure marketing activity supports wider business objectives rather than becoming a collection of disconnected tactics.

For SMEs, that means starting with the objective, understanding the audience, selecting the appropriate channels and measuring whether those activities are producing meaningful results.