Whether you’re taking the leap into the realm of digital marketing for the first time, or if you’re wanting to find an effective way to update your current strategy, you need to include content in your efforts. There are so many ways to direct traffic to your website but to keep your target audience coming back, you need to publish insightful, engaging and useful content regularly.
This is a great way to build a loyal following that is invested in your products, services and business as a whole. The success of your website is determined by the number of people clicking on it and interacting with your content. The end goal should be to convert these readers into potential customers by getting them to fill out contact forms or make purchases.
How to start the digital marketing process
Including content in your strategy is a must. You should be creating articles, infographics, videos, white papers and other forms of content that will sit on your website. These can then be posted on your social media channels to drive traffic back to your website. You need to determine what type of content will work best for your needs, goals and budget.
Some of this content can be produced for free by your own team, but other formats may require hiring professionals. Mobimeme offers all of these services to South African customers in tailored packages. This ensures that you get the most effective content for your business, backed by a tried-and-tested social media marketing rollout that builds brand awareness and grows your website audience.
Promoting your content online
Once you’ve decided on the content that you need and published it to your website, it’s now time to promote it. There are two ways to do this:
- Paid – This includes boosted posts on social media platforms, Google AdWords and any other form of promotion that entails spending money. The benefit of paid ads is a massive online reach with more clicks through to your website. You can also tailor your target audience to meet your exact requirements and find your ideal customers.
- Free – This includes organic posts that sit on your social media timelines and on-site search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. Both of these do not require a budget but are still effective ways to get your content out into the world.
Let’s delve into each of these strategies a bit more:
- Boosted posts on social media – You can pay Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and various other social media platforms to boost your content to a wider, more targeted audience. You can define the parameters, such as audience location, age, gender, job, industry and interests. Each platform ranges in price, but Facebook is the cheapest.
- Performance ads – These are similar to boosted posts but instead of using the content on your website, you can create ads from scratch in the back-end of the social platforms. These ads often hyperlink to your products/services pages or contact page. They are highly targeted and do not sit on your social media timelines.
- Google AdWords – You can pay Google to have your website featured higher up on its search engine results page (SERP). You simply define the keywords for which you’d like your website to rank (usually revolving around your products, services and industry) and you only pay Google when someone clicks on your link.
- Organic posts on social media – This is by far the most common and easiest method to distributing your content. Posting your articles, videos and other content on your social media timelines will help to build an organic following and invite your followers to interact with your brand. It’s completely free but the downside is that only followers will see the posts or people who search for your hashtags.
- On-site SEO – SEO is a very complex field but simple on-site SEO can be done for free if you know how. This practice essentially moves your website higher up the SERPs, allowing more people to find your business when they Google one of your keywords. When you upload articles and videos to your website, be sure to include at least six keywords, a meta description, a title tag and a proper H1 headline.
- Word of mouth – You can always tell your family, friends and people you meet about your website and content marketing efforts in a face-to-face discussion. This costs nothing and it allows people to put a face and personality to the business. They are more likely to check out your website after a social interaction.
Keeping track of your efforts
Your digital marketing strategy is ineffective if you cannot track your results and make appropriate changes. Gleaning insights from your website and social media data is crucial as it allows you to better understand your audience’s behaviour and how they engage with your content.
All social media platforms have analytics built-in, which allows you to see how many people saw your content, clicked through to your website, engaged with the posts (likes, comments, shares, saves, etc.) and how much money you spent per click. Clicks to your site is the best metric for determining whether your content is useful, interesting and appealing to your audience.
Google recently updated its analytics, now called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). If you set up your website properly, you will be able to access advanced metrics from your website visitors; where they live, how long they spent on your site, whether they visited one or more pages of your site and if they filled out your contact forms.
These metrics will allow you to track your audience growth over time and refine your marketing strategy at regular intervals to maximise its effectiveness. One of the most important factors determining the success of your strategy is consistency – uploading and posting content regularly ensures consistent audience growth and traffic to your website. This also leads to a stronger brand identity, a more loyal following and increased engagement on your posts.
Remember that digital marketing is a long-term game. Sure, you can see immediate results when you post something online, but you also need to be patient. You won’t build a one-million-strong following within a month. This takes time, sometimes a couple of years, but the end result will be worth the effort.
If you’re not sure how to get started with your digital marketing strategy or need help with any of the methods described above, please contact us today. Mobimeme specialises in digital marketing, content creation and social media output for South African companies in various industries.
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Mobimeme offers various digital services, including content marketing, SEO, analytics, social media management and expert direction in the digital sphere. Building and growing online audiences for your business is what we do best. For more insights, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.