Digital Marketing… A term we hear thrown around by every start-up on every corner. But what is digital marketing? WebEchoes has been in digital marketing since 2003 and we have survived the ups and downs of a fluctuating industry. Most people understand that digital marketing is marketing and/or advertising on the internet. That part makes sense. However, most people don’t quite know how it works.
“Hello! This is Tina with Google. I am calling to tell you that your business is not on Google.” Well Tina… You’re a recording and a liar. These calls are usually informing you (in a terrible way) that you need to fix some things about your local listings on Google and Bing. Good news – you can ignore these calls and not worry about if it was real. Bad news – you will always get these calls. Fixing your local listing on Google and Bing are very important, but will not bring you millions of customers as promised. We have seen far too many digital marketing/ SEO agencies come and go due to their efforts of trying to only claim local listings.
“Link-building” is out, “Link-Earning” is in. It doesn’t do much good to have a link to your site from a website that has absolutely nothing to do with your industry or trade. In fact, it may even be harmful to your search presence. There used to be companies built on link-building and they would beg, borrow, buy and trade links to help search engine rankings. Google now cares about how good of a quality is this link? A good quantity of great quality links is what you need.
“But how do I earn links?” It’s simple. Provide great quality content that influencers in your industry are going to want to read and share. Okay, fine. Maybe it’s not that simple. Good news – WebEchoes has developed a tried and true process that we call our Strategic Road Map that helps us generate content that B2B buying influencers will want to read and share.
Google Paid Ads (Pay-Per-Click) is another great way to pull traffic to your website. This is a smart tactic to generate a quick influx of users to your site while you are still building organic momentum, noted above. We commonly hear, “Nobody clicks on the paid ads on Google.” Well that’s just not true. If an ad is compelling and answering the question that people are asking, they will click. Even if they don’t click, they will still see the ad, creating brand awareness.
In all honesty, there is no perfect answer as to what digital marketing is. In all reality, it is a conglomerate of so many different things that all work cohesively to increase your digital brand footprint and exposure. Ensure that you have a strategy based on research before you begin any digital marketing campaigns to make sure that you are not wasting your time and money.