What is Digital Marketing and How Can It Help Your Business?

If you own a business, it’s likely you either already have an online presence or are considering having one. Perhaps you’re an ecommerce business, with a website where customers can purchase products and look at reviews. You might also have social media for your business, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, where you post regular updates or promotions. If you have any of these, you’ve already encountered digital marketing. 

What is digital marketing? 

Digital marketing is a form of marketing where businesses promote and advertise their services or products online through a variety of techniques and mediums.  

Let's break it down a bit more. Digital marketing includes: 

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): optimisation for “keywords” - that’s what your customers are searching for - on your website to help your pages rank higher in Google’s search results, as well as technical SEO (e.g. fixing broken links). 
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC): promotion of services and products through advertising campaigns on Google. 
• Content Marketing: updating and refreshing a blog or web page with optimised, strategical content. 
• Social Media Marketing: creating strategical campaigns which target specific audiences on social media. 
• Email Marketing: developing effective email marketing campaigns to grow your loyal customer base. 
• Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): reviewing your target audience and developing a strategic plan to improve their experience. 

This list isn’t conclusive, but the overall objective is the same: helping you connect with your customers, increase brand awareness and improve visibility by bringing high-quality, relevant traffic to your site which will ultimately convert into leads. 

Confused? Don’t worry. We’ll keep breaking it down throughout this article. 

What are the advantages of digital marketing for my business? 

Imagine you own a shop. It’s bringing in a few customers here and there, but not quite enough to pay the bills. The outside of your shop is looking a bit tired, and not quite in keeping with the rest of the street.  

So, to improve your shop, you start looking at your competitors, and notice they do things a bit differently to attract their customers. You tidy up the outside, so it is the best-looking shop on the street, and put out a sign showing your most popular products. You put up flyers around your local area to promote your new products and offers. As more and more people start coming into your shop, you make sure it’s easy for them to ask you questions and find out what they need to know quickly and efficiently.  

It’s the same when it comes to your online presence. Digital marketing: 

1. Improves the content, visibility, and appearance of your site for the user. 
2. Promotes your products through online advertising.  
3. Shares your services and products with the users who need them most. 

While this doesn’t cover everything, digital marketing – whether that’s email or social media marketing, SEO or PPC campaigns – can be a cost-effective way of bringing more traffic to your website, so that you can generate relevant enquiries and high-quality conversions. It really depends on your objective. 

Can digital marketing help small businesses? 

Digital marketing can be a great way for small businesses to bring in a few extra enquiries – just take inspiration from Clapham & Collinge. If you’re struggling to make your business more visible to customers and Google, some aspects of digital marketing can help share your business with the world. You might have a website, but you just don’t know how to get people to it. With a combination of paid or organic social advertising, search engine optimisation or content marketing from a digital marketing agency, you can boost traffic to your site, like when Natures Grub employed a mixture of SEO and PPC with us. 

Does digital marketing help your business grow? 

In a time when 98% of the adult population in the UK have a mobile phone (Mobile UK), it is integral that businesses like yours use digital marketing to its full extent. If you’re not making the most of your online presence, you’re missing out on a whole new audience to take your business to the next level. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are. We’ve worked to increase leads through PPC and SEO with schools, like Norwich High School for Girls, and to increase revenue with Searles Leisure Resort. 

Is digital marketing the key to success?

While there’s no shortcut to success, with a clear strategy in place and a reachable target in mind, you can meet your goals and bring in more business over time. Our digital marketing team can help you define individual goals and then recommend how you might meet them, whether that’s through paid advertising or search engine optimisation. 

Read about how the Zoological Society of East Anglia saw success with paid advertising. 

How can Netmatters help?

Netmatters have an expert team of digital marketers and specialists in subjects from Google Analytics to technical SEO to content writing, social media marketing and CRO based in Norwich and Norfolk. When you work with us, you can be sure of regular reporting and an adaptive, flexible strategy that meets your B2B or B2C goals. 

We help many businesses across Norfolk and the UK to meet their goals through SEO, pay-per-click, social media and content marketing. Contact us now for a free consultation on how we can take you to success.