Digital marketing may often feel like trying to put together a puzzle where the picture keeps changing. One day you feel like you’re getting your head around one set of jargon, and the next thing you know another algorithm update has left you feeling like a novice anew. Taking things back to basics, the fundamentals of digital marketing can be broadly broken down into four pillars: SEO, Social Media, Content, and Paid Advertising. Understanding what makes up these pillars of a successful marketing mix is key to getting ahead in today’s competitive digital space.
To begin with, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the holy grail of digital marketing, where the most relevant and helpful websites are able to appear at the top of the SERPs. After all, when people are search online, the first place they go to search engines first . And if your website is not appearing on the coveted first page of Google, you could be losing out on massive amounts of traffic. SEO is all about understanding how search engine ranking works, as well as the nuances of keyword research and on-page and technical SEO to ensure that Google can easily understand and categorise your website. When done right, SEO can help boost organic traffic to the website, which continues to accrue over time. Unlike paid advertisements, with organic searches there is no cost incurred each time someone visits the website, but the compounding benefits of SEO can help a website rank higher and higher over time, increasing the discoverability of the website dramatically.
Once people have landed on the website, the onus is on the businesses to encourage people to stay and explore more. Creating valuable and informative content is one of the best ways to both attract and retain web traffic. From blog posts and articles to email newsletters, videos, and beyond, the creation of useful content is the beating heart of just about any digital marketing mix. Having a strong content marketing strategy and writing compelling content are all about appealing to the audience and answering their most pressing questions. By providing useful information that helps people overcome roadblocks in their buyer’s journey, content marketing can help encourage people to share the content further and keep coming back to the website for more. Everything from blog posts to captions on social media feeds can be leveraged for content marketing to help build up the website’s authority.
While SEO and content marketing take time to build up steady traffic, social media marketing can help boost word of mouth and brand engagement right from the get-go. When done correctly, social media marketing can help drive significant traffic to the website, as well as boost user engagement. Having a strong social media marketing strategy is all about identifying which channels your target audience is on, and having a consistent presence across them. It is about interacting with the audience and cultivating a strong following on each channel, in addition to understanding how the algorithms of each channel work to boost your content’s visibility. Having strong organic social media smarts can lead to phenomenal engagement with your audience, which can then be leveraged into massive brand visibility and reach.
Finally, while SEO drives organic traffic and social media cultivates engagement, at times businesses need a more direct approach to begin reaping the rewards of their efforts. This is where digital ad marketing comes in, as it has the ability to boost reach and visibility exponentially. From search engine marketing to social media advertisements, paid digital marketing is the best way to get quick wins. Since you are only paying when someone clicks on your advertisement, it is critical to begin seeing which channels are driving the best results and leveraging those. By looking at your overall ad ROI, it becomes possible to optimize further down the line and maximize results.
When looking at the digital marketing mix, it is critical to realise that none of the pillars works in isolation. At its core, effective digital marketing is about combining all four pillars in tandem to create a synergistic effect. SEO informs content, which can then be leveraged into social media posts, which in turn can be boosted via paid media for even more reach. A blog post that has strong engagement can be turned into a compelling caption for a social media post or even a video, which can then be amplified using paid advertisements. In the end, the most successful digital marketing mix understands how to get these pillars to work together in tandem to get the best possible results.
