From PPC to SERPs to SEO, digital marketers use a lot of technical jargon and acronyms to describe the work we do. At Gemini, we employ experts in every aspect of our industry; however, we do want our clients to understand the services we provide and how they’re helping their businesses thrive. We don’t want anyone to feel alienated by terms they’ve never heard or confused by data that doesn’t make sense.
If you’re looking for a user-friendly primer to all things digital marketing, read on. We’ll try to explain what we do, how we do it and how digital marketing can improve the way people discover your business. If you have any questions after reading this article, reach out!
What Is a Digital Marketing Agency?
Marketing is about connection. Its goal is to create and enhance the relationship between your business and your customers. Marketing gives you an authoritative presence and consumer-friendly image that attracts new customers and inspires existing customers to return. By understanding what problem you solve for your customers, we can create campaigns that attract and convert them.
A digital marketing agency uses the internet and digital media to facilitate the business-customer relationship. Marketers use a variety of services or channels to achieve their goals. Often, building a marketing strategy using a combination of these channels will give your business the best results. A digital agency might recommend any combination of these channels for your company:
- SEO
- Content
- Pay Per Click
- Web development
- Social media
- Email Marketing
- And more!
Using these services, a marketing team will generate new leads for your business and increase your brand awareness in the digital world. Not only will they create online content that gets you noticed, but they will also measure the results of those efforts to constantly improve.
What is the Role of SEO in Marketing?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is any online application you use to find information. Google, Yahoo and Bing are all examples of search engines with Google being the biggest, owning 92% of the market.
Optimizing for a search engine means strategically filling your content with the words and phrases that match user intent and get it noticed by the search engine. If you perform a search on Google, you’ll notice pages and pages of results. Most often you’ll only look at the first few results and rarely click to the next page. The goal of SEO is to put your business at the top of those search engine results pages (SERPs) so that users find you ahead of your competition.
SEO affects every piece of digital content you create. From landing pages to blogs to paid advertisements, you want your content to be optimized to rank for search queries related to your business.
Why Content is Important in Digital Marketing
Content is essentially any text or creative your business makes and shares. Content can be a ten-word social media post, an in depth 2,000-word article about your industry or an infographic. While it may seem simple to write content yourself, good content is harder than it looks. Poorly written pages that aren’t properly formatted and optimized can reflect negatively on your business.
What makes good content marketing is expertly crafted pages that demonstrate your authority and build consumer confidence in your company. Search engines will recognize your expertise and reward you with better rankings which in turn makes you more visible to customers. Content marketing services encompass anything written and published digitally.
What is Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising?
Pay per click (PPC) ads appear in the results pages of search engine queries. If you perform a search for terms that companies have advertised for, their ads will appear above the other, organic, results. For example, a search for car tires on Google yielded the results in the image below:
These ads are called pay per click because you pay for the ad each time a user clicks on it and goes to your site. When you create a paid ad, you bid on how much you’re willing to pay when a user clicks on your ad; this amount will put you above or below other advertisers that have bid on the same terms. What you’re charged depends on the keywords you bid on and how useful Google has deemed your page.
An experienced paid marketing expert can explain the advantages and disadvantages of pay per click for your business. A PPC campaign targeting keywords related to your business can generate an influx of traffic to your site.
Why Web Development is Important to Marketing
Your website is the foundation of your marketing strategy. It’s like a banner for your business. If your site is slow, if it’s outdated or if it doesn’t positively represent what you do, you’ll lose customers quickly. In today’s fast-moving world of instant information, discerning customers are quick to move on. Your competitor is only one click away.
Digital marketing and web development go hand in hand. A skilled web developer can design an attractive and functional website that puts you in front of your competitors. By working with the SEO and content teams and ground zero, a web designer can build a website that not only looks great but will also be optimized so that search engines recognize it as higher quality than your competitors.
Social Media Marketing
57.6% of the global population uses social media with the average user spending 2 hours and 27 minutes per day. Social media can be an incredibly lucrative channel for digital marketing, but you have to know how to leverage it.
Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat cater to different demographics and have different rules for advertising. A digital marketing agency can maximize your social media advertising dollar by putting the right content on the right platform. They can also track results and adapt based on changes and new trends.
How to Succeed in Email Marketing
Nearly every company has a running email list… But are you using yours to your best advantage? Email is a great way to promote products, update new services, share coupons and educate your customers. Unless they don’t open or read your email.
Email marketing is the art of sending carefully constructed emails with enticing subject lines that will attract and engage recipients. A digital marketer versed in email marketing best practices knows how to create campaigns that reach their intended audience. An email marketing specialist will A/B test (try different versions of the same message) to measure which method of delivery your audience prefers. They will track the results, engage new subscribers and follow up with future emails that match each target’s intent.
Email marketing has a higher return on investment (ROI) than other marketing channels. On average, you can expect to recoup $55 for every $1 you invest towards email. But you need to play the long game.
Get Easy-to-Understand Advice and Effective Digital Marketing Services
There’s no need to wade through technical articles and confusing jargon when you have a friendly marketing team ready to help. The team members at Gemini are all experts in their marketing disciplines and we’re never too busy to get to know you and discuss your marketing strategy. We deliver results through personalized services that put your needs first. Ready to get started? Get in touch with Gemini today!
