A Comprehensive (Beginners) Guide to SEO
Our 8 part guide on all aspects of SEO, from how search engines work to the effects of UI and UX.
With many traditional marketing methods struggling to survive, digital marketing is fast becoming the primary way to reach out to your target audience. Not only can you increase your visibility exponentially, but you can also target the people who are most likely to buy your goods or services. It is a cost-effective form of marketing that produces tangible and trackable results allowing you the flexibility to tweak or change your strategy as and when required.
As the leading digital marketing agency in Bangkok, we are experts at generating the results our clients’ demand. We use the latest and innovative techniques to ensure that your brand gets noticed by the right people. Reaching your target audience is our primary goal, allowing you to keep control of your marketing budget while also seeing visible results. Our digital marketing campaigns are designed to give you the best ROI and reach out to a broader audience than you could have ever previously imagined.
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
There are numerous benefits associated with digital marketing, but essentially, we can group these into four key areas.
1. Targeting the right people
Unlike any other form of advertising, digital marketing allows you to target those who have an increased likelihood of being interested in your products or services. You can drill down to target an acutely defined audience, which means that you are almost sending a personalised message, which will inevitably lead to higher conversion rates.
You can use several methods, such as utilising the targeting features on social media platforms. Here you can target people using a combination of variables, including age, location or interests. Alternatively, you could adopt one of a range of Pay per Click or SEO strategies. Using this method, you can target potential buyers who have previously searched for your products or services or searched for keywords directly related to your industry.
Having this information at your fingertips enables you to identify specific buying personas allowing you to refine your marketing strategy. With the facility to target sub-groups, you can even target different groups for your differing range of products or services.
2. It’s cost-effective
As you can track and monitor your campaigns in real-time, you can alter your spending across different platforms, focusing more on those that deliver a better ROI. The facility to have complete control over when and where you spend your marketing budget isn’t available to the same degree as any other marketing form.
Small businesses can use proven techniques that require minimal capital outlay, such as spreading their spending across social media advertising, organic SEO or blogging. This impressive ROI couldn’t be matched by print media, billboards or TV advertising – often advertising mediums that aren’t accessible to small businesses.
3. You can compete with the biggest names in the industry
As a small business, it would be impossible to go toe-toe with multinational companies with vast budgets to spend on TV commercials or other nationwide campaigns. However, with carefully constructed digital marketing strategies, it is possible to compete in specific areas. For example, while conglomerates have the marketing budget to focus on generic keywords, a small organisation could identify precise longtail keywords relating to a product or services that they offer. Once identified, high-quality content can be produced, designed to strike a chord and resonate with your target audience.
Influencer marketing is something that has received a lot of coverage in the media recently. Using social media and well-known influencers with a large following, you can ask them to promote your products or services. With influences and online reviews now thought to hold as much influence as traditional “word of mouth”, it is an exciting and different avenue that you could explore.
4. You can measure the success of different campaigns
Whenever you start a digital marketing campaign, you will be eager to see the results. It is possible to measure your campaign’s metrics, such as shares, views, clicks, and the time spent by users on your page. With traditional marketing, it was impossible to gauge a campaign’s success accurately, which could result in significant amounts of money being spent on campaigns that no one noticed or failed to engage with.
As the results are available in real-time, marketers can instantly tweak, stop or increase campaigns to get the highest ROI. The mere fact that you have so much information at your fingertips means that you have more flexibility and control than ever before. Marketing managers, who take the time to monitor their campaigns’ results, typically get the biggest rewards.
What are the different types of digital marketing?
Digital marketing takes on many different guises, and most organisations adopt several strategies at any one time, which reinforces the point about tracking results. Here are some of the most common forms:
SEO aims to improve the “ranking” of your website on the primary search engines, most notably, Google. SEO involves obtaining this higher ranking naturally, which is free rankings that you see on Google below the paid-for ads and is known as “organic SEO”. To effectively boost your organic rankings, you must carry out a combination of the following:
- On-page SEO:This relates to content and images. Marketers will conduct keyword research to determine how the page can answer users’ questions.
- Off-page SEO:Off-page SEO is the component that involves things that aren’t visible on your website. The main but not sole element of this is creating inbound links, also known as backlinks, to your site. The “authority” of the sites where you place the backlinks will greatly impact your ranking. The emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity.
- Technical SEO: This is often referred to as the website’s backend and includes coding, image compression and your site’s loading speeds. This form of SEO often needs to be completed by experts to get the optimal results.
The phrase “content is King” is well known for a reason as it is one of the fundamental ways of improving your SEO, increasing brand awareness and lead generation. There are several straightforward ways that you can incorporate content marketing into your digital marketing campaigns:
- Blogs:The blogs are designed to demonstrate your expertise in your industry and can be published on your website and shared via social media.
- Ebooks and whitepapers:This is generally long-form content and again designed to prove your expertise, but it will also be used to obtain the reader’s contact details.
- Infographics:“Pictures say a thousand words” is undoubtedly true, and infographics are a way of presenting information that users can visualise the point you are trying to get across.
Promoting your website on social media is a fantastic way of increasing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website. Social media marketing can be used on well-known platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. There are some excellent tools available that allow you to control all of your social media marketing from one place.
PPC marketing is another proven way of driving traffic to your website. The best-known form of PPC is Google AdWords, where you pay to get your pages to appear at the topic of the rankings for specific keywords. There are other PPC marketing forms, including paid ads on Facebook and Twitter, along with sponsored messages on LinkedIn.
- Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing involves promoting another business’ products or services, for example, Amazon in return for receiving commission. Popular affiliate marketing channel includes YouTube’s Partner Program and posting affiliate links from your social media accounts. A lot of work is involved when setting this up, but it can reap excellent rewards.
- Native Advertising
Native adverts are mainly content-led articles that appear on platforms such as BuzzFeed, although they can also be found on Facebook and Instagram. They can usually be recognised as they are flagged up as being sponsored posts, although this isn’t always necessarily the case.
- Marketing Automation
Market automation is merely a case of using state-of-the-art software to automate many of your day-to-day marketing functions such as scheduling social media postings, sending out newsletters via email or campaign tracking and reporting. Some businesses also use it to generate and convert leads by sending targeted emails.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing can be used to promote your products, services, events or news to potential customers. However, to send these emails, you must have got the receiver’s permission, usually in the form of a subscription or a reply to something they have downloaded. If you don’t have permission, this could be looked upon as spamming. Typical forms of email marketing include newsletters, promotions or hints and tips.
Sponsored content is a popular form of advertising and involves paying another company or individual to promote content that mentions your products or services. Influencer marketing would be an example of sponsored content as too would blog posts or articles written about a specific topic where your company is mentioned.
