Common digital marketing platforms:
- Content Marketing
- SEO Marketing
- Pay-per-click Marketing
Content Marketing
Allows you to be proactive about educating consumers about products in a relaxed and unpressured way, and answering users’ questions. Digital marketing teams create written content, videos, and other marketing assets to answer questions or provide context throughout the three stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Awareness stage: Buyer realizes they have a need
- Consideration stage: Buyer determines an action to meet this need
- Decision stage: Buyer decides on a product/service to purchase
A consumer might realize they need new gym shoes. The digital marketing team for an activewear company may produce content about what features you need from a running shoe. The buyer then determines they need a pair of running shoes that meets that criteria. Other content might show the most popular running shoes and their price. Once they are educated on these factors, they decide.
Guidance offered throughout consideration and buying processes, builds consumer trust and increases sales. Content marketing produces nearly 3 times as many leads.
Search Engine Optimization Marketing
Content created can be written and posted online in a way that’s more likely to be seen by prospective buyers searching for information on a certain topic than similar content created by their competitors. This is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the customer is using a search engine, Google, to find information about a product/service.
When done correctly, can be an extremely effective part of a business’s marketing strategy. 53% of consumers say that they research their potential purchases before making a buying decision and 51% smartphone users discovered a new product or service via a search engine.
When conducting research on which gym shoes to buy, they will click on one of the first three results on Google. Marketing teams work to ensure their article appears in those top three results. This is done by optimizing content for user experience and ensuring the technical elements are in place to enable search engine crawlers to easily find and index this content.
Pay-per-click
This paid advertising allows marketing teams to purchase traffic to their website. Marketers place ads on websites or search engines and pay a fee every time their ad is clicked on. These ads are determined by bids on specific keywords.
PPC and content marketing are used together, and effectively drive customers to a website and increase sales. Many businesses find that PPC, returns them R36 for every R18 spent, resulting in a 200% return on investment.
