Digital Marketing | SEO & Search | Paid Ads | Digital Agency London

Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and distributing content—text, pictures, multimedia— that adds value for your audience, instead of just broadcasting an advertising message. If you’re in B2C (business to consumer), ‘content’ can mean social media posts, blog articles and fun videos; if you’re in B2B (business to business), it might be more white papers or reports, webinars and educational videos.

The pros

• It’s free in the sense that it’s about attracting customers to you and your brand instead of paying to push your message out to a cold audience
• Content is incredibly versatile and can help you build your brand as you educate, entertain and inspire your audience; it’s what fuels all the other types of digital marketing, driving search engine optimization, social media, email, etc.

The cons

• With everyone now waking up to the importance of content and pumping out blog posts, videos and whatever else, it’s a very cluttered space that makes it hard to stand out
• To be effective, you need to come up with consistent, high-quality content that meets the needs of your customers while also representing your brand and achieving your business objectives

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is all about getting your website to appear at the top of the results when someone searches for your brand, your products and services and other relevant words and phrases. Think Google (let’s face it, that’s the main one) but also Bing (often installed on business computers, so good for B2B!). It includes both organic or natural search (search engine optimization, or SEO) and paid search (pay per click, or PPC) and both desktop computers and mobiles (as well as smart home assistants these days—see number 10—audio marketing).

SEO

Search engine optimization does what it says on the tin: optimizing for search engines! This means creating content that people are actively searching for as well as making sure that this content, and the platforms where it’s sitting, is optimized from a technical point of view as well. Everyone should be doing this, no matter what business or industry you’re in.

The pros

• It’s free!
• When your brand appears in the organic search results, it comes across as being more ‘authentic’ and objective in the eyes of your customers

The cons

• You may not have to pay specifically for the search results, but it does take time and effort to create amazing content and do the technical optimization of your website
• You’re at the mercy of Google’s changing algorithms and with all the content that’s out there now it’s very hard to rank highly in the organic results

PPC

Pay per click is paid search advertising, for instance, Google Adwords or Bing Ads. It looks almost the same as the natural search results, except that it appears at the top of the page with a little box that says ‘Ad’. You can buy a top-ranking position via an auction based on keywords, geographical location and demographics—it’s especially useful for e-commerce and for local businesses.

The pros

• PPC can quickly buy you a top ranking if you’re willing to pay for it
• You only pay when someone clicks (hence the name!)

The cons

• It can get expensive, especially when you’re targeting popular keywords
• A lot of customers are skeptical of paid ads and are more likely to trust the natural search results

Display Advertising 

Display advertising, also known as banners, is a lot like the traditional print ads you’d get in magazines, except that they are online, and you can target specific publications that you know your audience reads. It has become much more sophisticated now with programmatic advertising (where ads are booked, analyzed and optimized automatically using algorithms) and retargeting (like when you look at a pair of shoes on your favorite department store website and then those shoes follow you onto every website you visit for months afterwards).

The pros

• You can target, and re-target, customers very effectively
• Display ads are really easy to track and allow you to measure conversion in real time

The cons

• Customers can suffer from ‘ad blindness,’ ignoring your ad to focus on the content they are trying to read
• You need to find a way to maximize impact, so that people notice you, but not so much that they get annoyed!

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is almost as broad as digital marketing itself and will overlap with a lot of the other types. It involves doing everything you’re doing on desktop but adapting it to mobile, as well as doing mobile-specific things like in-app advertising, sending text messages, and using social messaging apps. It’s especially important if you’re targeting a younger audience who spends all their time on their phones

The pros

• Customers (that includes you and me!) are on their phones much more than on their computers these days, so mobile marketing means reaching them where they’re spending their time
• Mobile marketing can be hyper-targeted using specific audience segments or geo-fencing to get to people in a specific location

The cons

• You have a very small space to play with creatively on a phone, mobile ads have a low click rate (with the few clicks you do get mainly being due to fat finger syndrome!) and most apps get downloaded once and are then forgotten
• People don’t want to be interrupted by brands and marketing messages when they’re in the middle of communicating with friends and family

Social Media Marketing

Compared to other channels like TV, print and even online display advertising, social media adds a whole new dimension of engagement and interaction. Instead of just broadcasting messages out at a mass audience, you can really interact with your customers and listen to what they have to say. There are all sorts of channels—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat—and options ranging from organic—for example, Facebook groups, page posts, stories and Messenger—to paid—like Facebook ads. Pretty much every business should be on at least a couple of these social channels.

The pros

• The effort you put in can be multiplied as people like, comment on and share your content with their friends and connections
• Facebook ads, in particular, have become very sophisticated and you can target specific customer segments with your content to get your message seen by the right people

The cons

• The Mark Zuckerbergs who are behind these social channels are constantly making changes, adjusting their algorithms or finding new ways to make money, and it’s hard to stay on top of all these changes and to keep your marketing working effectively
• It may sound simple to do a bit of posting on social, but you need a proper strategy and a lot more time than you think to do it properly and consistently

Email Marketing

Email may seem old school in a world where everyone is instant messaging or Snapchatting, but email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing tools. Especially e-commerce sites and retail brands are seeing a lot of success with pushing seasonal promotions and discounts (think Black Friday deals or Mother’s Day), while you can also use email newsletters to ‘nurture’ your prospects by giving them a lot of value beyond just pushing your products and services.

The pros

• Having an email list means you can stay in touch with your followers independently of any changing algorithms (say, if Mr Zuckerberg suddenly decides to close down your Facebook group)
• Staying in regular contact with your email list will help you build relationships and will keep you ‘top of mind’ when they’re ready to buy

The cons

• A lot of emails are left unopened, so you’ll need to come up with strong subject headings to grab people’s attention away from their cluttered inboxes
• You need to find a way to keep adding value so that they stick with you and don’t unsubscribe

Video Marketing

Video is the star of the show these days and if there’s one thing you should be doing, whatever your business, this is probably it! It can be a short clip or a longer format, educational or entertaining, pre-recorded or streamed live, in real time. It’s no longer just the case of taking a TV ad and putting that online but instead, you’re creating bespoke content for your digital channels.

The pros

• Video can be super effective in getting your message across as it creates an emotional connection with the audience and is much more memorable than just some text or even a picture
• All the major channels—Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn—are pushing video now so your video content will get more reach and engagement in those social feeds and rank higher in search engine results

The cons

• With the low attention spans of today’s audience, you need to grab people’s attention in just a few seconds—or they’ll move on to whatever’s next in their feed
• Although anyone can make a low-budget video, creating high-quality, engaging video content will take time, skill and money