From UTalkMarketing

Over the next few weeks, various UTalkMarketing folk will be writing a series of articles on digital marketing to help you and your business make the most of the opportunities it provides.

 We live in a time of both extraordinary change and opportunity for marketers. Digital marketing gives us the chance to deepen our relationships with consumers and drive enormous value for our businesses.

 We think marketers today have the chance to redefine marketing for the next 50 years. To give you an idea of the scope of the opportunity:

• 19% of all marketing spend in the UK will be on digital in 2009
• Google is already bigger than ITV in the UK in terms of advertising revenue
• By 2011, online commerce in the UK will be worth a staggering £52bn

Digital marketing comes with a language, skills, and techniques that can be picked up with hard work and trial and error. Many businesses spend thousands of pounds on agency’s who do the work for them. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the route for everyone – especially small businesses with no budget. Many of the skills can be taught and if you look beneath all the jargon – it’s really not that hard!

Here is an introduction to the different forms of digital marketing for you to get started.

How to get the most from digital marketing

They key to getting the most from online marketing is getting the basics right first. If you’re a small company, you need to think smart and think where the big wins are with the minimal amount of effort (and man power).

A brief introduction to search

Search marketing is the marketing technique du jour. Even up to CEO level, managers are concerned about their strategy for the huge expansion of marketing in the area.

Search companies like Google, Yahoo and Ask are like the operating systems of the internet.

You need them to find the information you want, and they are essential to users because of the sheer volume of content on the internet.

Search is a god-send to marketers, because people are communicating their intentions through the search terms they type.

Someone who types “cheap flights”, for example, is very likely to be booking a flight in the future. So if you sell flights and you can get them to your website, you have a very good chance of converting them into a sale.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

As the title implies, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad and is transported to your website. Whether they then buy anything is immaterial – you still pay.

PPC ads are the results that appear at the right hand side of the search results page (in blue) and also sometimes appear at the top.

The position that your ad appears in is crucial – the vast majority of the traffic goes to the top 5 adverts. How do you get your ad position higher? Spend more money! There are other, more complex techniques too, which will be discussed later and feature in our digital training.

Most businesses should buy the most important keywords relating to your business. You need to put yourself in the place of your customer. What would you search for to find you? Keep it relevant.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Search engine optimisation is about how high your business appears in the unpaid listings that typing in particular terms brings up. This is also known as “natural” or “organic” search.

The order in which search results are displayed are crucial to generating traffic to your website. Less than 10% of people look at the second page, and the majority of traffic goes to the top five results. You need to be on the first page.

The rankings are determined by a complex algorithm which companies like Google guard closely, and these are explored more in our SEO Skills Accelerator course (www.utalkmarketing.com/Training/seo.html).

The top determinants though are how many other sites link to yours, the relevance of your page to the search term, and the click-through rate your results produce.

Our view is that you cannot afford not to think about SEO. It’s free and despite the rocket science that most agencies claim to be experts in, the basics are very simple.

Online PR

The growth in traffic on the web has led to a huge rise in the number of places that you can place news stories. Many web sites boast audience numbers which are at least as big, if not bigger than their magazine counterparts.

They are also more desperate for stories and exclusives, because they are frequently ignored. Once there, your story will live on and can be found through search even thought it’s not on the front page any more.

Community sites (and there are many!) also pose a PR challenge. The web allows your customers to talk to each other, and when you let them down, talk they will.

The key is managing what’s happening online and getting people to talk about your brand by giving them something good to talk about!

Online Display

There are a number of online advertising display options, the best known being banner ads. There are a range of other display options, such as MPU’s, interstitials and homepage take-overs.

A key debate over the benefit of online display is the post-impression impact. Research by a number of companies, not all of them web site owners, has demonstrated that web display advertising has an impact on brand equity, and on short-term purchasing.

So even though someone doesn’t click on your advert, you will get some benefit. Normally you will get around 50% more people being influenced by the advert and coming to your site than a simple measure of click-through would indicate.

Generally online display is not worthwhile unless you are spending at least £3-5k on a campaign (which not everyone has a budget for!) We run an online display course to help with this complex area (www.utalkmarketing.com/Training/digital-display.html)

If you want to know more, UTalkMarketing run a variety of digital marketing training courses for all levels. See our training courses here: www.utalkmarketing.com/Training or email daniel@utalkmarketing.com

www.utalkmarketing.com is the first B2B user generated content site for the client marketing community set up by Niall Mckinney, ex Chief Marketing Officer for lastminute.com.