The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing in 2024

Don’t have time to watch the video? No problem. We’ll summarize here. Your approach should revolve around four principles:

• Have clear goals for each campaign (raising brand awareness, generating traffic, driving sales, etc.)
• Understand your target customer (What do they want? What matters to them? What motivates their buying habits?)
• Have a Unique Selling Proposition (what differentiates you from your competitors? What do you do that they’re not doing for your prospective customers?).
• Focus your efforts on one channel at a time. You may assume that an omni-channel approach offers you greater coverage and more chance of making your voice heard. However, you need to start with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Once you’ve perfected your approach on one channel, you can focus on expanding it outward to others.

It may take a while to build a strategy around these principles. However, this will provide the foundation of your digital marketing content as well as providing a framework for success. The better you understand your strategic goals, the more you know which performance metrics you need to keep an eye on. 

Getting Ahead of the Crowd: The Art of SEO

Everything your company does is geared toward being the best in your field, and gaining the trust that creates loyal repeat customers. However, you also need to focus on generating new business if you’re to grow your company sustainably and enjoy a prosperous 2021. In an age where almost 90% of consumers instinctively use search engines to look for services and products, it’s likely to be the channel through which many new prospects find you. 

Unfortunately, because consumers are more fickle than ever, if your competitors rank more highly than you on Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, it may not matter how much better you are than them. 

Users tend to assume that search engines are meritocracies. And that if your competitors are above you in SERPs, it’s because they’re better and more trustworthy than you are. While this may be a fallacy, you need to play the game to attract new business at the expense of your competitors.

Here are some tips for mastering the art of SEO and getting ahead of the crowd. 

Local, National or Global?

First, you need to have a clear idea of which market you’re going after. Are you trying to engage local prospects within a geofenced radius of your business premises? Are you hoping to appeal to new prospects all over the country? Or do you have your sights set on an international market? 

Each requires a slightly different approach to SEO. For instance, when focusing on the local market, it’s essential to focus on ensuring that your Name, Address and Phone number (NAP) data is accurate in order to target the large percentage of smartphone users who carry out “near me” searches. You’ll also need to concentrate on building backlinks from trusted local sources (such as local publications, public bodies and directories). Local Search Marketing Plans are affordable and effective.

National SEO, on the other hand, is a little more technical. It’s geared more toward the use of general commonly use keywords. You need a well seasoned team that can help with any algorithm change and the dreaded Helpful Content algorithm Google sprung on us in August, 2022! Make sure you use advanced SEO Software such as SEMRush or Screaming Frog.

Mobile marketing and leveraging micro moments

Since 2016, mobile internet usage has eclipsed desktop usage. And the gap is only going to widen in 2021. And this means you need to do more than make sure that your website content is well optimized for viewing on a mobile device (although that is important). It also means understanding how people use their mobile devices to look for products and services. 

The intent-rich moments where people instinctively reach for their smartphones to carry out a search are known as “micro moments”, and each of them is an opportunity. These usually come under one of the following categories. 

• “I want to go” moments
• “I want to do” moments
• “I want to buy” moments

If you can position your brand in front of prospects at these moments with relevant content, they’re yours. Well-optimized landing pages, product pages or blog posts (more on those later) can create the first step in their relationship with your brand. 

Beware the black hat!

As with anything worth achieving, it’s important to do things the right way if you want to achieve dominance in search results. However, there are many who may try to lure you to the dark side of SEO with “black hat” SEO techniques. 

These are designed to game the algorithms that search engines use to deliver search results to users. And while they may gain you a temporary spike in traffic, they create way more problems than they solve in the long term. These techniques include:

• Overusing/spamming keywords in content (known as keyword stuffing)
• Keyword stuffing using invisible text (that’s the same color as the background)
• Copying and pasting content from other websites with minor or no changes (this is known as content spinning)
• Links to sites with irrelevant or poor quality content.
• Cloaked redirects that take users to another website that they don’t want to go to

As this video explains, these disreputable practices can actually get your content penalized by Google, with long-term consequences that can be very damaging:

As hungry as you may be for fast results, sustainable results are what you need to aim for. 

Google and other search engines are geared toward giving users access to high-quality, relevant content. Keep producing quality content, using relevant keywords organically, and building backlinks from trusted sources and you’ll find that you creep to the top of SERPs and stay there. 

And this is far preferable to a sharp spike followed by an even sharper dip, which is exactly what you can expect when you give in to the temptation to use black hat SEO techniques. 

Targeting your audience

Market research & customer personas

As we’ve stated previously, you need to understand your customers and prospects if you’re to engage them effectively online. You need to understand what they’re looking for in the products and services you offer. You need to know whether they’re motivated by cost and value for money, or by prestige and status. You need to know what social platforms they use, and when they’re most likely to be online. You need to know what other brands they use, whether they’re related to your field or not.

The more you know about them, the more you can tailor your digital marketing content to appeal to their sensibilities; not to mention appearing in the right place at the right time to engage them meaningfully. 

Social media marketing

The great thing about social media is that it’s become deeply ingrained into the fabric of how we live our lives. Many of us learn about news and current events through our favorite social platforms. We use them to research products we might like to purchase and (increasingly) make purchases directly through social platforms. 

This is why it’s so important to have a robust presence on the platforms that matter the most to your target audience: social media marketing might not necessarily be just Facebook and Twitter. 

If you’re trying to engage affluent young women, Pinterest may be a much better place for you to distribute engaging content. Likewise, if you’re targeting Generation Z, you may find that Facebook and even Instagram don’t yield the same quality results as marketing on Tik Tok or Snapchat.

Geo-Targeting

The key to creating compelling digital marketing is to make your copy relevant. Users may not engage with campaigns they feel are not locally accessible to them, which is why you should employ geo-targeting in your campaigns so content always appears local and relevant.

One of the most common ways to do this is by using location-based landing pages. Creating individual landing pages for the towns and cities that you service can ensure that your content gets more engagement because it’s deemed more relevant by local prospects.

Re-marketing

It’s very rare that prospects will engage with marketing content the first time they see it. They will usually need to see an ad several times before they will consider clicking in it, which is why remarketing ads are so important.

Re-marketing is an effective way to maintain your ad’s presence in the prospect’s online activities. Effectively, your ad follows them around the internet, popping up on websites and social platforms they visit. 

Re-marketing is advantageous for brands as it helps to maintain brand awareness and keep your message at the forefront of prospect’s minds. It also tends to improve engagement and ROI. 

Email

Never underestimate the importance of the basics. Email marketing may seem old hat in 2021. But there’s ample evidence to suggest that email marketing still works. 

According to a study by McKinsey & Company, email marketing copy can be up to 40 times more effective than social media marketing. Especially if you’re generating high-quality, relevant content and appealing offers to the recipient’s inbox. However, if you do business in or with Europe, you’ll know that GDPR legislation may complicate the sending of email marketing materials. 

However, if you can incentivize prospects to give you their email addresses willingly, you can help them to perceive the value in your brand by sending them great content regularly.

Lead magnets are a great way to encourage prospects to surrender their email addresses, and thus enter your sales funnel. These are high-quality pieces of content that have the potential to generate real value for them. These might include free ebooks, white papers, templates, voucher codes and other goodies. 

Generating valuable content is a fantastic way to engage prospects and help them to develop a good relationship with your brand.

Content is key: Delivering value through content marketing

Content marketing should be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. It’s a highly cost-effective and rewarding way to entice new customers to your brand while also encouraging existing customers to keep engaging with you online, even if they’re not buying anything from you at the moment. 

It helps to ensure that you remain a valuable and relevant prospect at all times, while also strengthening trust in your brand. Take a look at this short video in which Hey Jessica explains the value of content marketing:

Your content can be a platform through which you can share your unique combination of knowledge, expertise, insight and experience. After all, these are the things that no competitor can match. 

A good content marketing strategy is highly multifaceted and includes different platforms for the most effective reach. 

Blogging

Blogging frequently is a great way to become a thought leader while also generating value for your clientele. Posting blogs to your website regularly can also help to improve your SEO.

Benefits of blog writing include adding more content to your website, encouraging users to move around your site architecture, improving scroll depth and time on page, and getting more people coming back to your website. And these are all performance indicators that search engines value.

Video marketing

Your prospects are likely busier than ever, and will likely access your content in short bursts through their mobile devices. As such, long-form content like blog posts may not always be the best way to engage them. 

This is why video is the future of content marketing. Yes, video marketing requires time and resources to create. But it is also highly engaging and allows you to communicate a lot of information in a short space of time. 

Podcasting        

Podcasts are growing more and more popular. They’re easy to consume on the go and afford you the chance to keep making a great impression on your customers and prospects alike. They are also quick, easy and fun to produce.

Guest-posting

Finally, you should actively seek out opportunities to guest-post for other brands and appear on their podcasts or vlogs. This can be a fantastic way to introduce your brand to a loyal following who will already be predisposed to you because of your connection to somebody they know and trust.

Whatever kind of content you choose to create, you need to ensure that it remains engaging, relevant and useful to the consumer. Otherwise, it can come across as self-congratulatory, and could do your brand more harm than good.

Converting customers into brand evangelists

Sometimes, the most effective content isn’t the content that you generate. It’s the content your customers generate. 

User reviews, social media posts and any other online content in which they talk about you in glowing terms can go a long way to legitimizing your brand and building trust for new prospects. 

Let’s face it. Consumers will always take anything brands say about themselves with a pinch of salt. But they trust in the word of other consumers. Which is why you should do all that you can to incentivize your customers to become vocal evangelists for your brand.

Pay Per Click: Useful boost or money pit?

For the most part,, we’ve listed digital marketing strategies that are organic in nature. They encourage internet users to find your brand of their own accord. However, building your audience in this way can be time-consuming and labor intensive. 

Supplementing these organic strategies with Pay Per Click advertising (or PPC) on search engines and social platforms can help you to get the best of both worlds. Paid ads can give you a huge boost in brand awareness, giving you the opportunity to follow up with the organic techniques above. 

This can make for an effective one-two punch. However, it’s vital that you get the balance right to ensure that your paid ads aren’t doing all the heavy lifting. Otherwise,  paid advertising can quickly become a money pit.  PPC Management Pricing Plans are  affordable and perhaps one of the best investments one can do in hiring an experienced Google Ad Partner to manage your ad spend.

The importance of keyword research

When it comes to paid ads on Google, you’ll likely need to focus on certain keywords to engage your audience. But some keywords are high in competition and thus, more expensive. So a balance needs to be found to ensure that your keywords generate sufficient ROI.

Aspiring Entrepreneur Project’s Jason Whaling offers this advice on using Google Ads’ Keyword Planner to find the most profitable keywords. The ones that are relevant yet relatively low-competition are the most profitable:

You are not alone: Work with the right digital marketing agency

As you can see, digital marketing is a multifaceted approach to building your brand. And it’s one that requires you to keep a lot of plates spinning at the same time. You may find that managing your own digital marketing while also maintaining operational excellence is simply untenable.

The right Georgia SEO company, however, can help you to design, implement and manage digital strategies that are based around your goals. They can help you to maximize your ROI and prevent your marketing efforts from becoming a money pit, all while staying true to your branding and helping new prospects to see what’s great about your brand.

For more information about how we can do this, get in touch with us today! (404) 923-0015