Digital Marketing - Which Tool is Right For Me?

If you're reading this article, then you have unwittingly been manipulated by the owner of this website. Do not be alarmed! This is perfectly natural. You are simply the subject of digital marketing, and there have probably been a wide range of behind-the-scenes activities that have brought you to this website to read this content. A pat on the back for the webmaster. Still reading? Excellent, a pat on the back for you.

Digital marketing has been around for quite a while, although the phrase is starting to gain some more mainstream use since the recession forced many marketing teams to look for cheaper, more measurable and accountable alternatives. Traditional marketers have been forced to become familiar with Search, Email Marketing, Paid Search Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, and Social Media. These are no longer magic words, these are mainstream marketing channels that are rapidly growing their share of marketing budget.

Define Your Objectives

As with all marketing, choosing the right tool for the job is crucial for a digital marketing campaign to succeed. The first step in deciding which tool to use is to clearly define what your marketing objectives are. What do you need to achieve? When do you need to achieve this by?

The next stage in your marketing plan is to understand your audience. Who are they? Where do they go online? How do they want to find you? Once you have these answers, choosing the tools that you will use becomes a whole lot easier.

Search

By its very nature, search marketing requires patience as your customers need to be looking for you or the services that you offer before they'll be exposed to any sort of marketing message. In classical marketing, this is the pull form. Search continues to grow in popularity as the web itself grows and content become ever more dispersed.

Ranking well for search terms is no longer the walk in the park that it used to be. To rank well requires a dedicated approach to building useful, unique and authoritative content. Search has more in common with PR than ever before.

In order to be successful, the first step in understanding search is to ascertain whether there is enough search volume for your chosen phrases to sustain your business or make a return on your invested time. If a visitor typically buys a small value item, you need to generate a large volume of them. If they don't search online for those items, then search is not a viable option.

Search has two options - paid or organic. Which one you will target will depend on your budget, your commitment to building a brand and its accompanying content, and the timescale within which you want to start driving traffic. If you're not prepared to invest in a brand building campaign, or need results immediately, then go for the paid option.

Paid search is fantastic when you need quick search presence and need to start driving traffic immediately. Script Generator needs to be taken to understand the value of a visitor to your site. So divide your average revenue per customer by the number of site visitors that it took to get you that revenue and you have your value per visitor. Now bidding on keywords becomes easier and the whole system becomes easier to manage.