FAQs - Marketing

Simply put, digital marketing is anything done online to market your website, brand, products or services. It includes a wide and varied range of methods used to engage clients and potential clients.

Crucially, engaging in digital marketing is how you bring in more leads and grow your business. However, it's also about creating awareness in your brand and gaining an advantage over your competitors. Digital marketing allows you to target certain types of people, in certain areas, meaning you only spend money getting the types of clients you want. This leads to higher conversion rates and more cost-effectiveness than traditional marketing avenues such as print, radio or TV advertising. The act of advertising online also means you can directly measure results, ensuring you are getting the return on your investment you need. If not, you can easily make adjustments to ongoing campaigns.

Digital marketing covers a huge range of activities from the most often thought about search engine optimisation, Google Ads and social media to the less often considered content marketing, email marketing and PR. All methods of digital marketing have their value, with each holding individual stengths that might make them more important to one business than another.

Each type of digital marketing has its own method, route, strenths and weaknesses and what works for one business, even within the same niche, may not work for another. In most cases, a mixture of marketing methods is the way to go, however there are many factors to consider, including:

• Budget
• Timeframe
• Industry
• Competition
• Target audience
• Individual goals

So many things influence what works and what doesn't when it comes to digital marketing. It can be a big investment and it's important to get it right.

Before you engage in any sort of digital marketing, you have to know your target audience. First and foremost, this is important so that you know where to find them and, therefore, where to spend your marketing budget. Spending money without knowing your target audience and where they can be found may mean you are wasting your money. Similarly, targeting the right audience means you are more likely to experience higher conversion rates and a higher return on your investment. This is further enhanced by creating content and messaging that speaks directly to your target audience.

First and foremost, you should be getting more enquiries! But how do you know these are a result of your digital marketing efforts? The main answer is in the data. You should be using the tools available to you to monitor the actions that you are looking for. Depending on the type of marketing, tools could include Google Analytics, social media insights or analytics on platforms such as Mailchimp. Whichever tools you use, you should be measuring your conversion rate and monitoring your ROI to ensure your investment is paying off.

The short answer is monthly, but not for everything. On a monthly basis, you should be reviewing your data using your chosen tools. This includes your conversion rate and your ROI and will allow you to quickly make adjustments if something is not working. On a quarterly basis, you should be checking that your strategy still aligns with your business goals and also checking to see what your competitors are doing. Again, this will allow you to make adjustments to your strategy if necessary. At the 6 month mark, you should be checking to see how you are doing in relation to reaching your goals, again making adjustments if required. Finally, an annual review should look at everything in detail, reviewing what worked, what goals are still outstanding and setting new goals. This will allow you to create a brand new strategy for the next year.

Integrated marketing is where all of your marketing channels work together to create one consistent voice. Essentially, anywhere you can be found online, you are saying the same thing. This helps to increase your brand awareness, as well as enhancing the user experience.

For integrated marketing to work, you need a clear multi-platform strategy, ideally with one person or group of people overseeing the whole thing to ensure consistency.

Most digital marketing strategies need a strong website behind them. That is a website that looks good, works well and has the right messaging, as well as being set up to convert the leads that come in through the marketing channels. Any good marketer should review your website as part of a marketing strategy and they may make suggestions for improvements to enhance the campaigns they will be running for you. Changes could simply be changing some wording or imagery or they could be more in-depth such as the addition of widgets of a new contact route.

The main way your website might impact your digital marketing strategy is if it's not up to scratch. The digital marketing method used will bring the lead to your website but, if it's not set up to convert, you will lose them, despite having paid for them to visit your website. At WEBPRO, we don't take on a marketing project that we know won't work due to a poor website.

We've been doing this for a very long time - over 20 years! We've built up our knowledge and expertise over that time and we know what works and what doesn't. We know because we have many happy clients to prove it - and because we do it for ourselves as well!

We understand it can be difficult putting your trust in a business that is new to you. Take the time to look at our portfolio, our client stories and our testimonials for details of the clients we've already helped. You can also use the link in our header to click directly into our Google Reviews. Get in touch and let us talk you through what we do - we can even put you in touch with a client or two!