Digital marketing and advertising refers to promoting your business using online channels. Small business owners often find digital advertising and marketing more accessible as it's usually a more cost effective alternative and requires less initial investment than many traditional advertising options. Show On this page
Digital marketing is part of an overall business marketing strategy. Understanding the fundamentals of marketing can help you develop effective online advertising and marketing activities. Before starting with online advertising and marketing, you need to develop a digital strategy and digital marketing strategy for your business. Some businesses will do all their advertising and marketing online. Others will combine this with more traditional forms of advertising and marketing. Think about where your customers are most likely to find out about you and develop a strategy that includes the most likely marketing channels. You can communicate your advertising or marketing content to your audience online through digital marketing channels such as:
Organic and paid trafficYou can use digital marketing activities to generate organic or paid traffic to your platforms and website to increase sales. Organic traffic refers to customers who find your business online themselves. The key to achieving high organic traffic rates is to make your business easy to find. Examples of digital marketing activities that can generate organic traffic are:
Paid traffic refers to visits to your website that were triggered by your online advertising. Paid marketing and advertising may involve pay-per-click or pay-per-view pricing, and other paid advertising options. Paid traffic can come from digital marketing activities, for example:
Benefits of organic and paid trafficYou should include both traffic types in your digital marketing strategy as both can benefit your business.
When choosing a theme for your advertising and marketing, consider aligning it with global or local trends, and showing products and services people are interested in at a particular time. Discover trending subjects with Google Trends.
Location-based marketing delivers targeted marketing messages and information to customers in particular locations. It's an efficient, measurable way to increase sales. Benefits of location-based marketingLocation-based marketing can be a very effective part of your digital plan. It:
Types of location-based marketing
When a potential customer does a web search, location-based listing services provide a list of relevant businesses in the area. Services such as Google My Business provide basic information about the businesses. Other location-based services (such as Yelp and Zomato) have more features. Creating online profiles allow you to get the most out of location-based listings. Depending on which service you use, it can also support your business by:
Create your online business profilesWhen you create an online profile, include:
Also activate review options on the service and ask customers to leave a review. Visit the following free services and follow the instructions to create your online profiles:
Geotargeting enables the delivery of advertising to consumers based on their geographic location. It works by using mobile device IP addresses. These addresses can pinpoint a device to a location. You can use geotargeting to create personalised marketing targeted to customers based on their location. For example, an insurance company could send a targeted advertisement based on their customers' home locations. They could offer different insurance packages in other cities matched to the target customers' needs in those cities. You can:
Geofencing is a specialised form of geotargeting that allows you to target customers when they enter a particular area, for example a shopping centre or specific store. Geofencing uses radio-frequency identification or Wi-Fi to trigger specifically targeted marketing activities when a mobile device enters a specifically designated area, for example:
You can use this to advertise to customers near you. For example, a coffee shop could send a text notification about a drink special when people walk within a certain distance of their store. Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram all support geofencing. You can perform geofencing in-house or through an external digital-marketing agency.
Beaconing is geotargeting that targets small geographical areas using beacons. Beacons are small physical objects in specific locations. These objects will detect devices nearby connected to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. For example, a supermarket may use beacons to send a customer a deal on ice creams when the customer is in the frozen aisle. Beaconing can be used for highly specific marketing activities in your business to capture users connected to Bluetooth within an exact location.
Geoconquesting is location-based marketing that uses geotargeting and geofencing to advertise to visitors in competitor's locations. For example, a business could specifically use geofencing to target users near, or in, a competitor's store to offer competing offers. This form of location-based marketing:
In digital marketing, a landing page is the first page a visitor lands on after clicking on a link from your online marketing content. It's not the same as your website's home page. You can create different landing pages for different advertising campaigns and target markets. A well-designed landing page can:
A landing page must have a call to action (CTA)—a request or invitation to a customer to complete an activity. For example, the CTA may:
There are 2 common types of landing pages:
Choose the type of page that best supports the goals you set out in your digital marketing strategy. Click-through pages
CTA examples
Lead-generation pages
CTA examples
Include the following on your landing page:
We discuss 2 common online (display) advertising platforms below, but there are many more available, including Microsoft Advertising. Ask your business contacts for recommendations or do a web search for 'online advertising platforms' to find the one that best meets your specific needs.
Google Ads (previously called Google AdWords) is a paid service provided by Google. These pay-per-click business advertisements can increase your website traffic, inbound phone calls and in-person/in-store traffic. Find out how to run a Google Ads campaign. Also consider using the free marketing tools offered by Google Marketing Platform.
Meta for Business is a paid marketing service provided by Meta (the Facebook parent company was renamed Meta in 2021). It offers combined advertising opportunities through Meta's platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Facebook IQ – Audience insights can help you choose your audience based on, for example:
Meta for Business – Ad formats can help you choose your advertisement type based on different formats, for example, photo, video, and Messenger. Go to Facebook ads to start your campaign Read about more Meta information and resources:
In marketing, a blog is a collection of online articles on topics of interest to you and your potential customers, for example, your products, your field of specialty, or your business. A blog post (or article) should engage your potential customers. Ideally, visitors should find it so interesting that they add links to your blog from their own sites or social-media platforms. Like any business activity, managing a blog requires planning, resourcing, and monitoring. Benefits of bloggingBy creating regular and unique blog content you:
Comments on postsOne of the most effective ways to use a blog is to allow visitors to leave comments on your posts. Comments create an interactive experience and online communities. They also provide valuable feedback about your products and services. As a blog author, you can respond to comments and may be required to manage (moderate) these online exchanges. You could set rules or guidelines for comments. For example, you would remove:
Blog dashboardThe dashboard is the central hub of the blog hosting platform. It's the first page you arrive on after logging in and houses all the main details about your blog. Your dashboard can manage the theme of your blog through templates. You can write, delete, archive, schedule and save draft blogs. Comments from readers will also be housed here, along with many other details about your blog. Steps to begin blogging
Your blog name should:
There are many different templates and blog hosting platforms you can use to create a blog for your business, both free and paid. If you're new to blogging, choose a blogging platform that:
A blog manager is the person who looks after both the technical and content aspects of a blog. If you won't be doing it yourself, you can engage an external blog manager, assign the task to an existing employee, or hire a new employee.
Regularly publishing new blog posts will improve customer engagement, audience retention and your ranking in search results. A blog content calendar is a great way to manage your blog. It's a simple way to plan what posts you'll write and publish on specific days and times. It can help ensure your blog posts are:
It allows you to:
When writing a blog post, it will helpful to:
It is important to promote your blog post to ensure that it reaches the desired audience. Share your blog post across all your social media channels.
Coupon websites offer discount coupons for goods, services, and events to attract new customers to your business. In Australia, well-known sites include:
Visitors select the category of deals they're interested in and view the current offers online. They then buy the coupon on the coupon website and redeem the coupon with the business. Coupon websites earn income by keeping a share of the value of each coupon sold. Coupon websites offer many benefits for a business aiming to attract new customers and get previous customers to return, including:
Action item: Start using coupon sites
Electronic direct mail (EDM) is a type of marketing using emails sent out to your existing database or contact list. EDM is a cost-effective and straightforward way to:
There are legal requirements you have to meet when using EDMs or email marketing. Under the Spam Act 2003 (Cwlth), every marketing email you send must:
When you create your customer database by collecting customers' email addresses and personal information, there are some privacy considerations you must manage. Read more about the legal requirements of online marketing and storing and collecting customer information.
You'll need to plan content to send out at particular times. You could send out:
If you're a new business and don't yet have an extensive email database, do a web search with the term 'email list building strategies' to get ideas about how to grow your email database.
Email marketing platforms can:
They also enable you to:
Do an online search for 'email marketing platforms' to find one that suits your needs. Also consider...
|