Untangling The Digital Marketing Mix

You likely here more than you need to about online marketing in 2021. The reality is, online is now the go-to for attracting customers. Maybe you’ve heard a bit about using Facebook, or even Facebook Ads. Then there’s search ads on Google. And email marketing. And what about SEO? Today we’re going to breakdown the digital marketing mix and take a quick look at the basic strengths and weaknesses of each channel.

Firstly, let’s breakdown digital marketing like this.

PPC Advertising.

PPC Advertising stands for pay per click. It refers to the kind of advertising platforms provided by companies like Google and Bing. And when people talk about PPC, this is generally what they’re talking about – platforms like Google Ads. Although many other advertising platforms offer this model of advertising. The big advantage of pay per click advertising is that, as the name suggests, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad. We’ll look at PPC in the form of search advertising in a little more detail below.

SEM

SEM stands for search engine marketing. SEM includes any online marketing activity that involves search engines like Google and Bing. SEM includes PPC advertising and organic search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO

Search engine optimisation involves ensuring that search engines have the best possible understanding what your website is about, and taking steps to improve your website visibility on search results pages. The more visible your website is when people use search terms relevant to your product or service greatly impacts the number of visitors who reach your website.

SMM

SMM stands for – you guessed it – social media marketing. Social media marketing can include paid advertising on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. But it also refers to any of marketing activity that uses social media – whether it’s maximising organic reach and engagement or utilising these platforms paid advertising options.

Email Marketing

As the name suggests, email marketing simply refers to the use of email to promote your business, brand, product or service. Dedicated online marketers have long realised the tremendous value in being able to communicate directly with your audience by email. And popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp make it possible to both send and carefully track email marketing campaigns. We’ll look at some of the benefits of email marketing in more detail below.

Websites

When it comes to digital marketing, your website plays a critical role as the hub of your online marketing activity. Email marketing campaigns will generally lead back to your website. Search campaigns – both organic and paid – are designed to bring customers to your website. And even your socials – although they can stand alone – are another way to bring traffic to your site.

Analytics

With all these online marketing options, you want to know what to choose, and how well it’s working. One of the great advantages of digital marketing campaigns is that you can accurately tracking just how well they’re working. And with granular analytics, you can also see exactly what’s not working. All this gives you the ability to refine and improve digital marketing campaigns over time. If you’re using our Coffs Harbour web design service, your website will include analytics so you can begin monitoring performance from day one.

Website Analytics. The first place to start recording data for is your website. You want to know how many people are arriving at your website, where they’re arriving from, and how they’re engaging with your content. Google Analytics provides all this data and much more. If you don’t already have Google Analytics installed on your website, do so today. There are a range of other Analytics services available, including Statcounter. However for most people and circumstances, Analytics works very well.

Email Analytics. If you’re running an email marketing campaign, you should be able to accurately track things like opens and link clicks. This gives you valuable insight into what’s working and what’s not working in your campaign. Email marketing platforms generally come with built in analytics. Sometimes racking link clicks in plain text email can be problematic – read more about using plain text and html in your email marketing.

Social Media Analytics. There are many third party tools available to help drill down into your social engagement with great detail. Sprout Social and HubSpot both offer advanced social analytics. If your social presence includes and Facebook page, remember also to make use of the built analytics and page performance reports available there. Here’s a

PPC Analytics. If you’re running a PPC campaign on a platform like Google Ads, you can completely integrate your ad campaign data with Google Analytics. This gives you a complete, context-rich overview of how your campaign is performing, and how that compares to leads and conversions from your organic traffic.

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