How do I scale a business with digital marketing?
If you’re a business owner, chances are you started it with the intention of growing it into something substantial. Because really, who’s ever really happy working their butt off to operate a business that stays completely stagnant forever?
Indeed, we all look for ways to scale our businesses and aim for the stars. And one of the most effective methods of growing a business is, without question, digital marketing. There are of course other factors involved alongside executing a digital campaign. Making sure you have the staffing and equipment to keep up with the increased demand and implementing new technologies to automate processes and increase efficiency are just two that come to mind.
But for the sake of this article, we will explore the ways in which you can effectively scale your business through the right digital marketing approach. But first, let’s get into what we mean when we say ‘digital marketing’.
What is digital marketing?
For the uninitiated, digital marketing (aka online marketing) is basically any kind of advertising that’s implemented via the internet. This advertising can be served up on a variety of different devices, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of different ways that brands can use digital marketing to communicate their advertising messages, though there are essentially four major types of digital marketing:
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The process of SEO involves using a variety of different tactics to increase where a website is shown in the organic search results of Google or another search engine when particular keywords are searched for. Boosting your ranking in SERPs (search engine results pages) will drive higher traffic to your website, which in turn creates many more sales and lead opportunities.
There are more than 200 different ranking factors that are taken into consideration, including (but absolutely not limited to):
● Quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to the site
● The quality of the content on each page including relevant keywords appearing naturally within it
● The speed and accessibility of the site
● Internal linking throughout the website
● User experience
● Meta tags
In addition to driving more traffic to your website, by working on your SEO and ranking higher in the results, you’re also improving your brand awareness and trustworthiness – even for those who don’t click through at that time.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
Otherwise known as PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, this is where businesses set up paid advertising which is shown provided the bid is higher than the competition. There are several different types of SEM ads including:
● Search ads, text-only ads which are shown above and below the organic results
● Display ads, image ads are shown on a selection of the 1 million+ Google Partner websites and apps on the Google Display Network which correlate with your target audience parameters
● Video ads which can be run as a standalone or inserted into streaming video content on YouTube
● Shopping ads where an image of your product and its price and store information is displayed when a user clicks on the ‘Shopping’ tab after searching for something on Google
● Call-only ads that only pop up on devices that can be used to make calls which offer a one-click phone call action
● Retargeting ads that, once a user has visited your site, will be served to them as a gentle reminder that they had an interest in your brand/product
While SEO is often referred to as a marathon, SEM ads could be seen as a sprint as you don’t need to wait to see results. That is, once you set the campaign live, as long as you’ve done it right you’ll quickly start to see the fruits of your labour.
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
As the name suggests, SMM is where social media is the channel used to achieve a particular marketing goal. This might be to drive click-throughs and boost your website traffic, increase brand awareness and recognition, grow your social profile followers or as a focus on total conversions.
There are a lot of different social platforms on which to do it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Reddit and Pinterest – just to name a few. And for every platform, there’s a unique method that’s required to communicate with your audience to ensure you see the best results. Get it wrong at all and you’re gonna have a bad time.
Content marketing
The aim of content marketing is more about offering your audience something useful, informative and/or entertaining and less about blatant advertising. It involves creating quality pieces of content such as how-to videos, interesting infographics, blog posts and newsletters to grow a meaningful relationship between brand and audience.
How to use digital marketing to scale a business
Due to the constantly evolving digital landscape, there are many different ways you can utilise digital marketing to scale your business. And considering there are now around 5 billion internet users across the globe and 22.13 million in Australia alone, it’s clear just how important a role online marketing plays to properly scale most (if not all) businesses these days.
To help guide you on your way, here are 10 ways digital marketing can help you when it’s time for your business to grow.
- Expand your target audience
You’ve probably already got an established target audience you spend all of your time and marketing budget targeting because, well, you know they’re the best chance of converting!
But if you want to grow your business, it’s always a good idea to seek out new audiences that you can target – even just as a secondary market. To find out who this new segment might be, your first port of call should be visitor data from Google Analytics. But you can also conduct research on who your competitors are targeting, for example by hopping onto their social profiles and looking through their follower lists.
Once you have a good idea of this new market segment, you can start thinking about the most appropriate ways to communicate your messaging to them.
- Determine the most appropriate marketing channels
Just because you’re looking to scale your business up, it doesn’t mean throwing your marketing budget at every single channel and seeing what sticks. That approach always leads to a good amount of wasted money that would’ve been much more effectively utilised elsewhere.
Instead, reinvest into your marketing by determining exactly which channels are going to deliver the highest ROI for each stage. This might look like a multi-pronged approach across SEO and SEM for the consideration and/or conversion stage, as they work together very well to drive traffic and promote brand authority in search results.
The channels you choose to use in your digital marketing strategy should be based on what your goals are and which stage of the marketing funnel you’re targeting.
- Research and strategy
Developing an online marketing strategy is a step by step process which grinds to a halt without the necessary information. For example, having no idea who your target audiences are is the first step toward failure because, without this basic knowledge, there’s no logical next step in building an effective strategy.
Conducting in-depth research into your audience to determine factors like the most appropriate channels to reach them, when to do so and in what way (the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’) will be the difference between a successful campaign and one that didn’t deserve to see the light of day.
Your strategy is the backbone of whether you’re able to scale using digital marketing as the conduit or not, so don’t rush it.
- Increase brand awareness
The more people that know about your brand and the products/services you offer, the better. And this is especially true when you want to expand your business.
Often, it’s assumed that a lot of money needs to be spent on awareness campaigns. For traditional media, that’s absolutely true. But the beauty of digital is that you aren’t wasting your ad budget on people you’re not interested in introducing your brand to. You can execute campaigns that will put your advertising in front of segments that are similar to your primary target audience, or even a completely different audience altogether. But one whose parameters you’ve dictated.
Use social media marketing and Google display ads to spread awareness of your brand to the right audiences who are most likely to actually have an interest in it.
- Promote brand loyalty
Growing your business shouldn’t only focus on bringing in all new business. By showing your existing customers and followers some love and engaging with them in the right ways, you’ll build relationships with them that can last a lifetime.
This might include answering questions that people ask on your social media profiles or addressing any issues people have in an open and honest way. It may also involve creating informative content like how-to videos or simply content that’s made to entertain such as some delicious memes.
- Work on your SEO
You might already be ranking well for a few different keywords across a few of the pages on your website, which is great. But considering there are more than 200 ranking factors, there’s always room for improvement when it comes to SEO.
For example, are you making sure to update each of the pages to keep the information correct and relevant? And have you updated all of the meta-information (title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, etc.) to provide visitors with the best possible experience? Staying on top of your site’s overall user experience is essential, and will make a huge difference in your conversions when you start to bring in more traffic.
- Create and grow social profiles
This doesn’t mean jumping on every single social network and making profiles for each. That would – for most businesses – be a huge waste of time and resources. Instead, find out which are the most popular amongst your target audiences and use those.
Enhancing your social presence by optimising your profiles and posting regularly will help to grow followers, which in turn increases awareness of your brand and provides opportunities to connect with more prospective customers.
- Start an ongoing blog
One of the more effective pieces of content is a blog, and creating a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly posting schedule can be a great lead generation tool. You can then publish and share the links with your social followers.
It’s important to remember that the topics of each blog must be of interest to your audience as this gives them a better chance of being shared and linked back to. Analytical data (engagements, shares) on the social platforms you use will show you what kind of content they like and what they don’t care for much.
- Implement an email newsletter
Another great piece of content you can utilise is an email newsletter. These are highly useful as a way to stay in the front mind of your consumers and can feature your latest promotions and offers to drive website clicks.
However, as most people receive dozens of emails per day it’s vital that each element of your newsletters is developed to perfection. From the subject line to the preheader and its design, you have just a moment to capture their interest. If done well, it’s an incredibly cost-effective way to reach your target audience.
- Use paid Google ads
As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of different formats of Google ads. Because of this, they’re a very powerful tool to communicate your advertising messaging throughout every stage of the marketing funnel. And if you set up, target and optimise your Google ad campaign correctly and use captivating copy/imagery/video, you’ll see results you’d struggle to see elsewhere in the digital marketing realm.
Bring in the big guns to take care of your digital marketing
When it’s time to scale your business up using a digital marketing campaign, you need to make sure you’ve put together a solid strategy first and foremost. Because as they say, proper planning prevents poor performance.
The process of scaling your business is one that involves a lot of work. So if you want to focus on the aspects you know best and leave the digital marketing to a team that understands it better than anyone else, it’s time to speak with First Page Digital.
We offer a full suite of Digital Marketing Services including social media marketing, SEO and paid Google advertising, programmatic and more. And we’ll make sure your business experiences the influx of sales and leads necessary to scale exponentially.
Call us now on 1300 479 226 and have a chat with us about your scaling goals.
