Use Digital Marketing to build an ROI based internet presence!
Last year, Google processed over 1 trillion search queries. OVER 1 TRILLION!!! It is a mind-boggling number of searches (how many zeros are even in a trillion? 1,000,000,000,000) that sets the stage for why your business should be marketing on the internet. Think of how many of those 1 trillion+ searches could have been for your business, product or service. Do you think the people who were looking for you found you? And that’s just Google’s numbers- Bing and Yahoo searches aren’t included.
These searches are targeted traffic – not impressions, brand awareness or other old school marketing techniques that are not quantifiable and do not drive revenue with ROI for a business. For the non-accountants, ROI is short for Return On investment – for each dollar spent how many dollars return.
Whether we look at a local business in a small city or market, an AM LAW 200 firm with a national presence or a Fortune 500 company with an international presence, there’s very little doubt that driving online traffic will have a significant impact on the bottom line.
Many companies that are not familiar with the internet think that they are in good shape since they have a website. While a website is important for information and lead generation, it only works if people can find it. Unlike the baseball field built in the corn field, they will not come if you build it. Even searches for local businesses in small markets, Google has hundreds of thousands of websites and other properties in their database that they can place into the search results for that particular search term.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the work done to optimize a website or other property and then to drive offsite authority to the property so the search engines see the property as a good choice to place high into the search results. While SEO is an important strategy for a business, Digital Marketing is a more comprehensive strategy that makes use of multiple online strategies to drive new leads to a business.
Online Market Research leads to a Digital Blueprint for building an online presence.
A Digital Marketing strategy begins with online market research to understand what people are actually searching for, determine the competition levels and then to follow the dollars to find opportunities to begin building an online empire. The research leads to a digital blueprint to guide a business in building their lead generating online properties.
The digital blueprint is a dynamic document that lays out the search keywords to target and the work required to capture a share of the market. The blueprint will show what optimization is required on the website for ranking purposes while looking at what other properties should be put into place to create inbound traffic. This will provide a guide to create multiple streams of inbound traffic to eliminate the risk of having all of the traffic coming from one source.
Other than a website, the other properties can include a blog, social properties such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube videos, Directories such as Yelp, Wikipedia listings or even creation of a industry Wiki site and even video sites. The company website and blog site are at the center of the of properties that can start small but end up running into the hundreds as an empire of properties and perpetual lead generating properties are built.
The internet is driving large amounts of revenue for businesses across almost all niches; the question is whether you are getting your share of the business or if it is going to your competitors!
