Whether your business is one that sells goods or disseminates information, knowing how to market your product is essential. That involves having an intimate knowledge of various types of web-marketing strategies that can be used to help promote your business. The four most common internet marketing strategies are: Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Marketing, and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing (e.g. Google AdWords). This article aims to go through the basics of each of these digital marketing strategies, although in practice they are often interlinked and can overlap.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most simple and common strategies on the internet today. In basic terms, rather than relying on traditional advertisements to spread your message to the masses, Content Marketing relies on providing good-quality, valuable information and content to your users. This allows you to create a loyal ‘following’ thus expanding your user-base and allowing your business to use this as a launch-pad to drive sales. For this type of marketing to be used successfully by your business, you need to be able to produce new and fresh information and content which users find interesting, engaging and useful. Content Marketing ties-in with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), as your content will be picked up by search engines and rated according to its relevance. Good content will often be shared via Social Media also thus tying-in with Social Media Marketing. By providing the best and most-engaging content available, you will have a greater level of success than your competitors.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

When you mention web-marketing, for most people this strategy is the one that comes to mind. The aim of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to have your website appear as highly as possible on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) (usually Google) based on the search terms / parameters. Given that search engines place a great deal of emphasis on good-quality valuable content, SEO ties-in closely with Content Marketing, as essentially your website and all of the content that you produce can be made to appeal to search engines. This entails the proper usage of keywords, latent semantic indexing, and headers so that search engine algorithms pick up your content and rate it highly. However, good SEO also takes a number of other factors into consideration such as your website design and structure, indexing, number of links and social media ‘shares’ etc. The result is that well implemented SEO will enable your content will show up first when people are searching for keywords related to your business, allowing your business to get the exposure that it needs.

Social Media Marketing

Another popular internet marketing strategy is that of Social Media Marketing. If you are familiar with Twitter, Facebook and any other social media, then you already know how much content gets shared, posted and re-posted, or even how fast something can go viral. Your business can use this to its advantage for marketing purposes, by advertising your services and releasing your content on a page that can endlessly be shared and promoted. If you have friends, fans or followers on social media, you can have your page shared multiple times allowing you to reach people all around the world at minimal expense, and the increasing importance of Social Media links in how search engines rank their content mean that Social Media Marketing could also have a positive impact on your SEO strategy. Not only is this a relatively cheap and effective way of advertising, but it can also be relatively low-maintenance once it is up and running.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click advertising using Google AdWords or a similar platform, is a widely uses web-marketing strategy. It essentially allows you to bid on keywords that are relevant to your business, so that once a search is initiated using those keywords, your business website can be displayed in the ‘advertised’ area of a results page allowing people to click on it and go through to your website. In return, you pay the search engine / platform a small fee for every person that clicks through to your website in this way. This can generate many website views for as little as a few cents per click. In essence this strategy is one where you are paying for potential customers to be directed to your website.

These are some of the basics of the most common digital-marketing tools and strategies that your business can utilise in order to build its internet presence and reach your target audience. Clearly, a higher level of understanding in each area will result in greater overall success in your internet marketing campaigns.

We at Oishii Media are here to assist you with your web-marketing, so whether you need help with Content Marketing, SEO services, Social Media Campaign management or PPC strategies, click here to find out what we can do for you.