Online Marketing

Online Marketing Tools

Here PN Digital takes a look at some of the tools of internet marketing that might be applied in executing a digital strategy. Let’s consider email and SMS marketing, social media, blogs and search engine optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation

Optimising the website for Page One search engine ranking is essential, but not for the sole purpose of generating increased traffic to the website. The internet marketing strategy should be aiming to generate high quality leads with a good potential to result in a sale. Quality leads come from understanding the key drivers of the target audience, including their important search key words, and integrating these into quality, content rich website copy. SEO is an extensive topic which takes time to cover but PN rates the role of SEO as highly important and is keen to hear your experiences.

Email Marketing

A very popular tool today but increasing oh so very ‘deletable’, is the retail marketing email. There are far too many allowed into our inbox, they’re usually far too long, far too generic in content, (not targeted) and not usually carrying compelling information. There are strict rules about successful email marketing which you ignore at your peril! However, having said this, email marketing is a great tool if you have, or plan to build, a rich data base of your customer list and its mix, from which you can create specific high value content relevant to each sub-group. This avoids burdening every email address on your list with information they don’t need. The tools do exist to make email marketing the easiest and most successful application in your tool kit. It’s also a great device for brand reinforcement, providing excellent visual opportunity to reinforce your brand values and extend the brand by inference through the use of visual supports.

An example on an email marketing tool, Mailchimp.

Social Media

The queen of all ‘pull’ marketing strategies, a successful social media campaign feeds on its own growth as the message travels around networks and mediums – to friends pages, chat rooms/video/mobile. It’s an excellent tool for building an email list if linked to other on and off line marketing. For new product launches, applied successfully it has great power to raise positive awareness for the brand and to achieve initial trial. However, this tool needs detailed planning, implementation and project management with clear goals and end points, for the protection of the brand. Dissatisfied customers or other bad publicity are more readily fuelled amongst social networks than other media.

Why not 'Like Us' on Facebook and see what happens!

SMS Marketing

The ability to time the message to coincide with when an audience is most open to making a decision on an offer is a key advantage of SMS marketing. Messaging is relatively cheap and has high cut-through with the customer. It’s a complimentary tool, always used in conjunction with other digital marketing.

Blogs

Blogs are the now and the future for many on line marketers. Gradually they are replacing the long content of websites. A powerful blog uses voices that can speak with authority in a category, either from their knowledge or experience, embracing voices of all types: suppliers, experts, authors, reviewers, customers and observers. They must however, each bring a distinctive or differentiated point of view in order to add value. Well structure blogs have clear categories and tagging to help users locate their subject of interest. Depending on your category, we believe weekly blogs of 300 to 600 words are sufficient to communicate a strong idea.

An example of a blog tool.