What Is Digital Marketing? Why should I use it to market my business?
Digital marketing as a term covers so much, but in summary it is using the opportunities presented by social media, email marketing web marketing and other related digital services to promote and grow your business.
There are three key elements to digital marketing that apply to all businesses.
Social Media Marketing
E-Mail / Messaging Marketing and
Web marketing.
There are then additional digital marketing opportunities that are business specific. For instance, if you sell products, you should consider being on Amazon, if you are running a hotel or B&B then you want to be on room booking websites such as booking.com.
The digital world is expanding all the time and you can now include other forms of digital marketing, such as podcasting too.
One of the benefits of digital marketing is that you have access to very detailed analytics, so it is easy to see how well your digital marketing activities are working.
Social Media Marketing
There are a vast number of social media platforms available, and they are growing and evolving all the time.
The big four has now become the big five, so you need to be looking at which of these social media platforms you should be on:
You don’t have to be on them all, but you should be on at least one of them.
There are a wide range of other sites that can be used for marketing too.
YouTube can be considered a social media platform too.
E-Mail Marketing
In recent years email marketing has become much maligned due to its mis-use, but it is still a really important way to promote your company and the goods and services you offer to existing customers, to remind them of all the goods and services you offer and to make them aware of new goods and services.
In recent times new forms of messaging have become available, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, that allow you to send messages to contacts in a similar way to using EMail.
Web Marketing
Every business should have a web presence of some sort, so you have a chance of being found when somebody does a search for your goods or services in a search engine.
This can be in the form of a pre-built platform such as Etsy, Shopify or Wix, or you can have your own website.
There are lots of different ways to build a website but the most common website development tool, often called a Content Management System (CMS) is WordPress.
Whichever website presence you choose, you will need to consider some of the following if you want your website to be found:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Google Business Profiles / Local SEO
Google Ads
Website optimisation
Content
Content is a key part of any digital marketing.
You should have a content creation strategy about the topics you will create content about, where you are going to use that content and what format that content will take.
You need to consider:
Where you will get ideas from
How to create your content
What key words and phrases you should include (especially for your website content)
What type of content you are going to create.
It can be a challenge to find time to create content for small businesses, so finding time to create content needs to be planned.
Paid v organic digital marketing
Social media platforms and search engines have an option to pay for adverts, or you can create content and hope it is optimised well enough for it to appear to enough of your potential customers to make it worthwhile.
It all comes down to what you can afford to give up – money for paid marketing or time for organic marketing.
Analytics
Every platform will have analytics available for your activities, but you may need to do some work to configure the analytics tools to get the best results.
Put time aside to check your analytics on a regular basis. Do more of what is working well and less of what isn’t.
Here to help
If you’re looking for help with your digital marketing then check out the wide range of digital marketing services we offer, or get in touch as we’re always happy to have an initial chat about Digital Marketing.
Video is great for promoting your business, but once you’ve made the decision to get one or more videos produced and you’ve been given the video files, what should you do with them?
The obvious answers are put it on your website and share it on all your social media channels – but how do you do all those things?
Posting your video on your website
When you put your video on your website, don’t make the mistake of loading the video file to your website, as your website hosting platform won’t be optimised for streaming video, so your video won’t play very well when people visit your website.
Video Hosting Platforms
The two most well-known video hosting platforms are YouTube and Vimeo, which both allow you to set up free accounts or channels. There are other video hosting platforms, such as Wistia, but these charge for their services.
I tend to use YouTube, because it is the second most used search engine on the internet, is owned by Google and you can link your Google Analytics for your website with your YouTube channel so you can get all your Google performance metrics in one place.
Once you have put your video on your hosting platform, you need to embed the video onto your website. It’s fairly easy to do this, on YouTube you click on the share button, go to the Embed tab, copy the line of HTML code that is shown and then copy this into your web page at the place you want to embed it on your web page. Note that there are some options available to you when you create the embed code, including video size, so choose the settings that you want.
When you embed the video on your web page, think about where you want the video to appear. In general, it is best to put the video as near to the top of your web page as possible, as you want website visitors to watch it and they are more likely to do this if they see it at the top of the page.
Posting your video on Social Media
Although it is possible to share your video from YouTube, it is better to post the video natively onto the social media channels you are looking to share it on, as the algorithms they use for deciding whether to share your post with others all favour video hosted locally over video links. Loading videos locally onto each social media platform will also give you access to post insights. Facebook in particular provides some very detailed insights to how your video is being watched and there is a second level of detail provided about the audience once the video has been viewed 100 times.
Uploading video works the same across all the platforms, but they do have some nuances that you need to be aware of.
Facebook
When you load a video onto Facebook, the system will select 10 thumbnail images from the video and you can choose which you want to use. You can also load a custom thumbnail if you don’t like any of the options available to you.
Facebook also has a very good tool for adding captions to videos and as over 90% of video views are made with the sound off, it is advisable to add captions if your video doesn’t have captions already. It is possible to export the captions file to reuse elsewhere, should you wish.
Twitter
Twitter is fussier about the video files you can load. It only allows you to load .mp4 and .mov formats and the video files must be less than 512 Mb in size.
Instagram
Instagram will only let you load videos that are less than 1-minute-long and you can only load files from your mobile device – there isn’t a facility to load a video from a desktop browser.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is currently rolling out a facility to load videos natively, but this is only available from the mobile client.
What to do with your social media posts
Once you have your video on your social media platform, there are things you can do to increase their exposure. On Facebook you can share your post into relevant groups. On Twitter you can get people to like and/or retweet your posts and similarly you can do this on Instagram. Follow this link on more ideas for sharing content.
If you need more help or advice on what to do with your posts, please call me or leave a message and I will be happy to pass on my advice. If you are looking to get videos produced, let me know by calling the Red Knight Solutions offices on 02392 265725.
