Drive Sales With Digital Marketing: A Complete Blueprint on How to Use Digital Marketing Resources to Grow Your Business and Outsell the Competition

By Peter Dickinson and Charleh Dickinson

Digital marketing is an essential component for any modern business. If you are an SME looking for a way to get ahead and stand out from the competition, this book is your ticket.

As an agency that delivers digital marketing for our clients, we understand that it's something that is constantly evolving. To be successful, you must be able to capture each stage of your customer journey and identify an approach that will allow you to gain traction in your market and take you from strength to strength as your business grows.

This book includes background on why digital marketing is so important and a step-by-step guide on how to develop the right strategy and manage the key elements such as websites, social media, and email.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Dec 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781739885809

Book preview

Drive Sales with Digital Marketing

Peter & Charleh Dickinson

Published by KUB

Copyright © 2022

Published by KUB Ltd

Albion Wharf, 19 Albion Street, Manchester M1 5LN

www.kub-uk.net

Copyright © 2022 Peter & Charleh Dickinson.

First Edition 2022

ISBN: 978-1-7398858-0-9

All Rights Reserved. The right of Peter Dickinson and Charlotte (Charleh) Dickinson to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and / or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publishers

All titles, content, publisher names, trademarks, artwork and associated imagery are trademarks and/or copyright material of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Forward

Why did we write this book? There are a huge number of videos and online courses on digital marketing.

Our research showed that nobody had really tried to show how these resources should be managed in order to drive sales.

After working with over 500 businesses over a 20-year period there emerged a pattern as to what successful companies did in order to use digital marketing to drive their businesses forward.

This book encapsulates these patterns and links it back to marketing strategy.

Whilst the world of digital marketing continues to evolve at a pace, the concepts behind managing it haven’t and so, although the specific details of implementation may change, the general principles remain the same.

Drive Sales with Digital Marketing

Contents

Section 1: Why Digital Marketing?

1. Understanding Why Digital Marketing Is Important

2. Understanding Your Market

3. Developing the Customer Journey

Section 2: Digital Marketing Resources

4. Get to the Top of Google

5. Develop a Content Marketing Plan

6. Manage & Develop Your Website

7. Manage & Develop Your Social Media

8. Generate Leads on LinkedIn

9. Use Email Marketing to Grow Sales

10, Measure Your Digital Marketing Activity to Drive Sales

Recommend Reading

Acknowledgements

About KUB

Section 1

Why Digital Marketing?

This section will look at the fundamentals of digital marketing and give you an overview of how it works and how you can make it work for you.

Chapter 1

Understanding Why Digital Marketing Is Important

Welcome to the complete guide on how to get started with digital marketing. This guide looks at what digital marketing is, why you need it, and gives you some ideas on what you need to implement to grow sales in your business.

This book will cover the groundwork you’ll need to complete in preparation for creating and launching a successful digital marketing strategy and provide an overall summary of exactly what digital marketing is and why you need it.

With the information you’ll take away from this book, you should be left feeling confident that you have a good knowledge of why digital marketing is essential for your business’s success. You will also come away with a succinct outline of your audience and what kind of marketing activities will be useful for communicating with them as part of your overall strategy.

Most people already have some idea of what kind of activities digital marketing involves, so this guide aims to build on that base-level knowledge and equip you with the vital information that many SMEs tend to overlook.

Digital marketing is ubiquitous, but it’s also something that’s constantly changing and evolving as new technologies develop and consumer behaviours adapt.

Because of this, you’ll find that there’s a lot of misinformation out there on how it should be used, which means there are many businesses that, too late, find out their resources have been wasted on techniques that are unsustainable in the long run or simply don’t work.

With the information supplied in this book, you’ll be able to identify the difference between good and bad marketing techniques, as well as what kind of groundwork you’ll need to put in before diving in to creating your strategy for your marketing, and wider business, development.

Ultimately, you’ll come away with an understanding of what it takes to compete in a digital world.

This means that you’ll be ready to hit the ground running and begin digital marketing while saving the time, money, and the headache of trying to figure out what’s gone wrong when you’re further down the line.

So, without further ado, let’s get started on everything you’ll need to know about digital marketing to build success within your business.

1.1 Why Do You Need to Embrace Digital Marketing?

Welcome to the first chapter. In this section, we’ll look at why digital marketing is so important and what’s changed over time to make other methods of marketing less impactful.

1.2 Why Digital Marketing?

For digitally-native generations, the answer to this question is pretty simple: we live in an increasingly digital world, where there’s very little that you can’t do online.

In marketing, it’s important to get your message across in the places where you know people are spending their time. Places which, as time goes on, are becoming increasingly digital.

Over a couple of decades ago, marketing messages would have been delivered primarily through TV, radio, and billboard advertising, but these techniques weren’t always the most cost-effective, leaving businesses with lower budgets to rely on word-of-mouth and communication tools like brochures to reach their customer base.

Nowadays, the prevalence of social media and other digital channels has created an opportunity for more businesses to engage in effective techniques, making impactful marketing more accessible than ever before. And, luckily for SMEs, the best marketing methods no longer need to be the most expensive, either.

So, let’s look at exactly where your audience might be spending their time online.

At least a quarter of the planet is on Facebook. The largest demographic is 25–34-year-olds, and most members exclusively use mobile devices to access the platform. It’s a great opportunity for B2C eCommerce to advertise using techniques like Pay-Per-Click, otherwise known as PPC.

There are over one billion people with an Instagram account. 25–34-year-olds represent the largest advertising demographic on the platform, but this is followed closely by 18–24-year-olds. As a visual platform, it’s perfect for B2C branding campaigns, eCommerce, and methods such as influencer outreach.

LinkedIn has around 740 million members. It’s the home of decision-makers, with the largest age demographic sitting at 46–55-year-olds, but millennials also make up around a quarter of the platform. As a professional platform, it’s a great choice of focus for B2B selling.

Twitter has around 330 million monthly active users. The largest demographic is 30–49-year-olds and is therefore a great platform to help with customer relationship management and PR.

The average person also spends almost 18 hours a week on a variety of social media platforms. With people spending so much of their time online, it should come as no surprise that the majority of marketers already use social media as a core part of their marketing strategy.

As social media users across various platforms can be segmented by aspects such as age, you should already have a pretty good idea of which platform you should be prioritising.

1.3 Changes Since Lockdown

As you’ll be aware of, the Coronavirus pandemic has become a pivotal point of change across many aspects of life.

Any form of successful marketing needs to reflect human behaviour and changing consumer habits, and so it, too, has had to quickly adapt to stay relevant in the face of such vast change.

Many of these adaptations are based around technology and have also fundamentally altered the way businesses are run.

For example, we’re now familiar with video call software like Zoom, but this was actually created in 2011; it took nine years and a pandemic for it to explode onto the scene.

For the tech-enthusiasts out there, a frustration prior to the pandemic was businesses being slow to adopt such technology, but the lockdown shifted all this, and now people are far more in-tune with technology and better understand how simple changes can make lives easier.

But how does this impact marketing? For one, it’s given us the ability to adapt faster.

Professionals’ newfound comfortability with video calls means that businesses are now able to work more seamlessly with international partners and build successful networks that bring in business – something that’s now more crucial than ever following Brexit.

Working globally enables businesses to transform their traditional marketing and introduces blended networking, where online as well as face-to-face communication is utilised more effectively.

This inevitably seeps into marketing strategies – whether it’s around building sustainable referral networks or finding new and better ways to communicate with customers.

This covers how business culture is shifting. Next, we’ll take a look at the shift in consumer behaviour.

1.4 Changing Consumer Behaviour

One of the fundamental changes to consumer behaviour is defined by access to information. Almost three-quarters of consumer journeys start with a search engine such as Google or Bing, and even more will consult a search engine before making the decision to buy.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also reported that, at the start of 2021, 36% of total retail sales were done online – a significant increase of almost 30% from ten years before.

This demonstrates the importance of ensuring your online presence is both visible and user-friendly. Without these fundamentals, your target audience will end up looking past your offering completely, no matter how great it is.

Despite digitally-savvy users completing in-depth research online, word-of-mouth is still powerful, with many users consulting online reviews, Facebook groups, and specialist forums before making a decision on whether or not to buy.

As a result, your business may need to consider its approach to referral networking to generate more sales – this again is where software like Zoom can serve a purpose beyond team meetings with colleagues.

2.1 What Elements Are Involved in Building a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy?

There’s a whole range of elements that your business can incorporate into its digital marketing strategy. You won’t need to use all of them, but it's good to be aware of what they are so that you can choose the ones that you know are likely to drive success.

This section will provide a rundown of some of the key marketing elements that your business could benefit from using.

If you don’t have the capacity to do it all in-house, it could be worth considering outsourcing at least some of them, as the return on investment is usually well worth it. And, if you’re new to marketing but don’t have the income to outsource, getting one-to-one training on some of the specifics could be the answer.

2.2 What are the Key Marketing Elements?

Some of the key marketing elements you need to be aware of include: your website, social media, content marketing including articles and video, SEO, LinkedIn lead generation, and email marketing and automation.

In most marketing strategies, each of these activities props their counterparts up, and so it’s worth noting that when you’re choosing the marketing activities for your strategy, every element needs to work together so that your marketing system works as a cohesive whole.

For example, there’s no point spending all your energy on your social media with the aim of driving more traffic through to your site if your website then isn’t up to scratch – users simply don’t have the time, patience, or trust to navigate information and resources that don’t put the customer experience first.

Think of each element as making up part of a marketing ecosystem – if one element is performing poorly, the others that support and rely on it are also likely to suffer.

2.3 Systematic and Sustainable

Once you have an idea of what sort of marketing activities you want to invest in, the next step is to ensure that they’ll work systematically and sustainably as part of a holistic marketing strategy.

But before you start creating a map of your strategy, there’s a little work you’ll need to do in terms of internal analysis.

This section looks at the individual components so that you can start to build your own digital marketing strategy.

2.4 Internal Analysis Overview

The first thing you will need to do is identify your products or services.

Then, dig down into their benefits, including how they solve your customer’s problem or make their lives better.

Next, look at how your products or services differ from the competition, this will usually be the additional benefits that go beyond solving their immediate problem.

Finally, consider your ‘why’, the reason behind why you’re selling your product or service – it’s often defined by the values behind your business and what you’re passionate about.

Once you’ve identified these aspects, you’ll better understand the kind of messaging you’ll need to communicate in your marketing and can then move on to the practical steps of deciding which elements will produce a sustainable marketing model.

If your customers complete most of their transactions or submit their enquiries through your website, your site will need to sit at the centre of your strategy, and the rest of the marketing elements will aim to direct traffic to it.

The key activities and components we recommend as part of your internal analysis include completing a site audit, keyword research, content plan, SEO strategy, social media strategy, LinkedIn lead generation strategy, email marketing, and automation strategy and analysis.

Let’s take a look at these in closer detail.

2.5 Website Audit

For most businesses, their websites sit at the centre of their marketing strategy, as it’s normally where customers complete transactions or submit enquiries, and all your other marketing elements will direct traffic here, making it your most valuable marketing asset.

This means that your site needs to be easy to find, and when a potential customer visits your site, they need to be able to navigate easily so that they can quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Your site audit will need to consider your overall site performance including load speed and on-page SEO performance.

You can look at aspects such as how long people are spending on each page and bounce rates for an indication of what customers make of your site.

Some of the useful tools you can use to complete this audit include Moz and Megalytics for handy base-level analytics, or SEMRush and Google Analytics (which is completely free) for more in-depth analysis.

See Chapter 6 for more in-depth information on how to manage and audit your website.

2.6 Keyword Research, SEO, and Content Planning

The next step is to define how you’re going to make your site visible so that your target audience can find you through search engine results pages (SERPs). One way to do this is with a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy that is both systematic and sustainable.

The starting point to this strategy is keyword research. SEO tools like SEMRush are a great place to start for detailed analysis, or if you want to explore a free option first, try UberSuggest.

These tools provide insights into how many searches are being made for certain keywords and indicate how difficult it will be to get them to rank highly on the search engine results pages.

Once you’ve built up a relevant list of keyword search terms, you can begin to compile a content plan that puts them to use. The easiest way to kick off your content plan is by writing articles that are informative and relevant to your target but bear in mind that content can also include things like videos and podcasts.

If you’re not sure where to start, try entering some of your keywords into tools like AnswerThePublic, which then produces a map of related questions and queries people are searching for around the topic of your keyword.

If you have a WordPress site like many other businesses, you will also need to make sure that you have the plugin Yoast SEO installed so that you can start gaining traction through your keywords. (A plugin is the phrase used to describe a piece of software that enhances the capabilities of your WordPress website.)

Remember, the payoff from a content-led SEO strategy will build up in the long term, but if you start putting the effort in now, the results will be well worth your time.

Don’t worry too much about the long-term aspect of SEO, because the content you produce can serve your shorter-term needs, too. You can gain traction in the short term by distributing it through your other marketing channels, such as social media, which will then start generating traffic immediately.

You can find more detailed information on what you need to build a great SEO strategy in chapter 4.

2.7 Social Media