Digital Marketing Beyond SEO

Digital marketing beyond SEO has become overwhelming. And it seems to be evolving at an accelerated rate. Even experts in the field find themselves scrambling just to keep up with the latest paradigm shifts, theories, and industry reports. So when you talk about digital marketing beyond SEO, what does the average business owner need to know?

Where there used to be a standard stepping-stone process for digital marketing, today’s agencies are blurring the lines between one tactic and another, overlapping them as they push the limits of conventional thinking.

Why Do I Need Digital Marketing?

Many business owners today wonder “Why do I need to waste money on a digital marketing plan?”

In the 1990s (and into the early 2000s) business owners were asking “Why do I need a website?”

In 2015 they are asking “Why do I need a branded mobile app?”

In the pre-digital world, if you had a business in the basement of a building, wouldn’t you put a sign out front  and get listed in the hyellow Pages? 

That is your answer because whatever you spent setting up your business, you should preferably have a budget three times that for marketing.

The Internet has made the world more competitive than ever before. And when you consider that as long ago as 2013 seventy percent (70%) of all local searches were done on smartphones, you begin to recognize the power of technology since the invention of the Smartphone. And Social Media has expanded exponentially in the same way and can now be considered the strongest vehicle to gain and share reviews — or n other words, the digital version of word-of-mouth. 

Consumers can now find what they want when they want it — and find it on the spur of the moment. This is great for businesses, especially local businesses … provided that they are not invisible online.

If you built your business in a basement, you’d certainly have spent the money to place a sign out front, yes? The same applies in the digital world.

The difficulty for many is that knowing the components of digital marketing does not a marketing plan make. Even if you know how some of the components work, and/or how to deploy those efforts yourself, you still need a marketing plan.

SEO is not unto itself a marketing plan, it’s just a marketing tactic. There are many different approaches to SEO, and new ones are being developed all the time with algorithm shifts.

At Incognito Worldwide we like to focus on a content plan (the broad narrative, the article topics that feed that narrative, an editorial calendar, writers and editors, and syndication channels).

Keyword research is still important, as is optimization. But while that is the jump-off point, content — as well as an off-site promotion — is the sustaining energy that drives an SEO campaign.   

Digital Marketing Beyond SEO

But there are many other components to digital marketing, and some of the most commonly known include:

But a good digital marketing plan also includes:

Should I Outsource Digital Marketing?

Many business owners, whether they decide to jump into digital marketing by outsourcing social media management,  hiring an expert in-house, or locally. or try to do it themselves, tend to do so without a plan. For example, many business owners build social media page(s) and start posting. They wait, and wait, and wait, and then wonder why nothing is happening. Because there was no plan.

What Does Outsourcing Digital Maertkring Cost?

If you do decide to outsource, the pricing can range from as low as $30 per hour if you use someone offshore, to $150 per hour in the United States and parts of Europe. Incognito Worldwide provides digital marketing services as low as $25 per hour (in some cases) and is recommended in the 11th position in the DesignRush article outsourcing social media management.

However, where they recommend Buffer and Hootsuite to companies that want to do it themselves, we recommend eClincher, and for SEO, DiiB. And if you’re doing your in-house digital marketing, you certainly want to automate the management of all the local-based directories. 

How Long Do Results Take for Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing overall is typically a slow-roast process, as opposed to the quick-grill results that some digital marketing components alone can offer. For example, an ad will get immediate results while SEO could take months to gain traction; ads however will stop working the second you stop paying for them while SEO lingers out there and gains strength and presence over time. Years ago just deploying good on-site optimization and/or backlinking of a site could jump to the top of search rankings. Today, the competition is fierce, and often you find yourself jocking for a position — with it changing daily — against competitors. Digital ads can get quick results, but you need to know (or learn) how to set them up correctly to be effective. You need the creative graphics for the ads, and the taglines, and you should – in most cases – have landing pages so you can A/B test different campaigns and track conversions.

Most every digital marketing component now overlaps with every other, so when you hire someone to do SEO, they had better be able to develop content (and the content strategy), build landing pages, and understand the psychology of social media. No single component of digital marketing seems to have the stand-alone impact it once did. It requires a multi-tiered marketing plan.

Confused yet? Fret not. As a business owner you only need to answer two questions:

• What do I want to achieve through a digital marketing campaign? For example, do you want to raise brand awareness for a new company or product? Or is it sales and revenue you seek?
• What is my budget, and for how long can I sustain it?