13th October 2020
Digital marketing is becoming ever more popular.
With COVID shutting down business shops and people preferring to buy from the comfort of their own home on their mobile devices, it is now more important than ever to ensure your digital marketing strategy is up to scratch and that you are using the right tools to measure your digital marketing campaigns.
Digital marketing takes a number of different forms, SEO , PPC, CRO and Social media – it is important that you tie all your activities across these platforms together as part of a fuller digital strategy with clear goals.
This article is all about doing that, you’re going to learn exactly what digital marketing is, why its important and then discover the best free digital marketing tools to help you achieve your goals.
Whether you are new to marketing or already running a marketing campaign and want to get more return from your investment this free digital marketing tools guide will provide you with all the necessary tools to get the most from your digital marketing.
The definition of digital marketing from Investopedia : “Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach consumers.”
Digital marketing comes in many forms.
There’s Content marketing, there’s SEO, there’s Pay Per Click (PPC), there’s social media marketing, there’s remarketing and for each of these methods, there’s numerous tools out there to allow you to get the most out of them.
The aim of all of these different platforms/tools/social networks is for you to laser focus in our ideal prospect and get your advert seen in front of them for the lowest/most reasonable customer acquisition cost possible.
Different digital marketing activities have different benefits:
SEO – Google is the most popular search engine and people searching and finding you and actively have some sort of intent whether that’s research, enquiring about a service or looking to purchase a product.
PPC – Allows you to dial in your advertising, especially on Google to specific search terms in specific regions and control your budget.
Social Media Marketing – Allows you to narrow down even further than Google AdWords and target people by gender, age, location, interests and many more whilst building up look-a-like audiences to further help your social media marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing – Evergreen content that when presented and written properly will help keep visitors on your website for longer, provide them with the answer to their questions and be easily shared across social media – Content Marketing can server you well into the future, just like this blog post!
SEO – It can be expensive, very competitive and you are at the mercy of the Google algorithm.
PPC – Can be expensive and eat into your budget if not managed correctly.
Social Media Marketing – Can be difficult to get attention in a social environment as you are trying to interrupt people to see your ads.
Content Marketing – Can take lots of time to research and write and then requires extra promotional costs.
So, each digital marketing activity has its downside but more often than not the downside can be easily negated and managed and provide you and upside that makes your downside seem like a walk in the park – when it’s bringing in new business anyway!
That’s a simple summary of what Digital Marketing actually is but why is digital marketing important to a business?
Digital marketing is important for a number of reasons. In pre-Covid times it was important to showcase your online presence, to convey you are a real business, advertise your products, drive footfall to your shop and a simple and cost-effective way to engage with your customers.
In Covid times as we stand today, digital marketing has become even more important than ever, which is as with everything both good and bad.
– Every business now realises the importance so every business is doing it and competing for attention and top spots in Google.
– The cost per click and competitiveness of SEO keywords will increase as more people jump on the bandwagon.
– Digital has enabled businesses to pivot and quickly adapt their business activities to survive the Covid pandemic
– It can produce quicker results albeit a little more expensive than activities such as telemarketing or direct mail.
What’s important with digital marketing is to have is as part of a fuller and well thought out strategy and not just a random one-off activity that produces no results and makes you think that “digital marketing doesn’t work” or “SEO doesn’t work” or “PPC doesn’t work and used up all my budget”.
These are very common things we hear, but when not thought out properly it’s very easy to see why digital marketing could fail.
Digital marketing is also important for a number of other reasons.
Digital marketing costs vary but it can be a very cost-effective way to acquire new customers. With the ability to closely manage your spend and track your return on investment, the cost of digital marketing makes it very affordable and very important for most businesses.
Digital marketing allows your brand and messages to be seen consistently by your audience across different platforms and for pennies per click or even nothing at all if your message is just viewed and not actually clicked!
Digital marketing, especially across a social platform like Facebook can allow you to build look-a-like audiences which will allow you to import your existing clients and have Facebook automatically build you similar audiences based upon their Facebook profile traits.
There are lots of benefits for digital marketing and they are certainly right now out performing traditional marketing activities, but that’s not to say they don’t work and can not be used in conjunction with website design and together to produce even better results.
Now, we move onto the best free digital marketing tools available, starting with the best free SEO tools available to help you get the most out of your SEO activities.
Most SEO tools are paid for.
And with good reason as they provide and hold a ton of data and provide insights that can be worth their weight in gold.
But there are some really good free SEo tools available.
There are probably fewer free tools available to help with your PPC campaigns, but that’s likely because Google Ads itself provides so much data.
There are tools such as Wordstream which turn this data into digestible bits for you, but the best tools for Google Ads are listed below.
Social media can be a great free / low cost tool for your business.
Measuring your return from social media marketing along with posting fresh content can be time consuming, but here’s some free tools that can help make that easier for you.
Now you have the tools to drive traffic to your website, it’s very important to monitor that traffic to ensure that it is of the right quality and that the traffic to your website is actually converting into new business for you.
These tools will help you run tests and further optimise your website traffic to get an even better return from your website.
Here’s some bonus tools to help you plan your digital marketing campaigns.
Planning is absolutely key. It helps you deliver consistent content and allows you to tie your content in to real life events to really connect with your audience.
The tools below will help you achieve this.
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Director of ALT Agency with a passion for all things design & conversion driven. Love Formula 1, Business and Property Investing.
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