There are so many avenues to consider when planning your marketing strategy that it can be hard to know where you are best putting your budget.
What can you do?
There are many methods of marketing available, some offer instant results, while others take time to have an impact. When planning on how to spend your budget it might be difficult to know which will have the most impact, or even what each marketing stream is.
Each marketing stream has different benefits and potentially different outcomes. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to a marketing strategy, so knowing the benefits of each stream is essential.
SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a method of helping your website to rank organically. It helps your website to rank well by generating consistent, improved and free traffic. Content produced in SEO work can cover a whole range of topics, from optimising content that already exists on your website, to producing new content such as blogs or case studies. This content can not only improve the experience of the user, but it can also enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of your site.
Topics from SEO cover a whole host of content that help you reach a target audience, from local, specialised audiences, to a global, broad audience, depending on your business objectives. In order target these audiences, your SEO team will do keyword research and write in a way that helps you rank for those key words in a Google search.
The results of SEO optimisation are often not visible straight away, it is a process that takes time and it can take up to 8-12 months to see the impact of SEO efforts. With Google as the #1 search engine, it’s beneficial to focus your SEO efforts on Google Search. However, the results can increase brand awareness and help you to rank higher across multiple search engines and put your site in front of even more potential customers.
PPC
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is a method of advertising, where each click on an advert is paid for. These adverts can provide you with instant visibility on search engines to drive traffic to your website. Doing PPC, similar to SEO, can help you to target your adverts based on anything from keywords, to locations and demographics to maximise upon the effectiveness of your Ad.
Unlike SEO, where it sometimes takes months to see the results of engaging content, PPC offers detailed analytics that allow you to track performance day to day and refine your strategy as you go.
Essentially, with PPC you are trying to maximise conversion rates through paid advertising, almost like paying for specific users to access your site.
Social Media
Social media marketing campaigns are a method of digital marketing that allow you to maximise brand awareness using social media channels. Utilising social media allows you to access a broad audience, while also providing a way to engage with both customers and potential customers. With so many social media platforms, there is no such thing as a product or service that doesn’t fit on a platform.
Similar to PPC, you can also run Ads on social media. This allows you to access new audiences, as the algorithms of social media can allow you to reach people with a specific interest, even if they aren’t necessarily actively searching for products they could be encouraged to purchase a product due to a prior interest or need.
There is also the potential for virality with social media. Engaging content can significantly amplify your online presence through a viral post at little or no cost. Content or products can also be pushed through using influencers, which is known as influencer marketing. Those who already have a following can help to boost your own, and through collaborations and adverts your products can be placed in front of a huge audience.
Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like – it allows you to have email access to your customers and drive sales through emails. Typically, email marketing can offer one of the highest returns of investment out of any of the marketing channels. A well structured, engaging, and considered email can help to drive significant sales and higher conversions.
With an email campaign you can divide your address list to send highly targeted and personalised emails that will resonate with your customer and their needs. Not only this, but making the most of email as a marketing strategy allows you to maintain contact with your regular customers through newsletters and updates – this will help to keep your brand at the front of their mind and encourage repeat business.
Email allows you direct communication with your audience, unlike with search engines or social media marketing platforms you won’t have to battle to reach your customer. This makes it a top choice for many businesses, no matter their industry.
Web Design
Although typically not considered a form of traditional marketing, your website is the first place that your customer will interact with you and your brand. Making sure that your website conveys the message that you want to put across is essential. A poorly designed website can lead to lack of trust and a negative first impression, which often means a lost sale. Having an enhanced user experience often leads to increased conversions.
There are also knock-on SEO benefits to having a solid website. An SEO friendly site allows search engines to effectively crawl and index relevant content to help improve your organic rankings.
A well structured site will be able to reflect your brand. There should be consistent colours, fonts and messaging that re-enforce what your brand is all about, and what you do. In turn, this will help to guide visitors to your site though the customer journey and make it easy for them to take the desired options. All your marketing efforts will be moot if your site won’t allow traffic to convert.
Choosing the right marketing streams
Research conducted by Neil Patel, studying almost 120 companies that earn over $1m in revenue shows that businesses are spending the majority of their time (and therefore their budget) on organic social media marketing. But is that the best place for your budget to go?
An effective social media marketing strategy is never going to be a bad thing for any business, however it isn’t necessarily going to be the best place for every business to place their entire or even the majority of their budget.
How you’ll connect with customers
Different marketing streams give you different ways of connecting with your customers, each with its own unique benefits and challenges:
- PPC – PPC puts you immediately in front of a customer, on the feed of a search engine, amazon or even social media, such as YouTube. Though you’ll be able to target an audience base, there is not huge amounts of interaction with your customer base.
- SEO – When you start ranking for keywords, they are not necessarily always leading immediately to a product page. SEO’s benefit is that you can answer the questions and immediate needs of your potential customers and provide helpful results. By doing so, you build a connection with customers, giving you their trust and helping you to appear more reliable.
- Email – Marketing via email gives you an avenue of direct connection with your customers that can’t necessarily be achieved in other means of marketing. Email marketing really allows you to emphasise your brand and stay fresh in your customer’s mind.
- Social Media – The beauty of social media is that it creates a conversation. It adds an element of relatability, interaction and engagement that encourages interaction with your brand. Easily sharable content also means that your brands message can be spread farther.
- Web Design – The way that your website is designed will affect how your customers see your brand. If it is difficult for your customers to find what they want or purchase it, then other streams of marketing may as well be null and void. Your website should encourage users through the buyers journey to aid in conversion rates.
What the revenue driven results of the data say
The data collected by Neil Patel also shows us where the revenue is reflected based on each marketing stream.
As displayed, the way that revenue is gathered does not exactly directly reflect the places that marketing budget was spent.
What this tells us is that as much as social media marketing is important, it is not necessarily the only place for a marketing budget to go. The data also shows that although an average of 38.2% of budgets were spent on social media marketing, this only returned 2.3% of revenue.
That isn’t to say that investing in social media is a bad idea – social media can encourage people to share SEO content, it can drive people to sign up to an email newsletter and direct people to your site. As a tool, social media can be a highly effective, top of funnel exposure to your customers, but it is important not to ignore other the methods of marketing.
The data shows us that SEO investments were as low as 8.5%, however yielded 17.6% of revenue. Here, it is shown that SEO has a directly positive impact on conversion rates. SEO content can often be shared in email newsletters and on social media to further add to the positive effect that it has on conversion. If the content can answer the question or meet the needs of a searcher, is well written and correctly targets specific keywords, then conversion rates are likely to rise.
What does this tell us about the best marketing channels?
When considering marketing budgets it is important to consider that all marketing channels can work together. You need to be effectively managing all steps in the customer journey with each marketing element.
Awareness Stage
When you’re generating awareness for your products and business, PPC and social media are highly valuable tools for generating visibility. The more relevant people that see your brand through a platform’s algorithm, the more relevant traffic and interest your brand will get, which is key for generating awareness. Similarly, SEO is useful for generating long-term organic visibility from search engines to allow potential customers to discover your brand naturally.
Consideration Stage
As customers are considering a purchase, SEO plays a significant role. It aids in capturing traffic of customers that are researching or looking for a solution to a problem, which can lead them to your brand.
Email marketing can also be beneficial in this stage, as customers who are considering purchasing a product can be encouraged to revisit a product as a result of an email campaign. In a similar sense, social media also encourages continuous brand engagement. No matter how you look at it, providing valuable content, in any form, to your customers is likely to generate leads, website traffic, and can bring customers one step closer to making that all important purchase.
Conversion
The aim of all marketing efforts is to encourage conversion from customers. At this stage, PPC comes in to re-target ads and re-engage users who have shown interest, but not yet converted. As well as directing them to optimised landing pages designed for easy conversion.
Here is where your web design is critical. Solid web design will ensure a smooth purchasing process to minimise people abandoning their baskets and not being able to find the pages that they need to access.
Email marketing can also play a key role here, encouraging customers to return to a site and make a purchase, even if they have stalled on making a purchase for a while, something as simple as an email informing them of a special offer could be all it takes to make the nudge to a purchase.
Retention
As important as new customers are, retaining the business of previous customers can also prove to be just as valuable. It is at this stage that you need to make sure your branding really powers through. Social media marketing can be valuable for customer retention as it encourages engagement from previous customers. These kind of reviews are not only beneficial for social media purposes, but in turn benefit your SEO as the authority that your brand possesses improves.
Web design is also valuable here as it makes it easier for customers to re-order or explore additional products that may be related to their first purchase.
All marketing channels are useful in some sense, but the data shows that it’s pointless focusing an entire budget in one place, especially when each marketing stream has the potential to work in harmony, creating a circular network for each customer to fall into.
Ultimately, there is no ‘correct’ way to spend your marketing budget – it depends on a variety of factors that are going to be unique from one company to the next. The next question you’ll have to consider is how much you should be spending on marketing and use that information to allocate your budget across your chosen marketing channels.
