Digital at the service of strategy and marketing communication
The current pandemic has shown us the importance of digital and digital marketing in the personal and professional spheres. Faced with long periods of quarantine, the online world will have allowed us to bet on security by allowing us to work and play from the comfort of our homes.
Safe but isolated, we have fallen back on our electronic devices to stay connected to the outside world. So, it was virtually that we walked the store shelves and attended our meetings, classes, family events, etc. As a result, zoom, Netflix, Youtube and other online consumer sites have seen their audience rates explode. All global traffic combined, Netflix reached 25 million new subscribers in the second half of 2020 (which represents their number of new subscribers over the whole of 2019), Youtube benefited from a 75% increase in audience, and social networks saw their use increase by 61%. As for Google, the most widely used search network in the world, its number of daily searches reached 80,000 searches per second, an impressive 6.9 billion queries per day.
In this context, it is understandable that businesses already on the web have benefited from a competitive advantage. However, the real “winners” are those who have already set up a smooth user experience allowing online purchases. This sudden discontinuity of our habits has made companies realize the need to adopt a digital transformation, including a good marketing strategy, to seize more growth opportunities.
Summary
- What is digital marketing?
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization, natural referencing
- SEA: Search Engine Advertising, paid to advertise
- The SMO: Social Media Optimization, the optimization of social networks
But what is digital marketing?
Digital marketing or digital marketing services refers to all the methods, techniques and tools we use to create and solidify a digital presence.
Discovered your latest purchase through a visual social media post? This placement may have been part of a marketing strategy carried out by this brand. On these global networks, the possibilities are many and almost endless. I can promote my business, products or services on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Spotify, Gmail, TikTok, car sites, news, etc.
It is difficult in this context not to mention search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) at the origin of the largest library in the world. Every day, products and services are sold in droves. Considering that “the best place to hide a body is the second page of Google” and the growing number of companies and sites seeking to be referenced, we understand the importance of building a strategy to make yourself visible. The goal is to ensure that your website appears in the first results. Think about it, when you search on Google, Bing or whatever, do you ever end up on the second page of results? Do you even bother to look at the sixth result on the first page before rephrasing your query?
By making myself visible to potential future buyers, I make sure that I am known and thus give myself the possibility of increasing my chances of selling. Each company has its specificity. It is, therefore, imperative to develop a tailor-made strategy.
Interested? So, you are probably wondering how to create and solidify a digital strategy and where to start. Follow us. We will give you a quick presentation of the different possibilities.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Better known as natural or organic referencing, SEO is an essential element of any digital strategy.
Let’s say you already have a website. So, you probably want it to appear when someone searches for the products or services you offer.
To do this, it is unfortunately not enough to fill it with content and click on “publish.”
Google’s goal is to offer its Internet users relevant and qualitative content to have a good browsing experience and continue to use it.
Google will use different information to classify the content on its network to decide which site to highlight during an Internet user request.
We don’t know all of Google’s criteria, which tend to change. But we know that it will take into account your visibility, your relevance and your authority. (We will come back to the concept of authority in a future article).
To carry out this classification work, Google constantly probes its library using robots responsible for exploring each page and each piece of information present… If indeed, it can do so.
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Understand that Google bots don’t see the world like you and me. They have their language. For example, they cannot “see” an image, understand it and interpret it the same way as us.
Therefore, it must present its site’s content so that Google robots can read it. It is, therefore, important to optimize your site by considering certain techniques and characteristics in your strategy to have a site and content readable by Google robots. These organic SEO actions will aim to facilitate the indexing of your site and its content.
Just imagine that the internet is one big library, and with each query, Google has to quickly come up with various choices. This speed and this strength of the proposal require upstream classification work, which we have just explained via the reference to Google robots.
SEO is, more or less, a team effort between you and Google. Depending on the competition already present, your efforts, and your strategy’s strength, the search network will or will not place you in the first positions for certain keywords.
Don’t forget that Google’s crawlers don’t just index your content. The final objective is to offer Internet users (those using the Google search engine) relevant, up-to-date, readable and original results.
So be sure to regularly share informative and quality content so that Google robots come to sympathize with your content.
In all this, we must not forget local SEO, which allows a company or structure to make its site visible to local requests.
By offering you this local presence, among other things, through your appearance on local directories and developing a well-filled Google My Business file, you increase your chance of appearing on geolocated search results. (We will also return to the interest of adopting a local strategy).
SEA (Search Engine Advertising)
Paid referencing, the two major players of which are Google and Facebook, allows your ad (online advertising) to appear in the desired location. (If your strategy is good).
If a paid ad appears in Google’s search results, its format will be the same as a normal (so-called organic) ad. The only difference will be at the level of the small mention of “Ad,” which will appear to its left.
The advertiser (you) invested in relevant keywords for his domain to allow his advertisement to appear in the first results for each Internet user request.
With ads at the top of the first Google page typically getting the most clicks, the ROI of a good strategy can pay off big.
Contrary to some beliefs, paying to appear on the targeted request is not enough. Instead, paid referencing is based on an auction system. (Due to the divergent nature of their networks, Google and Facebook do not operate in the same way).
Google will base itself on a quality score which will determine your position and the price you will pay. Its quality score is based on 3 criteria:
- The quality and relevance of your landing page
- The quality and relevance of your ad
- The expected click-through rate of your ads
There are different ways to get charged by platforms, but the most common for Google is to pay per click. This is why this type of advertising is often referred to as “cost-per-click advertising” or “pay-per-click ads” in English.
So, if your ad appears but the user doesn’t click on it, you won’t pay. So you only pay for the relevant traffic the search platform brings you. But don’t worry, we will have the opportunity to discuss its notions in a future article.
SMO (Social Media Optimization) or social referencing
This is about social media optimization. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Tiktok have had phenomenal growth following the health crisis.
Social media are also integral to a digital strategy and have become essential. They allow you to communicate about your company, your products and services, to unite your community and even to have direct feedback via the questions and the various actions offered by Insta Story, for example.
Hashtags can allow you to reach a wider audience, in line with your industry. Little more, social media can also give you a boost for your competitive intelligence, see what your competitors are doing, the publications they post, the topics they address but also their audiences, and the hashtags they use a real gold mine for those who like to investigate new trends to come.
