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The internet is awash with gurus, experts, and know-it-alls who claim the X, Y, or Zed method is the one true and only method of marketing online. No one method is going to be a magic bullet when it comes to marketing your services. We will not tell you about that “one tool” that is the magic for digital marketing.
Instead, we will outline these six tools that make up modern digital marketing: Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, Organic Social Media, Social Media Advertising, Display Advertising, and Email Marketing.
After reading this article, you will have a clearer idea of which digital marketing activities you can undertake in your marketing mix.
1st Tool - Search Engine Optimisation
Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon & eBay are the biggest search engines on the internet. YouTube, Amazon & eBay search a limited part of the internet (their website) yet are some of the biggest search engines around (when counting total searches).
When people use a search engine, they are looking for something specific that will suit a need at a given time. Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing are so powerful, they offer the chance to serve up the right service or product at a time they are looking to buy or take action.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is all about appearing at the top of Google, Bing, etc when a potential customer searches for a topic. This is called organic search because this requires no spending to drive that click. Organic because the traffic requires no spending for it ‘turn up.
In essence all about getting the right people to click and visit your site at the right time and providing them with the right information, product, or service.
The foundation of good SEO is to do keyword research into what people are searching for and create content that answers these questions. Over time the search engines will find your content and will rank you in the search results.
2nd Tool - Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing or SEM is paid for advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. When you search, every time a range of adverts will appear that businesses and organizations have paid for. The traffic from SEM is called ‘paid for’ as opposed to organic traffic because it is pay-for-play.
These businesses will join an automated auction to work out how much they will pay for a click, and the winning advert will appear in the search results. If you click on the advert, they will pay whatever they had bid for an advert. Generally, these adverts will appear at the top and bottom of the search page.
This all happens in the blink of an eye.
Search Engines are great ways to reach people, however, there are other ways to reach people.
3rd Tool - Display Advertising
Display advertising comes in a range of forms from short video adverts on YouTube before you watch that funny cat video to the small blocs of adverts you see on the side column of a blog, to the clickbait adverts you see at the bottom of a newspaper website like the Daily Mail.
All these are examples of different types of display advertising. They all have one thing in common, the advertiser is paying for these adverts to appear on these websites either at a cost per impression or a cost per click.
This type of advertising is very similar to adverts during commercial breaks in TV programs, trailers before movies, and adverts in papers and magazines or even billboards.
There are a whole host of display advertising services on the internet including Google Display Ads, Adroll, Thrive, Bing, Wordstream, Outbrain, and MediaVine to name a few.
4th Tool - Organic Social Media
Social media is a great way to build relationships, content, and connections. Organic social is best described as building a community of customers and potential customers through engaging and interesting content over the long term.
It covers everything from memes about your industry, to funny videos and text posts highlighting key issues. There is a diverse range of social platforms these days that cater to a wide and diverse range of users and digital practices.
Off the top of my head currently, there is Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, TikTok, Medium, and Xing to name a few.
Each social media network has its style, content type, and audience so you cannot approach each social media network the same way.
What works on Linked In might not work on Facebook.
5th Tool - Paid Social Media
Paid social media is very similar to Search Engine Marketing and display advertising. In a way, it is the love child of both of those channels. Paid social involves buying and bidding for space on the social network much like SEM, but also includes stronger content elements like display advertising.
The beauty of Paid Social is the high level of targeting you can do. For instance, on Facebook you could easily target nurses 30-50, living in manchester who speak Spanish.
6th Tool - Email Marketing
Many people look down on email marketing as the forgotten child of digital marketing. For those people, this is a mistake as email marketing has the forte and highest returns on investment in the digital marketing mix. And you control the email list.
The weakness with using all the above methods is you can get kicked off at any point. However, with email marketing, you control the medium and as long as you are not spammy you can engage with potential customers without distraction or competition whilst offering very clear calls to action and messaging.
As you can see there are a wide variety of ways of reaching potential customers for recruitment agencies out there.
Actionable Takeaways
Use the list above to understand what type of digital marketing you think would be suitable for your business.
Draw up a list of strengths and weaknesses for each of the channels with your client base and your business.
Think carefully about your budget and skill level set before starting on any one channel.
Focus on just two tools initially and build out as you master each one.
TL;DR
- Digital Marketing has several very different tools you can use.
- Each channel has its advantages and disadvantages
- The six tools are:
- Search Engine Optimisation.
- Search Engine Marketing.
- Display Advertising.
- Organic Social Media.
- Paid Social Media.
- Email Marketing.
Call-To-Action
If you found this article useful, please share it on Facebook, Linked In or where you get your social media fix.
This article is part of a new book coming out shortly called the Recruitment Agency Marketing Toolkit.
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