A lot of small businesses in the UK get pretty badly misled when it comes to digital marketing. The worst of it is the assumption that search engine optimisation (SEO) is a magic bullet that will fix their balance sheet – and cause sales to automatically rocket.

Do a quick survey of businesses around the country, and you’ll find that the notion of SEO as a online marketing cure-all is a shockingly prevalent myth. And along with bulk submissions to directories, content spinning and keyword stuffing, it’s one that is happily propagated by SEO cowboys – with nary a clue of what makes a successful marketing strategy.

So what should businesses be doing instead? If you really want a successful marketing campaign, you need to embrace three key elements of digital marketing:

Use SEO smartly

SEO is not a magic fix – but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or important to your marketing strategy. Rather than over-dependence on SEO to resolve all your marketing needs, it’s about clever and strategic implementation.

For starters, take an intelligent and intuitive approach to keyword analysis. There are a lot of free tools about that will help you find keywords that will perform better. Focus your efforts on niche and key phrases, and filter your keywords by relevance.

Optimise your PPC campaign

PPC can be incredibly helpful, when harnessed well. To get the most out of it, you need to make sure that your PPC campaign has a well-managed budget, and is working to its maximum efficiency.

Make sure that your ads and keywords are relevant – especially when coming up to a big retail season such as the holiday period. There’s nothing worse than throwing away money and being penalised by Google for irrelevant adverts. Improve your relevance by keeping landing pages as close as possible to users’ search terms.

Market your brand through social media

To get your marketing strategy right, a balance between all SEO, PPC and social media is absolutely essential. Effective use of social media is all about timing – so to harness this channel, you need to understand your audience, and identify when opportunities will arise.

Schedule tweets, blog posts and updates when your audience is most likely to be receptive – it may only be for a few minutes a day, but that time frame will be critical for your business.

Include a call to action. Social media is all about engagement – if you want your customers to get involved with your brand, don’t be afraid to ask for it.

About The Author:
Katy Wilson is a project manager at Gtec Media Ltd