What Is Digital Marketing?
You’ve probably heard about B2B digital marketing. It’s a way to help prospective customers find your business online and grow your company. You might be thinking about giving it a try, but you might also get a little dizzy when marketers start tossing around terms like SEO, PPC, bounce rate, brand awareness and organic search.
Start with the Basics
If you were traveling to France, you’d probably want to learn a few French phrases before you got on the plane. The same is true for B2B digital marketing. You can’t make informed decisions about digital strategies that will work for your business if you can’t understand what the people promoting those ideas are talking about.
With that in mind, here are the 10 most commonly used terms in digital marketing:
Bounce Rate
When someone visits your website, you want them to visit more than just your homepage, and to stay there as long as possible. When someone visits your home page and immediately leaves your website, they’re said to have “bounced.”
The percentage of total site visitors who leave after visiting just one page (it could be the homepage or another page you’ve directed them to) is known as your bounce rate. Of course, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.
Call-to-Action
When you post a digital ad on your website or another site, there’s a specific action you want people to take. It could be to download content, for example.
To motivate people to take that action, you typically give them a good reason for doing so and include a button with language like, “Click here to learn more.” That button and the words within it are your call-to-action.
B2B Content Marketing
Consumers are more skeptical than they used to be, largely because they’ve been bombarded with TV ads, direct mail pieces and calls from telemarketers for years. Smart marketers are responding to that skepticism by building trust before they talk sales.
They do this by sending prospective customers content (through emails, website blogs and social media posts) that gives them useful information. This process is called B2B content marketing.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
When you enter words into Google, you’ll see sponsored ads at the top and right column on the page. The advertisers who placed those ads only pay if someone clicks on one of their ads. How much they pay—referred to as cost per click—depends on several factors, like how valuable their products are and how competitive those terms are.
Keywords
These are the words that people enter into search engines to find whatever it is they’re looking for. To increase the odds that consumers will find them on the internet, companies do research to discover what those words are as they relate to their business.
For example, if you sell furniture in Orlando, Florida, your top keywords might be things like, “buy new furniture Orlando,” and “early American furniture.”
Organic Traffic
As noted above, when people enter keywords into search engines, they’ll see sponsored (paid) ads on the right and at the top of the page. The rest of the results on the page are “organic,” meaning that it doesn’t cost your business anything when someone clicks on those links.
The traffic that goes to your website from clicking on these results is organic traffic. Higher organic traffic is often a testament to a solid B2B search engine optimization strategy.
Paid Traffic
This is the traffic that comes to your website as a result of people clicking on an ad. Your business pays search engines to run these ads for you.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
If you decide to run sponsored ads on search engines, you need to find the best keywords for your business and enter them into Google AdWords (or another search engine’s PPC marketing platform). The process of working with search engines to run the most effective paid ad campaigns for your business is known as pay-per-click advertising.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Have you ever wondered why some businesses wind up on the first page of search engine results and others are 100 pages in? It’s because those businesses, and their websites, have characteristics that search engines like, such as authoritative content and quality incoming links from other websites.
The process of making your website more search-engine friendly and achieving higher results in search results is known as SEO.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
When you type words and phrases into search engines, each page that comes up is known as a search engine results page, or SERP. Your goal as a digital marketer is to optimize your website so your business appears on the first page in the highest position possible.
Online Marketing Builds B2B Businesses
Digital marketing can be complicated, especially if your business is new to it. Fortunately, Creative MMS is a top B2B digital marketing agency in Philadelphia! Our experienced team will guide you through the process and give you the information needed to make smarter business decisions.
To learn more about the ways our market research, keywords analysis, competitor analysis and audience engagement services can help you boost sales and grow your business, contact Creative MMS today.
