Business Digital Marketing: SEO, SEM, Lead Generation and Some Useful Tools

What is that one thing that can seriously take your business to the next level? You guessed it: marketing. Business marketing is an aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked, since it can play a key role in determining whether your brand is going to succeed or not. This business strategy consists in promoting your company to your target audience through many different means, such as advertising, public relations, sponsorships, websites, blog posts, events, social media profiles, etc. The end goal of business marketing is reaching a larger audience that will then acknowledge your brand and the products/services it has to offer. A good marketing campaign can do wonders for your business, that’s why it’s undeniably a valuable asset.

Marketing can be broken down into 2 main categories: traditional marketing, and digital marketing. In this article, we’re focusing on the latter. We talked a bit about the best digital marketing strategies for your business very recently, and now we’re going to go on about that same topic, this time by adding some new interesting info. Stay with us if you want to learn more about:

– SEO

– SEM

– Lead Generation

– Facebook For Business

– Semrush

– Google Analytics

The fundamentals of Business Digital Marketing: SEO, SEM and Lead Generation

In this paragraph, we’ll start by discussing about SEO and SEM first, and then we’ll find out what lead generation is about.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are two strategies used by marketers to help improve a given business website’s online visibility. SEO and SEM work in a similar fashion at first glance, but they actually differ in many ways. The primary difference is that SEO is an organic tactic, while SEM is a paid tactic.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization

SEO uses organic methods to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs), meaning that marketers resort to technical SEO, on-page SEO, content creation, and off-page SEO to rank the website higher on, for instance, Google’s search results list; it basically consists in making the website appear more “optimal” from Google’s standpoint.

Now, let’s see what SEO tactics are used to promote a business website:

Technical SEO – improve the architecture, looks and speed of a website, but also mobile-friendliness, crawlability, structured data, security, indexing, etc…

On-page SEO – optimize factors on the web page that will help search engines understand the content in context more clearly (title, H1, meta tags, image alt tags, etc.)

Content SEO – create content – blog posts, for instance – that properly matches the searcher intent

Off-page SEO – improve the trustworthiness and authority of a website in search engines’ eyes and its users by connecting it to other high authority and relevant sites: if search engines see that users trust a website, they will be more inclined to rank it in a higher position. You can do so through the use of link building, PR, and other similar tactics

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing

SEM, on the contrary, is a paid search advertising tactic, and that’s why it’s also called a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy. In this case, marketers use PPC advertising platforms such as Google Ads in order to use the available ad formats to reach a given company’s target audience. It involves everything from the set up and optimization of paid ads, to account management to increase conversions and returns.

SEM allows marketers to create targeted ad campaigns that place a brand’s products/services in front of the target audience. These campaigns start by acquiring comprehensive keyword research and competitor insights. Whenever users search for specific terms (keywords) that the advertiser is running ads against, they will see a custom ad, usually placed at the top of the SERPs. Every time the ad is clicked on, the business gets charged a small amount of money.

Source: SEMrush Blog

Lead Generation: what is it?

Lead generation is a marketing strategy that gets the customer interested in a brand’s products/services with the purpose of developing a sales pipeline. Marketers can lure potential customers in via different methods: blogging, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.

1) Blogging

Blogs can be both informative and effective in collecting prospective leads to your offered product or service. Business Blogs are based on a give-and-take relationship: users are offered information, while bloggers get leads generated for them. Lastly, blogs are fit for the Call To Action (CTA) strategy.

2) Social Media Marketing

Businesses that establish a social media presence are more likely to gain lots of leads with low to moderate effort, considering the immense popularity that platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn have nowadays. Start promoting your company to your target audience on any of these social networks by creating a business profile: you won’t regret it.

3) Email marketing

Email as a lead generation method is widely used. It’s one of the main channels that allow vendor-client communication; you can reach out to your customers via cold email campaigns and warm email campaigns.

Business Digital Marketing tools: Facebook For Business, Semrush & Google Analytics

If you’re unsure about how to take your first steps as a business marketer, you might be interested in checking out Facebook For Business, Semrush and Google Analytics. These tools are designed to help you promote businesses online. Let’s check them out.

Facebook For Business

We mentioned earlier how social media marketing is incredibly useful to grow your business; Facebook For Business is a service offered by Facebook that allows you to expand your brand’s presence on the Internet’s most popular social network platform. A Facebook business page is free, you can send and receive messages, post updates, get notifications, like, comment and share content just like a private Facebook profile. Apart from creating a page for your company, you can also create ads for your products and services that will be shown on Facebook users’ timelines.

On your Facebook business page you can:

– add your business contact info

– interact with customers

– provide customers with a link to your website

– improve SEO

Go to this link to get started!

Semrush

Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform that offers a great variety of tools to help marketers improve website visibility. Semrush’s features will give you a hand with:

– Keyword Research

– On-page SEO

– Competitor Analysis

– Content Marketing

– Local SEO

– Link Building

– PPC Keyword Research

and much more! If you’re interested in Semrush’s services, check them out at this link.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is currently owned by the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google Analytics is pretty great, since it gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place. It provides you with complete information, because it helps you understand your site and app users in a way that allows you to better check the performance of your marketing, content, products, etc. Through Analytics you can also access Google’s insights and machine learning capabilities, and, lastly, connect your insights to results: since Analytics works with Google’s advertising and publisher products, you can use your insights to deliver business results.