Digital marketing is a broad term used to cover all efforts designed and implemented to increase awareness, interest, and consideration of your brand across online platforms and devices connected to the internet. This means a targeted mix of campaigns across websites, social media platforms, search engines, applications, and a growing number of new, innovative channels set to improve the communication between businesses and their potential customers. The common components of a successful digital marketing campaign is a rigorous strategy built around business objectives, creative content paired with technical expertise, and consistent, transparent reporting and analysis to refine for better performance.

Given the large amount of digital marketing channels available, it can be overwhelming to decide which is best to achieve your business’s marketing goals. Simply jumping headfirst into all of them can spread your resources too thin and leave you struggling to see healthy returns. Equally, limiting your efforts to only a corner of the options available can leave a large portion of your potential audience untapped.

The key is to identify your ideal customer and learn where they are spending their time online. In other words, who do you want to purchase your offerings, and where would they most likely be searching for them? This could be through digital media buying, over search engines, specific social media channels, or perhaps they require a more indirect, nurturing content marketing campaign with a constant stream of information across multiple platforms. Every business is different and will require a unique marketing mix to achieve their goals alongside available budgets.

Modern business is conducted online, and without a refined, high performing digital presence, it is likely your operations could rapidly fall behind the competition.

Websites, social media accounts and other digital platforms create a convenient way for consumers to search for new products and services, as well as find valuable content to keep them engaged and entertained for hours every day. Businesses across the world are leveraging this fact, and the internet is now filled with flexible, creative channels allowing businesses of all sizes to better target and interact with their ideal audiences in real-time. With this data and a range of sophisticated capabilities available, it also makes marketing more affordable and effective with unlimited reach potential when compared with traditional advertising methods.

When a proper strategy is developed incorporating your specific business objectives and industry features, your business can maximise the appropriate tools available to you to increase return on investment in generating new leads or sales.

Billions of people around the world are spending hours of their days glued to social media accounts. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tik Tok – the number of platforms is growing every day. And with this much attention available, it has become the perfect vehicle for businesses to position their brands before potential customers. Social Media Advertising is a variation of digital marketing available to businesses upon which they use paid ads to place their products or services on the newsfeeds of their target audiences.

Given the amount of usage social media platforms can generate from users from every walk of life, the greatest asset available is the data they collect. If a business takes the time to map out their target market, and understands their ideal customer, then Social Media Advertising can help them to speak directly with these people in a way never before possible. Given the ability to apply a budget that is appropriate to your business, simple analytics to review performance, and quick, real-time results to allow constant refinement, this is an avenue of digital marketing capable of delivering the highest return on investment than any other channel.

The social media channels you use to convert users into customers isn’t nearly as important as the strategy you employ to do it. And any good strategy starts with identifying who you are trying to target. For example, you will not use the same tactics on Facebook to win over users on LinkedIn. Sometimes it is crucial to be highly active across multiple channels to deliver real social proof to potential customers. When you work with the Social Media Advertising team at Social Sparrow, we take the time to develop a clear roadmap on how to achieve your specific goals across the channels available to you, focusing more on the actions and efforts the convert best, as opposed to the specific channel.

Social Media Advertising and Google Ads are both powerful tools to promote your brand in front of a targeted audience ready to engage with your business. The performance of campaigns in converting these audiences will depend on how skilfully it is built and optimised. While every business and industry is different, and therefore will experience varying levels of success across the available channels, each platform has its place within a well-rounded digital marketing strategy and should be utilised to ensure all members of a target audience are being adequately reached.

Unlike organic social media marketing, where businesses use the platforms available to them to post free, valuable material to engage and grow their following, Social Media Advertising is a more direct approach with a budget placed behind advertisements. Your capabilities will vary based on the platform you choose to employ, but one key aspect that will be available to you is the audience research and targeting. Once you have created your social media ad, you will then be able to use the data collected on that platform to ensure it is seen by your target audience, based on demographics such as where they live, their interests, and their history engaging with other businesses. Social ads operate on what is known as a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where businesses are only charged once someone clicks on their ad.

Facebook is a platform best known for its organic reach through posting content and branded material in order to build a community following. Facebook Advertising is a paid alternative businesses can employ to reach more people within their target audience. Campaigns and associated branded advertisements are created with specific objectives in mind, with budgets placed behind them to be pushed in front of qualified leads using the customer data collected and refined by the Facebook platform.

Facebook’s greatest benefit and asset is the amount of data it collects about users and their behaviours. The key for marketing to receive the greatest return on investment is to place highly relevant advertisements in front of highly engaged target audiences, and Facebook Advertising makes this possible like never before possible. Using the advertising features and specifications available, businesses can delve into selecting who will see their ads based on users’ interests, demographics, behaviours, connections, language, age, and so much more. It’s important to remember, however, even though Australia has millions of average monthly users, they are likely using their Facebook account to communicate and check in with friends and family. Audience targeting needs to be not only highly refined but paired with ads that have clear image design and copy, a driven objective, and an engagement piece or offer that stops them from scrolling right past, otherwise your campaign will be at risk of losing your monthly ad budget without conversions. Always consider working with a professional Facebook Advertising agency who knows how to build and refine high performing campaigns in order to ensure the best return on investment possible.

Instagram advertising is the creation and distribution of paid, sponsored content to be seen by a wider target audience beyond your existing follower count. Many businesses will take advantage of the Instagram platform to build a community behind their brand using highly aesthetic imagery and videos, but this can take time. By allocating a budget behind Instagram ads, you can select an audience comprising of your ideal customers, and exponentially improve the exposure of your brand.

Instagram is a platform with hundreds of millions of monthly users (and growing) spending hours each day reviewing content. Studies show that over a third of these users have engaged with a business over this platform. By creating a campaign that is engaging, well-targeted, and partnered with a desirable product or service offering, Instagram Advertising often proves to be one of the most rewarding platforms within a wider digital marketing strategy.

Instagram advertising is similar to organic posting in terms of creating branded images, images sets, or videos to attract and convert audiences. Rather than relying on the social sharing element, however, Instagram ads will appear in feeds with a sponsored label to indicate they are advertisements. They are created through a business account, where users are able to select their target audience based on several key demographics and behaviours. It will then follow an auctioning system where bids are placed to get in front of these audiences, and should your ad prove relevant, high quality and set to deliver good actions from audiences, the platform will allow it to be shown.

Instagram Advertising is used to increase the exposure of your brands to achieve your objectives. This isn’t necessarily limited to direct conversions. Ads can be structured with engaging formats to build brand awareness and interest into your offerings, and when you target the appropriate audiences, there are good chances they will choose to follow your account for new information helping them along their buyer journey.

Where search engine optimisation (SEO) is the act of making your website rank higher on Google search engine results pages, Google ads are the paid alternative. Rather than adjusting various elements on your website, maintaining outreach and referral networks, and releasing constant content marketing, the Google Ads platform allows you to create online ads with targeted keywords around your products and services and push them forward on a bidding system. This is known as pay-per-click (PPC), meaning when someone searches for a keyword and clicks on your ad, you then pay a specified amount. It is a far more direct method to getting your site link to the top of Google search engines.

Google Ads run like an auction system. You build an ad and enter the keywords you wish for it to be presented under once a user enters it into the search engine, and then allocate a bid you are willing to spend on that ad. Paired with your Quality Score and the relevance of your ad to your landing page and selected keywords, the search engine will then review whether you ‘win’ the auction. If so, you will pay an amount every time someone clicks on your ad from the search engine (known as pay-per-click or PPC).

There are several methods for tracking the return on investment generated by your Google Ads campaigns.

If you are working with Social Sparrow – then there’s no need to fret! We provide consistent, transparent, and easy to understand reporting clearly demonstrating the performance of your campaigns.

If not, there are several metrics you can review to gain insight into the ROI of campaigns. Click through rate (CTR), for example, outlines the amount of people who have seen your ad on the search engine and clicked on it to learn more. Also consider reviewing your Quality Score, which shows how Google views your ads, and is built upon a mix of landing page performance, keywords, and other elements. Analysing cost per conversion (CPC) will also give you insight into how much you are having to spend in order to obtain a new client. Lastly, use the information available in Google Analytics or Ads interface for more understanding into your campaign performance.

The beauty behind Google Ads is that they are placed directly before searchers already with the intent to buy. Once the ad has been built it is ready for budgets to be placed behind it and set live. And you don’t need to have a certain timeframe behind your business in order to obtain a position on the results pages. This makes Google Ads a highly viable marketing tactic for any type of business, both new and established. With such speedy results, you can also use the platform to build fast insights for refinements in order to maximise ROI as quick as possible and begin scaling to new levels of success.

Google Ads can cost as little or as much as you would like – it really all depends on your goals. With the pay-per-click (PPC) structure, the amount you invest can fluctuate based on your available budget, the amount of traffic you are trying to generate, and the timeframe in which you are trying to generate them. This can be a fluid amount, and when you partner with a reputable agency to handle your Google Ads management, the area of focus will be creating and refining ads that convert the generated traffic at a higher volume, resulting in a greater return on investment. This can take a considerable amount of research, development, and testing, which is why management will also have a price attached to it, given the amount of work involved in operating campaigns to achieve your goals. If you try to save money on agencies offering less in management fees, you will receive less work on those campaigns, as well as a higher likelihood on tactics going against Google’s ad management guidelines, creating a poorer overall result from your investment.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is the pricing structure where a business pays for their advertisement every time someone clicks on it. As Google Ads works on a bidding structure, users allocate a maximum amount they are willing to pay, and if they ‘win’ the auction for the ad, will have their ads displayed until that budget is exhausted.

No two businesses or industries are the same, leaving a successful content marketing strategy to be developed and refined for each individual campaign. With so many mediums and channels available to promote your brand and offerings, the team at Social Sparrow will begin by taking the time to understand your specific business and objectives. This will then be converted into a strategy that embraces the right tools to achieve your goals, from search engine optimised blog articles, to organic social media management, to email marketing and more.

If your wider digital marketing campaign is the vehicle to build your leads and sales, content marketing is the fuel powering that vehicle forward. From your website, to social media accounts, to benefiting overall SEO performance, rich media can be generated, utilised, and repurposed across a range of platforms, creating awareness and interest in your brand from target audiences, before nurturing them to consider, and eventually decide upon, converting. Essentially, content marketing positions you as the prime authority within your industry, and tells potential customers exactly why they should choose your offerings.