As a business owner or manager, the importance of marketing and use of social media and internet marketing is very clear. There are many ways to advertise, but some methods are more useful than others. For example, in 2015 content marketing generated 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less. Utilizing the right methods for your business is essential. Only 12% of businesses feel that they have an optimized content marketing strategy, even though 71% of businesses created more marketing content in 2015 than they did in 2014. Other significant aspects for an internet marketing company to pay attention to is the layout, ease of use and accessibility. When the Nielson Norman Group wrote a report called “How Users Read on the Web” directed at marketing companies they stated that there is a 47% usability improvement in successful websites that utilize a clear layout that can be scanned.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is one of the most productive forms of advertisement in the world today. In the United States, 60% of all internet activity is conducted through mobile devices, half of that internet traffic is driven by mobile applications. By 2019 mobile advertising will represent 72% of all US digital ad spending. Because of this, 71% of companies are planning on increasing their digital marketing budgets this year. However, 50% of companies who are using digital marketing don’t have a plan for their online advertisement. This results in poor search engine optimization, leading to 15% of Google searches having never been searched before.
Search engine optimization utilizes key terms for directing searches to a company’s website. On these websites companies can also track the internet traffic to see how many visits are a result of search engine use. However, fewer than 30% of small businesses use tactics such as web site analytics, call tracking or coupon codes. In addition, 18% of all small businesses say that do not use tracking on their websites. Without the use of tracking, it is impossible to know how many people are finding your site through the use of a search engine. This makes it difficult to businesses to assess how much of their budget should be dedicated to SEO and internet marketing. Paying attention to tracking details makes it much easier to see the results of the money spent on online advertising.
When using online advertisement, there a few things to keep in mind. Advertising in a way that avoids being able to be blocked by an ad blocker is essential, as in 2015 ad blockers caused $22 billion in lost ad revenue for publishers worldwide. Half of that total, %11 billion was lost in the United States. Using proper search engine optimization is also an important feature, since 10.3 billion Google searches are conducted each month, with approximately 78% of United States internet users researching products and services online. Also, a company website should be easy to use and work quickly. If a site takes too long to load, for example, it can lead to a loss of potential customers. A website’s load time limit should not exceed 4 seconds to prevent that loss.
Marketing Through Social Media
Social media marketing is growing more and more popular and useful with each passing year. In 2012 67% of companies dedicated social media teams in their marketing department. In 2015 that percentage increased to make 78% of companies with social media teams. It is estimated that social media’s share of the total marketing budget will rise from 10% in 2015 to 14% in 2016. In addition, the amount of money spent on offline advertising will decrease by 2%.
Globally, 46% of consumers with a digital device used social media to help make purchase decisions. There are several platforms that marketing companies can use while prepping for social media management such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and search engines. In 2015, 16% of marketers plan to increase their marketing efforts on Pinterest. Currently 95% of brands are using Twitter. Out of that 95%, 82% of those brands add tweets between 1 and 6 times each day. Furthermore, 48% of brands reply to at least one tweet every day, and 68% of brand tweets are replies.
