2013 GuideBy Josh Hamit to SEO, Social Media, and Email marketing Digital Marketing How-To-Guide Written by Josh Hamit Curve Interactive Limited Contents 1.0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .............................................................................................................................. 2 2.0 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 3 3.0 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) ...................................................................................................... 4 WHAT IS SEO AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT? ......................................................................................................................... 4 HOW SEO WORKS .......................................................................................................................................................... 5 SEO BASICS .................................................................................................................................................................. 7 SITE ARCHITECTURE – ON-PAGE SEO ............................................................................................................................... 10 OFF-PAGE SEO ........................................................................................................................................................... 13 LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES ............................................................................................................................................. 15 SEO HOUSE-KEEPING .................................................................................................................................................... 19 TRACKING THE EFFECTS OF YOUR SEO EFFORTS – GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND WEBMASTER TOOLS ................................................. 20 SEO SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................................................... 22 4.0 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SEM) .......................................................................................................... 23 WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING? ............................................................................................................................. 23 FACEBOOK AND THE POWER OF LIKE ................................................................................................................................ 27 HOW SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS ........................................................................................................................ 28 INCREASING ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATION .................................................................................................................. 31 FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ............................................................................................................................................... 32 HOW TO RUN A BEST PRACTICE CAMPAIGN ........................................................................................................................ 33 CASE STUDY – AJ BOMBERS, USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO CREATE 1-2-1 RELATIONSHIPS WITH CUSTOMERS ........................................ 36 EXAMPLE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FOR A SMALL BUSINESS ................................................................................................... 38 SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMARY .............................................................................................................................................. 40 5.0 E-NEWSLETTER AND EMAIL MARKETING ................................................................................................. 41 HOW TO START YOUR EMAIL LIST ..................................................................................................................................... 42 EMAIL CONTENT ........................................................................................................................................................... 46 EMAIL BEST PRACTICES .................................................................................................................................................. 46 EMAIL DESIGN ............................................................................................................................................................. 48 EMAIL SUMMARY ......................................................................................................................................................... 55 6.0 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 56 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: [email protected] P a g e | 1 1.0 Executive summary Over the course of reading this book on digital marketing you will learn the theories and best practices used by the world’s top digital marketing experts to generate untold amounts of sales for themselves and their respective clients. Moreover, you will personally come to learn how to use these theories in practice to transform the ability of your own business’s website to generate huge amounts of prospects and leads. The fundamental strategies included in this marketing system come from the three highly complex fields of search engine optimisation (SEO), social media marketing and email marketing. Used together, in a ‘system of systems’ you will be able to build a fantastic web presence that will allow you to capture the attention of consumers who are already eagerly seeking out products and services in your industry. Each of the three digital marketing strategies will be broken down into simple steps and everyone from a complete novice to seasoned pro can learn a few things by taking in and implementing the lessons in this book. Firstly, you will learn the fundamentals of SEO. You will come to understand how search engines make their decisions and what factors play a role in ranking websites in search engine results pages. From here you will learn how you can edit your website to give the search engines exactly what they need to rank your website on the first page. This includes numerous tips on both on-page and off-page SEO, from simple edits to your individual webpage titles to more complicated link building strategies. Furthermore, SEO housekeeping will be discussed as well as how to track the effects of your work through Google Analytics. In part two of the guide you will learn what social media marketing is and how you can use it to influence your target market. This section is laden with tips as to how you can leverage social media effectively while spending less time on it in the long run. From this section you will ultimately learn what drives a successful social media channel, how to increase engagement and participation from your fans and how to run a best practise social media campaign. Through several case studies and strategies you will see exactly how you can implement a strategy of your own. Finally, in section three you will become accustom to the art of email marketing newsletters. Email subject lines, how to build an email list, email content and email design will be the discussion of this chapter, each of which is looked at individually. You will come to learn how you can leverage the power of email marketing to generate huge amounts of leads and make sure your brand name is on the tip of every one of your email subscribers’ tongue come the time they need your services. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: [email protected] P a g e | 2 2.0 Introduction It has long been believed that the best way to find new business is through using traditional advertising methods such as cold calling, print and television marketing. These ‘interruption-based’ marketing techniques have been proven to be extremely effective in the 1960s all the way through to the late 1990s. Marketers had found that if they spent ‘x’ amount of money bombarding the public with television, billboard, print and radio adverts enough people would get their message and they would eventually return a profit. However, with every business left, right and centre coming to learn this fact, the marketplace has now become inundated and overcrowded with advertisements and we as consumers have learnt to ignore these attempts to capture our attention. This type of advertising is no longer cost effective, and any return is hard to measure. To add to the decline in effectiveness of interruption based marketing a monumental shift in consumer behaviour has transformed the way we as marketers should promote our products and services; people now have the power to be in control of what information they receive and how. This behavioural shift can be attributed to the growth of the social media, email and the internet and its ever increasing integration in our everyday lives. Are interruption based methods of marketing dead and a waste of your time? We believe so - Consumers do not value being force-fed information. Instead they prefer to find out the information they need online, through mediums they can control. Staggeringly, 80% of all online transactions start with a query in a search engine and 90% of those searchers never look past the first page of results. However, the good news is the online fact finding mission consumers go on to search for what they want, can be manipulated