There are many different forms of digital marketing – SEO, PPC, CRO, email marketing and more – and any one of them may be the ‘best’ single solution for your company.
But any two of them are stronger together. Why is that?
Ultimately, it’s because of the way search engines work.
The goal of the engineers refining search engines is to satisfy their customers – to help their users find the products or information they’re looking for. After all, if a search engine doesn’t perform well for you, you’ll go to a competitor.
Using tools like Google Analytics or Bing Webmaster Tools, search engines keep track of visitors on their destination sites. They monitor engagement, activity, and keep an eye out for return visits.
This information is available to the search engine and to the site’s owners, giving both groups the information they need to improve performance.
A site’s ability to engage visitors is one of the many factors that affect how quickly it appears in a search list, and each visitor’s engagement levels are measured to help calculate this. It can be a vicious cycle, driving a poorly-optimised site out of sight – or a virtuous one, rewarding your work by bringing you to the attention of more searchers.
Driving engagement is important both to SEO and to CRO (conversion rate optimisation) techniques, for different reasons. However, adopting other CRO techniques alongside your SEO service yields significantly superior to those you’d get with just one or the other. It’s a true ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ situation.
Not only does this produce a more engaging site (and one which will do more business per visitor) but also one that brings more visitors in, using data analysis to find and optimise for sections of your market you might never have known about.
If you’re running PPC paid advertising campaigns, the principle is different, but the results are the same; combining digital marketing services can pay dividends. Why?
Again, advertisers want those who click through to engage with what they find, and they reward sites which are likely to do that with rate adjustments. You can reduce your cost per click significantly if your site is engaging, well-written, and well-optimised for the topics your adverts are targeting.
Similarly, modern email marketing is designed to catch readers’ attention, build a connection with your business, and draw them closer to you. Typically, this involves linking to your website; perhaps a new product page or a recent, topical blog.
Great email marketing and a weak website can perform well, but nowhere near so well as great email marketing and a strong website together.
When you’re looking at your marketing plans going forward through 2017, ask yourself: If adding another digital marketing service can multiply the effectiveness of each service you use, isn’t that worth paying attention to?