The Complete 7 Step Guide to Modern Digital Marketing Services

Feb 3, 2023 | Food for thought | 0 comments

digital marketing services

Over the years, the internet has become fundamental for nearly all consumer-buying decisions as 76% of U.S. adults regularly shop online. In order to succeed in modern competitive markets, small businesses can’t overlook the power of digital channels and how they can convert online leads into customers. Having established that digital marketing is no longer optional, let’s lay out specific digital marketing services that Destination Marketing utilizes to significantly grow your business.


Step 1 – Quality Website Design

Having a quality website is the first step to creating an online customer journey. A website excels when it utilizes a design that focuses on user experience, functionality, and compliments your content. In today’s market, it’s not sufficient for companies to merely have a website, as the truth of modern businesses show that poorly designed websites will actually drive away potential leads. While web design may sound objective, here are tried and true tips to building a site that will deliver conversions.

  • Make Website Speed a Top Priority – Research has shown that users will not stick around if your website is slow, it’s as simple as that. Plus, search engines such as Google and Bing will factor your page loading speed into their ranked search results. To avoid the pitfalls of a slow website, make sure to utilize a responsive webpage design that’s user-friendly and offers an optimized navigation experience.
  • Stick to a Simple Layout – Most companies have a list of everything they want on their website, and mistakenly throw it all onto their homepage. A simple streamlined webpage layout will always perform better than a cluttered screen. Instead of inserting complicated animations, which can include sidebars and sliders, trimming your content down to just the essentials and limiting excess drop-down menus will ensure that your web design remains effective.
  • Keep Typography & Brand Colors Consistent – The overall look and feel of your site should remain similar across all of its webpages. Whether it’s color schemes, typefaces, backgrounds, and even the tone of your copy, following brand consistency across your website makes a positive impact on user experience. When it comes to choosing brand colors, you really don’t need to overcomplicate it, as it’s recommended to use a maximum of five regular colors across your design. Additionally, when it comes to typefaces, be sure to choose a font that’s highly legible and utilizes a minimal design.
  • Avoid Stock Photos – It’s common to be tempted by stock photos due to the ease of acquiring these high-quality images, but most stock images won’t benefit your website. Users want to see who actually works for your company, and stock photos can drain the life and realism from your web design. While we always recommend using original photos for your website, if stock photos are your only option then remember to choose images that match your companies’ message and avoids the cheesy visual style of most stock images.
  • Optimize for Mobile – For your website to be effective, it’s critical that your company’s design offers a positive user experience on mobile. Research shows that more than one-third of web users do all of their online shopping over a mobile device and, additionally, American adults spend more than five hours on their cell phones every day. Not only does a poor mobile user experience detour potential customers, but it also negatively affects your website in online search rankings. If your web design isn’t focused on building a responsive website for mobile, your business is missing an easy opportunity to generate repeat user visits and spread a positive word about your brand.
  • Design Around Your Call-To-Action – Make sure your Call-To-Action (CTA) is clear and visible! Outlining a simple map of your buyers’ journey is imperative to your bottom line and helps users to easily navigate through your website. Placing your CTA at the top right of your site, or at the bottom of your web pages, are both strategically placed locations that companies commonly use to convert users to buyers. When online users are pointed in the right direction, rather than struggling to find what they’re looking for, this will improve the likelihood that they won’t bounce over to a competitor’s website.

As incredible as it may sound, all the provided steps barely scratch the surface when it comes to optimal web design. In today’s competitive market, your company’s website design is more important than ever. At Destination Marketing, our experts are thoroughly trained in the latest website trends, always testing new tactics and optimizing for the highest conversion rate.


Step 2 – Boosting Website Traffic

Now that you’ve created your website, how do you navigate online users to your desired landing pages? All companies are chasing the same KPI (Key Performance Indicator) when it comes to their modern online digital marketing services efforts, and that’s to increase website traffic. Typically, a business’ website will state their core values, mission statement, company origin, and, of course, their products. In order to make any return on investment, it’s important to have a thoroughly developed digital plan to funnel potential customers towards your website. Although, when a company is in its early years of development, it may be downright impossible for an owner to focus on marketing strategy due to all their manufacturing and distribution obligations. Here are some simple, inexpensive, and effective methods to quickly boost your small businesses website traffic.

  • Create Memorable Content-Video is the current king of online content marketing as it provides businesses a huge opportunity to attract website visitors. By creating informative, professional, and to-the-point video content that explains your company, it incentivizes online users to engage with your brand. Once your video is created, it can be repurposed across multiple different social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. With YouTube, in particular, the opportunity to add your website links directly to your video description allows for free organic traffic to navigate to your website. Other forms of content marketing include still images, podcasts, infographics, blogs (which we’ll touch more on later), gifs, and much more. Depending on where your customers are online, a different content type may be necessary to better communicate with your target audience. Try several different content types and regularly create new content to keep your brand fresh.
  • Optimize Your Google Business Profile- An optimized Google business listing brings 7-time more visits to a company’s website than when compared to an incomplete listing. This powerful tool allows your brand to show up for relevant searches and better helps users quickly understand basic facts about your company. Your Google business listing also enables your business to be found in mobile searches, which is even more of a priority than desktop traffic is nowadays. Given how quick and simple of a task this is, don’t pass up the opportunity to update your Google business listing!
  • Original Blog Posts – Some would say that the method of regularly posting blogs to your website is the singular best way to increase organic website traffic. Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors when compared to websites that don’t. Additionally, businesses that blog are 13-times more likely to generate positive return on their investment. Being a free method to organically build links to other notable websites, there’s no excuse to not blog in today’s digital landscape. The whole point of your website is to build value for customers, and hosting informative original blog content is an effective way of doing this. Be sure to write engaging titles, incorporate videos, embed visuals, and insert quality links throughout your blog.

A higher rate of website traffic means more customers for your business! With the evolving online market of organic and paid search practices, it’s important to be up to date in order to stay ahead of competitive websites. With this in mind, one tactic has always stayed tried and true, consistently creating high quality relevant content will always remain the bedrock of acquiring satisfactory online traffic.


Step 3 – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Emphasis

Roughly 75% of users never proceed past the first page of Google, meaning that 25% of users do visit the second page of their search results. This data highlights solid evidence that companies who rank on the first page of search engines hold a significant advantage over companies who don’t. Let’s explore some the top SEO professional services that will improve your company’s online traffic.

  • Quality Keywords – Keyword research is a great first step when it comes to building out webpages. Understanding your customer and being able to sum up each landing page in a short-tail or long-tail keyword is essential to reaching your target audience organically. Using online SEO tools (i.e. MOZ Pro, SEMrush, etc.) is an excellent way to perform data driven keyword research. Important metrics to look out for include Keyword Difficulty, Monthly Volume, and Keyword Priority. To take it a step further, it’s recommended to include keywords in the meta of your images, rather than just your landing pages. This helps search engines in their eternal pursuit to match relevant content to search results.
  • Focus on Link Building Strategies – Part of the reason why blogs are so effective at driving website traffic is due to their ability to build quality links. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other website domains that link back to one of your landing pages. This is an excellent way for other audiences to navigate to your website, and for search engines to better understand the relevancy of your content. External links are hyperlinks which navigates to a separate website domain. Data suggests that external links provide the best information for Google to determine the popularity of a webpage. Finally, internal links are hyperlinks that allow the navigation of one landing page to another within the same website. This helps search engines better understand your website, resulting in improved rankings in relevant searches. Accumulating backlinks naturally takes time and patience, although this is the absolute best way to improve search ranking and acquire mutually beneficial relationships with other companies.
  • Consistent Long-Form Content – Search engines, Google in particular, continue to dominate the internet when it comes to providing the best organic opportunities to grow your company. A positive aspect of SEO is that it’s an inexpensive way to expand your online traffic. Although, while you may not pay a hefty price with cash, you do have to pay with time and patience. Organic traffic is a long game requiring a steady drip of quality content that’s highly relevant to your company. Consistently creating more blogs, articles, and landing pages around keywords that show opportunity is a great way to rank higher. It’s also been proven that long-form content (landing pages with 1,000 words or more) perform much higher in search rankings. SEO takes 6-months to a year to get right, particularly if you’re a new company or rebranding. Rather than week-by-week improvements, which will inevitably waiver up and down in search traffic, we want to see incremental month-by-month improvements.
  • Optimized UX & Meta Copy – Google prioritizes page loading speed as an important factor when it comes to how they decide to rank websites. For example, websites with optimized UX (resulting in a snappier user interface) are much more likely to rank on the first page of search results. Making sure your website runs quickly on both desktop and mobile search engines is essential to rank higher than your competition. You can track your businesses webpage loading speed on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Additionally, adding quality Meta-Titles and Meta-Descriptions to each of your landing pages is a vital step. This is the text that’s shown to each impressionable user, including a compelling CTA within your meta-copy is a great simple way to increase website traffic and, eventually, conversions.

In addition to these SEO services, you need to take into consideration other factors such as Google My Business, compressing website content, crawl accessibility, and much more. In today’s competitive market, SEO is more important than ever. At Destination Marketing, our experts are thoroughly trained in the latest SEO industry trends, always testing new tactics and optimizing for prime positions to boost your visibility across all major search engines.


Step 4 – E-Commerce Strategies

E-commerce online sales have been surging to record highs, growing 50% in America since 2019, and seems to show no signs of stopping. In fact, while U.S. retail ecommerce sales reached $870-billion in 2021, this figure is estimated to hit $1.3-trillion by 2025. With a low barrier of entry, and its undisputed rise these past few years, it’s clear to state that businesses both small and large don’t want to miss this lucratively profitable opportunity while it’s in a state of growth. Let’s break down some expert strategies you don’t want to neglect when establishing your e-commerce online shop.

  • Provide an Omnichannel Shopping Experience – 86% of shoppers engage in two or more online channels, meaning that businesses should engage their audience across these various online options. Whether you’re reaching customers through your website, social media, or separate e-commerce marketplaces, it’s essential to provide an omnichannel experience to avoid alienating potential online customers. While it can get complicated when managing multiple social channels, marketplaces, and websites, don’t forget to make the customer journey seamless across these touchpoints.
  • Offer Free Shipping – Free shipping has been proven to be a big hit that customers have come to expect these days. Even though you’re likely eating the costs of free shipping, this method has still proven to increase sales and revenue. It’s been shown that 70% of shoppers hold a higher opinion of brands that offer free shipping. Additionally, 84% of online shoppers are more likely to purchase from sites that offer free shipping. While Amazon has set a standard for customers to expect free shipping in most situations, it’s about time for most e-commerce shops to add this profitable offering.

At Destination Marketing, our agency’s omni-channel digital marketing services approach and customized digital solutions will turn your leads into customers and your business into an industry leader. We will also increase your traffic, engage and re-engage your leads, and boost your e-commerce sales.


Step 5 – Social Media Marketing

While 93.33% of internet users have social media accounts, it’s clear to see the digital marketing services potential that businesses have when it comes to social media, and why it’s wise to invest both time and money into your brand’s social media presence. Many businesses make the mistake of creating business profiles and posting content whenever they want, this strategy has proved to be historically ineffective. In truth, your social media marketing strategy should require a multifaceted and thoughtful approach, let’s explore this topic a bit more.

  • Set Measurable & Obtainable Goals – One of the greatest aspects about social media is, if done correctly, it’s possibility to scale your presence at an incredibly affordable cost. Although everyone has to start somewhere, and it’s essential in the beginning to set realistic goals that’s both reasonable and affordable. When growing a social media presence, each company will have their own areas of focus depending on their unique business model, these goals can include generating sales, increasing brand awareness, boosting social engagement, driving website traffic, and much more. There’s no way to truly measure success without first setting measurable goals. So before mindlessly uploading social media content, it’s important to make sure your goals are specific, trackable, relevant, and attainable.
  • Find Your Target Audience – Getting to know your customers as real people with real necessities will help your company when it comes to targeting and engaging your social media audience. Establishing the age, location, income, interests, and much more about your target customer is essential to navigating a successful social media strategy. Once you know your audience, it’s important to keep in mind that you don’t need to dominate every social media channel out there, just the channels where your customers are. Some of the most popular social media platforms include Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube.
  • Create Quality Social Media Content – To effectively run a successful social media campaign, it’s vital to create a content calendar to better help organize your future posts. Publishing content 1-3 times a week is generally the frequency sweet spot, although different businesses may benefit from a different posting frequency. While a great strategy to gain content-inspiration is by researching competitor’s social media posts, don’t forget to highlight what makes your brand unique. When creating compelling content, it’s important to know what type of content best communicates with your target audience. There’s a wide range of content types, such as images, videos, blogs, memes, podcasts, user-generated content, and much more. For example, mobile video consumption is growing by 100% each year, and 64% of customers say they are more likely to buy a product after watching a video first. Additionally, visual content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media compared to any other type of content. Determining your businesses unique goals and deciding which content-type best suits your audience will go a long way when assessing your social media success.

Seeing how there’s billions of people across several social media channels, it’s clear to understand why so many businesses are marketing on social media nowadays. Developing a social media plan requires marketers to take a step back and asses their brands entire online presence. By establishing measurable goals, finding your target audience, and consistently posting compelling content across your channels, these three essential social media strategies will set your campaign up for success. For more information on how our Destination Marketing digital marketing services team can help your businesses social media performance, contact us here.


Step 6 – Paid Search Campaigns

Paid search can be a gamble, and not just in the sense that you’re betting on keywords, but more so due to the fact that making minor mistakes can cost your company big time. PPC (Pay-per-click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are the two primary methods that determine which landing pages appear in your search engine results. Although, paid search campaigns, commonly referred to as PPC ads, generate much quicker results. Here are our top paid search tips to ensure your PPC campaign runs effectively.

  • Determining Your Budget – The budget you set for your campaign can dramatically determine its success. Before setting a high budget, it’s important to only include your highest performing keywords. Stay on top of the data and set specific revenue goals to measure the success of your paid search campaigns. Tracking PPC data can help you identify creative strategies across other avenues of your company as well. Tracking, reporting, and optimizing is a critical key process in determining ad budget and understanding how customers interact with your business.
  • Always Be Testing – If you’re using Google Ads, the Experiments feature is often overlooked and can be very helpful to your paid search efforts. To use this feature, simply select your campaign and click “Draft & Experiments” from the sidebar menu to begin launching ad variations and campaign experiments. By testing out multiple variations of ad copy, you can better learn which CTA best motivates users to visit your website. Additionally, try inserting price points or discounts to determine what exactly incentivizes your audience.
  • Focus on Your Landing Page – Landing pages are often overlooked due to them not being directly related to paid search campaigns, although they’re definitely crucial to retaining your audience. While it may seem obvious, a good first step is to make sure that your PPC copy directly relates to what landing page you’re sending users to. If your ad copy discusses a certain sale on a product, and your ad links people to your homepage, this dissociation may sabotage an entire campaign. Creating a landing page that’s compelling and simple can drastically affect your PPC efforts. In addition to this, hosting a website that’s fast across both desktop and mobile improves search engine’s organic ranking of your landing pages, it’s also just overall more pleasing to the user experience. Compare your website to competitors often and incorporate new ideas, this continuous effort will keep your online content fresh.
  • Explore Beyond Google – It’s common to only think of Google when determining paid search strategies, but if you don’t explore beyond that then you’re missing out on a huge chunk of potential customers. Additionally, on Bing, you’ll be faced with lower bids and lower CPC (Cost Per Click) when it comes to most keywords due to the less competitive Bing market. Aside from search engines, deciding to invest in social media advertising is a great direction to explore as well. Be sure to research your audience and determine which social media platform is ideal to invest some of your ad budget into. When experimenting with different ad platforms, it’s advised to start with a small budget and increase from there depending on how successful the campaign performs. In addition to Google, investing in Facebook, Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Instagram can all improve your digital marketing services efforts.

While it’s right there in the name, paid search does indeed cost significantly more than any organic search strategy. However, when a company runs their paid search correctly, their ROI (return on investment) could make the entire PPC campaign well worth its cost.


Step 7 – E-Mail Marketing Tips

Since its inception in 1978, email marketing has grown to be one most powerful digital marketing tools available to modern businesses. When compared to nearly any other digital marketing services strategy, email marketing has consistently shown to have the highest ROI, resulting in an average of $42 in revenue for every $1 spent. This outstanding 4,200% ROI is possible due to the relatively inexpensive practice of email marketing. Let’s detail some marketing tips to ensuring an effective e-mail campaign.

  • Subject Lines – Let’s start with what the user will first see when receiving your email, the subject line. Being one of the most important aspects of email marketing, a subject line can make the difference of recipients opening your email, deleting it, or even reporting it as spam. In fact, 47% of email recipients choose to open an email solely based on the subject line. Additionally, put as much time into your email’s preview text as it’s just as important as your subject line. Effective subject lines will usually be short, simple, provide value, stay original, and add a sense of urgency.
  • Design Matters – Your emails design should align with the overall branding found on your website, this will establish consistency along your many touchpoints. Once the recipient is viewing your email, your design and copy should clearly indicate where they should go to take next steps. Inserting short paragraphs, exciting keywords, and bullet points all help the reader skim your email and understand your message quickly. According to Hubspot, 65% of users prefer emails that contain mostly images. Visuals are an excellent way to personalize your emails while staying on-brand. When inserting images, make sure to choose small files that don’t slow down the loading of your email. It’s important to insert images sparingly and omit any visuals that don’t contribute to your message. Some email providers consider images as an indicator of spam, so make sure that your sparse use of visuals really help illustrate your emails message.
  • Automation – One key advantage of email marketing is its ability to segment your audience and send tailored messages that yield a more targeted and profitable campaign. Audience segmentation gives businesses the ability to stay out of spam folders by personalizing emails to specific audiences. While it’s possible to segment by demographic information such as gender, age, and location; companies can also segment audiences based on content interests, purchase history, website activity, email engagement, and an assortment of other targeting factors. When delving into this world of audience segmentation, it’s nearly impossible to successfully manage these audiences without first automating your email campaign. Whether you’re sending Welcome emails to new subscribers, or reminding customers of their abandoned online shopping cart, there’s nearly limitless triggers available to help automate your email campaign. Popular online email marketing services include MailChimp, Sendinblue, ConvertKit, HubSpot, MailerLite, and many more.

Whether you’re marketing to new or reoccurring customers, it’s clear to see why so many companies are eager to invest in a robust email campaign. More than 304-billion emails are sent worldwide from companies on any given days, which is why it’s so important for your content to stand out to your readers, maintain their interest, and meet your marketing goals.


Destination Marketing

At Destination Marketing, our agency’s omni-channel digital marketing services approach and customized digital solutions will turn your leads into customers and your business into an industry leader. They will also increase your traffic, engage and re-engage your leads, and boost your e-commerce sales. With a fully integrated digital strategy and content that converts, our digital marketing services agency helps you stand out from the crowd because everything we do is focused on generating prospects for your business. For more information on how our Destination Marketing team can help your businesses digital marketing services efforts, contact us here.