Digital Marketing Agency Liverpool

We are Embryo, a full-service digital marketing agency that helps Liverpool businesses, and those based in the Merseyside area, grow their online presence and increase revenue by using the latest techniques and practices to deliver bespoke marketing campaigns.

We have a proven track record of delivering results for a range of clients and companies, including some major brands, and we’d love to help you. We offer every possible internet advertising service possible and have the skill base to hit relevant key performance indicators. Whether it’s increasing the organic traffic coming to your site, creating unique, long-form content to enhance the customer journey, improving rankings through link building, working on local and global SEO strategies, or increasing leads via a well-structured PPC campaign, we have a team of specialists who can help.

Our internet advertising services can be split into those that are more creative, and those that are more technical in nature. We’ll be explaining them in more detail on this page, but if you already have an idea of what particular service you’re after and want to get started straight away, feel free to give our digital marketing professionals a call today.

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At the core of our services is SEO. Liverpool businesses can benefit from this.

Our Creative Services: SEO, Content Marketing, Digital PR, and Paid Social

Standing for Search Engine Optimisation, SEO is a long-term internet strategy that is focused on improving your website’s rankings for keywords that your target audience is searching for. By doing this, the theory goes that your target market will see your website at the top of the search results page, visit it, and be converted from a lead into a sale. The SEO work we undergo is focused on quality and quantity and is done so that your website, and business, is seen as a hub of knowledge and one that is deserving of high rankings. We use tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix, and SEMrush to complete our work for you. Some of the technical SEO strategies we undertake include making sure that your website’s structure can be easily scanned by Google’s so-called ‘spiders’ and read by humans.

A good navigation structure tells both of those parties that this is a website that knows what it’s doing. This feeds into another one of our strategies, which involves sitemaps. Without an up-to-date sitemap, you can’t expect Google Search Console to properly read your site and, therefore, rank it well – we’ll ensure this doesn’t happen. Site speed is becoming an ever more present issue in the world of search and SEO analysis.

A site that loads quickly will be more rewarded by search engines than one that is slow. On this, Google says its new Core Web Vitals programme (which promotes site speed) is there “to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web”. We’ll get your site speed optimised by checking the number of requests – both internal and external – and including ‘Time To First Byte’ (aka: TTFB) metrics. At its core, our team of SEO specialists base everything around the keywords that are relevant to you, and it’s this foundation that has seen us help our current clients by providing a serious return on investment.

we place great emphasis on content marketing

Unlike other marketing agencies in Liverpool, content, for us, is not an afterthought. In many ways, we are a content marketing agency at our heart and understand better than most the power that optimised, ontologically relevant content can have for businesses’ websites and conversion rates. By harnessing AI-driven research tools, our dedicated team can, in minutes, sound like experts on your behalf and can create content that answers regularly searched questions, explains your products and services, and provides digital experiences that will have users coming back to your website time and time again. More and more, Google is prioritising well-written content that isn’t stuffed with keywords and other black-hat SEO practices.

Good SEO these days is centred around content and is the best long-term way to build trust with search engines and the average consumer. It’s no secret that we love natural, beautifully crafted content that spans two, three, four, five thousand words, because despite the emphasis on site speed, schema markups, and conversion rate optimisation, long-form content is still the thing that Google finds the most palatable. Search engines reward hard work such as putting serious time and effort into creating a unique piece of content that is presented in an accessible way. What our team of SEO specialists find too, with long-form content, is that a lot of your competitors simply don’t believe that this is the right approach. We do, and we are unapologetic about it, in fact, so much so that we analysed over 24,000 keywords and found that to rank position #1 for any given keyword, you’ll need at least 2855 words on that one page! As a result, there are huge opportunities for businesses that are willing to turn their website into a place that is filled with useful and comprehensive content. This, in turn, can increase keywords rankings and overall keyword visibility – two of the most important metrics in search engine optimisation. Sure, content takes time to take effect, but once it does, it will provide more benefits than most other digital optimisation tactics.

On-page content digital marketing services are enhanced massively by the efforts of our Digital PR team who utilise their exhaustive list of contacts in a great many areas of B2B and B2C publications to secure quality coverage and links to your site from places such as The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, and The Metro. Whether it’s through newsjacking – i.e, getting your company’s name in the headlines as a result of some recent news that has occurred – or by spending time creating longer pieces of newsworthy content that establishes you as a thought leader, our digital PR services will provide you with as-yet-untapped visibility. The work of Digital PR supplements the on-page content and establishes further trust from search engines because it’s from a 3rd party that themselves have high domain authority. In plain English, this means that you get the benefits of people seeing your name in online publications and the search engine optimisation advantages of having established sites linking back to you.

We are one of the few digital PR agencies in the north-west that have a designated data scientist – Danny – who can create raw data and interpret existing sets to create unique, newsworthy campaigns that are relevant to your industry and interest journalists, resulting in your name being seen by thousands of people. Further to this, we constantly scour the internet to find journalists who are looking for comments and opinions from business owners in certain industries. We satisfy their demand by offering them content on your behalf. Traditional PR – even stuff that’s found online – is in steep decline. You can’t just throw advertisements in front of customers’ faces and expect them to buy something – you need to be cleverer and more thoughtful in your approach. Digital PR plugs this gap and helps to create meaningful customer experiences that will help establish you and grow trust with your target demographic.

we'll help you leverage social media for your Liverpool business

In a country where four in every five people are on social media, your digital strategy must have some element of paid social in it. Our Social Media Management team are adept at creating campaigns across all relevant platforms – from Facebook ads and Instagram to LinkedIn, YouTube ads, and even the newest player, TikTok, which will get your products and services seen by a wide variety of audiences.

We use our creative capabilities to conjure up on-brand advertisements, which persuade Liverpudlians to swipe up, click through, or follow. While most social media companies just manage your account, publish content, and leave it alone, we act as your consultants as well as a management team. What does this mean? In basic terms, we get to know your brand in such a way that we can create and manage everything about your social media accounts (from creating the images and videos to bolstering your brand identity), leaving you to enjoy the benefits of increased sales and people visiting your bricks and mortar store.

Every post we create on your behalf has to reach our own professional standards. Before it’s sent to you for approval, each piece of content we create during your social media strategy is crafted and optimised for the platform it is going to be distributed on – there is no one size fits all approach here. Advertising on social media requires constant analysis, adjustments, and long-term planning, all of which take time and need to be done by a team of experts who understand the various complexities. From managing return on ad spend (ROAS) and curating engaging social media content to devising strategies, targeting various demographics, and using A/B testing to make data-driven decisions on further strategies, we take ownership of the whole paid social media advertising process.

we excel at PPC. Liverpool and Manchester businesses can benefit from our campaigns.

Our Technical Solutions: PPC, Web Design, and Web Development

Pay-Per-Click advertising – or PPC for short – is the online equivalent of buying up billboard space. PPC campaigns can help you bypass the organic traffic on a search results page and get you appearing at the very top as an advertisement – with you only being charged for it when a user clicks on the ad itself. We create engaging adverts that are unique to each keyword they are targeting to ensure that, in the milliseconds where Google is deciding which adverts to show, they select your advertisement to feature at the very top of page one.

We recognise that PPC can be a bit vague and hard to wrap one’s head around. Thankfully, we have a team of young, knowledgeable PPC consultants who can not only explain key concepts, such as tracking, return on ad spend, and cost per click (if you’d like us to of course!) but will manage the entire campaign – from selecting the keywords that are relevant to the product or service that you’re trying to sell to setting up landing pages that convert these clicks into cash. Our research team will help expand what you thought was your typical target audience, unlocking further markets and demographics that we know to be interested in what you’re selling.

One of the many fantastic benefits of this affordable marketing technique relates to the behaviours of consumers. The people who click on your ads are, on average, 50% more likely to purchase products straight away – as opposed to those clicking on organic results who are more likely to research before purchasing. Having run successful PPC marketing campaigns for businesses in the past, we’re well aware of what is needed to create a great campaign that either increases the number of leads your sales team has or the amount of stock you sell. Once live, we obsessively track the campaign’s performance and proactively make any necessary changes to ensure that budgets are used most effectively. Our goal is to keep visibility high and costs low.

we pride ourselves on helping north-west businesses build great websites

Getting people to your website is one thing – it’s another thing to ensure that the relevant traffic you’ve worked hard to achieve goes to a stunning, nimble, mobile-friendly website. Our Web Design team will, from conception to delivery, help you create beautiful websites that will help you hit pre-defined key performance indicators. The site we create will be, needless to say, completely bespoke and based on your brief and the interactions we have during the discovery phase. While most Liverpool digital marketing agencies create web pages, for now, our Web Design service team create them for the future by leveraging the newest elements and software that’ll have other brands green with envy. Our stylish designs, as well as being crafted with the user at the forefront, work and don’t compromise functionalities.

The website development service we offer works in tandem with the design to ensure your new site works perfectly and is optimised for every device it could appear on. We believe that the foundation of all advertising campaigns is attractive websites that are fast, easily navigable, and clean. Throughout the process, you’ll be given a project manager who will oversee all communications with you and be on hand to answer any questions and make any adjustments during the design and development process. We don’t just go full steam ahead and build a website; instead, we carefully carve out a sitemap that creates the perfect platform for the content you, or we, will write. Having completed over 30 separate website projects in 2021 alone, we know the behaviour of consumers better than most and create pages that instantly grab their attention through eye-catching design and lightning-quick development.

We Help Deliver Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns for Liverpool Businesses

We have four values that ensure we are successful as an online marketing agency. Liverpool and Manchester are just a few of the areas in which we’ve helped businesses funnel new leads and increase revenue by creating, and delivering, bespoke digital marketing strategies.

These values are ‘Together’, ‘Curious’, ‘Innovative’, and ‘Focused’.

The close-knit nature of our business keeps us together and ensures that we can constantly communicate with each other about your accounts and ongoing campaigns. It is this togetherness, as well as freedom of communication, that allows us to be collaborative and ultimately more creative to the benefit of your Liverpool business. We know it is essential to ensure we can deliver on our digital marketing solutions.

While another SEO agency might settle on certain processes and procedures, we here at Embryo are always curious and determined to improve on our ways of working. We consider ourselves students, as well as market leaders, and are constantly learning about the ever-changing internet advertising landscape and are not afraid of the unknown – all of this is ultimately for the benefit of your business and its online presence.

Being innovative drives us as a business. There are always new projects underway, and we are always building new software and technologies that push the boundaries of what we do.

While innovation looks at the bigger picture, our focused way of working allows us to deliver the day-to-day work to an incredibly high professional standard. Each of the technical and creative departments is laser-focused in their approach to the work and to the wider service that we offer.

Our Approach as a Creative Agency For Merseyside Businesses

Every campaign is predicated on your goals and individual keywords. In five simple steps, we’ll begin to deliver results for your business.

Aware that success is relative to every single Liverpool business, we’ll make sure that you, the client, define how successful our digital solutions have been – whether it’s leads, stock sold, an increase in relevant traffic, or creating meaningful customer experiences.

Here is a rundown of the approach we take as a marketing agency that operates in Liverpool and beyond.

Consultation: Before a word is typed, a campaign is set up, or a keyword is tracked, we consult with you and get to know you and your business a bit better. Here, we’ll learn about your business’s history, what it sells, its main products and services, average order value, and future growth plans. This first consultation period is key because it provides us with vital context that will shape the digital marketing strategies we eventually act upon. Everything from here on out is entirely focused on what is important to you in terms of success. Without this initial step, our digital marketing team is just working on a hunch – something we’re not used to.
Research: After we’ve established who you are as a business, and what is important to you, we’ll go away and undergo thorough research and audits. This second phase helps us learn more about what your target audience is searching for, which in turn signals what kind of specialist SEO tactics we should carry out. The research section will provide us with the data that will point us in the right direction – we then funnel that through the lens of what success looks like for you, based on what we learned during the consultation phase.
Strategy: Now, we have everything we need to create a long-term strategy. We combine the input from you, with the data we’ve pulled during the research phase, to deliver something to you, for approval, that is bespoke and based entirely on your business. We’ll lay out, in exact detail, the work we plan to create for you in the coming months so that A) You’re aware of what’s planned for each month and B) You are satisfied the work is matching your marketing budget.
Delivery: This is where we walk the walk, essentially. Once the strategy has been approved by you, our teams go away and create the campaigns, write the content, carry out the necessary technical procedures, or begin to build your new website. This stage is defined by pre-agreed deadlines to ensure client satisfaction and, throughout, your Client Services Manager will be in regular contact, keeping you updated. Work that requires approval, such as website content, will be sent over to you in good time before being uploaded to your site.
Regular reporting: Each month, you’ll receive a report summarising all the key headlines from the weeks that have just gone by. In it will be the key headlines along with stats about your website’s performance over that month, with overviews and reflections on the work that has been, and will be, created, and why.

Why Choose Embryo As Your Manchester And Liverpool Digital Agency

Branding & Design

The greatest, most ambitious brands have strong branding that runs through their entire company. From internal memos to their social media activity, their logos, motifs, and colour schemes are ingrained in their business. To be a market leader, regardless of the industry in which you operate, you need strong branding and design. We can guide you, via our creative strategy, to come up with a defining logo, colour scheme, and tone of voice, ensuring all your physical and digital content reflect the essence of your brand. By drawing from years of past experience with other brands, we can transform how your target audience sees you, in comparison to your competitors.

Unique Approach to Content

The way we write content is unlike other marketing agencies. Liverpool businesses, as well as those slightly further afield, love the way that we can write knowledgeable, ontologically relevant, long-form content right from the get-go, with minimal input from the client. How do we do this? Well, we use software tools that are powered by AI, which give us a rundown of what is being said by those businesses that are already ranking on page one for the keyword we are targeting. By doing this, we’re able to understand the topic, and the types of questions people are searching, and use that to create better, longer, more unique content that is more detailed than anything that is on page one.

Discover What Your Customers Want

Google’s algorithm changes, on average, 500 times a year and is becoming more and more focused on providing detailed answers to questions that users are searching. We aim to create content that directly answers these in ways that are more detailed than other websites. Our digital marketing team will look to create content hubs on your website that are powered by intent and built using in-depth keyword research, which will provide us with the framework to write your content. This type of content writing is providing answers to questions your exact target market has about your industry, products, or services, allowing you to build trust and authority – both key ranking and selling factors.

Competitor Analysis

We’ll use proprietary technology to analyse your entire industry and find opportunities that we can leverage to ensure success, no matter your marketing budget. The strategic marketing plan that we will create for you will feature in-depth competitor analysis. We will examine your competitors’ domain authority and ranking scores, the number of backlinks they have, the level of organic and paid traffic, and what keywords they are – and aren’t – ranking for. It’s this SEO analysis that allows us to understand what steps need to be taken in order to provide you with a serious return on investment.

So, Let’s Get Started: How Can We Help Your Business?

Liverpool is such an active market, bursting with different audiences, demographics, and people interested in your products and services. Book a call with our marketing agency today, and end your quest for a team to help you tap into this lucrative market. With our content marketing and specialist SEO services, plus our award-winning design team, digital PR team, PPC executives, and social media marketing group, we’re confident we can truly transform your business.

Lets talk!

Arrange a call with our team today.

Your Online Marketing Questions, Answered!

How much should I pay a digital marketing agency?

Charlie: The amount you pay depends on the level of service that you’re after. The more services and branches of agency you want to benefit from, the more your investment needs to be. When it comes to the cost of digital marketing services, it’s important to set yourself an internal budget before you go out and look for agencies who will pitch to you. Network with associates in this industry to get a better sense of the market, and always scrutinise the work that is being promised against the level of investment. Your gut will tell you if something is off, and you’ll quickly be able to spot the wheat from the chaff. Different agencies will use multiple pricing structures depending on the work you’re after – if you’re signing up for a long, 12-month contract, it could work on a retainer basis where you pay a monthly fee for the work, with a notice period. Alternatively, if you’re after a new website, this might be classed as a project that has a fixed cost to it, based on labour, software used, and the resource currently available in the agency. Putting a figure on it is difficult as it’s based on potentially dozens of factors – from the location of your business, the services you’re after from marketing agencies in Liverpool, and the kinds of things you’re expecting from the work.

How much do digital marketing agencies charge in the UK?

Dylan: This question is hard to answer with a definitive number due to the variety of work wanted or scale of agency sought, which will affect the price. For instance, it stands a chance that an agency in London that works with major brands would charge more than a small, one-person freelance marketer. On average, according to data business Statista, “having a digital marketing agency do SEO work for an organization costs on average 394.75 British pounds per day in the United Kingdom.”

That stat, however, shouldn’t be taken literally and will entirely depend on what you want from the digital marketing services. You should also take your time when it comes to finding an agency, and work with the one that provides you with documented evidence of their success with similar businesses in a relevant sector to yours. It’s this kind of proof that will make that one Manchester or Liverpool agency worth the investment.

Is it worth it to pay for digital marketing?

Charlie: Internet advertising companies get a bad rap and, in some instances, it’s easy to see why. Oftentimes, bold claims are made to clients without any proof or documented evidence of previous success. These businesses will be blinded by the results, invest serious money, only to be let down. Thankfully, here at Embryo, we’ve been very open about our successes and, rather than give you a load of marketing garble, we let those do the talking instead.

We’re confident that we’re very much worth the investment – our services are based on data, and the way we measure success isn’t on some vague metric but on the difference it’s making to your business. On a slightly separate, but relevant, note, the work that goes into successful marketing (the keyword being successful) requires a serious amount of time, dedication, and, crucially, technical knowledge. For many businesses, this level of fixed focus just isn’t feasible, which is why internet advertising agencies such as Embryo exist – to help businesses achieve the results without having to do all the hard yards!

I want to create a website. Where do I start?

Hannah: Start with us, a digital marketing agency! Liverpool businesses, and those in the nearby areas of Manchester, have benefited in numerous ways by letting our Web team design and develop a website that displays their products in stunning, innovative ways. Once you’ve got in touch with our team, we’ll send out a brief sheet and have a kick-off meeting to discuss what you have in mind regarding a new website. We can then turn that concept into something real. We then go about creating your website and, if you prefer, our Content team can even write all the content for it, without you having to do a thing. In a few months, you’ll have a brand-new website that is unlike anything in your sector.

What is the difference between media and social media?

Hannah M: Media could probably be categorised as traditional media such as TV advertisements, newspapers, and radio ads – these are still being used by numerous businesses on a vast scale and are effective if you’re simply trying to target a huge quantity of people, with no real thought as to who those people are and whether or not they’d be remotely interested in your product. Of course, that’s not to say that traditional media can’t have positive effects on a brand – there are numerous examples of famous adverts such as Apple’s “1984” advert, Budweiser’s “Whassup?!” ad, and Cadbury’s advert featuring the Gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight”. The difference between media and social media is that it is driven by user content, rather than businesses. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are all examples of social media platforms. For businesses looking to advertise to their target demographic, social media can be very powerful because you can get your products and services right in the faces of people that you know will have a strong interest in your product.

How big is this industry?

Emma: The digital marketing industry has grown massively over the past three years as businesses of all sizes increasingly use the online space to grow their brand. In the digital PR team, we have seen how companies within the B2B and B2C sector are creating thought-provoking campaigns that target their relevant audience online through news stories and social media. The pandemic has also encouraged people to use technology to engage and interact with others through their smartphones and other technical devices, which means that it’s an excellent opportunity for companies to invest in digital marketing to help generate leads and further sales online.

How do you measure success?

Cal: Thanks to comprehensive tracking solutions, measuring success is much easier than in previous years. Speaking from a paid advertising solution, Google ads has its own javascript based tracking that allows us to install a global body tag, recording all user data, then event snippet tags to dignify success, i.e., a successful lead completion or brochure download. Furthermore, you have the ability to create goals or e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics by installing global tags and setting up event triggers, which can then be imported into Google Ads for transparent tracking.

E-commerce success is very easy to measure, as it’s a simple basis of measuring the media spend against the revenue produced, resulting in a client’s return on ad spend (ROAS). This is a basic guideline to performance, but it needs to be considered that agency fees, product margins, staffing, shipping and VAT and more all need to be calculated to produce a return on investment (ROI) metric.

For lead generation, it is harder to measure end-to-end results, as within Google ads, you typically can only measure the cost per lead, lead volume and conversion rate of clicks to leads. By going further, you have the ability to work with the client’s in-house team to quantify the volume of leads that converted, the percentage of leads that resulted in sales, and the value of these sales to the business. Producing this data is vital to measuring success and especially if you wish to scale your digital advertising – as it allows you to place an ROI on your paid marketing and also identify which leads convert more, are of higher value, or alternatively never commit to a purchase.

How to get into digital marketing?

Dylan: When you’re looking to get into digital marketing, there’s no set way to do so – everyone has their own method for getting into the industry and it’s all about doing what feels comfortable and manageable for you! The two main ways to get into the industry are by going to university and gaining a qualification in a relevant field, or taking part in an apprenticeship scheme – both are fantastic options and give you brilliant avenues into the digital marketing world.

By heading off to university, you’ll gain a deep understanding of your field and this gives you a level of expertise that’s likely to be unmatched – a great place to start off! Alternatively, an apprenticeship will give you hands-on experience of the role that you’ll be moving into; if you aren’t enjoying it, you’ll be able to back out and change your mind without having been too committed, but if you love it, you’ll already have started to build a bank of experience that employers are going to love!

Why is online marketing important?

Dylan: These days, everything is done online – whether it’s education, shopping, entertainment, or working, everything we seem to do operates on a digital medium. Of course, this means that the competition across the web in every single industry is incredibly high, which makes it really tough to stand out from the crowd. Without the right level of visibility, it’s impossible for a business to function properly and you’re probably going to face a huge amount of difficulty getting the results that you want – this is where digital marketing comes in!

Through the use of effective digital marketing techniques such as social media, PPC, SEO, content marketing, and digital PR, you’ll be able to gain as much visibility as possible in your industry – the more people that see your business online, the better the chances of hitting those results and growing your business!

What is a digital marketing strategy?

Megan: A digital marketing strategy is a plan that helps you to attain specific goals through your selected marketing channels such as paid social. It takes into consideration what your business is currently doing well and what can be improved upon in regard to meeting the goals set, so you’re more likely to accomplish it.

In Paid Social, digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks and actions within your digital marketing strategy that move you towards your specific targets or end goal. When planning these campaigns, take into consideration your audience and which channel is best suited to reach them, as well as what media (whether it be blogs, PDF downloads, video content, etc. ) that you can use to attract them.

From their first interaction with your business to the point that they convert and beyond, it’s important to consider the funnel approach. How can you get users into your marketing funnel and how can you continue to reach them and eventually turn them into customers.

In taking all of this into account, you should have yourself a successful marketing strategy!

How to get a digital marketing job?

Jess: Being such a fast-paced, exciting industry, it’s unsurprising that so many people want to work in digital marketing. However, landing your first role can seem daunting, especially if you lack professional experience.

Here are some tips that can help you to get that dream job offer and become a digital marketer! Try to gain some work experience: Reach out to local agencies or businesses and explain that you’re looking to take on some unpaid work for 1-2 weeks. This will be a crucial first step in building out your CV and understanding which particular area of digital marketing it is that you feel drawn to.

Learn the basics: There are lots of free YouTube tutorials and online certifications available to help you build up your digital marketing knowledge. Get researching and see what appeals to you. Work on your LinkedIn: Add all of your relevant skills and experience to your LinkedIn profile and start connecting with people in the industry. Following and engaging with the right people on LinkedIn is a great way to build up your network and get you spotted by potential employers.

Proactively apply: Really get to know each business that you’re applying to, and what the job will entail. Take a look at their website and social media and tailor your application to suit. Remember that the technical side of any area of digital marketing can be learned, but great communication skills, an eagerness to learn, and a good attitude is what really matters when it comes to applying for an entry-level position.

You can see the jobs we have going at Embryo Digital here.

What is an impression?

Kasey: An impression is a type of metric that can be used to quantify the number of times your post, piece of content or ad has been served in front of your target audience.

For example, if your ad appeared on the screen of someone in your target audience and they happened to scroll down and then back up to maybe view the ad again or take a second look, that counts as one impression.

However, if this ad appeared then for a second time but at a different time of the day, this would then be classed as two different impressions as they have occurred at two different times of the day, meaning two different sessions.

In addition, when quantifying impressions for video content, impressions can be counted the same way single image ads are counted – this means that the viewer doesn’t necessarily have to start watching the video for it to be counted as an impression. Therefore, if you’re wanting to see how many of your target market started watching your content it would be useful to look at the 3-second video views metric for this insight.

What is SEM?

Sam: Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) relates to the specific marketing of businesses on search engines. SEM covers both paid ads, which traditionally appear at the top of the page, and organic results, which are lower down and include additional results such as map listings. The paid ads are utilised within the PPC marketing channel, and the organic listings are a result of the SEO marketing channel.

What is lead generation?

Kara: Lead generation is a term that we use a lot in digital marketing – it’s often a major KPI for a lot of clients for marketing agencies such as ourselves, making it a crucially important factor in our work. The process of generating leads can be done in a lot of ways and the outcomes can be very different across industries; for some, lead generation may be in the form of an enquiry for a service or product, whereas for others it may be generating interest in your website.

It’s clear to see why lead generation is such an important tool for businesses – visibility is one of the most important parts of running an online business and, by gaining leads, growing your reputation, and providing a high-quality service, you’re sure to be on the right track.

What are digital marketing tools?

Mitch: Digital marketing tools vary depending on the use case. Ideally, though, they should provide the user with a toolset that allows them to either manage campaigns, analyse results, or both. They could also be focused on competitor analysis, research, or auditing. Each area of digital marketing has its own tools. SEO for example could use SEMrush, PPC could use Google Ads Editor, and Social Media could use Hootsuite.

What does digital marketing involve?

Sam: Digital marketing is the practice of increasing business visibility online through various different marketing channels including SEO, PPC, social media, digital PR, email marketing and more. Each channel has specific methods and strategies that are typically designed to reach the goal of the business. Those goals could include revenue or lead generation, brand awareness, or something else entirely. Choosing which of the marketing channels should be involved in a campaign is entirely dependent on the end goal.

What is A/B testing?

George: A/B testing is a method of testing that allows you to compare the performance of two creatives, whether that be ads, landing pages, websites, call to actions, unique selling points, etc. A/B testing is crucial when aiming to get the best results. For example, if you’re in two minds with what ad copy to go with or landing page design, etc., then you can test both in order to find out which works best for you.

A couple of PPC examples where A/B testing is crucial can be seen below:

Ad copy is definitely the most common area when it comes to A/B testing. Usually, the client and the account manager will have slightly different opinions when it comes to what they think will work best from a call to action and USP point of view. In order to test both methods without jeopardising performance, we set both live at the same time and see which achieved the best results.

Another common area where we A/B test is landing pages. The content and design on landing pages can often be the difference between receiving leads and not receiving leads. That’s why extensive testing will have a much better chance of achieving success.

What does CPM mean?

Cal: tCPM (meaning target cost per thousand impressions) bidding is a bidding strategy that allows you to pay per 1000 unique views on your adverts, versus the typical and well known ‘pay-per-click’ option. tCPM bidding is exclusively available to video campaigns and is designed to produce as much unique reach as possible for your designated budget. If you have a very healthy click-through rate (CTR), tCPM can be cheaper than paying per click, and therefore produce better results.

tCPM is the strongest form of bidding for brand visibility and awareness. It is effective for advertising events, such as competitions, sales and limited time products, and has the ability to cast an incredibly wide net to capture new users to your website.

tCPM, however, is poor at producing bottom of the funnel results, such as lead capturing or closing sales, as this bidding is focused on cheap views vs engagement and results on the website.

Why is digital marketing the future?

Jo: There is about to be a massive generation change in the global workforce. In 2025, it’s estimated that around 70% of the workforce will be millennials or younger. We live in a world where, for the first time in history, the vast majority of the population is born into a digital world as standard. This digital transformation has meant that businesses have to implement strategies to engage with their customers online, and the skills required to deliver deep and meaningful impact are that much higher in this increasingly complex digital space. People will need to outsource or develop expertise in all areas to make that happen, such as SEO, PR, UX, PPC, paid social, advertising, content marketing, strategy, etc.

What excites you about the digital marketing industry?

Emma: There will always be shifting how digital marketing strategies are approached, from an SEO, design, and PR perspective, as we constantly have to react to new changes set by Google. Technical experts have to be ready to act and implement new SEO strategies to help companies boost their organic visibility and user journeys. Along with preplanning, we have also seen how data research plays a huge role in digital marketing and can forecast how machine learning and automation will impact the performance of campaigns and reporting.

30 Digital Marketing Facts

Better content may increase blog visitors by up to 2,000%.
Google accounted for 67% of all smartphone search traffic and 94% of all organic traffic in May 2020.
To expand and sustain their search visibility, enterprise and mid-sized businesses rely more on technical SEO and content generation.
As of January 2020, around 95.88% of all Google queries are four words or longer.
When it comes to website load time, corporations only get two seconds. Bounce rates rise by 50% if the page takes longer than two seconds.
Conversion rates are most affected by the first five seconds of a page’s loading time. With each extra second of load time, website conversion rates decline by an average of 4.42%.
Within one day, 18% of all local searches result in a sale. People who visit a physical site will select one that is within 5 miles of their initial location, 72% of the time. Mobile devices will have a £1,061,319,000,000 impact on local commerce by 2021.
90% of searchers haven’t decided on a brand before beginning their search.
Traditional outbound strategies such as cold calling or direct mail have a conversion rate of 1.7%; however, SEO has a 14.6% conversion rate.
The third page of search results will only be viewed 7% of the time.

The top social media sites utilised by marketers are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Reviews of a particular product or service influence 4 out of 5 shoppers.
Traditional banner advertising is 20 times less successful than location-specific ad campaigns.
When compared to websites without updated content, content production results in 434% more indexed pages.
Marketers should try to publish at least 16 blogs every month to enhance their traffic. When compared to publishing less than four times each month, this 16 blogs a month method generates 3.5 times the response.
A business that posts to a blog daily can receive five times the amount of traffic as one that does not.
Adding fresh material to an old blog can boost the efficacy of your search results by 74%. However, just 55% of marketers will employ this method.
In the last two years, smartphone inquiries for “where to buy” and “near me” have increased by more than 200%.
Almost a quarter of businesses employ mobile optimisation as a key SEO strategy.
The most popular content marketing search term is “content marketing strategy”.

The most popular content marketing search term is “content marketing strategy”.
According to 53% of marketers, webinars are the most effective format for generating high-quality leads.
The generation of leads is a primary goal for marketers.
On average, the cost-per-click for Google Ads is between 76p and £1.52. However, in other industries, it can be vastly different. For instance, the law industry’s average cost-per-click (CPC) is £4.68, with the most costly keyword CPC being £789.62.
Despite being extremely unpopular, landing pages have the highest conversion rate at 25%
Social media is used by 14% of customers to make purchases.
The average article length is 1050 words, and blog postings are becoming more graphic and lengthier.
The first result of any search receives around 20.5% of all page clicks.
81% of marketers want to boost their usage of written content in the near future.
72% of digital ad spending is spent on mobile.
On Google searches, the average number of organic results has reduced from 10 to 8.5.