Optimisation

Many people take SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) to be opposites. In fact they travel together: both the ads and the structure behind them have to be relevant for Google's crawlers to think well of them. So the best preparation for spending money is making content. It makes the spend work harder, and it makes your site worth reading — which is what future customers notice.

They come back, and you become the reference on the subject — the place they look when a question about your product or service comes up. With that standing behind you, Google starts favouring your ad over others: a competitor may bid more, but their content is not as useful as yours. One of the commonest mistakes is assuming content is only for businesses chasing organic results.

The money

There are two kinds of business owner. The first says there is not much to invest, and usually what is missing is a plan for setting aside part of the profit. Far be it from us to tell anyone how to run their finances — but putting a slice of earnings back into the company is sound. Digital marketing helps here, because it does not take a fortune. Paid campaigns do have a minimum spend, of course, and it is lower than most people think. If the budget is tight, starting small and scaling up is perfectly fine: campaigns on Google Ads, for one, need time to learn. More money can produce more, certainly — if the budget stretches that far.

If it does not, aim at other goals first; when results start appearing there will be money to put in, at a pace the business can actually bear. Which brings us to the second kind of owner: the one who spends everything available to force a result. Are they wrong? Partly. Go back to the paragraph about SEM travelling with SEO. They can put in one thousand or two thousand and see much the same outcome, because the content and the site itself are not optimised. The extra money buys more clicks on the ads, true — it does not widen the reach.

Metrics and indicators

Say you run a restaurant. Customers will have opinions about the food, the service and the room. Do those impressions reach the person running the place? Would it not be wonderful to know every question, complaint and compliment about your business? Online, you can. Think of the reviews on Google Business Profile and the conversations on social media. Beyond that lies a whole world of metrics and indicators that can make the business better.

Staying with the restaurant: you can find out how long people stay, where they came from and how they behave. If you know the field a little, you will recognise these as tools inside Google Analytics. And it does not stop there. Plenty of digital marketing tools produce indicators that show what is working. So the initials do not blur together, here are a few:

• Return on investment (ROI) — what came back, as gain or profit, against what went in
• Key performance indicator (KPI) — whether, and how, you are reaching those results
• Cost per lead and cost per click (CPL and CPC) — what each lead won, and each click, actually cost

There are many more that show whether things are going well or falling short: visits to the site, the conversion rate, whether the leads are qualified. Be straight with your customers about it — and why not ask for their help with a short form? All these tools answer, in moments, questions that twenty years ago would have taken weeks. Use them.

Audience and targets

Digital marketing also lets you target campaigns, which is how the spend gets sharper: the ads go to the people you mean to reach, and a return is easier to come by. For that to work, pay attention to the targeting. Once you have decided who you are talking to, the content has to appeal to them. Cast the net too wide and the money drains away, because plenty of people will see the ads without needing what you sell. So study your audience and understand what troubles them — and here the metrics help again.

They let you follow what people do online: buying habits, preferences, tastes, the path they take to a purchase. The ads can then be narrower, answering the questions those people actually have.

Which means hitting squarely the people who need your company. All of this feeds straight into your targets — and on targets it pays to keep both feet on the ground. Selling to the entire population of São Paulo would be splendid. But is it possible?

We would hate to spoil anyone's dream, but the odds are close to nil. So go gently with targets. Not everyone in the city genuinely needs your product. Narrowing the audience is what makes a realistic target possible, and targets drawn from real numbers stand a far better chance of being met.

What Manáry brings to your growth

At Manáry Digital all of this comes shaped around you. The content we write is built for your audience, and we sharpen the spend with campaigns aimed at the people who want and need what you sell, so the results you are after become reachable. There are annual plans, which can be tailored to what you need; and if an annual plan is not for you, the services can be taken on their own — ad campaigns (Google Ads and Meta Business), site, page and content optimisation with an SEO plan, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, and a good deal more. All of it to lift your sales and bring in more customers.

Interested? Fill in the form or get in touch, and a Manáry Digital specialist will be ready to help.