Website

Domain: what do I need to know?

A domain name is your personal or business home on the internet. Think of it as a piece of online real estate that you control completely, for as long as you hold the rights to that name.

A domain can be imaginative or plainly descriptive. It can be used for anything, from a personal blog to the public site of a multinational company. Having one, or several, is essential to being visible in a crowded online world. Understanding how domain names work, and why they are necessary, can help your business or personal site build a solid digital presence.

What are domains? Where do they come from? Where do they go?

Today's internet domains let anyone own a piece of cyberspace — a site that is theirs alone. The way to secure that territory is simply to create a unique name and register it, or to buy an existing domain name on a domain marketplace or from a private seller. That lets you create a Website that establishes a presence for a whole range of personal or business reasons.

Every domain must have a unique name

A domain has to be different from every other one, and it points to a single hosting. That is why anyone buying and registering a domain name needs to research the perfect web address carefully. That research has to include the domain names you want, to find out whether they are already taken. If they are, they are off limits, unless the owner is willing to sell.

If a domain name is available, any internet user can buy it. The buyer pays a fee for exclusive rights to that name for a period of time, which can range from one year to more than a decade. Once registered, the domain name becomes the owner's public address on the internet and the gateway to the website attached to it. A domain name is really just a stand-in for the true locator: the IP address.

If you plan to build a website, you may want to choose a domain registration provider that is also a hosting provider.

Here at Manáry Digital you do not have to worry about any of this. We guide you through the whole digital side of it.

Hosting for my site

Once the domain is chosen, you need a virtual place to publish your site. That place is the hosting, an online service that lets you publish your website on the internet. When you sign up for web hosting, you are essentially renting space on a physical server. In that space you can store all the information and data the site needs to work properly.

How does hosting work?

A server is a physical computer that runs without interruption, so that your site is always available to anyone who wants to see it. The server keeps your digital place running: its job is to protect it from malicious attacks and to deliver your content from the server to your visitors' browsers — text, images, folders and everything else.

When you decide to start a new site, you need to find a web hosting provider to give you that space on the server. Your hosting stores all your files, assets and databases on the server. Whenever someone types your domain into the browser address bar, your host transfers every file needed to answer that request.

So you need to choose a hosting plan that best suits your needs. It works much like renting a flat, with regular payments that keep the server running continuously. There is no reason to worry: there are plenty of plans for this kind of service, and they are not usually expensive. 

What hosting gives you

- Storage: like a flash drive, your hosting storage is limited. It helps to know what you need before hiring a plan. Will your site have lots of images and heavy files, or only light content? That tells you which storage tier to take. And if you need more room later, you can upgrade the plan.

- Transfer: the cap on how much data can be transferred, or trafficked, on your site in a month.

- E-mail: you can keep your e-mail on the same hosting as your site, which gives you a professional address. At Manáry Digital, this option comes with our monthly plans (See our plans!)

- Control panel: the interface where you manage the site's resources — the hosting itself, e-mail, domain and other data. 

- Site builder: a tool where you can put your site together your own way, with no need for deep programming knowledge, in an easy and intuitive flow. Here on the blog, we have already suggested WordPress, for example.

Security for my site

When people talk about a site, security is the topic that tends to slip by. And yet it matters enormously that the site be safe both for its owner and for its users. That is what keeps the data of everyone who visits, and of everyone building the digital space, protected. As online shopping grows, technology advances in favour of security — but as it advances for the good guys, it advances for hackers and internet trolls too. Here is a little more about keeping your site secure. 

Security and the SSL certificate

SSL certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organisation's details. Installed on a web server, the certificate activates the padlock and the https protocol, and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser. SSL is typically used to protect credit card transactions, data transfer and logins. More recently it has become the norm for protecting browsing on social media sites.

An SSL certificate contains:

• A domain name, server name or host name.
• An organisational identity (that is, the company name) and location.
• An organisation needs to install the SSL certificate on its web server to start a secure session with browsers. Once a secure connection is established, all web traffic between the web server and the web browser will be secure.

The application protocol (also known as HTTP) then changes to HTTPS, where the S stands for secure. This only happens once the certificate has been successfully installed on your server.

At Manáry Digital, every hosting option we recommend comes with an SSL certificate.

How does an SSL certificate work?

SSL certificates use something called public key cryptography. This particular kind of encryption draws on the power of two keys, which are long strings of randomly generated numbers: a private key and a public key. A public key is known to your server and is available in the public domain, so it can be used to encrypt any message.

An example: if Alice is sending a message to Bob, she locks it with Bob's public key. The only way to decrypt it is by unlocking it with Bob's private key. Since Bob is the only one who holds his private key, he is the only one who can use it to unlock Alice's message. If a hacker intercepts the message before Bob unlocks it, all they get is a cryptographic code they cannot break, even with the power of a computer.

Seen from a website's point of view, the conversation is happening between a website and a server. Your site and your server are Alice and Bob, respectively.

Why do I need an SSL certificate?

SSL certificates protect your sensitive information — credit card details, usernames, passwords and so on. They also keep data safe between servers.

Your site will rank better on Google, build and increase your customer's trust, and improve conversion rates. Think of your site as a space, like a restaurant. If your restaurant is not a safe place, customers will not feel like eating there, will they? The same logic applies to sites, especially ones that handle any kind of transaction, and above all a financial one. 

We will be with you at every stage of the project. Your certificate is already covered.

Inbound and outbound marketing

One of the most discussed parts of marketing is the difference between inbound and outbound. The shifts in the field point to a transition, at least for most companies, towards inbound. Both approaches are still relevant, though. Here are the differences:

Inbound

Inbound marketing sets out to attract the customer and keep them. Another name for this kind of strategy is attraction marketing. The idea is not only to sell the product or service, but to spark an interest in what your business offers — to sell an idea.

This kind of content keeps growing. As we said above, paying for ads in traditional media is expensive. Producing quality, relevant content is an alternative that invests in publicity and strengthens the brand at the same time. To do that, inbound marketing starts by understanding WHO might be looking for your business. That is where building the persona comes in: the interests, the doubts and the challenges of the possible customer. From there you create material that can help and solve those problems. 

That is how you start to understand the explosive growth of blogs on the internet as a channel of attraction and reference for all kinds of sectors. With digital marketing, your future customer can enter the sales funnel without even noticing, because they were drawn in by your content. 

Once they are on your site, your blog or your social media page, the customer starts to understand what your business does and how they can be helped. And once your persona is on the site, the digital structures also allow you to capture leads. Your company can run both forms of marketing, and amplify the results.

Outbound

Outbound marketing, meanwhile, is traditional marketing: the kind that goes looking for customers by offering services or products. The aim is to bring the customer to buy directly what the company has to offer. You go after the customer actively, and not necessarily by generating a genuine interest in your company.

This kind of strategy brings to mind advertising in the big media outlets, as well as visual promotion such as posters, banners and flyers. But outbound also lives in the digital world — video ads, e-mail marketing and pop-ups, for instance. It usually demands more money from the advertiser, since ads in those large media are not cheap.

Even so, outbound, though often treated as old-fashioned or outdated, is still quite relevant for companies. Imagine you have a hotel and want to attract more guests. With an ad on a YouTube video, your business could reach more people. The people reached, however, are not necessarily the ones who were looking for your hotel or were interested in accommodation. 

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What are leads?

One of the most important parts of digital marketing is attracting customers to your business — which is not necessarily easy. Knowing who is interested in your services or products is a first step, and it can help your company a great deal, because you start to understand the behaviour pattern of customers and what they are looking for. All of this through tools that measure and analyse.

A lead is a potential customer for whom your company has contact details — an e-mail address, a phone number or a social network, for example. With that information, a process of attraction begins so that they become a buyer.

Not every lead will be converted into a customer, though. A lead with direct interest is called a qualified lead, and that is where this kind of strategy should focus: a person or company that needs your company. The sales strategy should be built around making that conversion. Digital positioning, together with campaign strategies on Google and content, are examples of what can help attract leads.

It is worth saying that not every lead, even a qualified one, will close a deal with you. That is why it matters, above all, to map the profile of the ideal customer first, and only then build your strategies to attract them.

How do you get more leads for your company?

Generating leads is a very important part of any company, especially one without a physical shop. In a digital business model the process has to be accurate, so that it attracts the people who are genuinely interested in your services and products. There are many ways to get a lead. In traditional marketing, for instance, that information is collected in the street. In the digital world it can be collected through your site — with conversion buttons or forms for the future customer to fill in.

You can also write a blog inside your site. With relevant content your site will rank better, and search engines will show your digital space to more people. We will come back to this subject a little further on. 

A newsletter, e-mail marketing and events are also excellent ways to raise awareness of your brand and later turn visitors into customers.

There are paid ways of attracting leads too — campaigns on Google Ads and Facebook Business, for example. Through them you increase your company's presence among people who do not know it yet, all with budgets set in advance so that your spending is never compromised. If there is a trade fair in your sector this weekend, you can create a campaign for that geographic area. You will make impressions on people directly interested in your services. And who knows, they may bite one of your conversion hooks.

Organic strategies

Why Google matters for your business

When it comes to the digital world, there are companies whose history is almost woven into the evolution of the internet. There are plenty of search engines, but Google is certainly the best known among them. That is not advertising, just a fact. Here are some good practices that can help lift your company — all of them organic. 

Google My Business

When a customer looks for your business on the internet, Google helps them find it with the Google My Business. It brings together the old Google Places for Business, Google listings and Google+ Business pages, so that customers find the information they need to know your company.

By creating a Google My Business account, you will appear in searches with the information your customers need: opening hours, days of operation and a direct location on Google Maps. All of it free. With nothing more than your account login you can update the address, the phone numbers, the site, the opening hours and so on. It becomes much easier for your customers to find and interact with your business.

Besides appearing in Google search and on Google Maps, you will be able to reply to reviews, publish product photos and special offers, and add and edit information about your establishment. Google also lets you create a business site, so you can show your company online with photos and details and a good-looking layout.

Google Ads

So your online presence is growing — but that does not mean your business will be found more easily by your customers, especially if your field is a competitive one. This is where Google lets you advertise on the internet.

The platform also lets you estimate how many clicks your ads will get. Below we will say a little more about Google Ads, since it belongs to the paid strategies for attracting and converting customers.

SEO (keywords)

In digital marketing there are two well known strategies you have probably heard of: SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing). The second one is closely tied to Google Ads and to Facebook Business, which we will come to in the next section.

What makes SEO interesting is that it is unpaid, unlike paid traffic or advertising, where you pay to appear first in the results. A blog, for instance, is one of the SEO strategies. But one swallow does not make a summer: it matters a great deal that the content on the site, its layout and the tools it includes all work together. That way your site meets the expectations of Google's crawlers and ranks better. It helps to have someone who knows the subject, doesn't it?

Through this strategy your site can be shown first to a customer looking for a company in your sector — because SEO is an unpaid, organic way of putting your site on Google's radar.

Why does producing content bring more customers?

Producing content is one of the fastest growing ways of generating customers. You can see it clearly in the creative niche of Instagram. On that platform there are more and more content creators being paid to promote particular brands. But what is this content? Or rather, how do you produce it properly?

Imagine you are going on a first date with someone, and they have little to talk about, no references, and keep circling the same subjects. What are the chances you will want to go out with them again, or have more conversations with them?

Generating content follows that same idea. One of the ways to attract customers is to create content that is interesting, relevant and related to your business. This kind of strategy usually comes with a set of other ideas, and its main purpose is to inform the customer. If the content is good, relevant and helps your audience get to know you better, conversion will be the consequence of that work.

Social media helps here too. By forming a small social bubble around your company, you begin to identify the community that supports your business. Your customer can also interact directly with content aimed at selling. Customers come closer to the products with the advantage of trust and of understanding what the service or product is. This strategy has to be supported and thought through intelligently, though.

Why SEO matters when producing content

An effective way to make your business more visible and better known is creating content allied to an SEO strategy. With search engine optimisation you are shaping your content according to what Google likes. In other words, you need to lay out the site, the posts and the images in a way the search engine crawlers are used to. Doing it right will organically generate greater visibility in search.

Once standardised, that content will help improve your site's position organically — with no need to spend on ads. It is worth stressing that the content cannot be repetitive in an attempt to fool the crawler: it is smarter than we think. It matters to understand the content being created, because SEO will help attract the customer, but the job of hooking them belongs to the material itself.

Why does everyone have a blog?

At Manáry Digital, among many other services, we produce e-books as one of the strategies for attracting an audience to your service or product. Through that same strategy we develop content of up to 5,000 words for your site. And then there is the blog, where we develop content aimed at potential customers. All of it using keywords picked up by Google's crawlers and other search engines.

Another advantage of Manáry for your growth is that we have specialists in this kind of work. Creating a blog, for instance, directly increases your digital presence. Through keywords, phrases, articles and other features your site can rank better and appear first in search engines. 

It is worth saying that this tool, combined with others, only amplifies the reach and the converting power you have with your customers, since it becomes possible to understand what they want and look for. After all, there is no point selling shoes to a fish.

Why does generating content matter?

Paid strategies

More about Facebook Business

Facebook Business is the tool for running campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. It helps you organise and manage your company, keeping your personal profile separate from your business profile. It is also where you define the objective, the region, the audience and the calls to action for the customer in each campaign. 

How Facebook Business works

The platform offers Business Manager, which uses a two-step permission system, so each person gets exactly the access they need. On the first level you add the people who will work with you and decide what each of them can reach. Everyone can then carry out the tasks assigned to them and follow them through.

That keeps the privacy of your information on Facebook, since every collaborator gets their own level of access. One person can see financial details, for instance, while another only changes information on the payment records.

Once the roles are assigned, you can grant permissions to the company's assets. Those assets can be ad accounts or Instagram accounts, for example.

So one person can create ads and analyse the page's performance without being the one responsible for publishing on the page.

More about Facebook Business

Facebook itself has become a place to sell. Through it, communication with your customers is more direct, with no need for sign-ups. It also allows organisation based on the analyses and metrics the tool creates. Once the access and permissions are sorted, it becomes easier to understand what the platform does. To help with that, here are some of the many functions of Facebook Business Manager:

• Creating separate ad accounts for each client.
• Paying for ads in different ways.
• Organisation by objective, with reports responsive to each goal.
• Access to the pages of several clients through the ad account and other assets.
• A view of the tasks and of who is responsible for carrying them out.
• Reports on the assets and people the company is responsible for, and on how the ads perform across the different accounts.

With these advantages that social media brings to your business, the money put into ads can work harder, since the content is aligned with the objective, the region, the targeting and the calls to action for the customer.

More about Google Ads

Google Ads is more than important: it is a genuinely smart tool. With it you can win your place in the first search results. Through a small auction run by the platform, your ad competes for space with the competition. But it is not only the bid that decides whether you appear first — the relevance of your content counts too. So take care with it, and use attractive phrases to win your future customers. 

After that you only need to set your initial budget and where the ads will run. All of it with personalised messages that appeal to your target audience. 

Google Ads also lets you estimate how many clicks your ads will get. From there we can understand the picture of the leads captured, based on the searches people make. It becomes easier to attract people to your business, because we understand which search results it appears in.

Where once you would have spent money printing flyers to advertise a service or a product, today, with Google Ads, you can target ads and hand out those flyers digitally. Better still, you can choose the audience the ad should reach, decide what your initial budget will be and where the distribution happens. All of it with personalised messages that appeal to your target audience.

Can I invest only a little on Google?

Yes, you can invest little. Opening an account is free, with reports and insights straight from the platform, so ad performance is followed closely. The Google Ads platform also lets you set the advertising budget, so the monthly limit is never exceeded. And the tool lets you pause the ads whenever you need or want to.

Another good point is that the campaign budget is only charged when your visitors take action on the ads. You pay for results. The tool lets you set what will be spent per campaign or over any period of time, always with results based on the budget you choose.

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Digital guidance (a digital marketing plan)

One of the most important parts of a business is planning, which is why a digital marketing plan matters so much. It should set out the details of every campaign and every digital marketing action. The plan should be split into short, medium and long term objectives, with strategies for reaching them. You organise the channels you will use, the action and development plans, and finally the investment and the budget available for each. Take it easy: you will need to invest, but it does not have to be much at the beginning.

Some stages will always be necessary in your process with the customer, so that they fall in love with your product or service.

The method is, in a way, simple:

- Attract;

- Convince;

- Convert;

- Delight;

Step by step: the structure of a digital marketing plan

Step 1 — Analysing the company

The first thing to do when developing your digital marketing plan is to run a SWOT analysis of the company. The analysis lets you look at your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. From there you also become familiar with the market you are in, and then understand what the customers need and where those needs are addressed. The analysis is as qualitative as it is quantitative, because it also brings data such as digital habits, intermediaries and influencers.

Applying benchmarking techniques can also help identify the best digital practices and the success stories. From there you can apply them to the business, a practice more and more common in the global strategies of companies.

Next comes an internal study to see where the company stands and adapt it to the digital era. Is the website oriented towards the customer? What is the usability and the browsing experience like? Is the blog updated often? Where does our website currently rank? And what is our presence on social media?

Step 2 — Setting digital marketing objectives

Once you understand your place in the market and your strengths, work on setting some objectives. You gain a clear idea of where your actions should take you, and from then on everything you work on should aim at reaching them.

With that you can work on developing this part of your digital marketing plan, always keeping objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely.

For example:

- An objective with no planning: “I want to increase the number of visits to my site”.

- A planned objective: “20,000 visits a month to the website within three months. To get there, I will create a blog about my business's subject to generate traffic to the site”.

Step 3 — Defining the marketing strategy

Once your business objectives are set, spare no effort in reaching them. Personalisation becomes more and more important in digital marketing, so when it comes to defining the strategy that will carry out your plan, keep these factors in mind:

- Segment your target audience: know who you want to address, what their tastes, needs and preferences are, how to meet their expectations, and so on. As we said above, it helps to remember who the company's persona is. 

- Positioning: it is crucial that your image be clear to customers about what your values are as a company. Those values should reach your audience the same way. Make it clear why the customer should choose you and not the competition. 

Content strategy

This matters for creating, distributing and managing original content. As we have mentioned, good content attracts customers and strengthens the brand's references. It is also necessary to draw up a specific communication plan (content marketing) for each channel. Some of the tools we use to carry out this strategy are:

- Keyword research: this means identifying the right keywords for each piece of content, organically improving SEO positioning.

- Content planning: a content plan is essential to make sure your strategy makes sense. It provides value, lets you think long term, optimises your resources and helps create ideas. It is worth including the publication date, the author, the topic, the keyword and the tags.

- Publishing on social media: writing an article and not promoting it on social media is a mistake. Plan what you will publish, and when and where. Adapt the articles to each social platform, with the right number of characters, links, hashtags and much more.

Tip ---> Think about your audience's profile; which subjects you will speak about; which tone you will use and how often you will publish.

Step 4 — Digital strategies and tactics

Based on our objectives (attraction, conversion and loyalty), we start carrying out different strategies: e-mail marketing campaigns, social media, CRM, web optimisation, SEO strategies, paid advertising on social media and so on.

The number of communication channels multiplies by the day, and so does the amount of information we hold about our customers. It is essential to use automation tools that let you automate the marketing campaigns.

Thanks to these tactics you can create workflows and hundreds of campaigns with a few clicks. You can also personalise the messages based on your business's persona, increasing your chances of conversion and of success. 

Step 5 — Measuring results and KPIs

Once your strategies are in practice, it is time to look at what worked. Analysing the results is a critical pillar for successfully optimising the performance and the spending of digital marketing.

KPIs help with every action taken, to see whether your business reached the expected ROI (return on investment). You start measuring how effective the strategies and activities put in place really are — all of which helps correct what did not work, so you reach the objectives you set. 

Make sure you have an effective system for visualising data in real time. The digital world evolves quickly, so stay alert for opportunities and new technologies that can improve things. 

Keep these steps in mind when creating your digital marketing plan, and leave nothing to chance. Technology can be your greatest ally: as the task becomes complicated, the new tools let you simplify your work and push your performance further.

How the Manáry team works

Manáry Digital is a digital marketing agency. Built from scratch, we believe in service that is human, efficient and that generates results. We work with technologies and tools aimed at your growth, whether that means increasing your customer traffic or the number of qualified leads. From there, our clients watch their businesses grow with the Growth Hacking method. Our team, besides specialising in digital marketing, is also fanatical about communication, which is why we share every phase of our project with you — not only so you know what is happening with your company, but so we understand what it needs. 

What we are like

At Manáry Digital we value transparency, efficiency and price. We follow your project closely from beginning to end with one-to-one service. We give our clients productivity through the work of agile teams, because every member of the Manáry team specialises in something, and everyone knows the many stages of a project end to end. Even though technology advances by the minute, we believe in our greatest asset: the relationship between people. So we care a great deal about easy, accessible communication. We keep a WhatsApp group with every one of our clients, whatever the service or plan they hired.

We focus on your result, making your digital presence easier and wider. We work with digital services and annual plans that carry everything you need, using paid and organic strategies to grow your business safely. At Manáry Digital we give the same attention to the small and medium business owner and to the large company.

Once we know a little about your company, we start the process of creating the campaign. In that analysis we recognise customer patterns, strengths, weaknesses and market opportunities. All of it with options for annual plans that fit your pocket. And if the full plan does not fit your budget, we also work with digital services on their own.

Strategies

The pandemic certainly changed a few settings in our society. If a digital presence was once necessary, during that turbulent period it became essential. At Manáry Digital we work with strategies to lift your business, always understanding what each one needs and what comes first at each stage of the project.

We also build institutional and professional sites — every kind of site, really. We specialise in advertising campaigns (the paid strategy), both on Facebook Business (Instagram and Facebook) and on Google Ads. But you have already found that out above in this text. Here, we count on organic strategies for your business, optimising your site and your content so that it is found by search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing).

And it does not stop there. At Manáry Digital you also get content production. (see why that matters) Blog content tied to the SEO strategy, for example. We also work with posts for social media (Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn). And you can leave the creative side with us too. All our clients get digital marketing consultancy: every month we hold a meeting to follow the project's progress, understanding patterns and new needs.

What Manáry brings to your growth

Here you will find specialists and a team of developers to help your business. With an agile methodology, meant to be fast and efficient, we have a range of services waiting for you — from strengthening your digital positioning to building sites and digital strategies. All with personalised, human, communicative service.

And we do not say that lightly. Our name came to leave a mark on business and on human relationships. The origin of our name, Μανάρι, is a Greek expression of affection comparable to “dear” or “darling”. It is a neutral word, and it shows care, love and diversity. Life arranged for Manáry to be created in cloudy times precisely so that it could help everyone. Everyone, literally. We believe that access to information, and to the benefits digital marketing can bring, should be universal.

And that is it. Is your business ready for service that is personalised, attentive, one of a kind, and that generates results? If so, talk to one of the members of the Manáry team. Get to know a little more about this universe and about how we can take this transforming journey together.

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