by Lina Martinez

The digital marketing world is an ever-evolving one. Once upon a time, it was enough to have a website and an email newsletter. Those are still highly recommended, but if you’ve taken a glance at what the most successful businesses are doing, you will have come up against these four acronyms in particular. Here, we’re going to read between the letters and explain how each can be an essential part of your online success.

Image Credit: FirmBee

PPC

Pay per click advertising is hands down the most effective manner of direct advertising on the internet, today. Interruptive marketing, like video ads and pop-ups, has grown less effective, especially thanks to the growing use of Ad Blocker. Organic marketing such as content marketing is growing. PPC ads target users of these organic marketing platforms, such as Google and Twitter, to directly target the markets using them. As the name suggests, you only pay for every successful click, so it can be highly cost-effective, too.

SEO

Search engine optimization is all about how your business performs on search engines. The priority is mostly on Google, and as a result, following the Google news SEO changes is crucial. It’s all about making your website better organized, more trustworthy, more efficient, and more secure in order to make it friendlier to Google and other search engines. As a result, your site is more likely to appear in a place of prominence when search engine users enter queries relevant to it.

CRO

Conversion rate optimization focuses more heavily on how people use your website. If SEO is to get them to visit the site, CRO is to keep them on it and to get them closer to clicking the purchase/subscribe button, converting them into customers. This practice focuses on user experience above all else, testing the website to see which layout, content, and design is more likely to turn visitors into customers. Otherwise, your site may be over designed and confusing, leading to very few purchases even if you get a lot of visitors.

UGC

User-generated content is a particularly effective spin on the content marketing that has become so successful in search engine and social media marketing. Rather than producing videos, images, and written content yourself, you encourage your audience to produce their own content, which is then liked and shared not only by their friends, but by other participants in the campaign. Social media photo and selfie contests are a good example of a highly accessible user-generated content strategy that has worked effectively for many a business. Finding the content that your audience is willing to produce is crucial in making the most of UGC strategies.

Hopefully, you understand a little more of what makes a truly effective digital marketing campaign now. If you want to stay successful, however, you need to keep up with the trends. Each of the disciplines above continues to evolve as net usage habits change and the online platforms that we use change to match those habits. Use this as a jumping off point for your continued education, not the entirety of it.