Why digital marketing is gaining momentum

Digital marketing is the promotion of products and services by using digital technologies. Its main task is to convey brand information to consumers with the help of digital tools: search engines, social networks, applications, e-mail, and websites.

Compared to such channels as radio, television, print and outdoor advertising, etc. that are considered traditional, digital marketing emerged and became popular much later – in the early 1990s. This is when the first CRM systems began to be used.

With the proliferation of personal computers, marketers have gained the opportunity to manage customer information and run online advertising campaigns. In 1994, the world saw the first interactive digital banner ad. The conversion was high – 44% of users who saw an ad went to the manufacturer’s website.

The emergence of smartphones has changed consumer behavior patterns. Clients now rarely seek advice from shop assistants and look for information about a product on the web increasingly often. Digital tools have become the main selling channel of manufacturers, rather than sales-trained employees.

The development of marketing automation began in the early 2000s. This allowed companies to segment their audiences, run personalized ads, and launch advertising campaigns in parallel across multiple channels.

Today, thanks to social media, manufacturers have more information about clients for planning their marketing campaigns.

Main trends in digital marketing

According to Gartner, the following digital marketing areas will evolve in the coming years:

1. User data security

Marketing involves the use of large amounts of information, including users’ personal data. The ethics of user data is becoming increasingly important – a firm’s actions must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Companies that fully embrace modern ethical regulations and can guarantee the security of their clients’ data will gain an edge over competitors and ensure user loyalty.

2. Real-time marketing

Marketing messages need to meet consumer expectations, adjusting to their behavior in real-time. This will allow companies to offer relevant information and increase conversions, while marketers will be able to collect, analyze, and use the data of website visitors.

3. Artificial Intelligence

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies are opening up new opportunities for marketers. AI and ML help to quickly make decisions, change marketing tactics, switch between target audiences, and adjust communication messages during campaigns according to changes in consumer sentiments. This gives digital marketing tremendous advantages over traditional marketing channels where placement has to be planned beforehand.

4. Geolocation

Geolocation plays one of the strategic roles in marketing campaigns. Using clients’ location data allows a brand to be closer to their interests, offering relevant products and services at the right time in the right place. By combining the data from a user’s website experience and offline store visit, a company can form a comprehensive consumer portrait and work with the user in a more personalized way.

5. Personalization

Personalized marketing is a strategy where the user sees those websites, ads, and banners that match their style of interaction with the brand. Content that is more relevant to the user grabs their attention. Personalization is also used for retargeting, i.e. for reminding the client about the products that they were previously interested in and encouraging them to return to the website for purchase.

Types of digital marketing

Let’s consider various options for how a business can promote its products and services and interact with customers:

1. Social media marketing (SMM)

On average, people spend about 2 hours 22 minutes daily on social media. There are up to eight different accounts per user. Among the 5.11 billion smartphone users, 3.26 billion have social media accounts.

It is important for brands to be present on the social networks that their target audience uses. Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Instagram provide multiple marketing tools and are full-fledged digital marketing platforms. On these platforms, companies run paid targeted advertising, expand their customer base, interact with clients, receive feedback from them, work with reviews, and conduct research and polls. Companies that effectively use this digital marketing tool remain competitive.

2. Influencer marketing

Brands can partner with celebrities, bloggers, and people who are considered experts in their fields and share similar values. This is how companies attract influencers’ followers.

3. Email marketing

About 60% of consumers claim that email plays an important role in their purchasing decisions. Email marketing allows organizations to send customers personalized offers based on purchase history or brand interactions. In addition, users who have subscribed to newsletters from a brand are more loyal, so they can be invited to participate in research – for example, when new products are launched.

4. Content marketing

Marketing teams create content – blog posts, social media posts, etc. – through which key brand messages are conveyed. Content accompanies consumers at all stages of their interaction with the brand:

• stage of knowledge or awareness – the consumer learns about the product for the first time,
• stage of interest – the consumer searches for information about the product, reads reviews, and watches videos,
• stage of decision-making – the consumer compares the product with competitors’ products and learns the terms of delivery and payment,
• stage of retention – the consumer has already made a purchase and is using the product; it is necessary to encourage them to return again.

The specifics of the content depend, among other things, on what stage the clients are at.

5. SEO marketing

SEO or search engine optimization of websites means bringing content to such a form that search engines can easily find it. SEO uses a variety of tools for improving the visibility of a website to search engines – for example, keywords.

6. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing

A brand pays for clicks on its banners and ads posted on the Internet, and thus buys traffic for its website.

7. Affiliate marketing

A brand partners with another business – for example, places ads on another company’s radio podcast and announces promotional codes. But the values of the two companies must not contradict each other.

The above are just some of the digital marketing types. In actual practice, there are many more of them, and different tools are suitable for different tasks. If you find it difficult to orient yourself in rapidly changing technologies and choose the best strategy for your digital presence, digital marketing platforms will come to the rescue.

Benefits of digital marketing platforms

A digital marketing platform is a system that unites several online promotion channels and offers a company various marketing tools for launching and managing campaigns.

Digital marketing platforms combine multiple features in one solution, giving teams a holistic view of their advertising campaigns. Effective collaboration with a digital marketing platform provides a brand with the following benefits:

1. Cost estimation and planning

In digital marketing, determining which channel is most effective for a particular task can be difficult. A digital marketing platform has data on multiple digital channels to help you make the right choice. The platform has access to multi-placement of advertising, which can be beneficial for companies.

2. Relevant information

Digital platforms lean on the latest digital marketing data.

3. Ready-made analytics tools

Platforms like Google Analytics give users access to analytics tools for marketing campaigns.

4. Efficiency estimation

Digital marketing platforms help to work out KPIs, test them, and analyze how the figures change over time.

5. Marketing automation

Digital marketing platforms enable companies to automate their marketing processes.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is one of the key areas of marketing and brand promotion. Digital marketing platforms enable a business to develop and implement an effective strategy with the right set of tools and high-quality performance measurement.

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What SEO testing is and why it is important

SEO testing is not much different from other types of testing. It involves searching for errors: 404 pages, broken links, irrelevant code, problems with loading pages, visual defects, and so on. All this can be found during UX testing, performance testing, or cross-platform testing. And the goal of SEO testing is to identify problems that can arise after changes in a website before they affect the quality of the web application and organic traffic.

From a tester’s point of view, the 404 error is not a significant bug: it doesn’t cause disruption of the website, and the visitor can go to another page and continue the search. But from the SEO perspective, hundreds of 404 pages can significantly reduce organic traffic. According to Google, 61% of users will leave a website if it has access issues. The search engine sees a lot of low-quality pages with duplicate content and lowers the “intruder” in the ranking.

Here’s another example of the direct impact of errors on traffic. Let’s suppose developers have updated an important page and deleted its heading – H1- by accident. And H1 is one of the mandatory ranking factors, according to which the search engine determines the page content. This is the heading of the page that users see. If H1 is deleted, this important page will simply drop out of the search results, which will lead to a drop in traffic.

From these examples, it becomes clear that any change can lead to the accidental loss of data important for SEO, which will affect the quality of the website and its ranking in the search engine. That’s why testers should devote their attention to SEO. This will allow a business to maintain an unbreakable chain:

1. The higher the quality of the website that QA provides, the higher the web application is ranked.
2. The higher the search engine score is, the more organic traffic comes to the website.
3. The higher the organic traffic is, the more orders for products or paid services the business receives.
4. The more leads the business has, the better.

No website is immune to problems with SEO. Google has over 200 ranking factors, and the search engine changes its algorithms up to 1000 times a year. You needn’t strive to please it. What’s important is to create a high-quality and user-friendly website and check it after each change in order to provide yourself with the first positions in the search results.

An SEO audit and SEO testing: what’s the difference?

Sometimes non-experts get confused about the difference between an SEO audit and SEO testing. The SEO audit is an analysis of the current state of the website manually or using a special tool. This procedure helps to discover whether the pages are indexed, whether meta tags are written for them, whether the images are optimized, etc. In other words, such research helps to identify content gaps or deficiencies in the information architecture.

SEO testing involves tracking the results after changes to assess their impact or effectiveness. A well-tuned QA (Quality Assurance) process for SEO includes:

• Benchmark testing, where two versions of the source code are compared (intermediate and production);
• Testing elements important for SEO (for example, metadata);
• Automation (using tools that collect all changes between preparation and production);
• Monitoring changes when the application is in production;
• An archive of web pages, which contains a history of changes and source code you can return to in the case of a traffic drop.

QA testing helps to identify problems with a website before a product hits the market. The practice of good QA for SEO works as a safety cable, eliminating potential problems and reducing the number of bug fixes.

How often should SEO testing be done?

SEO testing is worth doing as your website is updated. As QA practitioners note, identifying SEO bugs is quite difficult – they may not affect the overall functionality of the website. It takes time for the search engines to re-index the website after bugs are found and fixed. If an error is not instantly eliminated, the website will no longer be included in the first search results.

Fortunately, this is much easier to do, since experts have access to tools that automate the process of collecting data. They identify quality control problems that need to be solved. This makes testers’ jobs much easier, as they no longer need to manually check every page, link, or image.

SEO testing helps to prevent failed migrations, fraudulent redirects, unintentional indexing, disappearing tags, and more. It allows specialists to check important elements for ranking: broken links, missing content, page load speed, missing metadata, and other issues that affect SEO performance.

With so many hands working on a website (developers, designers, project managers, and so on), every new update poses a risk. Since these updates directly affect the sales and success of a business, SEO testing should be an important part of increasing organic search traffic on Google. Therefore, as part of SEO promotion, it is worth tapping into the services of QA specialists who focus on finding defects and improving the quality of software.

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