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Digital Marketing Basics Explained

Understanding Digital Marketing for Holiday Home Owners

New to digital marketing or want to understand more about what it is to market your holiday home? 

CountryCottagesOnline.Net can help you to understand the basics of online marketing.

• Digital Marketing Defined
• The Building Blocks of Digital Marketing

Definition of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is essentially online marketing (as opposed to offline marketing), so is concerned with digital promotion, advertising, market research and sales of a product or service, on the main on the world wide web.

What Does Digital Marketing Involve?

There are various aspects to digital marketing, the main ones are:

•    SEO (Search engine optimisation), which focuses on optimising your own website and other activities performed outside of your own website with the aim of achieving best possible performance of your website on the search engines.

•    Paid Search Engine Marketing (includes Display advertising and Pay per Click advertising on Google and other search engines, as well as remarketing options).

•    Social media marketing (involves the promotion of your cottage on selected social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Google + for example (there are more social media channels out there including You Tube).  There are free and paid options for social media marketing (all can be arranged direct with the relevant social media channels when you have an account with them; accounts can easily be set up online).

•    Email marketing (this involves sending marketing emails and information emails to your mailing list (Data protection laws in the UK dictate who you can market to).  To manage mailing lists effectively and to compose professional looking emails, using a chargeable email marketing service like Mailjet or Mailchimp can be extremely helpful.

As a cottage owner if you have your own website you may want to perform some of the digital marketing activities outlined above direct.  If you don't feel comfortable learning about the above direct, there are some digital agencies that you can pay to perform the above activities on your behalf but for maximum control and understanding on which activities are effective and which are not, there is no substitute for getting to grips with doing things direct.  Digital marketing agencies work for a fee which makes the costs of the above activities higher.  Provided you have a reasonable level of IT skills, getting to grips with online channels really is a matter of experience.  Free tools like Google Analytics can help give you insight on the effectiveness of your online marketing activities.

For promotion online, you can also use websites like CountryCottagesOnline.Net (for a low annual fee) as we undertake certain digital marketing activities on our own website and help to promote holiday properties online.