In a global business environment still mindful of recession, which has seen massive cut-backs in marketing budgets over the past two years, digital marketing is one of the few areas that has seen sustained growth over this period.

Econsultancy and ExactTarget released a report in February 2010 suggesting that digital marketing would account for as much as 24% of the overall marketing spend of companies in 2010, and 28% are shifting significant quantities of their marketing budgets from conventional to digital channels.

Social media marketing and SEO are the two most popular areas that companies want to develop. The first centres on creating content that grabs attention, instigates conversation online and encourages readers to share information about the company through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

The second, search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is the method of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural the search results, as opposed to paid search listings. Optimising a web page primarily involves editing its content and HTML to increase its relevance to targeted keywords and remove any barriers to the indexing activities of search engines, most notably Google.
Since the turn of the new millennium the number of marketing agencies that specialise in digital marketing has exploded. One such company that has enjoyed enormous growth since its conception in 2001 is Greenlight Marketing ? a privately owned business that has become one of Europe''s fastest growing specialist SEO companies in the space of nine years.

Greenlight promise to turn ?searches into customers? by delivering income streams that are worth millions of pounds to their portfolio of blue-chip clients that include Vodafone, AA Travel Insurance and Legal

YUKO WOOTON