Are you having great products or services but not getting enough customers ?
Is your traditional marketing not producing proper results ?
Do you have great content on your website or blog but not getting enough visitors ?
All these and many more similar real-world challenges we are facing post pandemic to retain existing and acquire new customers.
If these sounds familiar to your situation then Digital Marketing is what can boost your business.
If you are operating from a brick & mortar shop selling in the local community or having E-commerce digital channel in search of more customers or a blogger wants to widen your reach then Digital Marketing is the way forward.
What is Digital Marketing
In the last decade with the rise in the usage of Smartphones, Tablets, Computers, Social networking sites along with the spread of broadband Internet reaching every corner of the world, the dynamics of Marketing has completely changed.
Marketers, entrepreneurs are using these new channels to reach prospective customers.
Apart from Traditional Marketing like TV, Print, Radio, Billboard, Digital Marketing has become de-facto marketing tool for marketing.
Difference between Traditional and Digital Marketing
In Traditional Marketing, we reach out to customers without knowing if they are interested in our product or not.
In Digital Marketing we select or target customers based on interests and focus on them for better response.
Knowledge of customer interests give marketers a great advantage to position and target prospective customers .
This reduces unnecessary costs in marketing to a wider set of people for all ad campaigns, time and yield better results.
Why Digital Marketing is Important
Over the years the amount of data collected due to usage of social networking sites and spread of mobile and internet gives a great insights into the likes and dislikes of customers.
People tend to research products or services over the internet. So marketing over digital channels to your prospective customer is effective and becomes the norm for the business.
Even if you are not an E-commerce store and selling products/ services via brick and mortar shop it’s important to reach customers to stay in business locally and Digital Marketing helps in this as well.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
- Accuracy in targeting customers
- Wide reach
- Mobile
- Tools for Automation
- Customer insights using Analytics
- Ease of Use
Accuracy in targeting
Personalization & Targeting has become more evident and effective in marketing compared to mass marketing.
The more we know our customer the more we can serve them with the right product, services or content and the chances of acquiring or retaining them will be more.
Digital Marketing can help to create personalized marketing or target a set of people with similar interests and maximize the response.
Wide reach
Local
Digital Marketing helps businesses operating locally by placing Local Ads through search engines with geographic restrictions, social media, review sites, local directories
This is very effective as it targets local customers and thus gets a better conversion rate.
Local business should take advantages of publishing their details in local directories and google business so customers can easily discover them online.
Global
Earlier Small Businesses were not able to think of selling outside certain geographic areas but with the spread of the internet, e-commerce, and digital marketing it’s becoming easier day by day to sell anywhere in the world.
Be it a Business to Business (B2B)or Business to Consumer (B2C), every business needs to reach to their customer base and Digital Marketing is a very convenient and powerful medium to achieve this.
With Digital Marketing, it’s very easy to decide the target audience with the right demographics and thus makes it easy to run an advertising campaign.
If you have an E-Commerce store and selling in different geographies, then Digital Marketing is what is required to sell your products.
Mobile
Mobile has become an integral part and people’s life and the usage of mobile is exponentially increasing for product searches, reviews, and recommendations to buy online or in-store.
Mobile has become a great help for Small Businesses to target and drive customers by doing digital marketing. Mobile Marketing as part for Digital Marketing should be an integral part of all Small Businesses
Mobile Apps is another good way to promote your business and get tightly integrated with users/customers
Tools for Automation
One key concern for all Business or bloggers is the availability of people and know-how on Digital Marketing and hence they depend on agencies.
But there are so many things businesses or bloggers can do by themselves and its better if they do it by themselves as they know their business and customer better than anyone else.
Day by day with the advancement of Automation, Artificial intelligence, and Machine Learning has taken center stage a lot of things can be automated using these tools.
The availability of various commercial and free tools on digital marketing reduces the effort and makes like easier for the Business or bloggers to execute a digital marketing campaigns .
Examples of Digital Marketing Tools
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Customer insights using Analytics
One of the key benefit of Digital Marketing is the ability to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.
These insights can be tweaked to improve the outcome or performance of any marketing campaigns which is not that easy in Traditional Marketing.
Many free and paid analytics tools are available in marketplace.
One such great tool is Google Analytics, which gives valuable insights about customer response to any marketing campaigns.
It’s easy to measure the impact of any digital marketing campaign and come up with the insights and adjustments required to make more effective compared to mass marketing like TV or Newsprint.
In traditional advertising viz. tv, radio, newspaper the communication is mostly one way and it’s difficult to track the response from the consumer for the marketing campaign.
In digital marketing, most of the activities of the users can be tracked and analyzed for further refinement of the strategy without storing uniquely identifiable information for any person.
Ease of use
Historically Marketing has always been a dedicated niche & creative piece of work and that led to the creation of Successful Ad Agencies
With the rise of Digital Marketing, the Small Business can perform their own digital marketing campaigns track results, until its really become bigger to engage external agencies.
Types of Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing encompasses different types of marketing methods, most common types are as follows
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Instant Messaging & Mobile App Marketing
- E-Mail Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Google Search Results Page (SERP) has 2 types of results, Organic and Paid.
- Organic results come from matching keywords with relevant websites.
- Paid results come from relevant websites who pay to advertise based on keywords.
Search Engine Optimization is the process by which a web page can win over other similar web pages and come in a higher rank in google search index when a user is searching for relevant keywords.
There are various techniques for SEO. Some are very easy and nontechnical whereas some are complex and technical in nature. Many of these can be done by the webmasters or business owners.
Types of SEO
Broadly there are 3 areas to optimize any website or blog, they are
On-Page SEO – Working on the content of the website or blog to improve ranking such as the use of relevant keywords, number of relevant keywords in a post, optimization of content.
Technical SEO – Working on the aspects other than the content of any website or blog such as page speed, security, formatting, readability, etc
Off-Page SEO – Working on external influences so that Google can decide your content is highly valuable or relevant to the search terms and your blog or website has greater authority over others.
With the availability of numerous free and paid Online Tools, implementing SEO techniques has become easier for business owners or bloggers.
By using those tools and techniques one can take their site or blog to a higher rank in the search engine results page.
Note: SEO is not limited to Google but can be applied in any search engines such as Bing, Yandex or even Amazon where people do a vast number of searches to find out relevant products they are looking for
Search Engine Marketing or Pay per Click
The second part of Google’s search results page is paid advertisements and it comes in a designated portion of the results page or any other websites as display ads.
Marketers or Business owners should also use this method along with SEO to advertise and acquire customers.
There are advantages of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) over Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and vice versa.
One key advantage of SEM over SEO is response time. SEM can show results in very little time compared to SEO.
Content Marketing
In Digital Marketing one key aspect missing is human touchpoints, to overcome that and influence prospective customers we have alternatives such as the creation of relevant content.
In Digital Marketing there is various type of content we can create, depending on the business type, customer base, etc. Some common types of content areas are
- Websites
- Blogs
- Social Media Pages
- Vlogs (Video Blogs)
- Case Studies
- Product Detail Pages
- Reviews
- Testimonials
Care must be taken in creating the content, size, quality, readability, formatting, freshness, uniqueness, frequency of updates and many more aspects while planning for an effective and impactful Content Marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Like Search engines, Social Media has become a powerful medium for marketing and understand the behaviour of customers to target.
Social Media over search engines has the advantage of knowing the likes and dislikes of people. Targeting becomes easier in these platforms and the response rate also becomes higher.
There are few widely popular social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram can be utilized to market products or services.
One of many of these social media can be considered in the plan to execute a Social Media Marketing campaign.
Instant Messaging & Mobile App Marketing
Instant messaging platforms such as Facebook Messanger, WhatsApp etc are bring used by a huge number of people.
This platform also gives marketers a good channel for marketing and companies already started using the same.
Although WhatsApp has not yet started using advertisements in its platform others like Facebook Messenger are now open for advertisements and marketing.
Since these are used by Mobile users, targeting the right user becomes very easy and the response rate and conversion rate increases.
E-Mail Marketing
One of the earliest forms of Digital Marketing is E-Mail Marketing. If done properly it can do wonders for businesses.
E-Mail Marketing is very effective to build a loyal customer base who can become your repeat customers and also market on your behalf to new customers as well.
It’s not an easy task to run an effective e-mail marketing campaign, but if one understands all key aspects and focuses on optimizing using available tools and creativity then e-mail marketing can be a huge success.
There are various good free and commercial tools available to make E-Mail marketing very effective and less time consuming and cumbersome.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is where someone is marketing on your behalf to sell your products or services and gets a commission.
This is not new in the Marketing world but using Digital platforms, Affiliate Marketing has become very popular and an effective channel for businesses as well as marketers.
As a business owner, you can create your own affiliate programs where marketers can enrol and sell your products or services.
As a blogger or website owner, you can advertise in your blog by enrolling in any of the affiliate programs and get the commission when visitors of your blog or website clicks and buys products or services.
Day by the day this is becoming very popular by business owners as well as a blogger as it gives a very good source of passive income to the bloggers.
Finally…
This is an overview of Digital Marketing, Businesses and Individuals may choose to use one or a combination of all these to leverage the power of it.
If you have any specific questions on Digital Marketing, post it to me so that I can help you in your pursuit for business success through Digital Marketing adoption.
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