How are you reading this article? The chances are that you must be reading it on mobile, laptop or any other electronic device which can connect to internet. Think of yourself how you consume information daily and how you share that information with your friends, colleagues, and family.
Internet usage has increased over the past decade and this has affected how people purchase products and interact with businesses. Gone are the days when businesses spent millions of dollars on billboards advertising.
People have shifted their purchase online rather than wasting time on going to a physical market. With so much demands of customers online, businesses are shifting towards online marketing which is also called as digital marketing. Employees who were into marketing/sales need to enhance their skills to adapt to the market demands and changes.
Here we will learn what is digital marketing, the importance of digital marketing, how it can help to boost your business online presence with different strategies and the benefits of digital marketing.
This article focuses mainly on people who want to learn digital marketing and grow their business irrespective of the industry you serve. By the end of the article, you will be able to make better decision for your business, which strategy works well and what to focus on.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies such as internet, social media, mobile or any other digital channels. It can take any forms such as online video, display ads and social media posts. It is data driven as compared to traditional marketing methods such as print, TV, billboards etc.,
With the combination of internet and technology, digital marketers can collect and analyze data of different customer behavior and engagements. It helps them to facilitate more personalized content towards specific audiences for better results.
Why Digital Marketing?
One of the major reasons why digital marketing is taking over traditional marketing is because internet has empowered businesses to interact with customers in real time. Your customers are online hence you can reach out to more people when you practice digital marketing.
This will increase your business exposure to find more customers. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is trackable and measurable. It can be optimized efficiently by monitoring the campaigns performance. It also helps in broad and targeted reach based on your budget.
How to do Digital Marketing?
Now you know what digital marketing is, and why it is important for businesses? You might be wondering how to get started with digital marketing?
First thing you should have before you start implementing digital marketing strategies for your business is having a website. You need to register for a domain name which fits to your business. Host it on the server to set your website’s online presence.
Once the website is set up, follow the below steps:
- Create a user persona – This is to describe your ideal customer which can be defined basis the survey or pre-defined target group.
- Identify goals – Every marketer should have goals in place. Make sure that the goals can be measured.
- Focus on blog – Blogging is one way to create quality content for your site and expand your content marketing strategy.
- Find your USPs – Every company should have a unique selling point for which they make profit. Do the research and find what it is.
- Track your process – constant monitoring should be ensured so that strategy works efficiently.
There are 7 components of digital marketing strategy which you should know to implement for your business.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. PPC or paid search
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Content Marketing
5. Email Marketing
6. Mobile Marketing
7. Marketing Automation
Now, let’s understand each of the digital marketing strategies in detail:
What is SEO in digital marketing?
SEO is the process of optimizing the content so that your pages appear at the top of a search engine results for a specific keyword. The important elements to consider when optimizing a web page are quality of content, user engagement, mobile friendliness, and number of quality inbound links.
Google changes its algorithm frequently hence it is impossible to make exact predictions. You can only watch out your page’s performance constantly and make the changes accordingly.
What is PPC in marketing?
PPC advertising refers to the sponsored result on the top of search engine results pages. Whenever a slot is available in the search engine, then your ad will be displayed. An algorithm prioritizes each ad based on ad quality, keyword relevance, landing page quality and bid amount.
These ads charge you for every click on the ad whenever a user enters a search term on the internet. Whenever an user takes action after clicking on the ad, is called as conversions which can be transactional or non-transactional.
What is smm in digital marketing?
Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging with people online. The most popular social media platform are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Since it involves active audience participation, it serves as the most important content medium for B2C marketers and its gaining importance in the B2B sphere as well.
The effective way of doing social media marketing is to share all your marketing efforts on social media. The more your audience gets inspired from your content, more they will engage and share potentially leading to become customers.
Social media marketing offers in-build engagement metrics, which are useful in helping to understand your audience behavior.
What is content marketing?
Effective content marketing serves to educate and inspire customers who seek information on the internet. When you provide content that is relevant to your audience, it makes you trustworthy to your users.
The goal of content marketing is to attract leads and convert them into customers. It offers value for free in the form of written content.
What is email marketing?
Email is still the quickest and direct way to reach customers with important information. The marketing emails should be trustworthy, relevant, conversational, and strategic. The email campaigns should be engaging, relevant and informative so that customers look at them in their mailbox.
First, you need to ensure that you do not spam people with irrelevant messages. This means content should be personalized both in body and in subject line, states clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will receive, offer a clear unsubscribe option and integrates both transactional and promotional emails.
Show your prospects that your campaign offers valuable service and not just as a promotional tool.
What is mobile marketing?
We check our mobiles constantly throughout the day. This makes marketing on mobile very important. SMS, MMS, apps are some of the ways through which you can reach out to your customers on their devices.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation uses software to boost the digital marketing campaigns which improves efficiency and relevance of advertising. It is an integral part of digital marketing which ties all digital marketing strategies together. It automates marketing task, measures result and calculates ROI of your digital campaigns.
It allows companies to keep up with the expectations of personalization. It allows brands to collect and analyze information, design targeted marketing campaigns, send and post marketing messages to the right audience at the right time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
1. Broader reach – when you post online, people can see it from anywhere all over the world. This makes it easy to scale your business.
2. Cost efficient – Unlike traditional marketing overhead expenses such as newspaper ads, television spots which can be high, digital marketing carries lower cost inspite of reaching a broader audience.
3. Measurable results - Monitoring is simple with digital marketing. They have software which automatically tracks the number of conversions which can be email open rates, visits to homepage or direct purchase.
4. Easy personalization – Digital marketing allows you to collect data unlike traditional marketing which helps in personalizing for each customer.
5. Two-way communication – Digital marketing lets you communicate with customers in real-time and more importantly they can also interact with you.
6. Easy and faster conversion – Digital marketing lets customers take immediate actions once they have viewed your ad. They can click the link and make the purchase right away.
How do I become a digital marketer?
You can become a digital marketer by learning from digital marketing brands, attending networking events, find a digital marketing internship where you can implement practically, stay up to date about all the digital marketing trends and connect with like-minded people.
Is digital marketing a good career?
Digital marketing skills are in great demand and the job market is booming. Brands are also shifting focus towards digital marketing. Most in demand skills are content creation and curation, social media strategy. For those who are technical, SEO and SEM have a high earning potential since it drives profits in any business
Conclusion:
Digital Marketing is the future of marketing. It can help to track the results of your digital marketing efforts with accuracy, which means you can analyze which strategies work well and which needs improvement. It should be one of the primary focus for almost all the businesses marketing strategy.
Better cost efficiency, more data for better decision making and building customer trust are few of the advantages of digital marketing. No one can afford to miss out the opportunities on web and every marketer must master digital marketing.
Will you apply any of the above-mentioned strategies in your business?
Leave us a comment below and if you need any further suggestions, do let us know. We will be more than happy to answer all your queries!!