What Is Digital Marketing Really All About?
If you are an entrepreneur, the chances are very high that you must have heard the word ‘Digital Marketing’ at least a couple of times in your workline. It may be from one of your partners, one of your workers, during a business meeting or while attending a business seminar.
You might have wondered what is all the buzz around this digital or online marketing, how it can change the way your business is running? And since you have reached this article, I can safely assume that you have started your research on what it is all about. So let’s waste no more time, and start on our journey to meet and befriend digital marketing.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Starting with the basics, digital marketing in short is the form of marketing products or brands through the digital media. The digital media can be social media channels, search engines, emails, websites etc.
The purpose of digital marketing is to find and communicate with potential customers. This will increase your sales/leads or to create and increase an awareness about your brand.
There are a number of methods through which a digital marketer can successfully promote your business and bring in more traffic and leads. We can see what are the different types of digital marketing later in this article.
How Can Digital Marketing Help Your Business?
Digital marketing is crucial for any business in the present times. The Internet rules the consumer world now, almost everyone is into online purchase. Even in case of offline purchases brands are now a big factor that influence people’s buying trends. In both these scenarios digital marketing can help your business become competent and well known among potential customers.
A professional digital marketer can design creative strategies and digital marketing campaigns to increase the visibility of your product or brand. An added benefit is that we can specifically target audiences who have a high probability of becoming your future customers, and all this within a limited budget far less from what you have to spend on print media or television.
Online marketing metrics are easy to track and measure. So finding out if a campaign is performing or not is easy. If a campaign is not bringing you sufficient ROAS then we can easily make changes to the campaign. This can make the campaign more efficient.
Types Of Digital Marketing
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of website traffic to your website. This can be done by improving the website search engine ranking in the organic search results section. SEO targets organic traffic, which means traffic that we don’t have to pay for.
A website should be well optimized to rank in search results. Also the website design and content should correspond to the service/product that you are offering. Ultimately our aim is to make the search engine choose your website as the best result for searches related to your niche.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social Media started off as platforms for friends or family to share ideas, thoughts, information etc. But now it is a huge platform for business owners to promote and sell their products or services. Social media channels are now fervidly used by businesses to promote their brands and to bring in traffic and leads.
All the popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn etc can be used to connect with your audience and help your business grow. In social media you can find and target an audience based on various factors. If you are selling different products you can find a different target audience for each of the products. The target audience are found based on the type of content they engage with in the social media platform.
3. PPC Marketing
PPC stands for pay per click, which is kind of self explanatory. In PPC marketing you have to pay the ad publisher every time someone clicks on your ad link. You can run PPC ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
Even though you have to pay the publisher for ad clicks, PPC ads are cost effective. This is because you can select the type of audience for your ad placements. A good digital marketer will be able to create a PPC campaign that ensures that each click on your ad is qualified and is coming from someone genuinely interested in your products or service. So if you create a proper plan and strategy PPC can guarantee you good ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the method of engaging, attracting and interacting with the audience using informative and relevant content. The content can be in any form i.e written, image, video or audio format. But the content should be of some value to the targeted audience and should be capable of acquiring some action from them.
The main tools of content marketing are blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, testimonials, webinars etc. Content marketing can help in increasing brand value and customer interaction. If the customer feels that your brand can provide valuable content regularly they will trust your brand. In addition they may also recommend it to others. It is also one of the most cost effective form of marketing.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing, contrary to popular beliefs, is not about spamming other people’s inboxes with junk mails. It is the process of using branded emails to connect with prospective customers. The emails may contain details about your company, new products or services you are offering, special promotions or events etc.
A good email marketing campaign can not just create leads. Furthermore it can also nourish leads into creating a strong bond and retaining customers.
Starting a Digital Marketing Campaign
The first step to creating a digital marketing campaign is to recognise your business goals. Your goal should satisfy the SMART criteria which is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. After you have identified your goals you will need to fix a budget for your campaign. You need to calculate how much money you can spend to achieve a good Return On Investment.
Once you have fixed both these you need to come up with a digital marketing strategy. Before planning the strategy you must analyze your website to get an outlook of where you need to work on to get the best results.
After the website analysis you will have a clear idea on what are the areas you need to improve to get your business going. With this information you can start planning your digital marketing strategy.
Now, digital marketing is not rocket science, it is quite simple. You can plan and execute a digital marketing strategy on your own but only if you have a good knowledge about it. If you do digital marketing without learning about it there is a good chance that you will lose money and generate no result.
So if you are someone with no prior knowledge in this field, it will be better to hand this to a good digital marketing agency. An experienced digital marketer would be able to do all this for you in a small timeframe and can help you achieve your goals. So don’t fall behind your competitors, start racing now!