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What is Digital Marketing– Digital marketing is the buzzword today. In simpler words, you can call it online advertising or internet marketing.
So, what is digital marketing in simple English?
Digital marketing is rapidly growing today due to the increasing number of internet users. Do you know about 62% of the total world population are internet users noted by Internet World Stats in the year 2020? The number of users is continuously growing with each passing year.
So, what is so special about digital marketing? To understand it, you need to know correctly what digital marketing is. Let’s dig into it!!
What is Digital Marketing?
As mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a mode of online marketing. There can be different types of digital marketing options using which you can advertise your business. We can advertise any business online through some of the digital marketing options, e.g., website, video content, infographics, testimonials, product descriptions, interactive content, social media pages, reviews, and many others.
You can follow different strategies to reach out to the potential audience who can view your digital marketing options mentioned above.
Here are some of the strategies that you can use to kickstart your biz with digital marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the most common method of getting noticed by your audience. As you create your website, you need to carry out several strategies such as inserting the right keywords in the website’s content or running campaigns such as guest blogging and others to get your website rank well in the search engine. This can be a time-taking process, but with the help of the right ways, you can achieve great results that can help you in getting a good amount of views that can be turned into your potential customers soon.
Pay Per Click
As the name goes, pay per click is a mode of advertising where you need to pay whenever someone clicks on the advertisement that you have posted. You can have such advertisements on the search engine or social media.
Paid Search
You must have noticed advertisements in the form of text on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or many others. This is another way of marketing your brand or business where you can run such text ad campaigns on the search engines.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is another famous platform that is free to use and can promote your business to get fast exposure. As per Statista, there are about 3.6 billion people who use social media platforms across the world. There is no surprise that this figure is estimated to rise to 4.41 billion by the year 2025. Don’t you think a platform offering you such a huge audience can be the perfect place to advertise your business?
Content Marketing
Another buzzword that is making rounds these days is ‘content.’ What is this content all about, or what is precisely content marketing? Well, anything that you create on your website or post on social media sites such as blog posts, infographics, videos, and many others to attract the audience and viewers towards your product is all related to content marketing.
Email Marketing
Now you may think that email marketing is not a new mode of advertising, so why it is a part of digital marketing. Well, remember what we mentioned earlier. Any online mode of advertisement is known as digital marketing. So, email marketing is also a part of digital marketing. It is only that you have to create the right emails for your viewers. Researchers found that an attractive email, such as with a personalized subject, is highly effective in attracting the viewers through surveys. There are 50% chances of getting these emails opened by the receivers as per Oberlo.
The list does not just end up here. You can look forward to many other strategies, such as affiliate marketing, native marketing, conversion rate optimization, paid social media advertising, and many others.
Why Should You Invest in Digital Marketing?
Before starting how to get started with Digital Marketing, there may be several people with the question of why one should be investing in Digital Marketing. Well, this question can be answered with many reasons. Some of the most important ones are discussed here.
Equal Levels of Marketing:
One of the most important reasons for making use of digital marketing is that the online platforms offer the same level of marketing for the big as well as small business owners. Earlier it was believed that the higher levels of sales and marketing are only for the bigger or the multinational companies. The existence of call centers was one of the major ways of how big companies often indulged in interactions with the customers and understood about them or solved their issues. But it is not always possible for small business owners to have a call center as well to maintain such customer interaction.
The online platform offers a perfect option for different sized companies to have such interactions without having a dedicated call center. The comments raining on the posts of social media platforms can be addressed and replied effortlessly and without spending much amount on it. Thus, whether you are a big organization or just a startup business, you can always make use of digital marketing campaigns in the form of social media marketing to have interactions and build up relationships with your customers.
Cost-Effective:
Small businesses do not have that much capitalization or financial resources that are available with larger companies. Even when a company that is a big shot now was a startup a few years back without much of such resources. Though earlier, it was a much difficult task for the startup business owners to survive and carry on with the marketing campaigns in a full-fledged way due to limited resources, the story is much different today.
Digital marketing has offered everyone a cost-effective way to promote their products and services in front of the audience. Of course, there are some digital marketing options such as paid advertisements and others where you need to invest in money. Still, there are also some other options such as social media marketing, where you can start up your marketing campaigns for free just by creating your business page and floating the advertisement posts around.
Higher Conversion:
Traditional marketing strategies may drive in traffic to your business, but it is not always necessary that the traffic that you are getting is useful to you. One of the best benefits of digital marketing is that it can offer you a higher conversion than traditional marketing. If you have made use of the right strategies such as email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and others to target your required audience, there are higher chances that you will have a higher conversion.
There are different experts from various platforms such as that from Hubspot that mentions the benefits of different digital marketing strategies in getting a higher conversion of the audiences and hence getting a much higher revenue.
So, this can be one of the major motivational ideas of why you should think of getting started with digital marketing for your business. Just think about it.
Better Revenue:
Now, this is quite obvious when you are having a higher conversion of your audiences; of course, you will land up having a better revenue than before. It has been mentioned by Google also that digital marketing helps the business owners to have about 2.8 times higher revenue than before.
Best Way to Display Your Products:
How do you think people will get attracted to you? In the case of hoarding, you may put up a huge image of a trending celebrity using one of the most amazing products of yours. Also, in the case of a television advertisement, you may create a story showing off the product that you wish to sell. But when you are making use of digital marketing, you get a plethora of options not just to showcase your products but also to attract your audience to come and try your products.
You can make use of different options such as infographics, videos, and many others to display your products and services in front of the audience. To grab the attention of the audience, you can make use of different contests or even a personalized email on special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries with special discounts to make the person curious or to make the already existing customers special. These tricks always work, and you can present your products and services in the best way in front of your audience.
Better Interaction:
This has been mentioned earlier also that digital marketing offers an equal level for everyone for different activities, such as interaction with the audience. It can be said that digital marketing offers a better mode of interaction in comparison to the traditional method.
When you have a conversation with a customer over call, no one else gets to know about it whether the customer has got happier with your service or not. But when you provide a solution to a customer as a reply to one of the comments mentioned in your advertisement post, many other people also view it. They can get motivated to take your service. Also, there will be many such customers who will be providing great feedback on the post stating how good your product or service is. This is again going to help you as seeing the positive comments; many other viewers will think of trying out your services.
Great for Mobile Customer:
Today, most of the people who are there on the road do not even care about the posters or banners available on the roadside until and unless it is not extremely attractive. One of the major reasons is that most of these people are busy with their smartphones and other related activities, even when they are on the road. Way back in the year 2013, one of the sites, Insivia, mentioned that about 91% of the total Americans have a habit of staying connected with their phones. This number, no doubt, has been increasing over time.
So, when most of the audiences are busy with their phone, it is quite a wiser decision to provide digital marketing for smartphones through options such as mobile marketing or even social media marketing. You can send SMS directly to your targeted audience with the link of your business application that you want the customers to install. Also, putting up mobile-friendly advertisement posts on social media also works hugely.
Brand Reputation:
Do you remember how much a person had to toil earlier to get his or her brand recognized in the market? Digital marketing has made this quite convenient for you now.
Today, a huge amount of audiences are there over the internet, and this offers you the perfect reason to start up with digital marketing. Whether you are starting up a website and getting started with strategies such as SEO or are creating a business page on Facebook to get started with social media marketing, you are sure to get displayed in front of a huge crowd of audience. Marketing online also helps you in breaking the limits of distance.
For example, if you are putting up a banner in Amritsar, only people of that particular city or even that particular lane will get to know about it. But when you are putting up your advertisement online, different people from different parts of the country will be able to see your advertisement. This helps in making you known among the people much faster and helps you in increasing your brand reputation in the market in a much smoother way.
Gaining Trust:
How do you think many of the online businesses are surviving in this world of cut-throat competition? One of the most important things is trust. Digital marketing actually can help you in gaining the trust of the audience so that you can start having higher conversion and better revenue, and most importantly, a loyal customer.
You can put up different options such as feedback from earlier customers and so on public so that many of the new viewers can see them and can start trusting you. Also, there are other ways, such as answering the questions placed by someone instantly so that they do not change their minds. You may not get all these benefits in the case of traditional marketing. Digital marketing can be one of the best ways to gain the trust of your audience so that they can be your loyal customer and can bring in more such loyal customers for you.
So, you have ample reasons for how digital marketing can be the best option for you in today’s world. If you wish to survive in this online dominated market today, you need to grab the strategies of digital marketing.
Now when you are convinced by the fact that you should use digital marketing for your business, it is the right time to understand how to get started with it.
How to Get Started?
Digital marketing works well for almost all types of business, whether it is B2B or B2C. But of course, the requirement for different businesses are different, and this brings in the need to choose the strategies for going ahead with the marketing campaigns.
Normally, products sold in the case of B2B marketing are much expensive compared to B2C marketing. Hence, the targeted audience’s density is much lesser in the case of B2B marketing compared to B2C marketing.
In the case of B2C marketing, you can convince a particular customer to try your product irrespective of whether they require it. But in the case of B2B marketing, the audience will be very specific about what they need, and you need to target that specific audience that requires your product.
Whatever your business is, it is quite convenient to start with the digital marketing campaign. You need to create a proper website with your company name and the logo that you have for your business. You soon need to make use of the different strategies mentioned above to get your marketing campaign for your business.
But what strategies actually will suit your marketing campaign? To know this, here are some of the important questions that you need to ask yourself and get an answer to it.
What is the Goal?
The very first question that you need to get an answer for is about the goal that you have set. The strategies that you need to select depend a lot on the goals that you have set for your business. There can be many goals that you can have for your business, such as generating revenue, converting your leads into sales and potential customers, getting clicks, or so on.
Ultimately, if you are running a business, the most common goal is to generate a good amount of revenue. It is always better to set a goal that you wish to earn from your digital marketing campaign. Of course, the purpose of advertising your products and service is to get more audience and convert them into potential customers to generate revenue.
Of course, getting more clicks is also a thing for man,y such as those who want to get viral. This works out for people who are selling information or an idea. People who are there to sell a product or a service need to get sales, and for this, they need to target a specific audience.
So, it would help if you thought hard about your goal to come up with the right strategies that you can use for your digital marketing campaign.
Who is your Audience?
After you have set your goal of how much you expect to earn as revenue, you need to work upon the type of audience you need to target. There can be people with different personalities who can get converted into potential customers. Hence, it would help if you marketed other people in different ways to land up buying your product.
So, how can you understand and come to know about the different types of buyers that you may have? One of the best things that you can do is get in touch with the sales experts who are standing on the borderline to meet up with the customers and sell them the products. Professionals in the sales department meet up different customers throughout the day and are aware of the various types of buyers who can become your potential customers. Based on the types of people they meet and deal with, you can develop different creative ideas for your digital marketing campaign.
But sometimes, just getting information from the sales team is not enough. Another important thing that you require is direct feedback from the customers who have already bought your products. You can have a dedicated team who would call up the customers after a couple of days of the purchase to know several things such as:
- What made them buy the product from your brand?
- Are they satisfied with the product?
How are customers helpful in creating a digital marketing plan?
Now when you know who the potential audience is for your business, it is time to understand how to provide the right advertisement to different types of customers so that you can turn your potential audience to your potential customers. It is important to understand the persona of different buyers so that you can reach out to the nerves of such types of buyers.
Have you ever noticed a software company selling its software? They offer quotes in different ways, such as for individuals, small groups, and big enterprises. Some companies break it down even more, such as a monthly package and a lifetime package for an individual, and so on. You can provide such options so that each type of customer can feel comfortable with the offer and find the option that suits them. You will also find such companies that even offer customization options for those who wish to have a specified number of software features.
Again, why do you think a body shower brand offers different flavors and options? It is only because you cannot be sure if one customer likes a particular taste, but someone else may like it.
Now the task is to display that you have so many options with you. You can either advertise various options to a section of people strategically or can display all the options together in a single ad, depending upon your marketing strategy.
What Shall be Your Expenditure?
Though several things such as creating a social media page for marketing or getting a website for your business will not cost much, several other activities such as that of paid advertisements will require some good investment. Hence, it would help if you calculated your expenditure depending upon the revenue that you will earn from the marketing campaign. For example, if you have checked upon an average that you may make an income of $50 a month and you have to pay $25 on Paid Advertising, this is not worth it. It is better that you choose out some other options instead.
Also, if you have a B2C business product such as cosmetics or so on, social media platforms can be the best option you can have. All you need to do is to get innovative and creative so that your viewers click on your advertisement and visit your website or online store and the call to action you have provided.
You need to follow Paid Advertisement methods for the B2B businesses where the products’ costs are usually high.
Whether you are in a B2B or a B2C business, one of the best ways is to calculate the average revenue that you can have. Based on the revenue that you have estimated, you can try out different strategies. Of course, you can start small and then can invest bigger as your revenue increases over time.
Go Mobile
Whatever strategies you are selecting for your digital marketing campaign, one of the most important things today is that most of the people today are on mobile internet in place of the desktop. As per Statista, more than 50% of the total population today uses the internet on their smartphone and regularly increases. So, if you are creating advertisements based on the desktop version, you may lose out on a huge chunk of people who are more comfortable on smartphones. Hence, it is one of the most prominent strategies to create campaigns suited for the desktop and mobile versions so that you can reach out to each and everyone in the market.
Digital marketing is here to stay. Hence, if you wish to survive and prosper in the competitive market with your business, choosing digital marketing for your advertising will be one of the wisest decisions. Just analyze the important facts, estimate the figures, and you can surely create great strategies for your digital marketing campaign.
