In the world where everything is going online, we have all heard about digital marketing by now. We know the meaning of digital and marketing, but what does it mean when they are put together? It is not that complicated. Here, we’ll be informing you about the what, how, who and when’s of digital marketing in the simplest way possible.
We are no strangers to the internet. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you’d know what the internet is and what it is capable of. But you might not know how it works and how you can use it to benefit yourself and your business.
Lets go ahead and answer some most common questions when it comes to digital marketing.
1. What exactly is Digital Marketing?
Basically, digital marketing is marketing attempts that use electronic devices and/or the internet to gain new customers.
Email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing and blogging are all parts of digital marketing—they introduce people to a company and the goal is to convert them into a customer.
Most businesses have a specific audience that they want to reach. Digital marketing helps those businesses to connect to the targeted audience by the means of digital channels.
“It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”
– Jeff Bezos, founder, CEO, and president of Amazon
2. Why is digital marketing important?
Most of the desired audience for most businesses is now online. People use the internet to do everything. From entertainment to office work, from studies to money transfer, everything is online and so is everyone.
A business doesn’t have to attract customers; it has to meet the customers where they are.
Today, online videos are watched by more than television, online articles are read more than magazines and newspapers. If a business wants to reach an audience, there is not a better option than digital marketing.
“In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.”
–Doug Warner, Senior vice president of Vonage
3. How does digital marketing work?
It is important for business owners to understand how digital marketing works to make smarter decisions for their marketing campaign. The key to understanding the workings of digital marketing is to understand the elements of the same.
Website marketing:
This is the most important aspect of the digital marketing strategy of your business. The website is where most of your target customer will form their first impression.
The first impression is the most important factor for your business. You either score a six or get bowled right into the wickets. There is no in between.
Your website is where all the customers will be lead towards. So they better like what they see.
“Speak to your audience in their language about what’s in their heart.”
— Jonathan Lister, VP Global Sales Solutions, LinkedIn
Search Engine Optimization:
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in digital marketing. Basically, SEO is getting your name on the top when a customer searches on a search engine for a product or service that you sell.
For example, when we search for sport shoes on Google, it displays a lot of links, but you, most of the time, select one of the links that are displayed on the top of the search result.
Getting your website on the first page and, ideally, on the top of an internet search can do wonders for your business. SEO concentrates on exactly that.
“Don’t optimize for conversion, optimize for revenue.”
–Neil Patel, English entrepreneur
Content marketing:
It is essential when you create and promote certain content that is aimed at attracting and engaging your target customers. No matter what tactics you use for digital marketing, content marketing has to be created to support that tactics.
Some well known types of content marketing are:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Images
- Podcasts
- Ad Content
“Blogging isn’t about publishing as much as you can. It’s about publishing as smart as you can.”
― Jon Morrow, founder of Boost Blog Traffic
Email Marketing:
Companies use branded email to reach their target audience. It is an easy and a common way to increase brand awareness, promote events and get the word out about special promotions.
Social Media Marketing:Most companies now use social media marketing to drive traffic to their websites.
Social media marketing involves engaging with your target customer and promoting your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and many more. It is a tactics that is used to help a company increase its brand awareness, improve customer engagement and generate more leads.
“We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.”
– Pierre Omidyar, Chairman of eBay
Pay-Per-Click Advertisement:Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is one of the most important elements when it comes to advertisement.
PPC ads are a type of advertisement in which you pay an ad publisher for every new lead that clicks on the advertisement. Google ads is very effective when it comes to PPC ads. Google ads help you get your website appear on the top of the search engine results.
PPC ads not only generate more traffic to your site, but they can help you ensure that the leads you are getting are qualified.
The people who are clicking on your PPC ads are consumers who are searching for the topics that are most relevant to your products or services, which means that they are more likely to be interested in the products or services that you provide.
There are many other aspects of digital marketing but these are the most basic elements out of which the base of digital marketing is constructed.
Summary:
Digital marketing works upon the following aspects:
1. Website Marketing: Most important part. It is the first impression. Audience led to the website.
2. SEO: Helps you get on the top of Google Search.
3. Content Marketing: Support marketing tactics. Attracts audience to your website.
4. Email Marketing: Reach target audience easily. Spreads Brand awareness, event promotions.
5. Social Media Marketing: Drives heavy traffic to website. Direct and good engagement with customers.
6. PPC: Ad publishers publish your advertisement. Generates quality leads.
4. Who needs digital marketing services?
Frankly, in this day and age, everyone needs digital marketing. If you aim to go big, if your goal is to dominate your industry, if you have a vision and you want to make it come true, digital marketing is the most vital part of it and you just cannot ignore it.
Not trying to reach your target customer through digital means won’t let your business grow in the rate that you want and the rate that it needs.
Nowadays, even small shops have an online presence which promotes the shop and brings in new customers every day, so why wouldn’t you want to connect to your target customer online?
You, yourself, might have experienced being attracted to something that you saw an advertisement of online. That’s exactly how digital marketing works.
So if you are starting a business, no matter how small, digital marketing strategy should be one of your main elements to concentrate on in your advertisement tactics.
Summary:
If you have a business, no matter how small or big, you need Digital Marketing to attract a huge amount of new qualified customers.
5. Why you need Digital marketing strategy?
Affordability:
Digital Marketing costs less than any other kind of marketing. Cost may vary depending on what you want to do but money spent on advertisement is way lower in digital marketing.
Mobile access:
3.5 billion People, who make 45.04% of the total population of the world, in the world own a smartphone. India alone has more than 300 million smartphone users.
Almost all of those smartphone users use their mobile devices for social networking, news, and many other activities.
Digital marketing helps you reach those people while they’re doing this.
Flexibility:
There are many forms of digital marketing. Therefore, learning how to creatively use these forms can open up a great range of possibilities for future marketing strategies.
With digital marketing you can also test and stop poorly performing campaigns in real time.
Expansion:
Many customers do their shopping online these days. Digital marketing will help you reach those customers effectively and faster than any other form of advertisement.
Tracking:
Digital marketing helps you communicate and track the activities of your target customers. You can track their activities and analyse what type of advertisement works the best and change or improve your strategies accordingly.
Influencer engagement:
Almost all influencers continuously promote themselves online and through social media. Digital marketing allows you to advertise through them which will bring their followers to your product and spread brand awareness.
“Ignoring online marketing is like opening a business but not telling anyone.”
— KB Marketing Agency
Summary:
- Digital Marketing is cheap but very effective.
- You meet your customers on their phones, which is always in their hands.
- Lets you be creative with your ideas.
- Gives you many chances of trial and error.
- Effective and faster means of advertisement.
- Lets you actively track the performance of your advertisements and customer engagement.
- Lets influencers drive traffic to your website or product.
6. What do the stats say?
We’re going to hit you with some stats to help you understand a little better about the benefits of Digital Marketing.
- 3.03 billion people, which is close to half the world’s population, are on some type of social media.
- In 2018, 12% of all retail sales in the world were eCommerce sales. (Statista)
- 86% of women search through social media before purchasing a product.
- 64% of shoppers said getting to know about a product in a video format helped them make decisions about their purchases.
- 43% of online stores observe significant traffic from their social media pages.
- Total average that each US consumer spends a year on eCommerce is $1,800.
- And average Indian buyer spent more than ₹8,300 on online purchases in 2018.
- Online shoppers made 108% more purchases using mobile apps than on mobile web in 2017.
- Better content blogs can drive traffic to a website by up to 2,000%.
- 91% of retail brandsuse two or more social media channels to promote their brand and
bring in traffic.
- 81% of all small and medium businesses use more social platforms as a part of their digital marketing strategy.
- 93% of all website traffic comes from search engines.
- On an average, email marketing has a 4400% ROI (Return of Investment).
“Social marketing eliminates the middlemen, providing brands the unique opportunity to have a direct relationship with their customers.”
— Bryan Weiner, Board of Directors of Cars.com
7. How to get started?
Now that you know what digital marketing is, how it works and how important it is, we are sure you want to use it for your own business.
You can start simply by hiring a digital marketing agency. There are many digital marketing agencies that can do your marketing for you. All you will need to do is specify your needs and goals and then work with the agency to get the desired result.
These are some steps that you’d ideally want to follow:
Step 1: Understand your selling point.
Step 2: Analyze your existing audience.
Step 3: Research about your competitors.
Step 4: Create an audience profile.
Step 5: Run small test campaigns and evaluate them.
Step 6: Learn from your mistake, evolve with time to reach your goal.
TAKEAWAY:
- Digital marketing is easier than any other form of advertisement.
- You will find it cheaper and most effective form of marketing.
- It allows you to reach your customer more efficiently in less time.
- Digital marketing makes it easy to know about products and services in detail.
- It is flexible and expandable, allowing changes at any point of time.
“Discoverability equals sales in the digital world.”
— Dev Chandan, Founder of Dev Chandan
Digital marketing is, hands down, the most effective and affordable strategy for any business venture! And, you need to have an efficient marketing structure holding the reins in order to put your product and service out there, in the grand scheme of the world.
We care about your venture just as much as you do. We know exactly what works in the digital age, and with our drive for creative gambits, we can help you create an excellent outlay crafted specifically to your company’s requisites. You now have the chance to enhance your marketing goals and fine-tune your objectives to scale at a faster pace.
Visit our website and our Facebook page to get an idea of how we do what we do, and how much we love doing it.
Also, feel free to share the blog and let us know your thoughts and tips on digital marketing!
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-Sagar Singh