Everybody talks about digital marketing. Today the matter became really vital for most businesses having online presentations. So, we also decided to discuss this hot topic. Reading this blog post you’ll get a deeper understanding of digital/internet/web marketing and learn how to use this powerful tool to grow your business.
First of all let’s answer the question “What is Digital Marketing?” to make sure that we are at the same ground. Digital Marketing is a type of marketing done through digital channels. What is it about? It’s about getting potential customers to get to know you, like you, and trust you.
Digital marketing is basically an umbrella term for the marketing of products, talent or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. Digital marketing is way of online marketing in which businesses, digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and other websites helps to connect with their current and prospective customers.
Digital marketing is the process of promoting the products or brands by electronic media. It involves the use of social media channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns.
Brands can either set up their own in-house teams, or hire an external professional digital marketing company to engage in this field and ecosystem. Both the options should be carefully examined. Most brands and organizations prefer to work with specialized digital marketing agencies, rather than set up in-house teams.
Here are some components in digital marketing for business growth:
Website – as you understand, having a website or blog is obligatory for online marketing. If you still don’t have the one or your outdated website needs a rebranding, you may use a quality template from a reputable provider instead of ordering expensive custom design. Choose a template developed for free open source platform, like WordPress template , for instance, in order to avoid unexpected expenses in future when you decide to extend the functionality of your resource.
Email – you need to have a corporate email to keep in touch with your customers, answer their questions, send newsletters, etc.
Content – if you want to be taken seriously, you need to post awesome content. Both search engines and users love it.
Search (SEO) – search engine optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results that are often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. The higher ranked on the search results page and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. These visitors can then be converted into customers, which all of us aim.
Social – social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Most of these social media platforms have their own built-in data analytics tools, which enable companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns.
Paid Ads – pay-per-click (PPC), also known as cost per click (CPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is commonly associated with first-tier search engines, such as Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing Ads.
Lead Management – this is a set of methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing campaigns or programs. Lead management facilitates a business’s connection between its outgoing consumer advertising and the responses to that advertising.
Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online such as email, social media, websites, etc. and automate repetitive tasks.
Webinars allow real-time point-to-point communications as well as multicast communications from one sender to many receivers. They offer data streams of text-based messages, voice and video chat to be shared simultaneously, across geographically dispersed locations. Applications for web conferencing include meetings, training events, lectures, or presentations from a web-connected computer to other web-connected computers.
Videos – video marketing is a component of an integrated marketing communications plan designed to increase audience engagement through social activity around a given video. In a successful social video marketing campaign, the content, distribution strategy and consumer self-expression tools combine to allow an individual to “add their voice” or co-create value to a piece of content – then further propagating it out to their social circles. Social video typically benefits from a halo effect cast by the “influencers” of a given social grouping. Media publishers and content rights holders create social videos from TV, live video feeds and pre-recorded content in order to generate engagement on social platforms and drive media distribution. They use real-time video editing software to instantly create and share social videos in native formats such as vertical video for Snapchat and square video for Instagram.
Analytics – marketing analytics comprises the processes and technologies that enable marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives. This is accomplished by measuring performance (e.g., blogging versus social media versus channel communications). Marketing analytics uses important business metrics, such as ROI, marketing attribution and overall marketing effectiveness. In other words, it tells you how your marketing programs are really performing.
Sales Tools – the right context can provide you with the needed information for an effective and informative relationship with your prospects. Use one or more of these tools that can help your sales team become more effective and informed reps: Rapportive, HubSpot Sales, LinkedIn Advanced Search, SalesLoft Prospector, Sales Training from HubSpot Academy, Social Prospecting Workbook, Boomerang, Sales Search, the list goes on.
We hope now you started to understand digital marketing much better, so it’s time to pass
to tips for growing your business.
First, you need to look at your industry.
If you’re in an industry or business where people don’t hang out online, or don’t purchase online, digital marketing might not be the best type of marketing for you.
Most of marketing professionals are convinced that 80% of digital marketing, or marketing in general, is about defining your ideal customer.
If you can, with detail, describe…
What keeps them up at night
What their fears & frustrations are
What their hopes & aspirations are
What the biggest struggle they face right now is
Where they hang out online
…and then actually TALK to 10–15 prospects about these points, you’ll know 80% of what you need to know to come up with the perfect “customer avatar” that you can use to guide your digital marketing efforts.
An effective customer avatar can help you craft your content marketing strategy, your marketing materials (website), your salesmanship and copy, and create a list of “fishing holes” where your prospects hang out online.
Growing your business with digital marketing is about getting deep inside the heads of your prospects, finding them online, and presenting them with helpful content.
This content can be YouTube videos, blog articles, podcasts — the form isn’t important. What’s important is your ability to understand their problems and the emotional needs behind those problems.
Once you know that, you can use online content to get these prospects to know you, like you, trust you — which is the first step of getting them to actually buy from you.
Nowadays, whatever we saw on the internet (mobile, desktop) is the result of digital marketing either it is related to things people or world.
Know WHO your customer is: build (rebuild) a buyer persona and validate it thru data coming in from tools such as Google analytics or market research tools like surveymonkey or typeform if you’re getting started.
Knowing WHERE your customer is: identify where most of your customers ‘live’, is it on social media, organic, search or on your trusted mailing list?
Tweak digital marketing strategy: to focus more on the customer most likely to buy your product on the digital channel that this customer ‘lives’ on.
Final thoughts
It’s really difficult to overestimate the role of digital marketing in business growth.
Online marketing/digital marketing provides a platform to small & medium business startups to compete and attract website visitors by sharing blogs, websites, Internet banner ads and online video content.
Digital marketing attracts online audience. Mostly people works & stick to the internet regularly which leads to increase in online audience. It helps in fetching online audience and connect target your audience by promotion.
Digital marketing is more cost effective than traditional marketing. Digital marketing needs the following kinds of investments: a laptop and an internet connection. Nowadays 40% of people go for digital marketing rather than going for traditional marketing. It is also analyzed from a survey that 28% audience shift their marketing strategy towards digital marketing.
Digital marketing also helps in generating better revenue. This is one of the reason why people use digital marketing and moving towards it. This method is profitable for the business growth and generating higher revenues.