Digital marketing is traditional marketing done on digital platforms. The concept is selling your products or services via the internet. The way the internet has penetrated the global arena has spurred this. Statistics point out that these numbers have doubled up in the recent past.
This is what the numbers look like.
This pie chart shows each region, and how the internet has infiltrated those regions.
This phenomenon has changed the way people connect and interact with the brand online. Digital marketing is simply connecting with your prospects on the internet. This is not the case with traditional methods. You can’t find out your customer base as well as your marketing performance with accuracy.
Defining Digital marketing?
Digital marketing is marketing conducted online or electronically to reaching out to larger audiences. Develop a digital road map to identify where your target prospects are spending most of their time. Strive to locate every prospect and make them part of your audience. No business can thrive without a sustainable customer base. This is a major drawback with traditional marketing, since it’s difficult to target a specific audience.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
You can focus your marketing efforts on specific audiences
Digital platforms are splendid avenues for targeting specific customers who have shown interest in your products or services. For instance, SEO is a digital tactic that enables you to showcase your products or services to specific prospects. You can strategically position your products or services by using the keywords they’re actively searching for.
Additionally, you could offer free gifts like ebooks in exchange for email addresses. Hence, you can use them to send more personalized messages to boost your conversions.
However, this is the opposite of traditional platforms. Imagine, you have placed your advert on a billboard. It’s difficult to target a specific audience because you have no control over who sees it. Again, with most people hooked up on their smartphones, they are likely not to look at your advert.
Digital Marketing is trackable and appraisable
Digital marketing is a game-changer. Certainly, it has made measuring your performance against your set goals pretty much easier. For this reason, it gives you a holistic view of how your audience is interacting with your business.
Offline marketing is neither trackable nor measurable. Imagine, you’re selling beauty products and you decide to run an advert in a newspaper. It’s not possible to tell the people who saw it. Lastly, you can’t tell either how that advert influenced your sales levels.
These are some ways you can measure your performance.
Your site’s traffic
There are several tools you can set up to track your overall performance. Integrate Google Analytics accounts with Google search console account. Google Analytics will track every activity regarding your website. This includes;
- The number of prospects driven to your site
- The number of goals achieved
- The channel driving the most traffic to your site.
Secondly, Google Search Console is another tool to embrace. Moreover, you can use it to track your Google search performance and technical performance. Besides that, you can track the following;
- keywords responsible for both organic and referral traffic
- Technical issue that requires fixing on your website.
Attribution Modelling
Every goal you meet must be traced back to a customer’s first touchpoint with your business. You should be able to match every single sale with each customer. These insights will help you simplify the sale funnel for your customers. Therefore, every data or insights collected on each platform is communicating something to your business.
Make use of such data and insight from your website to align your marketing to be in tandem with your sales goals. Attribution modelling can accurately give you the value of each customer to your business.
Digital Marketing is Cost-efficient
Remember, we said digital platforms are trackable and measurable. You can tell top-performing channels from underperforming channels. You can decide to increase budgetary allocation to top-performing channels as you cut down on underperforming channels.
Albeit, this is not the case with traditional marketing. Spending more money on adverts irrespective of their performance is like shooting yourself in the foot. Digital marketing soon or later, offline marketing is becoming irrelevant.
Subsequently, you can allocate more time to unpaid channels such as SEO. Statistics point out that 57.8% of web traffic is driven by Google. Take advantage of this potential traffic, which is free and accessible. These trends are going up as an indicator of prosperity if you target them using the right keywords.
Digital Marketing is unbiased and democratic
Digital platforms are giving both startups and big companies a fair playing ground to flex their muscles. Every venture has an equal chance of succeeding online regardless of its size, profitability, or stages of growth.
Small businesses can outrank big brands because digital platforms are unbiased and democratic. With SEO, any business that aligns with the searcher’s intent will get its keyword ranking high on Google. What matters most is how your business targets prospects with relevant keywords.
Of course, this is not the case with traditional marketing. Where big brands with huge financial muscles will spend large amounts of money to run adverts on both print and mass media. Traditional platforms give undue advantages to established brands.
The different digital marketing platforms
There are several marketing strategies you can employ for your business to drive leads that will eventually convert into customers;
1; Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2: Email Marketing
3: Affiliate Marketing
4: Content Marketing
5: Social Media Marketing
6: Pay Per Click
1: Search Engine Optimization
SEO is ranking your website above your competitors’ sites. It seeks to improve your site’s visibility by showing up your site for relevant organic search results. This is how your business will drive organic traffic to your website. Similarly, this implies that your business will get prospects who will be interested in your products or services. You can employ these 5 SEO tools to track and improve your SEO strategy.
2: Email Marketing
Comparatively, email marketing is a good business practice to ask your prospects or customers to subscribe to your email list. This a way of developing a good rapport with your audience. You can use email marketing to communicate with your audience about new products you’re launching, any offers, discounts, and any changes to your business. It provides two-way communication between your customers and business.
3: Affiliate Marketing
This is another form of advertising where you undertake to promote someone’s else product or service on your website. You end up becoming an affiliate marketer. Once you sell such a product through your website, you earn yourself a commission. Therefore, if you have a website, be an affiliate marketer.
4: Content Marketing
Content is an integral part of digital marketing that enables your business to engage with your customers. Content plays a big role in attracting, engaging, and delighting your customers. Therefore, create content that enlightens, educates, and informs your customers about your products and services. That content can take different formats such as; blogposts, videos, infographics, or ebooks.
Content is like sunlight on your website. It needs to shine brightly to attract prospects who will delightedly bask in it on your website.
5: Social Media Marketing
Every business ought to have social media presence to compete with other brands effectively. Through social media, you will reach out to new audiences. Social media than any other digital marketing strategy will achieve easily your brand awareness goal. You can use social media to promote your brand and content, which may bring more leads to your business.
6: Pay Per Click (PPC)
This one is a paid advertisement. Which includes the costs accumulated by an advertiser once they click their adverts.
How to implement digital marketing for your business
Before implementing digital marketing, dig deeper and try to understand your business structure. This will help you align your sales funnel with relevant messaging. With this move, you can only target specific customers from the marketing channels. Bearing this in mind will enable you to unravel where your business falls in. Is your business a business-to-consumer (B2C), or business-to-business (B2B) type of business? Once you resolve this puzzle, you will take off your business to another level.
Social media marketing is ideal for this kind of business setup. Therefore, you can also blend it with paid social media advertising to reach out to more customers. These set-ups require very simplified sales funnels because items sold under them are pocket-friendly.
You can sell a watch worth $40 without referring your prospect to a salesperson. You only need to showcase your product on your social media pages and get your prospects into your website. While on your website, give them an irresistible offer before closing the deal.
These are complicated business setups because they are involved in technical products which are capital intensive. You must gear your marketing strategy towards getting your prospect to speak with a salesperson.
Therefore, in your marketing, you must endeavor to reach out to specific audiences that are interested in your products. SEO is the most convenient channel because you could target your prospect through relevant keywords. Ensure your content is among the top search result for you to attain meaningful conversions.
Lastly, you can market your business on LinkedIn. This a platform you can get a very serious client who could show interest in your products.
Final Thoughts
Digital marketing is futuristic and your business’ success is anchored upon it. Take advantage of this ever-growing digital market and nurture your fledgling businesses. Test each digital marketing channel and settle with the ones that are giving you the most results.
Ultimately, keep your eyes on the performance of your business by measuring your set goals against your attained goals. Take action where goals are not met by revisiting your digital marketing strategy. The time is now to ride your business on a digital marketing platform.
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