What is Digital Marketing?

As quoted, “Nowadays, avoiding digital marketing is like starting up a business and telling no one about it.” But to answer all the assumptions, digital marketing is much more than just comments and likes. It’s a holistic system of all marketing efforts and promotion of brands through an electronic device or the internet. Everything that digitally impacts a customer’s journey makes up digital marketing. 

The critical components of digital marketing are –

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors and making your website “rank” higher on the list of results by a search engine. You can use SEO for websites, blogs, infographics, etc.
2. Content Marketing – Content marketing attracts leads that ultimately increase conversions. It is free value addition in written material as the content published caters to the target audience’s needs.
3. Social Media Marketing – This type of marketing promotes your brand on social networks to build brand awareness, engage with the audience, generate leads, and ultimately convert them. It includes all social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC) – PPC is a process of digital marketing in which you only have to pay the publisher each time an ad is clicked. For example, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram promoted Tweets and accounts, sponsored LinkedIn messages, and LinkedIn ads.
5. Affiliate Marketing – This works on a performance-based model. You market another brand on your website and get a commission in this type of marketing.
6. Native Advertising – Native advertising is the advertising that blends in with other content so that it doesn’t directly appear to be advertising. These ads majorly contain content and are featured on a social platform and other non-paid content. 
7. Marketing Automation – Marketing automation uses software to enhance digital marketing campaigns. Marketing automation helps in personalizing a customer’s journey with the brand.
8. Email Marketing – Email marketing is engaging with prospects through emails. These emails can be promotional, providing discounts, or value-adding providing informational content. 

Why is Digital Marketing Essential for Businesses?

After understanding digital marketing, it is essential to know why it matters. Digital marketing helps you tell your story to a larger audience and target the people who are most likely to engage with your brand based on specific parameters. This was rarely possible with the traditional methods as their probability of reaching the target persona was neither accurate nor measurable. Moreover, it’s often more cost-effective and allows you to reach people you want to sell to at a much lower budget than traditional advertising. Let’s find out a few ways businesses can reap the effects of digital marketing.

1. Competing with the big players: Digital marketing provides this extraordinary advantage to small businesses. No matter how small a brand is, it can compete with the established brands in market reach. 
2. Cost-Effective Marketing: Not only does digital marketing cost less, but your digital campaigns also allow you to reach the people you want to sell. What to do when you can’t afford a $30 million advertisement? You capture the attention of the digital market.
3. Focus on Conversions: Digital marketing allows you to focus on your conversion goals by applying an immediate call to action in your ads or website. The best part is, you can continuously track the conversions. 
4. Reach the audience you want to target: The significant part of digital marketing is targeting your buyer persona using granular targeting options. It allows you to target people based on age, gender, income, and even psychological demographics.
5. Engagement With Your Customers: Digital marketing allows you to strike a real relationship with your customers. It lets you communicate with them. But the most crucial part is, it also allows your audience to communicate back with you.
6. Build Your Brand Voice: Digital Marketing provides you with numerous opportunities to do your Brand reputation management right. It provides you to let your audience know your brand vision and understand your story.

‍

How to Make Digital Marketing Work for Your Business?

Digital marketing is the new norm for all types of businesses. For example, digital marketing practices are profoundly different for B2B and B2C companies, but both of them can still use it to their advantage. Works for B2B and B2C companies, but best practices differ significantly. Generally speaking, B2C companies aren’t trying to sell expensive products or services and thus have shorter sales funnels, unlike B2B clients with much longer decision-making processes. B2C purchases are more inclined to be based on emotional appeal and B2B on logical evidence.

Another interesting point to note is that most B2B purchases require decision-making by more than one person. Regardless of the differences between the marketing practices of specific industries, here are a few common ways to leverage digital marketing for the best results. Some of the ways are:

1. Give your website a makeover : The primary and most essential reason to optimize your website is to help your visitors achieve the conversion tasks that align with your business goals. An effective website should focus on one goal at a time, with a powerful page layout and structured information hierarchy. The visual representation has a significant role in your website design, be it the images chosen, the cour scheme applied, or the contrast of fonts and typography. Your website is the bridge between you and your potential customers, and it is essential to build credibility through testimonials and customer logos. Reducing friction and optimizing the website for mobile users is another milestone that will take you further. A fully optimized website is your key to unlocking increased conversion rates and ultimately a fast-growing revenue.
2.  Build a solid social media presence: Social media is where the most communication happens between the brands and every user that can be a potential customer. Social media is popular among business owners regardless of age. A large population of our generation relies on social networks to obtain knowledge about brands and companies. The beauty of social media is that it allows brands to engage with audiences and build relationships directly. This engagement can happen in comments, likes, shares, or live interactions. Not only this, social media monitoring and listening can provide brands a fair idea of their perception among their target audience. Isn’t it amazing that nearly 4.48 billion people use social media, and most of those engage with an average of 6 social media platforms? And with time, the numbers are still increasing. Doesn’t this provide an extraordinary opportunity for each brand to tell its story to many people? And the humongous data collected can help you understand the purchase behavior of your potential customers.
3. The Essential Social Testing: Social testing is a beneficial practice when trying to learn which content gets more meaningful responses from your target audience. For example, if you want to know whether an ad works better with or without video, you can run a test on any desired platform and measure impressions. According to Hubspot, Social media testing is essential because it analyses the collected data from your social media strategies and provides valuable insights to refine your activity further. It helps you determine how some particular variables, like photos and videos, affect the results obtained by your marketing efforts.Ultimately, you can collect data about how your audience behaves and refine the structure of your campaign accordingly. It will give a fair idea of what works and what doesn’t. A/B tests are a type of social testing used to check a variable between two content types. Split tests are different from A/B tests as they determine significant changes due to entirely different variants. Multivariable tests can test multiple variables and compare more than two versions of other posts, ads, etc.
4. Make use of both paid and free digital strategies: Both paid and free marketing are necessary for the success of a digital marketing campaign. For example, if you create extensive buyer personas that help you identify the pain points of your target audience, then you can create content that will engage them. This will provide long-term solid results after a few months with minimal expenditure. But if paid advertising is included in your initial strategy, it will help you accomplish fast results like newsletter sign-ups, website visits, email funnels, and many more. But for long-lasting and efficient campaigns, it is necessary to invest in organic traffic building strategies. You can also customize your strategy according to the results you achieve, catering to both paid and organic marketing efforts.
5. Using email marketing to connect with customers : Email marketing can engage with the target audiences and can also be promotional, providing discounts or value-adding providing informational content. Marketers also use them to maximize click-through rates. According to HubSpot, 80% of business leaders think that email marketing causes an increase in customer retention. According to a survey, many marketers agree that email marketing primarily influences purchasing behavior.Email marketing is a cost-effective strategy with a high ROI. It ensures a customized experience for the leads and increases brand awareness. It also ensures that the authorities are nurtured adequately by engaging them consistently. Email marketing allows you to track the rates your prospects bounce efficiently, click-through, unsubscribe and open. This will help you understand the changes you need to ensure in your existing campaign and which strategies to let go of completely.
6. Take Advantage of Video Marketing: Haven’t you started noticing more and more videos in your feed? Be it ads or content; Video marketing has become the new go-to for marketers. Many platforms reported a significant increase in engagement with video content. Not just this, 72% of customers are likely to learn about a product or service in a video format. Video content marketing is used to produce video content to increase brand awareness and enhance brand reputation. Videos are generally posted on Youtube or other social media platforms. They can also be published in the form of webinars, courses, live videos, or self-hosted videos based on the identified needs of the target audience. Video content can also include: 1. Product demo videos 2. Behind the scene videos 3. Educational and how-to videos 4. Customer testimonial videos. When done correctly, video marketing is a great tool to tell your story to the customers in a fascinating audio-visual format. Video content is proven successful for both B2B and B2C companies.
7. Leverage Mobile marketing : As per the PEW research, it is found that three out of four adults have a smartphone. There is no doubt about mobile phones’ rapidly growing usage time, so why not take advantage of the growing passion for mobile by using the right strategies to optimize your marketing efforts for mobile users. You can try out various marketing strategies and understand which ones you want to incorporate in your marketing strategy. Mobile marketing can be – App-based marketing, In-game mobile marketing, Location-based marketing, SMS marketing, mobile search ads, Mobile image ads, Push notification, and QR codes. When executed correctly, mobile marketing will not only amplify the strength of your relationship with your prospects but also open up numerous opportunities to engage with them.
8. Retargeting and Remarketing: Remarketing and retargeting help brands reconnect with people who previously have already interacted with their website or social media. It is essential to reach out to those visitors again as it enhances the chances of conversions, and for this, you should tap into the potential of remarketing and retargeting. Retargeting can be done on websites, mobiles, and various social media platforms to reach out to your leads. You can also formulate your strategies according to the customers’ purchase cycle. One such way is adding a “pixel” to your website. The tool tags all of your visitors, making a list of them while pixels trace the people visiting your website based on the decided parameters, for example, where they are in their purchase funnel, days since view, location, etc. This can help you find out who you want to retarget and remarket your product and service. All in all, retargeting and remarketing are cost-effective because you are necessarily advertising to everyone who has already shown interest in your products, services, and offers.

‍

“There are many definitions of marketing, but the single fundamental that remains the same throughout is – “Marketing is everything from the customer’s perspective.” Marketing is not thinking out of the box because there is no box when talking about marketing.”

Taking the Next Step to Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the future of marketing. Digital marketing should be the prime focus of the entire marketing strategy of any business. There has not been a more incredible way to engage your audience and personalize their journey throughout the funnel other than digital marketing. 

It provides businesses with extraordinary opportunities for consistent growth. But it entirely depends on how you use it to your advantage. You can also consider outsourcing a part of your digital marketing campaign to access instant expertise and a wider variety of skills. Having a helping hand always makes your life easier.

‍