Do you want to take your business to a new level by using digital marketing?
Well, before we dive into the details and step-by-step strategies, let’s first have an overview of what digital marketing is, so that we all are on the same board before diving into the sea of details.
Introduction to Digital Marketing
The first approach to digital marketing defined it as a projection of conventional marketing, its tools and strategies, on the Internet. However, the particularities of the digital world and its appropriation for marketing has fostered the development of channels, formats, and languages that have led to tools and strategies that are unthinkable offline.
What is Digital marketing
Digital marketing refers to a term used to associate marketing techniques with digital technologies like the Internet.
The term is used for online marketing practices such as SEO, CRO, PPC, blogging, web design, content marketing, and all other forms of online marketing.
Internet streaming of video with advertisements can also be a form of digital marketing.
How it works
Businesses would be wise enough to assess the bigger picture before investing into any certain platform. It is generally suggested to crawl before you walk – start small with your online marketing strategies and expand as your business grows.
Digital marketing is hugely helpful to firms in that it allows them to grow their audience as far as their budget allows. On the other side of the coin, internet marketing offers companies the chance to focus clearly on marketing to the right audience. In other words, a firm may reach the perfect target clientele on a local, national, or international stage, all while staying on budget.
Need for Digital Marketing
The world is digitizing at a fast pace. According to GSMA, there are 5.29 billion unique mobile users in the world, with a growth of 1.74% per year. Therefore, digital marketing is important for businesses to connect with 71.4% of the total world population that make up their customers.
Importance of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is one of the most valuable assets to your business’s growth and ensures you an authoritative online presence.
In fact, 89% of marketers say methods like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are successful and methods like Pay Per Click (PPC) increase brand awareness by as much as 80%.
So, why is digital marketing important?
Here are a the key factors that make digital marketing inevitable:
1. You reach people where they spend their time
Over 7.7 billion people use the internet across the globe. It has become an integral part of everyday life to conduct searches, use social media, and purchase products online.
2. Your competitors are already doing it
If you’re wondering why is it so important, the answer is that your competitors are already using it. Many of your competitors have already taken advantage of all digital marketing has to offer.
They’ve created social profiles, adapted their website for SEO, and run paid advertisements to reach new leads. This reason in itself is one of the reasons why you should use digital marketing.
3. You can compete with larger organizations
Competition is the hardest part of running a business. When you’re in a market with bigger corporations, like Walmart, Target, and Amazon, it’s hard to compete with them. They have a big name for themselves, which automatically draws people to trust those corporations.
You have a fighting chance against bigger corporations, which is why digital marketing is important to your business.
Your business can reach interested leads with the same methods as a larger corporation
4. You can target your ideal audience
The ability to target your audience is one of the main reasons why digital marketing is important. Imagine being able to market directly to people who are interested in your product or service
5. You can monitor your campaigns and optimize for better results
The importance of digital marketing is that you can easily track and monitor your campaigns.
When you invest time and money into your campaigns, you want to know that they are working. Digital marketing makes it easy for you to track your campaigns, which allows you to adapt and drive better results.
Every campaign you run is trackable. You can easily track a campaign’s ROI and other indicators to see if it is driving valuable results for your business. Moreover, you can see metrics such as impressions, clicks, likes, shares, comments, conversions, and more.
You get an impressive return on your investment – ROI
Online marketing strategies have an awesome return on investment (ROI). When you invest in these methods, you’ll get more out of them. Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs out of all methods.
For every $1 spent, you have the potential to earn up to $44 in return — an ROI of 4400 percent!
History of Digital Marketing and its emergence
Although the term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s, and got popularized as a term in the 2000s, but it came into existence long before.
How long? Well, about a hundred years before it was named.
Here is a picture of the first digital marketer from 1896:
His name is Guglielmo Marconi.
Marconi?
Yes, you got it right. In 1896, he was the first human to demonstrate a public transmission of wireless signals.
Guglielmo Marconi invented radio.
While it would take another 10 years for the radio to reach the general public, it sure didn’t take the creators long to realize they could use it to sell stuff.
The first live broadcast was from an opera performance at the Met and guess what people did after it?
They bought show tickets!
Digital Marketing was born
Types of Digital Marketing
You might be familiar with a few types of digital marketing, but today, it encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach customers online.
Following are the most popular 7 types of Digital marketing:
1. Social Media Marketing
It includes everything a business does on social media from creating brand awareness, creating new clients, to retaining and staying in contact with already present clients.
Thus, social media marketing goes far beyond just creating posts and posting them.
In fact, It requires a blend of creative thinking and objective, data-driven strategy, and may be a great fit for professionals who enjoy blending these two disciplines.
2. Influencer Marketing
This includes brands collaborating with an online influencer to market any of their products or services
Everyone is familiar with Christiano Ronaldo – one of the most popular footballers in the World.
Ronaldo has an instagram following of 390 million people and is one of the most expensive influencers out there, charging $1.6 million per sponsored post.
Unlike celebrities, influencers can be anywhere, they can be anyone, with a large following on the internet and social media.
3. Email Marketing
Even with the emergence of social media, mobile applications and other channels, email is still one of the most effective marketing techniques. It can be part of a content marketing strategy, providing value to consumers and over time convert an audience into customers.
Marketers can do many things to make their emails more appealing to users and more likely to be opened. These includes:
- Create a sense of urgency
- Personalize emails
- Let clients set their preferences
4. Content Marketing
Vast majority of marketers use content marketing, in fact, it is used by prominent enterprises like Microsoft, p&g, Cisco Systems, and others. Also it is developed and brought under practice by small businesses and enterprises.
Content marketing is a strategic approach, focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
5. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Buying a domain, and hosting it on the web would not do any benefit, unless and until your website is ranked by Google, and this is where Search Engine Optimization comes into action.
The role of SEO is to get a business rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.
Following are few of the most important SEO strategies, that are vital to your business website ranking:
- Content indexing – it is vital to let search engines clearly read your content by doing things like adding alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio content.
- Good link structure – It is important that search engines can “crawl” your site structure to easily find all the content on your site. There are many things that an SEO specialist can do to properly format links, URLs, and sitemaps to make them most accessible to site crawlers.
- Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords – i.e. the search terms you want your site to be found for—in your content and headers is one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO. Writing high-quality content that uses keywords in the headers and a few times in the crawl-able page content is now considered better practice, and will make pages rank better in search results.
For detailed SEO guide – click here.
6. Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists.
Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online.
One of the other things that differentiate pay-per-click from SEO is that you only pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google AdWords campaign, you will pay only
when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You can spend just about any amount of money on pay-per-click advertising.
7. Mobile Marketing
This type is focused on reaching your target audience on their smartphone or tablet.
Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email and mobile applications.
Marketers can tailor offers or special content to a geographic location or time, such as when a customer walks into a store or enters an event.
Future of Digital Marketing
The future of digital marketing is bright because now there is more market and consumer awareness.
Businesses can also use a wide range of smart tools to collect an ocean of data and make in-depth analyses about their target audience. It’s a completely new way to approach the audience.
In fact, extensive market and consumer research allow businesses to leverage untapped opportunities.
Businesses don’t need to understand every facet of new technology. Of course, the mechanics of a smart tool matter. However, businesses that plan to broaden their digital approach will see the most positive results. It is the main reason innovation will become vital for B2C and B2B players.
Conclusion of Digital Marketing
As you have seen, today, of course, no one can afford to miss out on the opportunities of the web. Thus, eventually, every marketer has to master online marketing.
Offline and online worlds are colliding with each other, and it has now become crucial for the businesses to claim their authority on web in order to compete in this ever growing race of competition and to retain all of the customers who prefer spending much of their time leaning over their laptops, smart phones, iPads and other smart gadgets.
