What the heck is Digital Marketing anyway?
To decode digital marketing, Let’s first understand marketing at its grassroots level.
RefferalCandy Best puts it
Great Marketing “softens the ground”, giving the salesperson a more receptive audience to work on.
The lines between Marketing & Sales are quite blurry. Hence lot of people has a blurry sense of what Marketing actually is.
The Truth
MARKETING & SALES are two different things influencing each other.
Marketing is simply a pull strategy that you devise to attract customers.
In Marketing your job is to communicate the value proposition without appearing too desperate or else your “Would be” customer might grow suspicious & bail.
Perceiving Marketing as sales are the main reasons why startups fail & businesses incur losses. Marketing is the mandatory activity that you take to attract your target customers.
Sales is a push strategy. The outcome of this strategy depends upon the preliminary Marketing efforts.
Sales resorts to techniques like cold calling, cold emailing, door-to-door services. The outcome of these techniques determines the accomplishment of Target set forth by Administration.
Now that we know of Marketing, let’s jump right into Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing is marketing using digital Technologies.
The “Internet”.
The Internet Infrastructure on which you do Marketing includes
Search Engines (Google, Bing, yahoo, Baidu)
Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
✅ Websites/Blog
✅ Games/ Applications
✅ Forums
✅ Virtual communities
✅ Bots
The main reasons why Digital Marketing is preferable & works are because it is cost-efficient & the growing number of Internet users Day-by-Day.
According to Hootsuite’s Research, Internet users worldwide in 2018 is 4.021 Billion
You can read the whole research here
The Digital Marketing Process
Awareness
To build awareness for your brand you need CONTENT, content is the king. Content are of various forms i.e text, images, videos, ephemeral content (eg: Instagram Stories), e-books & Courses. With a good content strategy, you can drive an ample amount of sales & revenue to your business.
Your content needs to have less “ME TALK” and more of what your target customers can find the use of, that’s how you develop long-lasting relationships with them.
Consideration
Once your Target customers begin to come across your content frequently, they begin to understand your value proposition.
For example, your brand provides email marketing solutions to individuals & enterprises, so that’s what your value proposition is. You will curate the content that resonates around it. Your Target Customers are already looking for such solutions.
Use the tools & techniques of digital marketing to present yourself in the best manner to your Target customers.
Now your target customers would consider your product/service as they had good exposure from the content that you were distributing across digital platforms.
Conversion
In this phase, your target customer takes the action that you want them to take, it could be a sale, installing your app, booking a demo, downloading a file etc. The better your work on Awareness & Consideration phase the more you can scale up on conversions.
Using the tools & techniques of just Digital Marketing you drive conversions indefinitely or at least generate leads that your sales team can convert into customers.
And guess what? It doesn’t stop there, your continuous digital marketing efforts are aimed towards retaining those customers. They would go a step ahead & promote your Business for free. That’s the magic of digital marketing.
Throughout this blog, I will be decoding various aspects of Digital Marketing. Decode Digital Market as the name suggests is a comprehensive guide to navigate your way through Digital Marketing.
Additional Resources:
✔️ What is Digital Marketing, and how do I learn it?
✔️ What exactly is Digital Marketing?
✔️ Information Overload is hampering your growth in Digital Marketing
Originally published at decodedigitalmarket.com on June 30, 2018.
