Digital Marketing For Business
Digital Marketing, also known as Internet Marketing or Online Marketing is the art of using various digital channels to grow your business online.
It can be thought of as an audience-targeted, conversion-oriented, measurable & dynamic form of marketing that uses various digital channels in order to achieve traffic & then convert them into real customers.
Here, Digital channels include those platform where your prospect audience is hanging out. Eg: Social Media, Online groups, forums, search engines & many more.
Major Characteristics of Digital Marketing
- Audience-targeted
- Measurable
- Dynamic
- Budget Friendly
Audience-Targeted
Digital Marketing gives you a broader sense of Audience-targeting when it comes to showcasing your products or services to your preferred audience.
In compared to traditional marketing where each campaign are implemented generically, Digital marketing provides you a greater flexibility of targeting your prospects audience & client online in a well-organized manner using various channels & techniques.
Audience Research is one of the primary blocks in order to establish your business online.
Once you have determined who your audience is, you can now target then based on Age, Gender, Geography, Demography & even their activity & choices.
Below is the screenshot of dashboard for Facebook post advertising. You can see what all targeting features they provide in order to reach your prospective customers.
Measurable:
Digital marketing channels provide you with a platform to track your marketing progress & measure them accordingly. Once you have initiated a particular campaign, you can use various web analytics tools in order to measure your conversion & hence the return on Investment (ROI).
Return on Investment is the ratio of Total money invested to the Total profit earned.
For Ex: Let us consider you have an online electronics store & sell the latest gadgets & Mobile phones online. And you get a 5% profit as sales commission from sellers.
Suppose you created a Facebook campaign for an iPhone sale which costs around $1000 and yields you $50 per sales as commission.
Now, you started creating catchy posts & advertising it on Facebook. You invested $500 in Facebook advertising to reach a number of people in your area.
As a result, there was a sale of 100 pieces of iPhone in those periods.
That literally means, you got a profit of 100*50, that equals to $5000.
So, In this case,
ROI = Total profits gained/Total Money invested * 100%
= 5000/500*100
= 1000%
Whoa, That’s amazing.
And That’s why Digital marketing has gained a large popularity in the past few years.
Dynamic
Apart from being Audience-targeted & measurable, Digital marketing has gained popularity for being dynamic.
You don’t need to call multiple people in order to make a change to your marketing campaign. You can do it by yourself in just a few clicks.
Besides, Digital marketing channels also give to flexibility to schedule & rotate your Ads & all based on your Audience timezone & comfort.
You can even measure your marketing progress & conclude which days or time suits your Ads offering.
Based on such an assumption, you can dynamically adjust your campaign & execute accordingly.
This is the dashboard of Google Ads.
You can see, how you can choose your audience, Ads, extensions, scheduling & rotation according to your needs.
Budget Friendly:
Have you any idea How much would it cost you rent a billboard in The Times Square.
Let me tell you. It’s more than $25,000 per day for a small billboard. Moreover, if you opt for Television Ads, the bill can go in Millions. It is, therefore, only large businesses & corporates could build a brand in those days.
But with the dot-com boom, things changed and so did the course in marketing. With the advent of the internet, people started getting more active online.
The scenario of communication changed from telephone to skype calls and Text message to Whatsapp & Snapchat.
With all those changes, there came a more sophisticated & budget friendly modes of Marketing online. And that’s what we call Digital Marketing these days.
Digital marketing gives you the flexibility of setting a budget yourself. You can even get your products in front of the customer in $10 and can also spend thousands of dollar for more visibility.
So, it all depends upon your prospect audience & your advertising budget.
Besides these, you can also increase the traffic on your business Organically, which literally means that you don’t need to spend any bucks to get your website or business in front of your preferred audience.
It’s all about proper optimization & you would be good to go.
Compare With Traditional Marketing
Traditional Marketing refers to the process of making people aware of your products, service, offerings or announcement using various channels & method. Whether it be traditional or digital marketing, there are always a few steps & processes involved.
Any type of advertisement, promotion or campaign that is truly implemented by companies using various marketing channels in order to increase their sales & revenue falls under Traditional marketing.
Have you ever noticed McDonald’s: “You deserve a break today” or Nike’s “Just Do it” large billboard in your city.
That’s a part of traditional marketing, my friends.
Traditional marketing channels
- Print Media: Print Media like Newspapers, magazines & Journals used to be the main source of news & information those days. And Businesses used those channels extensively to promote their products & services to their readers.
- Outdoor channels: Have you notices pamphlets & billboards stuck in your street corners? Well. That also falls under outdoor channels. Outdoor marketing channels like Pamphlet, stick paper, billboard, flyer, etc were used in various streets & corners of the targeted city so that passerby can see those & get aware about their new products & services.
- Broadcast Media: Broadcast Medias like Televisions & Radio used to be the chief source of entertainment before the nineties. As an instance, large businesses used Tv & Radio Ads to get their products in front of their prospect customers.
- Announcements: Have you ever come across vehicles roaming & announcing a certain product around your places. Those channels used to work well in the old days when a company had an announcement to make about their new products or services.
- Referral Channels: Referral channels used to be one of the important forms of marketing before the existence of the Internet. Even now, some of those referral channels work; but in a digital form. There used to be corporate businesses which could market business products or service in the local market & were supposed to get a percentage of commission on that behalf.
Problems with Traditional channels
- You can’t target a set of a relevant audience through any of those channels. Ex; you can’t expect only women to see your large billboard in the market, can you?
- You can’t measure the number of customers visiting your business by seeing your Television Ads, can you? No, because the referral can be many.
- It is quite difficult to track your marketing progress and even harder to measure exact conversion from a specific marketing channel.
- Do you imagine how many thousands of dollars do you need to spend just to get your 30 seconds advertisement on Tv? you shall understand what I am talking about.
To combat all these problems, there came the inception of digital marketing with the Dotcom boom in the nineties.
Benefits of Digital Marketing For Business
Broader rich
Doesn’t matter where your audience lives, Digital marketing gives you the freedom to target & connect with them 24/7 from around the world. You can target users & audience in your area, city, country & even in another territory.
Well-targeted
With a proper audience research & Digital marketing, you can target your preferred audiences on the basis of their age, location, demography, interests & all.
Trackable & Measurable
As discussed earlier, with the various web analytics platform, Digital channels provide you with techniques to track & measure your marketing progress.
Lower Cost
Digital marketing is far more targeted & costly than the Traditional form of marketing channels.
Flexible
Digital marketing provides all sort of flexibility in targeting audience, budget, scheduling & rotation which makes it easier to implement strategies, measure what worked and develop a better strategy for achieving organizational goals & objectives.
Longtime run
Digital marketing is a whole process of creating a brand, attracting customers & retaining them for a longer time. Don’t expect an instant result from it.
Since a business can only get successful if it is able to retain customers & maintain a good relationship with them, Digital marketing comes with a package for a long business run.
Branding
With digital marketing, you can not only aware people about your business but can also drive traffic to your website, and convert those traffics into paying customers.
As a process, we create various marketing funnels to attract, convert & retain them.
Moreover, despite the size & budget of your business, you can act as the best source of information & services using various digital marketing techniques and that can largely contribute to Business Branding.
Better Customer relation experience
With a well-optimized website & customer relation management through different digital channels like Search engine & social media, you can track your customers, communicate with them and listen to what they have to say.
This ultimately creates a better customer experience.
Improved Conversion rate
A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of people viewing or clicking or ads to the number of people actually converting into customers or buying your products.
For ex:
If your ads are shown to 1000 people and 50 of them managed to buy your products.
Then, the conversion rate, in this case, would be:
50/1000*100=5%, which literally means that 5% of your audiences are actually converting into real customers, which is way too high while compared to the conversion rate in terms of traditional marketing.
Better ROI
ROI refers to Return on Investment which basically means what profit you are getting from your investment.
As calculated earlier, The ROI is always higher in the case of Digital marketing while comparing to other traditional marketing channels.
Now that doesn’t mean that you should develop a marketing strategy in all of them. It is necessary to first select your targeted & relevant channels.
In order to determine your targeted digital channels, you need to determine your audience first.
Determining your Audience
You need a clear representation of your buyer’s persona for an effective marketing.
How’d you do that?
A buyer persona is kinda typical model of your ideal customer.
Let us take an example.
Suppose your business is related to an online women clothing store based in London.
In this case, your ideal customers would certainly be girls & women between 15–50.
In this case, your buyer persona would look something like this:
Name: Carolyn (can be anyone)
Sex: Female
Age: 15–50 (both teenage & grown up)
Financial status: Both dependent & independent
City: London, Nearby
Now that you have an idea about who your audience is, you can now connect & target them based on the platform they use. Choosing a particular channel truly depends upon the nature of your business, services & audience.
Digital Marketing Channels
SEO
Social Media
PPC Marketing
Email Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
SEO
SEO, which is the abbreviation of Search engine optimization is the process of getting traffic & growing your business organically. You don’t need to pay in order to optimize your website organically.
SEO is the process of implementing various tools & techniques online to optimize your website in such a way that it becomes well accessible for both users & search engine.
Whether you know or not, people are always looking for your products, or services online.
Just consider yourself.
What do you do when you need to buy something or get any information online.
Step 1: Go to Google & search for your query. Long lists of web pages are displayed to your screen as a result.
Step 2: You visit few of those web pages & filter the best one
Step 3: Click the best one and shop your favorite products from there.
Step 4: If you liked the shopping experience there, you visit that store again & again
This is as simple as that, isn’t it?
There are two things that we get to know from the above context:
- People are already searching for you.
- Nobody tends to visit the second page of their search results.
Therefore, Search engine optimization or SEO is all about optimizing your website for a particular set up keywords (or user queries) so that your business pops up in front of their eyes when they search for those keywords, the next time.
There are 2 parts of SEO
On-Site SEO’
Off-Site SEO
Check out this article for On-Site SEO Guide
Social Media
It is estimated that social media users will increase as big as 2.77 billion users around the globe by 2019, which grew from 2.46 billion in 2017.
So, Literally, more than 70% of internet users make the use of social media.
You can just imagine the size of social media in the modern market.
And since your probable audience is hanging out on social media, where else in the world are you looking for them?
Social Media marketing is the process of using various approaches & techniques to drive traffic to your business from various Social media channels.
Some Popular Social Media channels include:
Google Plus
Snapchat
PPC Marketing
PPC, also known as Pay per click marketing is the paid form of marketing where you get to pay a certain specified budget to search engines whenever someone clicks on your ads or make a conversion.
Unlike SEO, which helps in driving traffic organically without paying any cost, PPC marketing involves payment for your ads displaced by a search engine.
PPC Ads are usually displayed on the top of the search result based on your Ad relevance & Quality score.
It appears just above the organic result, which is driven for free using various SEO techniques.
Ex: I got the above result for the keyword “Buy clothes in US”.
However, You can get different results based on your Location & intent.
Email Marketing
You might have got emails from various companies regarding specific information. We all get that and that is one of the forms of email marketing.
Email marketing is underrated, yet one of the best digital marketing channels nowadays.
It is basically the process of sending a commercial message (be it about your products & services or the new announcements) to different persons online using Email.
Each email sent to your customers or prospective customers in order to deploy your marketing message can be defined as Email marketing.
An email can be of different types depending upon the Buyer’s journey sales funnel:
- It can covey direct marketing message to the customers.
- It can provide you with relevant information.
- It can ask you to take an action and many more..
Affiliate Marketing
This is similar to referral channels that were used in traditional marketing channels in the past days.
This can be thought of as a performance-based marketing where an affiliator is rewarded a certain percentage of commission for each visitors, customers or conversion.
Affiliate Marketing operates in the following three environments:
The Merchant: This is the business or retailer who needs customers & leads.
The Affiliate: These are publishers who agree to bring you customers in exchange for a certain commission.
The Platform: This includes the platform like Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and many more that provides a solid platform for affiliates.
Final Thoughts On Digital Marketing
It’s the 21st century and every one of us have their own profile on Facebook. People no longer read the newspaper & listen to the radio for news & information these days. People usually prefer online blogs & journals for such purposes.
Televisions have been replaced by Youtube & Text messages are being taken over by instant messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Since, Maximum of your prospective customers are hanging out on the Internet, you can’t ignore the importance of Digital marketing for your business these days.
Gone are those days when only a few of the big companies could afford at their branding. Now, even small businesses can achieve some sort of Branding with the use of Digital Marketing.
So, This was all about the Introduction To Digital Marketing for business. Let me know your thoughts in the comment below. Feel free to ask any questions regarding Digital Marketing.
Originally published at webpreneurshub.com on August 2, 2018.
