A Beginners Guide to Digital Marketing

If you are a businessman, then you are aware of the fact that a great part of the market is online. Even if you have a mortar and brick store, most of your potential customers make their decision to buy by exploring their options online through websites, searching on Google, and by going through customer review online. Home delivery is trending now more than ever. Online purchases are easier to make and help you save resources.

So how can you enter the world of eCommerce and boost your business online? Digital marketing!

Digital marketing simply means marketing your business online through various digital channels. Alternatively, it can also be called internet marketing. It helps you reach a lot more customers with a lot less money. According to a report by Smart insights, 45 percent of the companies do not have a clearly defined strategy for digital marketing. Whether you are among the people who want to add digital marketing into their traditional marketing or you want to move from traditional marketing to digital marketing, we have you covered.  

Let’s start by learning a few digital marketing strategies.

• Search Engine Optimization

• Email Marketing

• Social media marketing

• Search engine marketing

• Display marketing

• Mobile marketing

• Content marketing

Here’s the detail for each one of these! Keep reading till the end to learn everything about it!

Search Engine Optimization

You might have heard about SEO but not sure about the meaning. Well, let us help you understand better. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the way to direct good quality traffic to your website. Simply stated, if you have good search engine optimization, your website would rank higher on the search engine. There are different search engines available online. The most popular among them is google. There are certain rules to help you rate your website higher on the search engine and ensure that it gets more traffic. These guidelines are:

• Website structure that is easy to navigate through

• Use of relevant keywords

• Helping the search engine understand the content by the use of headings (H1, H2, H3)

• Relevant information of high quality

If you want to rate higher on the search engine, you have to structure your website to attract and direct organic traffic to your site. It is impossible to grow a business online without SEO and you will need paid advertising. SEO is similar to content writing and email marketing and they work together to give good quality content.

Any good SEO campaign has three main ingredients: Audience, your website, and google. Google places your search results against a search query that matches the keywords that you used. But how does Google do that? Well, Google takes into account your site content and structure while assessing your website and matches content with the keywords and search query to determine the relevance of the content with the queries. Google also checks if there are any quality links in the content as the link tells the value of your content and admits it as a reliable source of information. Although, the addition of links to the content of your website will help it rank higher on google but be sure to add the links of authentic websites from high authorities like professional associations and new channels.

Another important factor for google is the time spent by the visitor on your website. By using an artificial intelligence algorithm known as Rankbrain, Google measures the time spent by a viewer on the website. So, if the viewer spends a long time on the website, it tells Google that your content is interesting and relevant. Resultantly, SEO chances are increased. On the other hand, if the viewer spends less time on the website and leaves immediately, it tells Google that the website doesn’t have relevant information or is unsuitable. Similarly, posts with a higher word count which is above 2000 are more favoured by Google.

Email Marketing

According to research carried out, every one dollar put into email marketing generates 38 dollars. That is why email marketing is one of the most important strategies used by marketers. Almost 82 % of B2C and B2B companies are using it. Another report shows that a suitably defined email marketing strategy will attract 40 times more customers than the combined Twitter and Facebook campaigns. There is no doubt about the effectiveness of email marketing if implemented properly.

Good email marketing campaigns share timely and relevant information that is personalized for the recipient of that information. Reaching the right people at the right time is important. This is achieved through segmentation. Once you know about your buyer’s journey and when they are about to decide to purchase, you can approach them and influence their decision. Educational content takes many forms but emails usually share white papers, blog articles, webinars, and eBooks. You can also write a newsletter to your viewer to educate them. Moreover, you can tell them about your promotional offers in the emails and convince them to take action.

Content Marketing

According to the Wikipedia, content marketing is the form of marketing in which you create and share content to attract customers. It is a form of permission-based marketing. The potential clients opt-in and often share it as well. If you want to gain the interest of your customers, you have to give them something relevant; this is the basic idea of content marketing. It has to be helpful and must guide the readers in making the right decision. 

The Content Marketing Institute explains this as a marketing technique in which you create and distribute valuable content to engage a targeted audience and drive profit. For example, if I am selling sportswear online, I can work on the content which my customers may read before making the purchase (instead of just focusing on the landing page). 

Search Engine Marketing

SEM refers to the different processes involved in creating traffic from search engines. It includes SEO but it is a bit different. The main idea of Search engine marketing is paid advertising through platforms like Bing ads and Google ads.

Digital Advertising

This is also known as the paid advertising. Digital Advertising involves all the strategies that are required to generate traffic on your website through the paid digital ads. Businesses usually conduct the digital advertising process on various platforms and it depends on their target audience that which platform they choose. Some of the most common platforms include:

• Google AdWords

• YouTube

• Facebook

• LinkedIn

• Pinterest

• Instagram

• Twitter

Amongst all of these, Google and Facebook are the most popular ones as they alone drive around eighty percent of the traffic. The ads generated on these platforms are usually paid per click (PPC) ads and the advertiser has to pay a certain amount of fee every time someone clicks on the ad. 

There is a lot of data and courses available on the internet that can guide you in detail regarding how you can initiate your Ad campaign on a certain social media platform. You can learn it in detail if you are planning to start your digital marketing journey.

A great feature of digital marketing that you must know is the remarketing process. This means that you can even convert the window shoppers successfully into the customers by showing them your brand ads, that too after they have left your site. You must have experienced this as well. When you leave a certain site (an online store), you may get to see the same items on the other sites you visit next. This is known as remarketing. It helps the businesses get more customers sending them back to the sites they have already viewed. The basic idea behind this is to remind the customer to buy the products they were once interested in. Maybe they couldn’t buy the product previously for any reason, but reminding them again brings a good chance that they buy it this time, hence it is a good marketing strategy also known as remarketing. 

Mobile Marketing

As the name indicates, mobile marketing is a form of digital marketing that targets mobile users. As we all know that smartphones have become so common these days and the internet can be accessed almost everywhere, so this is an important niche to get the targeted audience. The marketing strategies included in this are all mobile-based and examples include SMS, MMS, and various mobile phone apps. 

Social Media Marketing

Here, marketing is done through social media platforms which can target a large audience. On social media platforms, you can either use paid advertisements or generally grow a large audience until you reach the target. Most of the brands usually use both methods as they work well together to grow the business exponentially. The famous social media platforms, as we all know, include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with millions and billions of daily users. 

Now you can see how all these digital marketing methodologies work together to engage followers and attract customers. A good social media strategy must include high-quality content and the same is for email marketing. Brands create relevant content and publish it on all the channels. 

How to Plan a Digital Marketing Campaign?

Now that you know all the basic digital marketing strategies, let’s have a look at how you can plan them for a successful outcome. You must know here that for a profitable venture, you need to implement the strategies properly. If not done the right way, you may not get the desired results. Thus, you have to be very careful about that and need to do a lot of research. Here’s what you can do to start your digital marketing journey:

• Identify and target the right audience:

This is the first and the basic step when it comes to digital marketing. You need to set your goals and target the right audience. Remember that you will not be able to generate any profit if the audience you have targeted is not interested in your services or products. With a lot of development in this field by now, targeting the right audience has become very easy and there are special digital marketing agencies that can help you.

• Develop a marketing Funnel that can help you achieve your goal:

Now you must be thinking about what a marketing funnel is? It is a term used to refer to all the steps that are taken to convert a prospect into your customer. This means that it includes everything from when the customer sees your product for the first time on the internet to buy it. Each level of marketing funnel requires different types of marketing strategies. The customer first searches for the solution to their problems and queries. An optimized blog will provide the answers through the search engine. 

They would also look for different vendors and compare the solutions with knowledge of detailed features, pros, and cons. After the initial contact, the remarketing feature will help them remind if they are still looking for the product or service, and may get them back to the website. 

So, for all these successful tactics, you need to understand the target audience and what they are exactly looking for to help you achieve an effective funnel. Only this is how you can convert the potential audience into your long-term customers. Again several digital marketing agencies can help you build your sales through effective funnels and help you achieve your goals. 

Conclusion:

Digital marketing has become a necessity these days! Without it, you cannot successfully convert the audience into your long-term customers. To be successful, you need to know the basic strategies and the right ways to apply them for profitable business growth and make sure you set a clear goal, choose the right channel and keep measuring the results to monitor the right strategy.

With all that, there is no doubt that your brand with a flourish and grow, and become successful within so time! So get started already and good luck!