What is Digital Marketing? An Overview of Online Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Marketing is synonymous to selling. The goal of marketing is to connect with potential customers and convince them to buy your product or service. In a nutshell, digital marketing is connecting with your potential customers and maintain a relationship with them online.

Digital marketing is big these days and will continue to grow. Internet usage has an unprecedented growth in the past decade, and this will continue now that we are ushering a new normal brought about by the CoViD-19 pandemic. People purchase products online. Even some services like workouts and personal training are being done online.

This article will tell you what you need to know about digital marketing and why you need it in your business.

Digital Marketing

It refers to the efforts you use to introduce your company to people and convert them to customers. This can be through email, social media, blogging, and pay-per-click advertising. Click here for more information

Digital Marketing Tools – There are materials you can use to introduce your business to people. Maximize the use of these tools to create a presentation to the people online. Some of these tools are:

• Website
• Branded assets (logos, social media handles, etc.)
• Video and images
• Blog posts, articles and other written content
• Reviews
• Social media accounts

Digital Marketing Strategies – Strategies are constantly changing and here are some that are still being used:

PPC Advertising – This is a strategy where you monetize every click made on an ad.

Paid Search –You can put text ads on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) of Google, Bing and Yahoo. It is a good way to target potential customers who search for a product like yours.

Search Engine Optimization – You can use SEO to boost the ranking of your pages or blogs organically.

Paid Social Media Ads – Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. allow ads on their sites. Paid social media ads are great to build awareness because almost everybody is on social media.

Content Marketing – This is a strategy that makes use of content like blog posts, eBooks, videos, etc. to build awareness and drive sales. Included in content marketing is native advertising where an existing content recommends you.

Affiliate Marketing –This is when you pay a business or a person to promote you on their website.

Email Marketing – Although this is the oldest form of online marketing, a lot are still using this primarily to promote an event, advertise a sale or to highlight a content.

Is digital marketing effective?

Any business can benefit from digital marketing. Once you identify who you want to reach, digital marketing company can reach anyone wherever he is. With that said, there are certain types of digital marketing services that will benefit certain businesses.

Paid social advertising or social media marketing is good for companies that sell fast-moving products, i.e., products that are not expensive and considered basic needs. Bread is a good example. Advertise your bread on Facebook or Instagram and you will get queries easily. Before the day ends, you will have orders coming in. You cannot do that with expensive products. You cannot put “house for sale” on Facebook and close a sale immediately. You need to build a relationship and cultivate trust before the buyer parts with his money.

Paid search works for companies that have a specific audience. Let’s say you are selling condominium units targeted for young urban professionals. You do not use social media to sell your units. A more effective approach is to be seen in a SERP when buyers type in “condominium units near (blank)”. Once they see you and initiate contact, it is your cue to build a relationship and eventually earn their trust. You do this through long-term strategies like content marketing where they get to know your track record, plans, etc.

Getting started

Digital marketing is not difficult. Advertising platforms are easy to sign up in and they also make it easy for you to make your first campaign. But before you start, you must first consider the following:

Your desired revenue –Before deciding on how much you can spend for digital marketing company, know how much revenue you want to earn first. How you approach this goal will determine the strategy you need to employ. Getting a lot of PPCs and conversions are okay, but unless they translate to sales, you’re not doing to make money. Having a target figure will help you determine how much to spend in advertising in order to hit your target.

Know your market –It is important to know the personality of your market. Marketing tactics depend on the personality. What is their typical behavior? Are they the type who are easily convinced? Do they require long courtship? Once you know your market’s personality, you will know what type of strategy to use.

Know your customers’ value –There are different types of customers, those who buy one-time big-time, those who buy small-ticket items often and those in between. Which of these types brings in the money? How much will it cost you to lure them? Knowing this information will help you determine the value these customers bring. Knowing where your bread and butter comes from will help you determine where you should focus your effort.

Mobile Digital Marketing

It is different from desktop digital marketing. Sidebar Google Ads are not found in mobile, and to make it consistent, Google got rid of it too on desktop. Mobile also prefer short blogs than long ones. These are just some of the differences, all of which are important because more than 50% of web activity is done on mobile devices. If you are venturing into digital marketing for the first time, assume that your audience will see you first on mobile. Optimize your campaigns for mobile exposure, make your page is easy to navigate on a phone or tablet. However, it does not mean that you

should abandon your desktop efforts because there are users who will look you up on a desktop after seeing you on their mobile device.

To conclude, digital marketing is here to stay primarily because most businesses are encouraged to be done online. It will benefit you a lot to know the ins and outs of digital marketing. You do not have to do it yourself if you’d rather focus your efforts on the other aspects of your business. There are digital marketing agencies who would love to help your business grow.