What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing Services
Digital Marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online and digital marketing efforts. It is referred as any form of marketing product or services that involves digital channels such as Google search, social media, emails, websites, and mobile apps.
Digital marketing was first popularized as a term in early 2000’s. In those days, the internet was not being used more frequently as of now. Rather businesses were more focused on offline marketing to attract their audience to buy product and services.
Later, with the evolution and effectiveness of the internet, people spend twice as much time online as they used to, many years ago, and the method of buying and shopping the product or services has also been changed.
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already spending time, that is, internet.
So, what exactly the Digital Marketing is?
From your website to your online branding assets, digital advertising, online brochures, email marketing, and beyond — there’s a huge spectrum of tactics and assets that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. And the best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each asset or tactic support their overarching goals.
Here are some of the most common assets and tactics:
Assets:
- Website and SEO Content
- Blog posts
- Ebooks and whitepapers
- Infographics
- Interactive tools
- Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
- Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
- Online brochures and lookbooks
- Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)
Tactics:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing the content, setting up technical part, and reach of your website so that your web pages appear at the top of a search engine result for a specific set of keyword terms. Ultimately, the goal is to attract visitors to your website when they search for services, products, or information related to your business.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is the process of gaining more and better qualified traffic to your website from the search engines. Google AdWords is by many measures the most popular paid search platform used by search marketers, followed by Bing Ads, which also serves a significant portion of ads on Yahoo.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, high-quality and relevant content or online material that does not explicitly promote the brand but attract, inform and retain the clearly defined audience.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is the process of attracting the customers through relevant and high-quality content and adding value at every stage in your customer buying journey.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
The practice of promoting your brand and content on social media channels to drive traffic, increase brand awareness, and generate leads for your business
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay-per-click advertising is an online marketing model, in which the advertisers pay a publisher when the ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Adwords
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based advertising technique where you earn commission by promoting someone else product or services on your website.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is an online advertising technique, that is primarily content-led and featured on a platform beside other, non-paid content. For example, BuzzFeed sponsored posts, Facebook advertising, and Instagram advertising.
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is the software that allows companies to automate, streamline, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. Most importantly, it helps to measure the results and ROI of your digital campaigns, which eventually benefits you to grow revenue faster.
Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, offers related to the product, service, and events, as well as to direct people towards the business’ website. Email Marketing is one of the quickest and most direct ways to reach customers with critical information.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile Marketing is an online marketing strategy focused on reaching the targeted audience on their smart phones, tablets, and any other handheld devices through websites, emails, SMS and MMS, social media and mobile apps.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
1. Opens up the growth option for the small businesses
The benefits of digital marketing for SME business lies in the method of marketing and the selection of it is done as per your budget and audience availability at a lesser cost. Even a decade back launching a product and getting it marketed was a task in itself. Most of the expensive types were just out of their reach and they had to adapt to small level methods where the guarantee of the success was close to negligible.
The digital modes of marketing are customizable and hence much cheaper. If you are trying to make a venture into an already established market, you can still make your presence held by targeting a small base of customers
2. The conversion rate is higher
The businesses that are using online marketing as the preferred mode of marketing are able to measure the conversion rate through real-time using simple tools or methods. The conversion rates such as the percentage of viewers who got converted into leads and then subscribers and finally purchasing the service or product. SEO, Social media marketing, and email marketing are methods which have a high conversion rate as they are able to produce a quick and effective communication channel to the consumer.
Ultimately, all the traffic that you may get on your website may not be fruitful, hence digital marketing lets you reach out to only those who have the need for services which are provided by you and so offering better lead conversion
3. Customer support has become a priority
For any business to survive the one thing that they really need to work upon is establishing a reputation which is impeccable. In the past few years, it has become evident that customers will always prefer a company which does not have any scandals associated with it. Importance of Digital marketing today lies in offering you multiple ways to establish a personal rapport with your customer base. Be it email marketing or social media you can always offer the customer solutions to their problems and make them relate to your product by even providing live chat access. Your website and social media page forms a place where the consumer can ask queries, give suggestions and hence take the association with you on a positive level.
4. Get connected to the mobile customers
With the Google mobile update nearly almost all the websites these days are made in a manner that they are easily viewable on the mobile as well as on the other handheld devices. Since all the customers have access to smartphone and most of them even look for products on the same. In many situations, customers have changed their purchased plan and picked up a product from a different brand just because they were convinced that the new product has much better functionality.
5. Increase the trust for your brand
The presence of your brand and service on multiple platforms gives the option to the customers to rate your services as per their level of experience. With the positive and complimentary review left by satisfied customer causes the new ones to immediately convert. The customer today preferred a social media page of a brand for issue resolution and other matters. This, in turn, leads to the building up of strong image of the brand in the minds of the new consumers hence leads to more conversions.
6. Better ROI for your investment
In the earlier stage, budget allocation was done individually to handle each kind of marketing medium the situation becomes more progressive now. Being digital you have access to packages at the different level of costing hence ensuring that you can pick up one which best suits your budget. Even a small level of investment done in a method like an email marketing has the potential to deliver results in terms of customer engagement. With the help of web analytics, the business owners know whether your website is providing optimal ROI. While the website may not be generating revenue for you, directly you can always track the conversion rate of inquiries made through email and telephone calls to sales.
7. Digital marketing is cost-effective
A small business needs to save up on its resources before it finally goes into the green zone and starts making profits. Digital marketing gives you the scope to reach out to many customers at the same time and that too within your budget. You can plan your marketing strategy such that you only use modes which lie in your budget. If there is a desire not to extend the budget, then you can always target niche audiences who you know would definitely like and appreciate the concept of your offering.
8. Potential to earn higher revenues
Since the amount of money invested is less and the ROI more the scope to make money is much higher. As per a study conducted by IPSOS Hong Kong in accordance with Google has shown that compared to traditional methods, digital marketing is known to generate 2.8 times more revenue. This, linked with the fact that the conversion rates here are much high ensure that you are minting money as soon as you enter the fray. For organizations which are formulating their strategies keeping the money in mind, this also means a faster movement towards the growth path they want to be on.
The bottom line is, the digital age is here, and those businesses that fail to adapt to the new marketing environment are at great risk of going extinct sooner rather than later.