Digital marketing for your business
Digital marketing – advertising campaigns that are carried out to attract a target audience using PCs, phones, tablets. It is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine advertisements, billboards, and direct mail. It has several forms, including online videos, display ads, social messages, networks. We will discuss this in more detail below.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the promotion of brands using the Internet and other forms of digital communication. Includes not only e-mail newsletters, social networks and online advertising, but also text, multimedia messages.
Benefits:
- wide coverage;
- lower cost compared to traditional marketing;
- availability of detailed information about the results of advertising campaigns;
- shorter sales cycle;
- assistance in building brand loyalty;
- customer retention;
- sales promotion.
To take advantage of these benefits, you need to decide on the type of digital marketing. Each of them is used to achieve different goals, according to which they are chosen during strategy development.
Types of digital marketing
Digital marketing refers to advertising that is distributed through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. While this term covers a wide range of marketing activities that are not always used, we will focus on the most common types.
Search engine optimization
This is the process of optimizing a website to improve its ranking on search engine results pages and to increase the volume of organic (or free) traffic.
SEO includes the following steps:
- optimization of pages;
- external optimization;
- technical optimization.
The promotion strategy and further work on each site are developed individually, since different approaches are used for landing pages, business cards and online stores.
Content marketing
Content marketing is the creation of informative, useful content in order to increase brand awareness, traffic growth, and attract potential customers. One of the most important parts of content marketing is to show users the main “value” of a product or service. Whether the content is for free or for a fee, the user should get really useful information that will motivate him to become a client of your company.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is about driving traffic and increasing brand awareness by engaging people in online discussions and interactions. The most popular platforms are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. There are others, but they are selected depending on the interests of the target audience.
Since marketing in social networking involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way to attract attention. It is effective both for little-known and small companies, as well as for large ones with a certain reputation. It is the most popular information medium for B2C marketers and is also gaining ground in the B2B arena.
SMM performance can be tracked using various metrics. Built-in social networks are not always enough, therefore, in addition to them, services are used to assess the dynamics of subscribers, feedback, reach, conversion and much more. After analyzing the data, you can see if a particular type of interaction is effective or needs to be changed. Metrics also show the reaction of users to publications: likes, comments, reposts, referrals to the site.
Many brands use digital social marketing networks to start a dialogue with the audience, while not explicitly indicating that the main purpose of communication is to convert potential customers into buyers. This communication method is used for several reasons. This can be targeting an adult audience or carefully promoting products and services that are not suitable for impulse purchases.
Contextual advertising
PPC or Pay Per Click advertising usually refers to “paid results” at the top or side of search results (SERPs). You only pay when your ad is clicked. You can customize your PPC ads to appear when you enter specific keywords by creating ads that target a specific audience.
PPC channels:
- Google Ads;
- paid ads on Facebook;
- paid ads on Instagram;
- LinkedIn advertising messages.
With the help of statistics, you can find out which ads are generating income and which ones are generating losses in order to remove the latter in time and avoid wasting your budget.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate digital marketing is one of the early strategies used to generate passive income. The concept is actually quite simple, in short, promoting the products or services of other companies in exchange for a fee.
Native advertising
Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Such ads naturally fit into the surrounding content, therefore, when viewing them, the so-called banner blindness does not turn on for visitors and the message itself does not cause negative emotions. Unlike the natural one, the native looks like a disinterested message, so they are more loyal to her. It can be educational (useful articles about a product or service), entertaining and branded.
Native advertising is an unobtrusive way of communicating with your audience that builds brand awareness. When used correctly, it increases the trust of the target audience.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation – the use of programs and services to support digital marketing advertising campaigns, improve the effectiveness and relevance of advertising. This is optimization, automation of marketing tasks and work processes. Using services, you can see which digital channels are working and which are not. All data is displayed in metrics, the analysis of which will show how well the applied strategy works.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the use of email to reach an audience. It helps to establish trust with customers, retain them, and stimulate repeat sales and returns.
Why your business needs digital marketing?
Unsuccessful attempts to find relevant information about local companies, their absence on the Internet negatively affects the perception of brands by the audience. For many users, this is a decisive factor when deciding whether to order a product or service or not. If a company does not have a website or contains irrelevant information, its credibility drops.
One of the advantages of digital marketing over traditional methods is the ability to assess the reaction of the audience, assess the reach, campaign effectiveness, collect and analyze customer reviews. You can get any information – from demographics to the exact timing of an ad. Thanks to this, you can timely adjust the launched campaign and achieve high results.
How to create an effective digital marketing strategy?
Successful advertising campaigns take time and effort to develop and implement.
6 factors to consider:
- Exact target
A strategy is essentially a plan that outlines one or more goals and how to achieve them. Campaign development begins with figuring out what exactly is needed or what is lacking in a particular brand. For example, it could be an x% increase in sales of a certain product in 12 months.
- Buyer’s portrait
Understanding your target market is essential for successful advertising campaigns. To create a portrait of a buyer, you can and even should cooperate with the sales department and colleagues working directly with clients in order to collect as much information as possible (experience, positions, needs, problems, possible solutions, etc.).
- Competitor analysis
Before buying, consumers use online sources to find out as much as possible about a company, product or service. When collecting data, they will also see your competitors as a way to solve their problem.
To increase the likelihood of cooperation with your company, you need to analyze other players in the market. Find out all about their offerings, how well their value is shown. Study social networks, blogs, audience, interaction with it – all this will help to see the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, which can then be used in developing a campaign.
- Buyer’s journey
Observing visitor actions from the moment they visit the site to the purchase of the product will help in developing a strategy to increase the number of buyers. Thanks to this, you can get to know the potential client better: his needs, what influences the decision, what problems he faces, etc. Knowing the buyer’s journey allows you to evaluate and then improve the passage of each stage, gradually building trust with him.
- Choosing digital marketing channels
Digital marketing channels are plentiful and growing. Choosing the right one depends on the desired goal and target audience. For example, you can use website, email, LinkedIn and Twitter to promote a B2B company. At the same time, B2C should focus on social networks such as Facebook and Instagram.
- Choosing Online Marketing Tactics
For each tactic, certain tools are used with the help of which they communicate with the target audience, study it and, as a result, achieve the desired result.
