In the modern age of the internet, in all probability, it is fair to say that traditional marketing techniques took a back seat while digital marketing is driving and ruling the online world. No longer advertisements in newspapers, newsletters or magazines are in need to shoot up your sales, as traditional ads become a thing of the past.
Hence, not just the print magazine, the whole marketing landscape has changed and is no longer the same as it was even one decade back. Gone are the days when one need to blow thousands of dollars to buy a TV spot to expand their commercial.
Now the question arises, how far it will be worthwhile to switch to digital marketing to channel your products or services?
Digital marketing, or what many of us might call internet marketing, online marketing, refers to any marketing efforts through digital channels via Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), social media, website, Email or any mobile app.
In this time and age, we read on the web, shop online from groceries to dresses, do online research of any products or prices before purchase, and all these are the out-turn of digital marketing. And this shows how one will miss out on the potential visits and sales in case someone denies switching to digital mediums.
Because your users are 24 hours online and as soon as they get to know about your business, the first thing they will do is, search you online to find your business’s existence. If you are not available online, your business will be nonexistent for many of them!
From acquiring and retaining more customers to creating more opportunities and growth for your business, digital marketing works in all senses.
In digital marketing, you can get to know what your audiences are looking for. By looking at your business insights, you can find how many clicks you are getting in your Google AdWords or sponsored content, the audiences, how long they stayed on your site, what content they downloaded, etc. Analysing this factor lets you spend dollars in rightful places where your investment can be quantified.
Even if your business is running on a tight budget, digital marketing would be the right option because it won’t come up with a hefty price tag. You don’t have to target a wide variety of viewers who might have minimum interest in services or products. Even when it comes to boosting your social media presence or other digital marketing techniques, the investment you will need is not even close to what you would have needed to get a billboard presence.
In this fast-paced world, you will not need much time to spend on digital marketing as it is easy to adjust. Such as you don’t need to worry if an ad is not working because it can be modified or stopped. Or, if another online tactic is working, you can invest more in it. Also, it brings the brand development fast with a useful website, some quality articles and uses social media channels.
Your digital marketing campaign will reach a worldwide market and find your new markets. It ensures local plus global reach, and this expands your dollars. Online accessibility also opens the door of chances for both local and international businesses. So whether you run a small local business utilising effective strategies, you can discover more profitable avenues.
Digital marketing is crucial for both types of consumer transactions B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer), where the end customers are businesses and consumers, respectively.
Just as their end customers, the two types also utilise digital marketing with some different approaches. Suppose, when the aim of B2B marketing is to reach the potential right audience, B2C’s marketing aim is to ensure and gather much traffic to the website and landing pages. Producing informational, educative and logical content to educate the audience is one target of B2B’s content marketing, in oppose to B2C’s content marketing, where the priority goes towards engaging, interesting or emotional stories.
Again B2B marketing seeks data-driven content where the B2C audiences look for something they can personally connect. That’s how all the social ads and flashy promotions we encounter on social media are influenced by B2C marketing that grabs the attention of consumers and encourages them to purchase.
Once you decide to go for online marketing, you need to hold a competitive and strong online presence. And for that, several internet marketing tools are also available, but the question is which one will be worth enough to focus on. To decide the right channel that will generate considerable results, you need to consider your business types, budget, targeted audience, marketing goal.
So here is the list of some useful core digital marketing platforms that you can familiarise yourself with if you are ready to commit to online marketing.
Email marketing is an open communication platform. One of the most effective marketing ways that assist the owner in nurturing leads also drives customer loyalty at every stage.
Don’t you get encouraged sometimes to buy some items after opening a promotional email since you can’t just ignore the exclusive offers? Or, just to check your transactional emails for your online purchase, you might click the link of the brand’s website repeatedly to know more and end up purchasing another new one. All these are results of email marketing that turn the prospects into paying customers and paying customers into repetitive customers.
Why prioritise email marketing?
Since you know why email marketing is considered the best bet to grow a business, let’s learn some ways to understand how to get improved.
Ways to run a successful email marketing campaign.
Search engine optimisation, or in short, we say SEO, is the process of turning the quality and quantity of your site better for search engines. It is a process to increase the visibility of your website in search engines. For example, when you enter a search query in Google, the search engine results page you get delivered contains some non-paid organic results that bring organic traffic, which happens through an effective SEO.
Why is SEO crucial for businesses?
To craft a successful SEO marketing plan, one needs few tips to increase your visibility in search engines. You might also need to register accounts on several sites because SEO requires a lot of new account creation. For this, you can use a password management tool, as it’s important to protect not only your own data and logins to your SEO tools but the general safety of the website.
SEO tactics you can use to ensure higher rankings.
Content marketing is one online strategic marketing approach, where the goal is to attract and engage audiences by creating and sharing various content via social media, blogs, websites or other channels. The ultimate aim of planning high-quality, relatable online materials and content are to drive profitable customer action and increase brand awareness.
There are many content marketing formats available that can be used to boost your web’s traffic. For example, you can either create visual content or videos as audiences appreciate visuals or choose blog posts and social media posts, which are on the rise. Also, there are more types such as podcasting, live streaming, infographics, case studies etc.
Why is content marketing important?
Some high effective content marketing strategies to follow.
Social media marketing is another appearance of digital marketing where marketers use social media or social networks to share their brand’s content. Whether you want to build more brand awareness or increase sales and drive more website traffic, social media marketing will help you succeed.
What is the value of social media marketing in business?
Some ways to create an effective social media marketing plan.
Pay-per-click or PPC is one common, highly impactful advertising model that works to drive traffic to a website. Most advertisers choose PPC marketing as they get quantitative measurements that let them pay only when a user clicks on their ad instead of wasting dollars after dollars on estimated impressions. For example, when you search for something on Google, you will notice some ads appears on the first page based on your searching keywords; this is how PPC works.
What are some actual advantages of PPC marketing?
Some steps to develop a successful PPC campaign.
Marketing automation is the process where businesses use a set of tools and turn manual marketing processes into automated processes for modern marketing practices. For example, the advanced marketing automation tools can measure your user’s engagement and depend on that; the automation tools can trigger the right action.
Such as with these tools, neither the marketers need to align every process to send every email, campaign, message, while marketing automation tools send custom messages to targeted audiences.
How marketing automation helps a business?
Strategies to use during marketing automation processing.
Native marketing is a paid marketing media where marketers pay to put their content in any place of their choosing. That means the brands pay to get their desired spot; whatever they find will be eye-catching for their targeted customers. You might often notice some contents under headings such as ‘you might know’, ‘sponsored post or suggested post’ or ‘recommended for you; all these types show native contents.
How is native advertising effective?
Native advertising strategy to improve your brand marketing.
Mobile marketing targets people using smartphones to convert them into customers, leading to more sales by sending personalised, time-based, and location-based messages about their services and products. Mobile marketing simply can’t be ignored because mobile is one most used devices that people use to browse the internet, and the number is still on the rise.
Why is mobile marketing becoming important for brands?
Some mobile marketing tactics you can apply to thrive your business.
With all these discussions of types and usefulness of digital marketing, it is way clear that the approaches of digital marketing and traditional marketing are not close. Now, what if we say the effectiveness of digital marketing over traditional marketing is vast. Yet in doubt? Read on towards the listed points.
Each day, the world is turning more digital, so as do the people. Constantly all the classic methods that have been used for the past many decades are becoming less relevant. Let’s point out some issues which are letting traditional marketing lose the spotlight.
For the full-page newspaper ad or a TV or radio ad, the cost is a lot where you cannot even guarantee that your viewers are giving attention to it or not. However, digital marketing is cost-effective; also, you can track every click, every visit and depending on that, you can decide further plan on how to improvise.
In digital marketing ads, the viewers always get the option of skip through in case they are not interested. But in the traditional system, no matter how bored you are of those repetitive ads, you cannot just skip or block those, which disturbs the audiences, making them feel less interested in TV or radio ads.
In traditional ways of the marketing campaign, you need weeks and even months to evaluate how your campaign is performing. Just think, can you actually know who is reading your billboards unless or until someone gives a follow-up and even to understand what is the reason, you need to do a survey! But digital marketing let you measure your audience’s involvement in every step since the early stage.
The relationship between traditional marketers and audiences is too far to be engaging, and one need to wait long to measure the response. On the contrary, a digital marketer can interact with its audience personally via a live chat, which turns to be more effective since the customers feel heard and noticed.
The advertisement of your products aired in the newspaper is limited to might be taking a column or space in a corner also limited for a specific region. With digital marketing, you can have a full website full of your services and details and make it available for your audiences worldwide.
As you can see, these are some road bumps of the way towards traditional marketing that is turning the old marketing strategies less prevalent. Which also release you from the upsetting situation to choose between digital marketing or traditional marketing.
But wait, before you hit the big time by creating websites, ads or sharing content, take some time to build a sound marketing strategy because with a directionless process, neither you will be agile enough to catch up nor you can be ahead of your competitors.
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