Online Marketing 101: Why Your Business Needs Effective Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has been all the rage in the business world these past few years and if you’re not making use of it, then you’re definitely missing out. A successful digital marketing strategy style=”font-weight: 400;”> can help grow your business big-time. It increases brand awareness style=”font-weight: 400;”> which in turn helps you acquire more customers and eventually spurs sales. 

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, is the advertising of brands, products or services through the internet or any electronic devices. It brings a variety of opportunities to the business and exposes it to a lot of people. Having been around since the 1990’s, it is expected that every business owner must know a thing or two about digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing vs Online Marketing

Depending on your business goals, you will need to decide what sort of market strategy you want to pursue. It is best to consider different factors such as your target audience, its cost-effectiveness and how far you’re willing to stretch your marketing budget.

Traditional marketing is a type of marketing that’s deemed to be old-fashioned. It promotes businesses without the use of the internet like print, broadcast, direct mail, phone call or text message. We actually encounter traditional advertisements in our everyday lives, from the billboards outside, TV and radio commercials, newspapers and magazines. Through different traditional marketing methods, it is easy for businesses to reach their local consumers. However, it can be quite expensive because of the materials needed and work involved. It is also a one-sided communication that limits the consumers’ participation. For this reason, feedback and marketing results can be delayed.

In this way, traditional marketers believe that it can be quite challenging to compete with a modern marketing tactic. Due to trends and new technology, this latest market strategy is commonly referred to as online marketing. Today, online marketing is everything. It’s the easiest way to connect with potential customers worldwide and boost brand visibility. Every business can take advantage of different digital channels available such as website, email, social media and search engine optimization style=”font-weight: 400;”>. Different digital strategies style=”font-weight: 400;”> allow businesses to interact with their customers, collect their feedback, improve their service and build trust.

In a nutshell, the main difference between traditional marketing and online marketing is their means of advertising. There are pros and cons to each strategy, that’s why you should know which will work best for your business. As you read on, you’ll learn everything there is about digital marketing and understand why your business definitely needs it.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Effective digital marketing can make a big difference to your business. It gives you a number of opportunities to promote your goods and gain new clients. Among the many benefits of digital marketing, here are a few:

Brand Awareness

Through digital marketing, building brand awareness is a piece of cake. The internet’s global scope allows you to easily reach a wider market by just putting your business out there. Having a large audience gives you the chance to show off your products and services. In doing this, well-designed digital marketing campaigns will greatly help you. In fact to get started, you don’t need to be a marketing expert. Since almost everything can be learned online, the only thing you have to do is be proactive and develop your marketing skills. However, if you have a lot on your plate, you can always hire a digital marketing expert to do these things for you.

To start off here are some digital channels that you can use in developing brand awareness:

Social Media

According to Data Reportal, 9 in 10 internet users are now using social media and it equates to 53% of the total world population. This huge user base is the primary reason why social media is one of the best places to advertise your brand. Since there are a lot of social media platforms that you can choose from, you need to consider a few factors in order to connect to the right audience. 

For instance, if you offer products that are targeting Gen Z teens, you might want to consider TikTok. When you are providing a service like photography, you’d want to use Instagram to showcase your portfolio. Analyze your target market, business, products and decide what fits into your needs. 

A social media marketer style=”font-weight: 400;”> can help you with your social media activities. Social media marketers do everything from identifying your target market, to optimizing your digital profiles, social networking, and driving traffic to your website. They can also help you set up online advertisements like Facebook advertising in case you need one.

Search Engines

People turn to search engines every time they need to know something – this includes brands, products, services, and businesses. To grab the attention of your potential customers, you need to be on top of the search results as much as possible. In order to do this, you need to understand how search engine optimization (SEO) works.

In a few words, search engine optimization focuses on improving your website and digital content to enhance your visibility in relevant searches and ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). SEO specialists can assist you in specific areas that SEO encompasses. They can handle the technical, off-page, and on-page aspects of the website. Aside from an SEO specialist, a content marketer can also help you in optimizing your content. Content is King and search engines take this saying seriously. It’s a good idea to plan a content marketing strategy along with seo tactics to avoid any backlog or hassle throughout the optimization.

Apart from that, you need to learn what is search engine marketing (SEM). It is a paid search marketing that enables you to land on the first search result page by bidding on keywords that users are likely to key in their search query. These ads are usually referred to as pay-per-click advertisements or ppc advertising style=”font-weight: 400;”>, and they appear in a variety of formats.

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing style=”font-weight: 400;”> go hand in hand in improving your visibility and overall ranking in search results pages. SEO and SEM experts are your go-to specialists in this digital channel.

Online Advertisements

Online advertisements can be seen almost everywhere. Paid search are text-based ads and as mentioned earlier, these are done by advertisers bidding on significant keywords or phrases that users enter in their search queries. The keywords should be related to the business and organized by campaign type in order to ensure that the right audience is reached.

Paid social on the other hand, are advertisements done and displayed through social media platforms. Advertisers are mainly attracted to the huge number of social media users because with the right marketing communication, they can be easily turned into loyal customers. Other than these two paid ads, there are different ways to display advertisements online. This can be through visual advertisements like a banner ad, creating landing pages that are optimized or email marketing.

What’s great about online advertisements are the key performance indicators readily available. This allows you to see the effectiveness of your marketing effort that helps you make changes as you go. 

Videos

Video is a marketing tool that is on the rise these days. Video marketing can be used to provide informational content while promoting a specific brand or business, making it similar with content marketing . It is important to know your audience and be authentic with your videos. Being true to your brand and its values helps you develop a strong identity that your customers can easily remember and distinguish you from the rest.

Remember that it may take some time to see exponential growth in your results. In the beginning, finding the best digital channel is a matter of trial and error. Once you run all of your campaigns and find the perfect combination for your business, you will get the hang of it.

Targeted Audience

For businesses to grow, connecting to the right audience is important. Unlike traditional marketing methods which limits you to local consumers, digital marketing enables you to engage with your target market worldwide. You can easily reach people who are interested with your products and services by creating a buyer persona and utilizing it in your strategies. A buyer persona is a fictional person that represents your target market. Whichever digital channel you use, you can set attributes such as gender, age and interests to reach specific people that are interested in your business.

Real-time and Measurable Result

There can be real-time results in online marketing. Depending on your marketing strategy, you can effortlessly figure out the number of visitors on your website and social media page, demographics overview of your audience, consumers behavior and many other smart insights that digital marketing provides. Since results are given real-time, it can be measured and examined right away. Your marketing team can make any necessary changes to improve your digital marketing campaigns. They can optimize seo, tweak your advertisements, refresh your content to generate better results.

Cost-effective

In digital marketing, pretty much everything is done online and in most cases, promoting your brand on the internet is free. Creating social media accounts for your business does not cost a single penny and there are many free options available even for setting up your own website. For display advertisements or marketing campaigns that you need to pay, you can simply adjust your funds according to your marketing budget.

For example, Facebook ads lets you create a promotion that you can set according to your budget. You get to set the amount of risk you are willing to take without being bothered by it. Compared to traditional marketing which costs a lot, this is much more cost-effective.

Increase Conversion Rate

A well thought out digital marketing strategy style=”font-weight: 400;”> leads to an increase in conversion rate. This demonstrates how effective your marketing campaigns are. You can focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) to help maximize your online presence and performance. It allows you to concentrate on people that are interested in your brand and are likely to take action. Remember that higher conversion rates indicate better ROI and they contribute to the growth of your business.

These benefits are far from what traditional marketing can do for you. That is why it is no surprise that businesses around the globe are all into digital marketing. Taking advantage of this marketing strategy will make a huge impact in your business as you build customer relationships, earn higher conversion rates, and better revenue. 

On the flipside, if you can’t do all of the work by yourself, you can always call for a digital marketing expert to help you out. Bear in mind that you will also get a lot out of investing in people and your business in the long run.