Digital Marketing is the way of advertising of products or services digitally to the potential customers. It offers more scope and scalable options to businesses to reach their prospective customers. It’s delivered through digital channels. It’s a mode of marketing products or services that involves electronic devices connected via internet. For any business lies in Creating awareness, developing interest in prospects, grooming enduring relationships and giving the right offer to enable conversions forms the crux.
The digital channels through which promotions and ads are done are Social Media, Mobile Applications, email, web apps, mobile Apps, search engines, websites or any digital channel. Basic Building blocks of Digital Marketing are:
- Content Marketing
- Digital Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing
- Website Analytics
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Customer Satisfaction
- Content Marketing
In digital marketing, Content is the King that drives or attracts traffic. Content marketing is the strategic marketing to create, distribute valued, appropriate and reliable content to attract and hold on to a clearly defined audience which in turn drive one to become a customer. The different types of contents are audio, video, social media posts, blog posts etc.,
For Example, if a company is about come up with a recruitment platform, instead of directly pitching in for their own products, they need a content marketing strategy to create what kind of the content and what intervals with the focus on value creation done by the recruitment platform.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is using one or a combination of social media platforms and website to market a product or service. Differ social media platforms – Fb, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram etc., Just having Social Media handles isn’t enough. Having the presence where your audience [ potential customers] hangs out makes the vital difference in engaging the prospects, build relationships and strike a chord with your prospects who will become your fans and later convert into your customers.
For Instance, A dress retailer can have a social presence in Fb & Insta will be fruitful and need not have a presence in LinkedIn.
A Training Institute need to have presence over Fb,Insta & LinkedIn as students may be in all three platforms.
Digital Advertising
The content which reached more audience can be boosted to reach even more audience through paid ads. This is paid Ad campaigns that’s available across all social media platforms – Fb, LinkedIn, Google, YouTube video ads, Instagram etc., The ads ranging from Banner Ads on websites to video ads on YouTube. You can see it the moment you search about a topic and you will start seeing the ads related at the top and sides of the search results. This needs to have strategic planning for the digital advertising and needs to conceive, develop a paid ad plan in such a way that drives traffic to website or converts.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the way of sending out emails to a prospective customer or a group of prospects. Different types of emails are sent out at different levels of customer engagement like welcome, Tips, customer testimonials, re-engaging an old customer etc., The different email marketing services that are available are Constant Contact, SendInBlue, GetResponse, MailChimp, Convertkit, Drip etc.,
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the increasing the visibility of the websites in search engine results page primarily through paid ads. Visibility of a website appearing on the Search Engine Results Page is done through search engine Optimization (SEO). Another way is bidding on keywords that end users use when searching on search engines – Google & Bing whenever they are looking for a specific product or service and are termed as Pay Per Click Ads. They can be off many types like small, text-based ads, whereas shopping ads appear as product-based ads so that customers can see them at a glance with price & reviews appearing side by side.
Search Engine Marketing gives advertisers an opportunity to put their ads visible to the prospects directly who are in need or looking for some product or service. Its very effective as any prospect will start by start by searching in search engine.
Website Analytics
Web analytics provides an insight to the performance of the digital marketing activities. It gives statistics about who visited, what kind of people visited and what they did and they duration of stay in the website. It is the process of analyzing behavior of a website visitor. This helps to estimate how a digital marketing campaign brought in new traffic and a way to scale whether the marketing campaign is effective and also useful in market research.
Website Conversion Rate Optimization:
Website Conversion Rate is the process of increasing the percentage of the website visitors who take a desired action like purchasing a product or subscribe a service.
A desired action can be any one of the following
- Subscribing for newsletters
- Account creation with the website
- Purchasing a product
- Getting a quote
- Subscribing for a service etc.,
Conversion Rate is the rate at which conversions happens at your website. This is different from the Conversion rate calculated for SEO.
Conversion rate optimization is needed when a specific website gets steady increase in flow of visitors and consider converting each visitor into a lead. Some of the ways of optimizing conversion rate are:
- Keep the content in landing pages Simple, Attractive & User friendly.
- Get the basic information through the sign-up forms
- Attractive call to action button.
- Have a chat-bot or someone to answer the queries of the end customers.
- Train your sales team about the process to be done the moment a lead enters your system
Customer Satisfaction:
Customer Satisfaction proves to be vital. Digital Marketing Activities doesn’t end after getting a new customer. Retaining the new customer builds the relationship with the product. Value for money and the quality of the product or service enhances the customer satisfaction. Along the customer’s journey of awareness to promotion build the confidence and loyalty which goes a long way in bring retaining the customers. Returning customers will bring more new customers.
Any business needs to analyze the segment audience to be reached, their behavior and the marketing goals and then devise a strategic digital marketing plan.
Let’s how to devise the digital marketing Strategy in our next article!