Do you know that digital marketing is the bedrock of businesses these days? Yes, it is, and there are many valid reasons why your business needs digital marketing.
Most times you hear a lot of people talk about digital marketing and how it’s related to business growth and you are wondering what such relationship is all about right, right?
Relax, let me take you on a sweet and adventurous journey on how you can improve and better your business and brand via digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Before we dive into the importance of digital marketing to businesses, it is good we understand the concept of digital marketing and all that it entails.
This brings us to defining digital marketing.
Digital marketing as the name implies the act of bringing your business to the knowledge of your target customers through the use of digital channels such as social media, search engines, mobile apps, emails, and websites.
It is all about the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers online using the internet and other forms of digital communications.
Digital marketing has to do with endorsing your company’s goods and services digitally. It can also be referred to as online marketing or internet advertising. Marketing your brand online is indeed a huge way to cash out these days as internet usage has doubled over the past years and this increase has massively affected how people purchase products and interacts with businesses.
You can also term digital marketing as any online efforts or assets. Examples of digital marketing are email marketing, blogging, social media marketing, and many more.
In a nutshell, digital marketing helps you to introduce your business to more people and convinces them to patronize you.
Types of Digital Marketing.
There are different types of digital marketing and here we are going to talk about 6 of them extensively.
- Content marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Pay per click
- Online PR-channels.
- Content Marketing; this involves creating and usage of contents such as texts, pictures and multimedia that add value for your audience for the sole aim of creating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation and customers.
Content marketing is incredibly versatile and can help you build your brand as you also educate, entertain, and inspire your audience. Content marketing is what fuels other types of digital marketing such as SEO, Social media, Email, etc.
For your content to be effective, you need to be consistent and create high-quality contents that meet your customers while also representing your brand and as well as achieving your business goals.
Content marketing allows the marketing team to be proactive in answering their users’ questions.
Marketing teams create content, videos, and other assets to answer questions and provide context to consumers throughout the stages of the buyer’s journey.
Strategies of content marketing include; blog posts, infographics (visual contents), eBooks, and white papers or report webinars.
- Affiliate Marketing: in affiliate marketing, content producers are commissioned for each conversion they get for a product of service.
Here, content producers work like a sales team to your business; they create their own relevant and original content and mention your business or recommend your goods or services using an affiliate link. If any of their audience clicks on the link and buys any of those products, you’ll have to pay them for each sale.
The most amazing thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to have a large audience because you will reach a built by content producers.
Affiliate marketing is similar to referral programs, it involves working with outside individuals or companies under the agreement that they promote your products in exchange for a commission from each patronage that can be as a result of their efforts.
This is a way to cut down costs and outsource some of the heavy lifting of promotion. However, you are putting your company’s reputation on some other person’s hand, so there’s a need for extensive monitoring and tracking.
- Email Marketing; this type of digital marketing allows organizations to stay connected with prospects and consumers, sending them customized newsletters or offers based on post shopping history or brand engagements.
Email marketing involves emails, blogs, etc directly to your mailing list inboxes. This is a great way to reach your customers, interact with them after purchase and even send them newsletters.
It is usually considered short-term but can be used as long-term as well. If you are sending out unique discount codes for a brief time, it can be used as short term fix to boost sales.
But if you are sending blogs or newsletters to boost your website traffic, it can be used in long term.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM); another form of digital marketing is social media marketing. Just like the name, it is marketing or adverting your brand or business via the use of the various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Snapchat, Pinterest etc.
With social media platforms ever-growing, businesses online need to invest in social media marketing in other to grow their pages followers and reach a new pool of potential customers.
Through campaigns and target ads, the goal is to grow your followers on social media with the hopes of gaining more business through these platforms.
Most of these social media sites collect personal data about your interests and likes, age, gender, location, and even marital status, all this information is available to Facebook business users to create targeted ads to appear on a selected demographic news feed. These ads can be used to promote products and services or they can be used to entice users to like your page, keeping them updated with your posts.
Social media marketing can be both long term and short-term investment. Whilst maintaining social media is the key, using targeted ads via the service doesn’t have to continue forever, otherwise, it could get lost.
It is also an ongoing strategy, the longer you invest in it, the more positive results it brings as it is not a quick fix.
- Pay Per Click (PPC); this is the most used model of payment for media on the web, and it is likely used in almost all digital marketing strategies. As the name implies, you buy clicks on your ads through a bid in a keyword auction.
In this type of digital marketing, marketers pay a fee anytime people click on their ads. Basically, it is the process of buying visits to your sites as opposed to getting them organically via search engine optimization or other types of digital marketing.
- Online Public Relations (PR) Channels; this is another type of digital marketing. It is an online communication channels or tools. These channels include social media campaigns, blogs and website.
Online PR engages in comments on your personal blogs and website reviews of your company.
Online PR realigns brands, reposition products, and brings companies into the spotlight. Online PR also uses the right stories and the right press releases to reach the target audience.
Through online PR, influencers are recruited from a wide variety of industries whether large or small, global or local. Online PR channels are the right tools for the unique positioning of your business or brand.
Who is a Digital Marketer?
A digital marketer uses online channels to reach customers, build brand awareness and promote products and services. He is usually creative and strategic in planning, he has to master a wide range of skills in order to stay on top of the ever-growing digital media channels he uses to create, deploy, manage and track campaigns.
As a digital marketer, you will need to create and upload copy and images for the organization’s website, write and despite email marketing campaigns, and also provide accurate reports and analysis to clients and the company’s management to demonstrate effective return on investment (ROI).
Skills of a Digital Marketer
- Writing and Editing; as a digital marketer, you need to be very efficient in writing and editing. This is one of the most important skills of a digital marketer. This is because virtually every job in digital marketing most definitely involves writing such as a copy writing for a blog post.
- Design Skills; many activities of marketing is usually driven by visuals. Content on all of the social media platforms perform better when accompanied by great images. As a digital marketer you need to have knowledge of graphic designs and videos editing to help you create and edit your own visuals.
- Social Media Savvy; almost everyone in the world now uses either one social media platform or two or even more and over 95 percent of the world share of businesses use social media marketing. This has made social media knowledge a very important skill to have as a digital marketer.
There is a lot more to social media marketing than just posting on Facebook. You should know how to generate user engagement on all platforms, copy write, build ads, create visuals, and analyze reach and engagement. You also need to understand all of the rapid changes on each platform and when to utilize different platforms for different internal goals.
- Power point design; this is another important skill a digital marketer really need to have, yes, there’s always needs for presentations to either clients, prospects or even students, hence the need for power point slides.
In digital marketing, it is important to know how to create a PowerPoint that is not just text on a slide, you need to thread together a story and clearly state a strategy, so you can socialize your project and results across a number of important players.
- Have a Creative and Analytical Abilities; to be a digital marketer, there’s an utmost need for you to be creative and analytical in thinking because everything about digital marketing has to do with how you think ranging from how you meet people, talk to them, create visuals to represent what you are talking about.
Digital marketing is both creative (photography, writing, and design) and analytical (Google analytics, CRO marketing automation). To be really successful in this career, you need your brain to always be active.
- Influence Marketing; brands can score big time by connecting with online influencers to raise brand’s awareness and distribute or create contents. Understanding how to connect with influencers and move them from unaware to advocate is an important digital marketing skill.
If you know how to track online influencers, you will hit it real big in your job as a digital marketer.
- Email Marketing and Newsletters; another skill is the email marketing, people still read emails, so it is still a very easy and effective way to reach customers.
Any company you are working for will always have contents they want to distribute with email newsletters; you can gain access to an email user base to reach content.
- SEO and SEM Skills; a well written blog post or newsletter is useless if the right people don’t find. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Management (SEM) are strategies responsible for driving traffic to your website.
A deeper understanding of it translates to better execution of your marketing strategies.
Google algorithm is constantly upgrading, and the importance of using relevant and specific keywords has reached a new high.
With the world wide web becoming more crowded each day, it is important to remain updated and fully aware of the latest algorithm updates and factors that affect search ranking.
At the same time, marketers need to strategically consider those algorithms in their content creation and distribution strategies to attract and engage people.
- Relationship Management Skills; this is all about how you relate, monitor maximize customers experience.
By understanding customers’ interactions and experiences, you can connect with them on a personal and emotional level toward improving your business.
A good customer relationship management skill has empathy-see your clients just as you see yourself and put yourself in their shoes, ask yourself if you were the customer, how would you like to be approached and marketed to?
This will help you know the best way to reach your intended customers without flaws.
- Good Communication Skills; have a good or rather an excellent communication skill. Every client is different and how they operate their business is also different.
But knowing how to communicate efficiently with different people makes it easier to work out a great deal with them.
- Listening Skills; be a good listener. Remember that you are dealing with people who are also entitled to their opinion.
As a digital marketer working for a company, you need to establish a good relationship with their customers who happen to be the voice, ears, and eyes of the company from the outside.
Effective content creation is founded on the information you gathered and analyzed to help you determine the information your target audience is looking for and how they want it delivered to them.
If you want to be an excellent digital marketer, know that the design, the information, and the way you market your content are crucial.
Know the best way to convey your marketing message to your customers is by listening to them.
Make use of social media, pay attention to the way your target audience talks about your brand, your products, and your services.
Social listening will also allow you to gain insight into how your target market perceives your competitors.
Duties of a Digital Marketer to your Business.
- Plan and execute all digital marketing, including SEO/SEM, marketing database, emails, social media and display advertising campaigns
- Contribute to company and industry’s blog and manage ecommerce communications.
- Develop and integrate content marketing strategies.
- Make steady research on new online opportunities that may interest the company mobile, social media development of blogs and forums.
- Use web analytic software to monitor the performance of client’s websites and make necessary recommendations for improvement.
- Provide accurate reports and analysis to clients and company’s management to demonstrate effective return of investment (ROI)
- Contribute to social media engagements and brand awareness campaign.
- Manage the contract database and assist with lead generation activities.
- Create and upload copy and images for the organization’s website.
- Design websites banners and assist with web visuals.
- Communicate with clients, affiliate networks and affiliate partners.
- Assist with paid media, including liaising with digital advertising agencies.
- Conduct keyword research and web statistics reporting
- Write and dispatch email marketing campaign.
- Negotiate with media suppliers to achieve best price for clients.
7 Valid Reasons why your Business needs Digital Marketing
- More people are going online; the modern consumers is increasing moving toward a more digital experience when it comes to researching and making purchase.
Search engines like Google remain the most popular channel for consumer research.
Whether consumers are at the beginning stages of the consumer’s or ready to buy, they often use search engines to find the information they need to make informed purchasing decisions and research specific brands.
It is vital that companies’ work is visible during these digital searches so they can engage the customer and work to influence their purchasing decisions by providing valuable information.
As more and more people use their smartphones and other mobile devices as part of the consumer buying journey, digital marketing tactics will become even more important.
The marketer should aim to deliver content to the consumer right in their moment of need.
- Digital marketing helps you build your relationship and company’s reputation; through monitoring digital advertising and social sites, you have a direct connection to your customer’s interaction and reactions to your business.
By monitoring, you can proactively share customer accolades, respond to complaints, solve problems, answer questions, manage crises, and discover trends; all why developing a voice for your brand.
As the interaction between you and your customers increases, your company’s reputation grows along with it. Customers will begin to trust your ideas, they will feel that their voices are been heard and their issues attended to.
Such kind of trust turns into referrals as they share their delight with family and
- Get proper direction and goals; building a proper digital marketing strategy or campaign help your company to get clear direction and proper goals in the aspects of acquiring new customers online, building deeper clients relationships and also improving online visibility. Without setting some certain goals, it is difficult to actually come to terms with the level of result that you really want from your online campaign. Writing a well defined marketing strategy at the start of an online campaign will also help you to define your target audience and achieve the desired results.
- Increase your business reach; traditional marketing methods such as local prints or radio/tv ads limits your reach to targeted customer’s demographic or geographic locations.
With the use of digital marketing, those boundaries get broken and you have the chance to look beyond that target audience and find new customers across oceans through new ways of digital-driven marketing. Also, the new effective ways of digital marketing give your increased customer exposure and build effective brand recognition.
If you have a product or service that you believe is beneficial for the global audience, or larger demographic, you better start with digital marketing to promote such business.
Through tailored blog content, social media, and search engines, the possibilities are unlimited with digital marketing to help your brand, product or services shine in the online space.
- For easy tracking and monitoring of your online campaigns; it is important that the modern marketer has a way of tracking their marketing campaigns.
This helps business owners to see what actually works for them and what didn’t work when it comes to their marketing skills.
With this information, brands can not only more accurately measure their return on investment, but can also identify areas of improvement and work to create more successful campaigns based on the findings. Digital marketing makes the task easier than ever by taking all the guesswork out of tracking and monitoring marketing campaign success.
Digital marketing offers marketers and business owners the advantage of having an abundance of useful campaign data at their fingertips. With easy-to-use digital marketing analytics tools and software, business owners and marketers can test different ad contents to see what resonates best with their target audience.
Overall, the ability to track and monitor your digital marketing campaign success closely allows brands to get more out of their marketing budgets.
By having access to real-time analytics, you can work to make changes to improve campaigns before you waste more money on ineffective tactics.
By reviewing these analytics periodically, you can also work to optimize your marketing budget by allocating more of your budget to the tactics that provide the best results.
- Digital marketing increases competition; for your business to be successful, you really need to pay attention to what tour competitors are doing and as well learn from it.
Think of your competitors not just as someone that you are planning to beat, but as someone from who you have to learn something.
Get to know what your competitors are doing to excel in their business. Ask questions like; how do they communicate their brand and what makes them stand out amongst others? How well do they engage with their audience? Also, ask yourself if you think you can do better. All of these, you can’t get answers to if you do not join in competing with them in the digital world.
If your prospects begin to search for a business similar to yours and are able to find your competitors’ website but not yours, your business is therefore not even in the running. Your prospects can’t choose you if they don’t know about you.
In this scenario, your competitors have just raced ahead of you regardless of whether they have an effective website or a clear message.
- Digital marketing is more affordable; being an interactive method, digital marketing is superior compared to traditional marketing when it comes to getting the most bang for your buck, and the great thing about digital marketing is that you can get started with just internet access and a computer or even a smart phone.
For example, a free organic search still dominates web traffic and delivers the best results even when compared to traffic driven by paid campaigns.
When it comes to paid advertising campaigns on certain platforms like social media, you can start with just a little money and build from there.
How to Start Digital Marketing
- Educate yourself
- Find your niche
- Do competitor research
- Launch your website
- Build a portfolio
- Set a business
- Have a social media presence, and
- Generate leads.
Final words
I believe that by now, you are no longer finding it strange as to the relationship between digital marketing and business, and must have been fully convinced of the reasons why your business needs digital marketing.
So for your business to grow and beat your imaginations, you need to introduce it to the digital world. But if you can’t do it yourself, you can contact us at www.JobReaders.org and let’s help you take your business to the digital world.
