"Digital marketing is defined as the process where a business uses different digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time online. From the website itself to a business's online branding assets -- digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond. There are several channels that a business can harness digitally to promote its offerings:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website to "rank" higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include:
Websites.
Blogs.
Infographics.
2. Content Marketing
This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include:
Blog posts.
Ebooks and whitepapers.
Infographics.
Online brochures and lookbooks.
3. Social Media Marketing
This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include:
Facebook.
Twitter.
LinkedIn.
Instagram.
Snapchat.
Pinterest.
Google+.
4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:
Paid ads on Facebook.Promoted Tweets on Twitter.Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn.
5. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:
Email newsletters.Social media post scheduling.Contact list updating.Lead-nurturing workflows.Campaign tracking and reporting.
6. Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business's website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:
Blog subscription newsletters.
Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
Customer welcome emails.
Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.
7. Online PR
Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It's much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
Reporter outreach via social media.Engaging online reviews of your company.Engaging comments on your personal website or blog
This is how digital marketing helps small businesses to market there businesses :
1. Increase Your Visibility
If your main goal is to get more customers, then digital marketing will help improve your company’s visibility online. You can write blog posts about your products and services, never forgetting that your posts should be of high quality to be useful to your audience. You can also create your own website where you can better show off your products and settle transactions.
2. Cost-effective
Reducing expenses is the top priority of any startup. Online marketing offers a multitude of cost effective platforms that can help save precious marketing expenses and if utilized wisely can offer the best result in a short amount of time. Social media like Facebook etc help in this regard.
3. Helps you to earn peoples’ trust
Digital marketing strategies leverage on social media signals and testimonies from consumers who have purchased or availed a particular brand of business, in order to earn people’s trust. More than 90% of respondents claimed they would trust information about particular brands if the data comes from a particular digital marketing, social media marketing, SEO & PPC management company, which they have worked with earlier.
4. Provide better return on investment
Digital marketing company provides social media optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing & optimization and SEO services for generating steady flow of targeted online traffic that converts into leads and sales. The faster you can recover your ROI, the more your business generates this kind of online traffic that converts into sales and leads.
5. Builds brand reputation
Digital market strategies effectively build brand reputation and help you to develop better relationship with your targeted audiences.
Best way to create your brand awareness is by promoting your brands through:
Social media sitesVarious blog postsEmails and newsletterSearch engine marketing
Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses (SB)
Digital Marketing is the need of the hour not just for multi-national companies or big enterprises, but also for small businesses. These small businesses still follow the traditional ways to run their operations and marketing because they believe that Digital Marketing is for massive companies with huge revenues and not for them.
The idea of entering into an unknown territory scares the SB community. They fear for their brand having a bad name, they will not get the ROI if they spend money and they feel that exposing themselves to the internet is not necessary.
They are comfortable in their zone because the business is running and is making adequate money to continue its operations. However, young players in the market are aware of internet’s power and influence. They are either looking to outsource these services or are managing as much as they can on their own. This gives them the competitive advantage over your business which has been present for decades.
What should you do to get your business online without spending anything?
Follow these steps:
1. Make Your Business Available on Google:
Ideally a business should be available on all search engine platforms, but Google has such dominance in the search engine market that just being present on Google can work well for starters.
If you have a store, mark your business on Google Maps so that potential customers can easily locate you with directions. Simply sign-up on Google and add your business using the Google Business page. Google Business page also helps in crawling your business, the type of service or products your business provides, your working hours along with the exact location with directions for the user.
2. Choose your Social Media Platforms:
There are a lot of Social Media platforms all over the internet and everyone has their own popularity zones.
As an SB, you must choose and pick the right platforms for your business instead of being present everywhere. If it works for you to be present everywhere, then ideally you should have a presence everywhere, but the key factor is to be active everywhere. The secret to social media success is to run your operations actively. Many businesses have social profiles everywhere and are active on some or none of them. This can be harmful, as someone might post something bad about your business or product or service and it may stay on forever.
So, choose your platforms, be active on them and engage with your target audience to grow your business on online portals.
3. Create a Website:
Creating a website might seem like rocket science to many people, but it is not that tough. Platforms like WordPress, Weebly among many others have made website creation a much simpler task.
A website gives your business an opportunity to display its products, services, ideologies, mission, vision etc. A website is your space to communicate with the rest of the world. However, you need to have a good displayed website as it is the face of your company online. You can learn from plenty of tutorials from YouTube, and individual site FAQs.
4. Be Active & Keep a Check at things:
Being active doesn’t apply to Social Media only, you need to do that all over the internet to ensure that your online reputation is healthy.
Potential customers check your business status plenty of times before even entering your shop. With the help of your website, social media presence, they might know your business inside out before even meeting you. It is vital for a business to have a good reputation in the form of good reviews and testimonials from past and existing customers.
A good review with good products and services can sell your products instantly, and a bad one will push your potential customers away and lead them right to your competitors.
5. Share your Expertise over the Internet:
Since you have been working in your business for a long time and you have an expertise over the domain, sharing your knowledge in the form of blog postings, FAQs, writing on forums, participating in online debates is a great branding activity for you and your business.
People are vocal on the internet. They don’t think twice before sharing their opinion. Therefore, if they like your views, blogs, videos or any other content, they make sure to give their thumbs up and they appreciate it.
With everything going Digital, there's a lot that Digital Marketing can do to help Small Businesses grow. So, Small Businesses have to catch up in the race or else they will be left behind.
References: quora.com, blog.hubspot.com
