Digital marketing is the sum total of your efforts on the Internet to promote your brand. Your brand can be related to products or services. And to make sure you are reaching the right customer on time, you can utilise digital marketing strategies.
That post you are doing on social media to show everyone how awesome your drawing skills are – that’s digital marketing.
Remember that ad you saw on your Facebook about the upcoming sale on Amazon?
That’s also digital marketing.
Even the emails you get in your inbox telling you there’s a not-to-be-missed webinar coming up on fabulous interview skills in the post-COVID world is also another example of DM.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
We live in a world now where most of us are working from home via the Internet. In this post-COVID world, we are connecting with and selling to prospects and customers online. Gone are the days when you can communicate with your target customer in person. So your sales tactics need to change.
If earlier you were having a website, just because you wanted to be “online”, then employing digital marketing strategies can make a real difference to your business profits. You can make that website work for you, even when you are sleeping!
On the other hand, if you have never had a website and are being forced to own one because you can’t meet your customer otherwise, then digital marketing is the way to go!
With digital marketing, you can reach out to customers you would have never considered.
Here’s an example:
One of our previous projects involved working for a brand who had a website but were thinking of going international. Being a Chinese website, they thought Chinese and English would be the only languages to have on their website. But our research and their analytics data showed that it’s better to incorporate Spanish language as well. And we did.
Another reason why digital marketing is important for your business is because it is more cost-effective, as compared to traditional methods of marketing. Like print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, and billboard advertising.
You can also measure the success of your digital marketing efforts more quantitatively. E.g. Google Analytics can give you the stats on your website traffic. For each piece of social media post you publish on Facebook, you can get the Reach, Engagement, and more in Facebook Insights.
Types of Digital Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
These are some of the types of digital marketing.
At AnksImage, we work on the above-mentioned digital marketing strategies. But before we start the actual work, we work on the digital marketing strategy.
So..
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
This is the strategy you need to adopt to achieve the business goals you have set for your brand in the digital world.
Your DM plan is the actual plan you create to list out the tasks you are going to perform on different marketing channels.
At any time, you have access to 4 types of digital media:
- Owned – your website, blog, etc.
- Paid – ads you place on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
- Shared – your social media channels (you are posting here by yourself, but the ultimate authority to display those posts lies with that social media platform)
- Earned – what others are writing about you, without you paying for it!
Your strategy should utilise all these different types of media to achieve your goals.
A sample DM goal may be to increase sales by 10% within 3 months.
As you can see above, this is a S.M.A.R.T. goal. It’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Based.
[You can learn more in my how to create a digital marketing strategy for your brand article]
Once the goal is defined, the strategy can be defined and a roadmap of the efforts involved can be planned for the brand.
We have worked with many brands on a varied range of goals. Some are listed below:
- boost brand awareness
- improve organic marketing
- increase engagement rate
- decrease bounce rate
- redesign brand perception
- find the right customers online and boost sales
and more!
How to Start Digital Marketing?
You can start digital marketing by first installing Google Analytics on your website. This will help you to figure out your goals. There are other analytics solutions that you can incorporate into your website later.
Next, you need to know who your competitors are. This will help us do a deep-dive analysis on your competitors to set up your strategy.
We will have long discussions with you regarding your ideal customer persona. It’s always good to know who you are trying to target for your brand.
And equally important is to know the pain points within your industry. This way we can understand how to set up your brand as an authority in the industry.
All the above will give us the goals we need to work on for our digital marketing strategy to work for you.
Usually, for the brands we work with, the composite digital marketing strategy for a brand is the sum total of the SEO strategy, content strategy, social media strategy, UX strategy, and brand strategy. That’s how we roll.
Once the strategy is finalised, we will set up the roadmap to list out every task that is need to fulfil the goals we have set up in our strategy.
It is important to note that as the analytics data rolls in, this strategy and roadmap will keep getting tweaked to ensure long-term success.
Top Tips for Your Digital Marketing Success
We have worked with brands across the world for more than a decade. So here’s what we have learned on how to ensure digital marketing success for your brand:
Go mobile
Not every website is mobile-friendly.
Use the Google Mobile Friendly Test to make sure your website is mobile. If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will be ignored by Google (and other search engines) because mobile user experience is not good.
Be active on Social Media
Most business owners are passive consumers on social media. Even I was.
But that’s of no use.
It’s better to participate in conversations. E.g. Twitter Chats.
As you participate in more conversations, you get more visible online. And the best part is that these conversations need not be about selling your products or services all the time.
Just be human. Be helpful. And be nice.
The more visibility you get, the more your brand will get. And that’s good to support any digital marketing strategy you plan or follow.
Use emails
Email marketing is NOT dead. It is still the best connection between a brand and a consumer. So leverage that for your brand.
Add a form on your site to increase your email subscribers. Don’t be spammy and never sell your contacts.
But email them regularly to stay connected.
Focus on your Content Quality
Your content marketing and search engine optimisation efforts are closely bound to one another. If your content is good, your SEO will get better. And if your SEO has been set up right, your content will prevail.
Our rule of thumb is to create content that can:
- Inform
- Educate
- Entertain
our audience. When our content does all three, it’s one heck of a piece of content!
With a good promotion plan in place, both our content marketing and SEO efforts help us achieve our goals.
Mind the Data
Your analytics data can be a great guide on what to do to optimise your brand.
Where are your visitors are coming from?
Which pages are doing great?
How much time is a visitor spending on your site?
In what ways are your visitors browsing your site?
You can find the answers to these above-mentioned questions, which are critical to your digital marketing success.
There are other tools like HotJar, Clarity, Bing Webmaster Tools, SEMrush, etc. that can also provide valuable analytics data on your website.
Once you have this data, you can tweak your digital marketing strategy, and work on only those strategies that are doing well.
Don’t go overboard!
There are scores of digital marketing strategies. You do NOT have to employ them all. Doing a simple competition analysis can let you know which strategies to adopt so you can connect with your target audience.
Yes, it’s easy to decide to try them all. But if you are just starting out, it’s best to start with the following strategies to win at business in the digital world:
- Content Marketing
- SEO
- Social Media
- User Experience
- Branding
Now, over to you..
Digital marketing is using different digital technologies to promote your brand. And it is supremely important for your business so that you can edge out your competition in the digital world.
In this post-COVID world, you have to employ digital marketing strategies to promote your products and services to your target audience, and drive profits for your business.
To get started with digital marketing for your business, start with a free quote today!
Read my other Digital Marketing articles.