Do you have an idea of how important digital marketing can be for your business? am here to show you how digital marketing can transform your business;
Read on;
What is digital marketing in reality?
You may be thinking that digital marketing is simply the stuff you do on Facebook…HELL NO!
But just look the meaning.
According to sas.com– a leading digital marketing portal, It is marketing or promotion of products through use of electronic media or digital technologies. For instance, smart phones, tablets and any device connected online. Digital messages are usually delivered to the target audience via their personal gadgets
Rough idea
Now that you have a rough idea on digital marketing, let’s move on.
Let’s start with Facebook:
You have an account with Facebook. Don’t you? I know you use to post photos and perhaps chat with pals. Right?
A question…
When you think about your business, are you really maximizing your Facebook presence?
Well, chatting and posting your photos for fun is great, but I am convinced you could much more..
Let me give you an example:
Assuming you sell some photocopy machines and smartphones, don’t you think that updating your facebook profile picture with an image of the items you are selling would bring clients?
There you go..can you see why I think you are not fully utilizing Facebook’s potential in e-commerce?
Ooh! Before I forget, that’s an example of digital marketing.
But how does digital marketing work?
Not only do we have social media. There are many other online marketing platforms.
You should start be setting a marketing goal. What do you want to achieve with your digital marketing campaign?
Set a goal and start there. Once done, pick a a strategy
You need a strategy that eventually translates your visitor into a loyal customer.
Here are some awesome strategies:
- Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
SEO are the efforts that you put on your site to boost its ranking in search engine result pages(SERPS) and subsequently increase your ROI.
if you have a website, you can consider hiring a specialist to run an SEO campaign and see how it pans out.
- Social media
Over 2 Billion people are on social sites including twitter, youtube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.
Build up on your social media presence, increase followers and daily updated with juicy news and your latest offerings. After all, there is power in numbers
You can consider paying for posts promotion to reach more people.
- Online press release
A press release is an official information item released by your PR department to the media- online and offline.
The target is to generate a buzz around your brand or build your reputation. You can hire a journalist to write the content and publish it if you lack competent staff.
Press releases work wonders for example when launching new products.
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
Google has the Ad words program. You can also use place Ads on Bing and Yahoo Search.
- Ads can be text, banners, video or image based. The biggest advantage is that you can target your promotions on your most probable group of clients- those that you believe have a need for your product.Retargeting and remarketing
Here, you target customers who have shown interest in your business in the past through running new promos or custmized offerings
Retargeting increases your conversation rate
- Email marketing
Build an email list at all costs and have your prospects subscribe to it.
You can be smart and create a lead magnet such as a freebie (E-books or downloadables work well) to entice them to register.
Later, you can run a campaign targeted at your email subscribers.
Remember, a quality email list is a gold mine in matters digital.
- Affiliate marketing
You can contract publishers of popular blogs and have them promote your products on their sites.
In return, you pay them an agreed commission each time there is a sale.
This is how the big boys like Amazon, E-bay and Linkshare do it.
- Web analytics
This help to collect data, measure, understand, analyse, plan, and generate useful marketing reports.
Analytics offer you great feedback so that you can see whether your efforts are paying off or not.
You can hook up with great analytical tools such as Google Analytics, Woopra, mint, and clicky.
Some are subscription based but I can assure you they are worth every dollar!
So, is there one master strategy?
Not really!
As a beginner, its good to experiment with all of them so as to see what works for you.
Funny that what works here may not work there.
Remember tochange your plans if you hit a brickwall
This is how your business wins from digital marketing?
Now let’s look at these benefits
- First, it is cost effective:
Startup businesses are starved of resourcesso they tend to spendless on marketing and advertising.
Using digital marketing solve the problem as most are very cheap.
- Secondly, it’s easy to track results and monitor your marketing campaign:
The analytics helps you keep an eye on what’s happening so that you can cancel it if it’s not having an ROI.
- Third, you get a greater audience:
Unlike traditional marketing techniques which only reach part of your audience, digital marketing lets you market your products worldwide. Imagine having a client as far as from the Greenland? Awesome!
- Fourth, you build better customer relationships:
. When your clients see you online, they feel more confident and it can boost your overall turnover.
Of course, you will also enjoy a greater brand loyalty
- Then, you can handle problems immediately:
If a customer raises an issue, you can react right away as everything is automated and in real time.
What challenges can you expect?
You may lack experience but this should not blind you to the fact that digital marketing is the next great frontier for businesses.
You can teach yourself on you tube or get a professional to help. If you have any marketing software you are using, ask the vendor to help- most have free training programs.
Whichever way, the benefits are more than the cost so go ahead and start.
Final thoughts
Your competition is getting social so you should too. Statistics show that 91% of brands are online so if you don’t act, you will be left scrambling for left-overs So, if you want to see your sales sky rocketing ahead of your competitors, storm into the digital
Don’t be surprised if you find yourself smiling all the way to the bank.
PS:
Here are other top freelancing jobs for newbies.
