DIGITAL MARKETING: WHAT IT ENTAILS

Maybe you have heard one of those big business bosses talking about Digital Marketing. Maybe you have no idea what it’s about. Digital marketing is used in branding to enhance our day to day life. Digital marketing is the promotion of services and products that involves using electronic devices. It has become essential as we live in a world where people spend 10+ hours on electronic devices daily. The internet has vastly changed the way we operate our daily lives. Digital marketing is the reason why many young people earn a living from their home.

Digital marketing is an avenue to aid in marketing and sales. It’s a way to interact with your followers and influence them through digital media.

SO WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Let’s imagine you are in a car or bus with your parents. You look up and see a billboard displaying a product or service with a beautiful face on it or a face that is familiar, but you draw their attention, and they reply that they didn’t see it.

Children see more of these advertisements because they have fewer distractions while riding in a vehicle. Adults are saddled with more responsibilities and distractions making it more difficult to see things around them. However, adults use their phones to keep organized, therefore getting marketing materials on their phones or tablets becomes much more important.

The importance of digital marketing cannot be overemphasized.  It has raised businesses from small shops to international stores and helped them thrive. Digital marketing introduces your brand out to people and puts your business in their face.

You can use your website, or your logos or acronyms (what is referred to as branded assets), blog posts, product descriptions, social media pages, and more as a digital marketing tool. The list keeps on growing.  It only depends on the strategies you want to employ.

TALK ABOUT STRATEGIES

Many people do not understand the different ways digital marketing can improve their business profitability, and how much of it they have at their disposal. The list of digital marketing strategies evolve all the time, and it’s the job of the digital marketer to use them to improve the quality of his business. They include:

Pay-Per-Click Marketing:

Remember the times when you’ll see an ad flash in front of you when you browse? Very good.

As the name implies, it is a digital marketing strategy whereby advertisers pay a certain fee to the search engine whenever their ad is clicked. This is a powerful tool enabling marketers to get their ads in front of potential customers for a small fee. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): There are millions of blog posts that come out every day. Thousands of these posts can be on the same topic. 

So it’s challenging to put your ads out there in the face of the heated competition. The main job of the marketer is to put the blog post to be the first post a user sees when he or she types a particular word. Almost nobody wants to go to the second or third page of the search engine results, especially if they find what they want on the first page.

It’s important that while you try to use keywords in your post to attract readers, ensure you write relevant content that your readers will love.

Content Marketing:

What comes to your mind when you hear these words? Blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook and Twitter posts? Well, content marketing is simpler than you think. It’s storytelling, and as humans, we have always enjoyed stories.

It is giving your audience or readers valuable, high-quality content that will be important to them on a regular basis.

One of the most important things to remember in content marketing is to understand the needs of your prospective customers and audience and create content that will solve their problems. Don’t get me wrong here! The ultimate goal of this strategy is to grow your business and share ideas, but you can’t do that without attracting the right audience. No customer means no money, which ultimately leads to no growth.

Three points lead to a successful content marketer- identify the pain and exaggerate it as much as you can. Tell customers how severely it digital marketing can affect them. Then, tell your customers there is a solution out there. Finally, push your solution right in their faces.

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing refers to the strategy of a business rewarding an affiliate for bringing one or more customers to the them. Ever seen one of your friends advertising a particular brand to you both directly or online? They may probably be affiliate marketers for the company. By bringing customers to the company, they may get incentives or a small percentage of the sales made by that person. Therefore, more customers invariably mean more money for them.

The good part is that, not only do you increase sales for your company but you help other people make a living.

Email Marketing:

One of the oldest but still effective. Email Marketing involves people who continuously read their emails. However, it only depends if they subscribe to your newsletter. The quality of the content determines if they keep on reading or discard the email in the trash.The use of imagery and personalization will make your email stand out. Design your emails to open on all devices such as phones and tablets.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM):

It is the strategy of purchasing ads on a search engine therefore enabling the website to gain traffic. SEM includes activities such as paid search ads, cost per click, paid search advertising, pay-per-click/pay-per-call (although this is rarely used), and others. These all include online marketing that use search engines.

Social Media Marketing:

Have you counted the number of hours one spends on social media during your day? If you did you would see numerous business brands and ads flash across your screen. Social media marketing is just the promotion of a product or service using social media platforms. Most social media platforms give businesses the chance to build relationships and form communities online. Also, by retweeting, blogging and reposting, you get to spread the word faster than traditional advertising. Most companies identify social media as an essential component in branding by setting up their business pages as well. By having followers, it helps them keep track of their followership and allow messages to reach a specific target audience.

CONCLUSION:

So there you have it! With over 3.2 billion active users on the internet, digital marketing has come to stay. So for businesses looking for a way to increase sales and profitability, look no further! Make use of the different social media tools, and soon you’ll be on your way to the top.