The era of digitalization has officially entered its rights. If you still haven’t built the digital presence strategy for your brand, you need to hurry and jump on the bandwagon. You’re unique, right? But so are your competitors. Your users may be perceived as goldfish. The advertisement and noise pollution sky-rockets every day, forcing businesses to think out of the box in order to capture users’ wandering attention. The importance of digital marketing can’t be underestimated any longer!
What the hell is digital marketing?
If you’re asking this question, we have some bad, even terrible news for you. You’re years behind your competitors! Where have you been, huh? Leave it to us! We provide many services including marketing. Rest assured, we’ll help you catch up!
Digital or online marketing is a promotion of your business/services/goods through digital channels. Any type of promotion that intertwines with technologies can be called digital marketing. SMM, email marketing, or pay-per-click are great but not the only examples of digital marketing.
Types of digital marketing
We cannot deny the benefits of digital marketing for business! The list of it’s strategies is progressively evolving, but we’ve tried to separate the most common ones.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This instrument helps to optimize your business web pages for search engines, for example, Google. The main idea of SEO is to promote your website to higher positions in search engine ranking pages. Think for yourself, when was the last time you’ve googled something and scrolled to the second and the third pages of results?
SEO is not about conjuring something up, but about improving your content, quality of the website, page load speed, and implementing relevant keywords. There are so many ranking factors that some of them will forever remain shrouded in mystery. By no means optimizing your website is a one-minute thing, the process usually demands at least a couple of strategic months before the results will be visible.
SMM
Social media have become an integral part of our lives and as a consequence, a prominent venue for business promotion. No wonder, business owners invest in building a brand’s media presence and recognition. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and YouTube are top-notch platforms for involving your audience. Newbies like TikTok and Clubhouse are storming the world and can hype up your business. You can leverage different social media for advertising your products and services, or, more efficiently, for producing relevant and entertaining content that captures your target audience. Ingenuity makes the best of it!
Content marketing
Content defines the substance of your business. Content marketing is all about generating unique and valuable content that will ameliorate customers’ experience, rather than direct promotion. You may have noticed that many popular brands actively maintain blogs, film entertaining videos, or create infographics and images specifically for their posts. The importance of content marketing is commonly underestimated amongst small businesses and startups. Custom-created content influences the positive perception, adds value to your brand and differentiates you in the digital world of trite cliches.
PPC
Well, they seem to look alike, but content in entirely different essence. In simple words, when you’re searching for the best french fries in New York, the first couple of results typically will be paid restaurant promotions. You can identify PPC by the “Ad” label near the website address. It may seem primitive – you just pay and get promoted, right? But nothing can be as easy as it looks. PPC may be considered as an instant auction. To get the highest rank, the promoted website should comply with algorithm requirements such as keyword relevance, landing page quality, bid amount, etc. Every PPC campaign has to include at least one target action to convert prospects into leads.
Email Marketing
Some experts claim that email marketing is no longer relevant. Yeah, it may be old school, but it still rocks if you know how to do it properly! Commonly, people have overloaded inboxes, and even getting the user’s email address has become tricky. You need to ensure that you have a strong and attractive call to action on your website, and users will consider email signup as something beneficial. Offering a valuable barter to get the user’s email is a great tactic. For example, you may offer free guides or eBooks in exchange for their email address. If you want your users to see your campaign as a valuable service, rather than irritating notifications, you may be interested in some tips.
- Personalize. Allow users to choose the theme of the newsletters, and don’t forget to address them by name!
- Do not mislead your users. Make sure the content of your email clearly meets users’ expectations.
- Don’t be annoying! A company that sends emails every few hours may resemble a buzzy fly.
- Give them an option! When a user is eager to unsubscribe and has to waste his/her time figuring out how to do this, your business is more likely to be associated with negative feelings. Ensure to offer a clear unsubscribe option.
It is not enough to get an address, it is important to maintain interest and send relevant materials, otherwise, the user can unsubscribe from the mailing list and get a negative experience of interaction with your business. The golden rule of email marketing — provide only valuable content in your newsletters to keep in touch with your leads! Almost every internet user has an email address nowadays, so this type of marketing has a rich potential of benefits.
Influencer Marketing
As was previously mentioned, social media have taken a pivotal role in our lives, and the amount of time we spend on social networks is only increasing. Fundamentally, influencer marketing is part of SMM, but with its own game rules. Getting someone famous to endorse your brand will increase your brand recognition and credibility.
Learn from the greatest! Even such monopolist giants as McDonald’s use influencers for hyping up their brand. For example, their latest influencer collaborations include stars like Traviss Scott and BTS. In collaboration, they’ve created stars’ favorite menu boxes and merchandised a new line of souvenirs. That strategic movement has created quite a stir amongst fans and helped to get sales back to pre-pandemic levels.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is getting money for promoting someone’s business. In simple words, if you share a link to some product and another person buys it, you get paid for attracting a new customer. That model is sometimes called revenue sharing. Affiliate marketing typically works out well in collaboration with bloggers, influencers, or people with vast audiences on social networks.
Benefits of digital marketing
You cannot deny the significance of digital presence and online marketing. So, why is digital marketing important? What benefits can it bring to your business?
Cost efficiency/Better ROI
Conducting a marketing campaign may seem to cost an arm and a leg, and small businesses typically have a tight budget. Compounding a digital marketing strategy is much more cost-efficient, compared to traditional marketing. Small businesses always try to make the most of their budgets, and digital marketing provides them many channels and options for effective reach. Moreover, you can always combine digital and traditional marketing if needed. Digital marketing gives you many channels to communicate your brand identity and reach a vast target audience even if your budget is very limited.
Overall, building an effective digital marketing strategy offers a more attractive ROI (return on investment) for small businesses and helps to optimize their budget. Email marketing has one of the highest-ranking ROI of all marketing types. The reason behind that is the high ability to personalize your letters and provide relevant information.
Broad reach
Whilst the traditional marketing methods like newspaper advertisement, TV commercials, or mail letters typically apply only for building your local brand identity, digital marketing helps you to expand your business recognition all over the globe. Online ads can help you to reach users worldwide, and build your business strategy on the global market. Whoever is your target audience, they definitely have smartphones! In the era of digitalization, we cannot deny the impact of gadgets on consumer behavior. If you’re looking for ways to reach beyond local target audiences, using digital marketing will help you with that.
The statistics claim that between 79 to 82 percent of consumers research brand websites and custom reviews before buying a product. Typically, 70% of users use three or more channels to research the product before actually purchasing it, and that’s why building a strong digital identity and reputation is a must. If you don’t engage with digital marketing tactics, you may miss your chance to capture new visitor’s attention.
Data-driven analytics
Have you ever experienced issues with keeping the efficiency track of your efforts? Traditional marketing has no strict metrics, and you can’t evaluate how many people interacted with your content and what emotions they have experienced. That’s frustrating, right? The ability to measure the success of your campaign is vitally important for understanding if your strategy works at all.
On the contrary, digital marketing gives you the key to understanding your users and their preferences. Each time users visit a website, interact with any media, open new pages, or follow links, they leave breadcrumbs that point out their experience and overall impression. Tracking the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and common success of your marketing campaign is much easier and precise this way. That also helps to identify the company’s mistakes and improve their experiences hereafter.
Instant feedback
Social media marketing provides you instant feedback from followers, real-time communication, and the ability to keep up with the user’s vibes. That helps to enhance the quality of your contact with customers and create long-lasting relationships. Internet interaction can be viewed as a litmus test to indicate the mood of your audience and analyze your recently launched campaign.
You can immediately feel the beats of the provided feedback and adjust your marketing methods to them.
Easily Adjustable
Another advantage of digital marketing is flexibility. You can change your online strategy and already put it into work projects just in one second. When you experience negative reactions or the marketing company simply didn’t work out the way you’d expected, there are always ways to drastically improve it. Whilst the traditional marketing methods wouldn’t delight you with instant options for changing your campaign.
Precise targeting
Let’s assume you’d printed an ad in the magazine that’s supposedly read by your potential target audience. Generally, you’re trying to reach out to all readers in the hope to catch your target audience. Doesn’t that look like a shot in the dark? That may be a great way to increase brand recognition, but you can never be sure of reaching your full potential through the traditional marketing ways. Moreover, there’s no precise mechanism to measure the success of your campaign.
Digital marketing tools can provide you with very specific data about your potential clients and helps you to target people almost specifically. With many types of marketing such as SEO, content, or SMM you can create buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional characters that portray your perfect customer. Typically you specify potential consumers’ age, gender, income, location, and education, but that’s not the limit! You can think out even the smallest details such as marital status or hobbies. Digital marketing allows you to get extremely specific about your desired audience, whilst traditional marketing cannot boast about that.
Creating specifically themed blog content, relevant social media posts, and setting up your SEO gives you more chances to get in touch with your desired audience.
Build reputation
Another non-negotiable reason for investing in digital marketing is building your brand’s online reputation. Googling and researching a business before buying from it is a common practice, and even if you have thousands of followers on social networks, a single negative review can ruin your reputation and scare off potential customers. Building meaningful, trustful relationships with consumers on the internet can help to strategically improve your brand identity. Persistent online presence is paramount for creating a solid outlook for your company and converting indecisive visitors into leads.
Compete with large corporations
Small and midsize businesses often struggle to compete with large companies. Sprawling globalization makes it harder to squeeze into a competitive niche and adjust your budgets to the increasing demands.
The Internet gave every business owner access to relevant business news, digital tools, and a broader understanding of consumer’s needs, and that helped them to gain a competitive advantage and keep up with globally established companies.
Unique experiences
Digital marketing can help you to implement your bravest ideas. With the help of modern technologies, you can keep up with trends and introduce new technologies into your business strategy. Creating a unique website can drastically change the common outlook of your business. Outdated websites are rarely recognized by users and are typically associated with poor services or experiences. Adding interactive actions or activities on your website can skyrocket business and create a unique and recognizable style for your company. In a world of ever-increasing competition, creativity is necessary to stand out amongst your competitors.
All in all, the only constant thing is changes. Traditional marketing doesn’t work as efficiently as it used to, and digital marketing can help you to keep your business on track. Investing in your digital strategy and online presence is pivotally important for engaging your existing users and capturing the new ones. The importance of digital marketing in businesses can’t be ignored. Digital marketing helps your company to create a strong online identity and gain more relevant traffic. If you’re ready to expand your horizons and skyrocket your business, contact BramblingTech. Let’s conquer new summits together!
