Digital Marketing | What We Do & How We Do it

I have almost completed my 4 years career in Digital Marketing. Although I don’t want to claim that I am an expert into this field, but whatever I have learnt in the last 4 years on Digital Marketing I want to share my experiences with all of you.

Differences between traditional marketing & Digital Marketing

In traditional marketing you may already heard about 4P’s or ‘Product’, ‘Price’, ‘Place’, ‘Promotion’. In Digital Marketing these 4P’s also exists but in virtual way.

For example you may have a shop where you sell your handicraft items. To sell your handicraft product you may first need to set a price for each item, and then keep those products into your shop which will be considered as place from where your target customers will buy. Then you may want to create some awareness to let your target customer know about your product. You may go to hang your shop name and items name in front of your shop. You may also use different ways which is called as traditional marketing channels to go for promotion, like brochure distributions, banner ads in front of the major streets near your shop or you may go for even TV commercials to target a larger portion of your audiences.

Now in Digital Marketing you can do all the same ways of marketing but virtually. Since you already have handicraft products to sell at your desired price now you need a virtual place to show your products to your target audiences. And yes this place might be your website, or using others ecommerce sites to listing your products or simply maybe a Facebook Fan page to showcase your products and let your target customers to browse and purchase.

Now to create awareness in virtual world as like traditional marketing you have to use different channels or customers touch points from where they will get to know about your products or ongoing campaign.

The major difference is all about tracking your audiences. In Digital Marketing you can track your audience journey even before they enter your website and search for your product.

Now, you may think that the main difference between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing is its nature of marketing ways, which is physical and virtual attributes. But ‘No’ this is not the major difference. The major difference is all about tracking your audiences. In Digital Marketing you can track your audience journey even before they enter your website and search for your product. Not only this, you can track all about your audience activities, from where they are coming from, how they got your business information and shows interest on your product, what other sites they are visited most, what mobile, web browser they are using, and from which point they lose their interest on your product. Most important feature in Digital Marketing is you may also promote your product promotion only to those who really have interest on your products and they will see your ad wherever they visit until they buy. In traditional marketing you may even don’t know how many of the passers saw the name of your shop.

Major Digital Marketing Touch Points or Channels

Customer touch points or channels are those mediums in Digital Marketing from which you can show or promote your contents to your target audience groups. For example 60% of your target audience use search engine to search for handicraft products. Now as a digital marketer your concern should be come up as much high as possible to the search engine search results to get noticed by your target audience group.

Major digital marketing channels are:

Direct: means your target audience already know about your virtual property (website, facebook, or whatever) from where they can interact with your products and visit directly by typing or bookmarks within browsers.

Referrals: means your virtual property is listed down on some others website or any virtual place from where your target audience will visit your virtual property.

Search: means your audience will get to know or visit any of your virtual property page from search engine search results.

Social: means target audience get to know about your virtual property or product from any of the social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other social networks.

Mail: means your target audience will get to know about your products from mail, in Digital Marketing this kind of mail is known as ‘newsletter’.

These are the major marketing channels or customer touch points where a digital marketer distribute its marketing activities. Beside this, all these channels can be used for paid marketing. For example your target audience can get to know about your handicraft product from organic search results or from search ads. Similarly you can use other marketing channels for paid promotion.

The Process of Digital Marketing

Every system has a process by which it become successful. Similarly the success of your digital marketing largely depends on the process or how do you conduct and utilize the each channels.

Market Analysis:

As like traditional marketing before jump over your business and start marketing campaign you should be aware about the target market share which you want to acquire within a certain period of time. To acquire that target market share you should conduct market analysis to know in details about the competition and competitors.

In traditional marketing it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to know how the competitors using their marketing channels to promote their products, and what was the outcome they got by using traditional marketing channels and strategy. In digital marketing you can get and analyze each and every metrics about your competitors. What marketing channels they are using, which channel brings more audiences, paid marketing channels, content strategies and so on.

In traditional marketing it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to know how the competitors using their marketing channels to promote their products, and what was the outcome they got by using traditional marketing channels and strategy.

In one line, again the true power of digital marketing lays on analytics and through market analysis you can easily predict your probable success or failure rate of your business.

Set Goals and Conversion Point within Virtual Property:

Every business has a goal; in most cases one of the business goal is to sell products. In traditional marketing when a transaction occurred physically it will consider as completion of a goal or conversion. Similarly in digital marketing you need to establish some goals and conversion points which might be consider as completion after a specific action taken by audiences. For example you might set a goal for brochure download of your product or after a place an order the action will be consider as a conversion point.

Digital Marketing Budget:

As like traditional marketing in Digital Marketing setting up budget and distribute digital contents to all the channels for a given period of time is one of the primary step to consider. Based upon your market analysis you can set up digital marketing budget for your handicraft shop for a fiscal year or campaign wise. You need to distribute your budget for each channel in a way which will reflect the market analysis report. For example from the market analysis report you got the analytics that from search engine channel on average your competitors gets 60% target audiences while from social media channel bring only 10%. After getting and analyze that type of data you should distribute your marketing budget rationally to each channel. 

Campaign Strategy:

If you are completely new in digital marketing, the term ‘Campaign’ may seems alien to you. In simple words each time you run promotional strategy to promote your business product it will be consider as a ‘Campaign’. Digital Marketing Campaign runs for a specific period of time. In this time period you need to set up your content strategy to distribute your content all over the channels to get the best outcome or conversion from your target audience.

Content Creation, Distribution & Optimization:

After creating appropriate contents you need to distribute those contents all over the digital channels proportionately. For example you are going to start a campaign on one of your handicraft product to attract the attention in all over the digital marketing channels. To do that, first you need to create appropriate contents for all of your channels. But at first you need to create the center of the hub zone where all the audiences from different channels will visit. In digital marketing world it’s called ‘Landing Page’ creation. A landing page will contain briefly about the ongoing campaign purpose. After that you need to create appropriate contents for each digital marketing channel by referring the landing page link.

The true success of a running campaign lays behind campaign optimization. After distributing campaign to all digital marketing channels a marketer needs to optimize its running campaign specially the paid channels continuously to beat the competition. In search campaign marketers need to optimize with paid keywords bidding, in display network profit able placement ads should be optimize and so on.

Analyze Campaign through Advanced Web Analytics Setup:

Web analytics is the core of Digital Marketing. Based on the data from web analytics report you need to take crucial decision and marketing and campaign strategy for your business. Basically you need to set up primary analytics code within your virtual property which will track continuously about your business audiences. Like from where they are coming from, how long they are staying within website, how many pages they visit and their demographic profiles.

But to track in depth analytics like how many audiences subscribe for newsletter, click on the ‘Add to Cart’ button, or how many audiences download the brochure or tap on the number to call from mobile, you need to setup advanced web analytics within website.

If you want to break down the social media campaigns in depth like you want to know from which post of Facebook brings more leads then you must have to optimize campaign with advanced Web Analytics setup

Beside this, when a campaign launch for the first time you need to track all channels outcome. If you don’t setup advanced tracking system you may end the campaign result by getting generic analytics report like each channels outcome, like 45% traffic comes from social channels. But if you want to break down the social media campaigns in depth like you want to know from which post of Facebook brings more leads then you must have to optimize campaign with advanced Web Analytics setup.

So this is how we do digital marketing in virtual world. If you are interested to have a session with me regarding any aspects of digital marketing feel free to visit my website. In my next post I will discuss about the tools that we use in different stage of Digital Marketing.

Till then If you want to explore more on Digital Marketing I would like suggest the following books:

1. Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion
2. The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization
3. Digital Marketing Analytics: Making Sense of Consumer Data in a Digital World
4. The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand
5. Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Have great time ahead with digital marketing. :)