How you can make Digital Marketing work for you?

Digital marketing is a form of marketing products or services that involves digital devices to outreach users. It is a future of marketing. Now a day’s more and more people are getting influenced with easily available data on their digital devices. Marketers are using the technology to create the sentiments towards the product they wanted to sell. Selling online is very important as people are open to buy with a click.

Why Digital Marketing?

Due to the easily available data and technology to connect, the share of people using digital medium is increasing day by day.  For a business it is mandatory to have a digital presence and important to have the increases visibility or brand awareness. In essence, digital marketing is the future of marketing in the digital world and it is cheaper than traditional marketing with measurable results. For a complete Digital marketing strategy, we need to have a plan for both offline and online tactics.

There are many ways to use digital medium to popularize and drive conversions for startup or business.

Online Digital Marketing:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Content marketing
• Email/SMS marketing
• Online Brand Reputation
• Mobile Marketing
• Affiliate marketing

Offline Digital Marketing

• Electronic screens
• Radio marketing
• Television marketing
• Phone marketing

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process which helps increase your website’s visibility and allows you to reach more people in your target audience. Good SEO (organic and paid) ensures that your overall website traffic increases, thus positively influencing conversion and business.

Benefits

1. Improves the overall ranking of the website
2. Increases number of visitors to the website.
3. Ranking in Search Engines lasts long.
4. Affordable compared to other methods.
5. Better Return on Investment (ROI)
6. Perfect way to promote and expand your business.
7. Explore new markets
8. Achieve better conversion rates
9. Build brand awareness through better rankings
10. Higher brand credibility, people trust Google
11. SEO makes you stand out from millions of websites

 Social Media Management

Stay connected with your consumers with an always-on engaging conversations

From exploring and shopping to discovering and building relationships, little did we know that social media will one day have the power of the Elder Wand. Social Media Marketing has the unique strength which enables brands to connect with people as a friend. It helps in your brand to stay relevant, keep the consumers engaged and enable you to stay on the top of their minds, resulting in an uplift in brand and business metrics.

Social Media Monitoring & Reporting

What are people saying about you in the online world? What are the macro trends? What are the voices and opinions that matter? How to respond on social media as per the need of the hour?

A brand needs to ensure to stay a step ahead in the online world and ready for the ever changing horizons. They need to plan their campaigns accordingly.

A good social media strategy is to create a plan and then involves presenting it on platters to different target groups as per their taste buds. They need to ensure that each interaction is meaningful and relevant, thus impacting the business in a positive way and also contributing towards building the brand.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is a practice of marketing your business using paid advertisements on search engines. SEM greatest strength lies in offering the advertiser the opportunity to place their ads directly to the targeted audience at the right place and at the precise time. The ads come in a variety of formats such as text-based ads, product listing ads (PLAs, also known as Shopping ads) are more visual, product-based advertisements that allow consumers to see important information at-a-glance, such as price and reviews. No other advertising channel can do this, which is why SEM is so effective and an amazingly powerful way to grow your business. So SEM is the most effective way to promote your business to the target audience resulting in increase in brand awareness and sales.

Content Marketing

Compelling content is the need of the hour and if a business gets it right, it can be its most dependable resource. Content marketing works at various levels – to spread awareness about your products/services, build your brand image, increase traffic to your website, generate leads and finally, to drive conversions. You need to create a custom content strategy which can include blogs (that are SEO optimized), videos, landing pages, infographics, press releases, brochures, outdoor media content, emails and online ads, among others based on your targeted audience.

Email/SMS Marketing

Want to keep your loyal and potential customers engaged and updated with your latest offers? Want to establish a personal connect with each of them with tailor-made content? Email/SMS Marketing will help you to achieve just this and more. Segmented emails and SMS services helps brand to reach different audience sets on the basis of their search history and preferences. A brand can be more reachable/ accessible or can create a more customized way to reach the users with the automated Email/SMS campaigns. This ensures the high engagement and increased conversion rates for a business.

Online Brand Reputation

In today’s world, where everything under the sun is now available online, people have begun to take decisions on the basis of the reviews, suggestions, recommendations and descriptions they read on search engines, social media and other such channels. With the audience evolving in such a way, it becomes vital for any business/brand to have a strong and good reputation in the online world. They need to ensure the management of what people are saying about them, what they are writing about them? They need to be in control or informative about the noise about them. A positive noise can do wonders for your brand and at the same time little negative can also create hindrance for your brand growth.

Mobile Marketing

As Wikipedia says, Mobile marketing is multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smart phone, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, E mail, SMS and MMS, social media or mobile applications. Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes goods, services and ideas.

Mobile is leading the way people engage with brands. Everything that can be done on a desktop is now available on a mobile. As with any marketing effort, every brand and organization will develop a custom mobile marketing strategy based on the industry and target audience. Mobile technology is all about customization and personalization based on the customer personas.

• Create Customer Personas for your target audience
• Set goals
• Establish measurable KPI
• Monitor Metrics

With apps you can even reach people on a regular basis without adding additional investments, this can be achieved with

• Push Notifications
• In-App Notifications

A mobile marketing strategy is not a stand-alone strategy, but it is something which will add a personal touch for your marketing campaigns and can enhance your conversion rates. Optimizing your marketing strategy for mobile will give your brand an edge over the competition. Don’t wait—go mobile today!

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts (Wikipedia Definition).

• Strategy - Defining a custom strategy for your business model is the pillar for the success
• Signing up - Partnering with the right affiliate or publisher will define the success of the strategy
• Tracking - Tracking of every conversion is mandatory for affiliate marketing
• Reporting - Compiling reports and data driven insights to be shared regularly

Offline Digital Marketing

This is a form of marketing that is completely offline, but done on electronic devices. You can see them as the electronic bil-boards or a screen playing ads or marketing content on roads, in-store or outside stores. They are reaching people via radio or television. Now a days you can also get an automated call which will be having a marketing or informative content being delivered directly to you from your mobile phones. This is mostly a part of BTL activities and used for increasing visibility or enhancing brand awareness.

Electronic Screens

Now a day’s its common to find big LED screens delivering marketing content both outside and inside the stores or complex. People love watching their favorite commercials on screens available in the store or outside on roads. They had taken the place of billboards.

Radio Marketing

Radio is one of the oldest tool used in marketing. No it is not dead yet, radio is still here and does a lot of influencing. People still loves listening radio while commuting.

• Radio still reaches major part of the population every week
• Listeners listen more than an hours per day, on average
• Businesses still have a good portion of marketing budget for Radio

Radio means entertaining, so while creating your marketing content for the users, you should keep in mind the theme of the show, audience affiliated with the radio station and then find a best place to put up your marketing ads, so that you can have the maximum possible engagement. Unlike other advertising mediums, radio marketing rely on the audio message. So creating a high quality audio commercials has become an art form and is the basis for the success.

Television Marketing

Business uses a well-crafted television ads as an effective way to appeal to their target market. This medium is highly expensive as the ads need to be shown again and again to the viewers. Before rushing to television ads you need to make your ad and book your spots, review the various marketing strategies available to help you produce the most effective, attention-grabbing ad possible.

Set Goals

Identify the goal for the television ad. Drill down to the minute details which will help you to create a well-crafted strategy for the curation of the ad and to choose the program or channel to show your ad to reach the target audience.

Go Local

Research the local channels if your target audience is local, it will be less expensive to reach to your target audience as compared to national channels and it will also be ensuring that you are reaching to the local audience you want to target. To get the best rates, offer a long term contract.

Encourage Action

Your ad will result nothing if you will not put a call to action in your ad. This will ensure to encourage people to do a certain action at the end of your ad. Provide a clear way to reach you or the next steps to do. This will help you to get the desired exposure and results at the same time.

Direct Response

There are plenty of channels which does the direct selling on their platform, it will be a good exposure for the new product as they provide an opportunity to explain the product in detail and how it will be useful. Also they will provide a way to directly place an order for your product and a faster way to reach you.

Phone Marketing

Many businesses use telephone marketing to reach their target customers. They can use the telephone to call sales leads, give quotes and arrange appointments.

Unlike other marketing channels, you can directly talk to the customer and do the communication to gauge their interest, find out what their needs are and answer queries and objections. If you are targeting consumers, you should think carefully before you use telemarketing as sometimes, people take the telemarketing as an interruption.

People are usually ignore sales calls as long as the caller is offering them something relevant. Telephone marketing can help business to achieve a number of goals such as building database, generate leads and appointments, follow up a marketing campaign and keep in touch with customers.

Analytics & Reporting

One of the most important tasks is to measure your efforts. If something isn’t working, change it. Then measure it again. And repeat. A Successful digital marketing strategy is not “set it and forget it.”

The increasing pressure to justify spend, optimize return on investment and evaluate different channels and content is boosting investment in smart measurement and analysis. Strong analytics will ensure you are meeting your goals effectively. Make sure you include at least one tracking & analytics tool in your marketing budget.

Fraud in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing fraud is like a game of whack-a-mole. Once a solution is found for one type of fraud, a new one pops up. As an ongoing and complex challenge, it can only be contained with a committed effort by all the parties involved. Technology has a huge role to play in this and has to constantly evolve to fight this menace. Artificial intelligence needs be leveraged much more to combat this threat and here again all involved should share enough data so that comprehensive technologies can be developed.

Conclusion

Brands that have not done, should embrace the transition to digital, else they will not be able to compete in this digital world. As a Brand you need to adapt to the latest marketing strategies to ensure that you remain engaging with your target audience across multiple channels of marketing. And every brand has his own custom sets of digital marketing channels and platform to execute their marketing campaigns for their target user personas. That can be a all of them or specific ones aligned with their strategies.