What is digital marketing?

Today we are exploring Digital Marketing, Types, How you can take advantage of that and how to do Digital marketing. Let’s deep dive into this- In the earlier time, all businesses used magazine ads, newspaper ads, Billboards, direct email and Television ads to promote their brand or products and it was bound in a specific area or location, it was called Traditional marketing. But Now, in the era of the internet, almost everyone uses the internet to explore things using searching on Google, social media platforms etc. and now you can show your brand or product to anyone who is using the internet. Now all the things are converted digitally, where you can access all things from your mobile phone or PC from your house. You don’t need to go to the market to purchase any product. It’s all because of Digital marketing.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing typically refers to online marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts. All businesses are using digital platforms to show their products or promoting the brands using websites, social media platforms, and using other digital platforms. Digital marketing takes many forms, including : Search Engine

• Websites
• Social media
• Email
• Mobile Apps
• Text Messaging
• Web-based advertisement

Digital Marketing uses the same principles as traditional offline marketing but in a digital space. It relies on consumer data to find a business's target audience and deliver the most relevant messaging possible. This is effective, but digital marketing is so popular that the biggest challenge today is learning how to stand out from the crowd.

There are two types of scenarios in marketing, one B2B (Business-to-Business) and other is B2C(Business-to-Consumer). B2B companies rely on the Business to Business model, but B2C rely on the Business to Consumer model. Digital Marketing works for both models. Whether you are targeting business or Consumers, Digital marketing will help you to target your audience.

The Benefits of Digital Marketing:

Digital marketing helps you to know your audience, understand their pain points, and provide the data that will give your marketing team credibility. Digital marketing has several benefits:

1. Reach to large Audience: Digital marketing allows you to reach a wider customer base with less effort. If you post anything on social media or you are running an ad online, it can reach anyone, regardless of their location. You can connect with anyone from the other side of the world using social media and provide your services to them online. You can expand your reach to the whole world and grow your business in ways that would have seemed impossible before digital marketing.

2. Cost efficiency: Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. With digital marketing, you can create the content in the form of blog, social media post or videos that allows visitors to explore your product without any cost. Digital marketing gives you much more flexibility to reach your target audience at a very low cost as compared to traditional marketing. Where you have a small business or you are working in a big organization, everyone trying to cut the costs, digital marketing will help you a lot.

3. Measurable Results: Digital marketing has a big plus point than traditional marketing, where you can measure your result using data analytics. You can track the number of conversions and leads, visitors on your website, and much more. It gives you valuable data to help grow your business. For example, digital marketing allows you to - - measure data on social media engagement with analytics by Google or Facebook pixels. - Track the traffic on your website. - Measure accurate data on paid campaigns like impressions, clicks and conversion. Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to chat one-on-one with customers. You can engage with them directly on a blog or social media post to learn how they found you, what they think, and what they need. This gives you both quantitative and qualitative information on your marketing efforts, which is more worth for your businesses.??

4. Easy personalization: Every business needs customer data to learn about their ideal customers. So, every business or individual needs a proper ideal customer profile and it can be done by Digital marketing. Customer data is the foundation of digital marketing. You can personalize your marketing campaign based on this data which you got from ideal customer profiling and it can be easily personalized by digital marketing. For example you can personalize the data based on customer demographic, geographic, behavior, social media engagement etc., that helps you a lot to target your real customer.

5. Engagement with you ideal customers: Digital marketing is more cost-effective to engage with your customers. You can engage with them at several points through various social media platforms in their initial buying journey. Once they come up on your website or they decide to buy your product then you can create some offers for them who come from your social media or paid campaigns. After making a purchase, you can ask them for a referral to give some discount or upsell with other products and subscriptions. So, the engagement with your ideal customer is easier now using digital marketing.

Types of Digital Marketing :

Digital marketing is much more beneficial now because of its flexibility. It comes in various types which gives you more opportunities to connect with your target audiences. Here are some types of digital marketing :

1. Content Marketing: It aims to educate and share value to readers instead of promoting a product and services. Business uses content marketing to attract the leads and convert them into loyal customers. Content marketing comes in various forms like - - Blog posts - Newsletters - Guides - Ebooks - Audio content - Video content - Infographics Currently video marketing is on top because everyone wants to gather the information in a very short amount of the time. So, content marketing plays a very crucial role in digital marketing.

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the process of optimizing your content whether it is blog post, video content or your website, so your content or website pages appear on top of a search engine result page for a specific set of keywords. SEO is important because you get the organic traffic on your website when your content comes on the first top 5-6 search results on SERP. You need to create quality content, fostering user engagement content, mobile friendly content etc. to engage your audience and get the traffic on web pages. There are two types of SEO mainly – On-page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

3. Social Media Marketing: Social media is everywhere, so your business must be active on different platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are the most popular social platforms right now. But depending on your industry and target audience, LinkedIn can also be a lucrative platform. However, the key to effective social media marketing goes far beyond simply having a few social media accounts. You can follow some best practices to increase your reach on social media like : - Know your audience, their favorite? social media platforms. - Create engaging and high quality content. - Respond to answer comments on your posts. - Create a post calendar where you can set an automatic post on a daily or weekly basis. - Post content frequently like, daily or weekly basis. The goal of social media marketing is to engage your audience or followers with your content.

4. Paid Campaigns: You can run a paid campaign for your product or services around social media or on Google which allows you to pay only when someone clicks on your ads. You can run Google Ads or Meta Ads, for your product to reach your target audiences. Google ads include search ads, display ads, video ads where you can advertise your product in the form of texts, banners or video.

5. Affiliate Marketing: With affiliate marketing, you’re promoting your business through someone with an established platform and connections to your target audience. The affiliate’s audience already trusts them, and if the affiliate recommends your brand, their audience is more likely to trust your business by association. Affiliate marketing comes in different forms. For example, some affiliates will do reviews or unboxing videos for products. Other affiliates might use your products and will link to your company in their content.

6. Email Campaigns: If you want to reach directly to your target audience then Email marketing is the best option. You can write a strategic email and directly send this to your target audience. Your content needs to be incredibly engaging, relevant, informative, and entertaining. So, your audience can engage with your products or services. Email might be the oldest form of digital marketing, but it’s kept up with the times. There are many more different types of digital marketing like native advertising, mobile marketing, and influencer marketing where you can promote your product or services.

How to do a Digital Marketing : We can do digital marketing in so many different-different forms as we saw earlier in the post. But before that we have to do some research about our audiences. You can follow below steps strategically to achieve your marketing goal -

1. Define your goals: This is a very first step in your digital marketing strategy, you have to define your goal which needs to be measurable, achievable and relevant for your digital marketing campaigns. Think of your goals as the guiding principles that shape your approach to digital marketing. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, maybe you invest in social media marketing to get the word out.

2. Identify your target Audience: After defining your goal, you need to identify your target audience. Target audience are the people where you have to sell your product or services. Digital marketing can help you to reach more people, minimize cost and better engagement with your target audience.

3. Select your Digital Marketing Channel: After identifying your audience, you have to select the best channel for marketing where your audience spends most of the time. People are spending time on different-different media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube etc. You can post daily about your product or services for your customers.

4. Set a budget for each digital channel: If you want to run a paid campaign, then you have to set a budget for each channel. You can run Meta ads for your local audience, Google ads for broader markets. So, you have to define your budget before doing a paid campaign.

5. Refining your market efforts: As we saw, there are lots of AI tools coming into the market, so we have to update constantly according to market trends and need to use those tools for our marketing. Consumers and trends are never static, so you’ll need to use data to constantly refine your strategy and remain current. Review your social media metrics, email marketing data, and site analytics to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space.

Conclusion : Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. You have to follow your strategy to grow the audience, sometimes you have to change your strategy based on the data which you got from the previous one. So digital marketing plays a crucial role for every business to grow their audiences