Digital Marketing- A Quick Recap

07 May 2020

Article also published in Medium.

Before the 2000s, the usual exchange of commodities used to happen physically. By that, I mean to search for a product we had to seek out physically. But now the situation has reversed. The products seek their target customers with minimal effort from the customer’s end. All thanks to Digital Marketing. Hence in simple words, the various ways to market your products online, help your products reach the target customers using various tools available online is called Digital Marketing.

With digital marketing, we can reach a wider audience which would surely catalyze a business to take off. We can track our campaigns using analytics tools like Google analytics and ensure that our business is flourishing well digitally.

Today almost 4.57 billion people use the internet. That’s a whopping 59 percent of the global population. It indicates that if we know the various ways to market ourselves online then we can reach out to a huge number of customers.

We often browse the internet and stumble upon various adverts. Now have you wondered why do these adverts pop on our screens? Sometimes you may even find adverts that may be related to a product that you had browsed previously? We may click on adverts we find interesting and probably buy the product the advert was displaying. Now the catch here is, we did not search for the product instead the product itself came to us. Now if we had bought that product then in a nutshell, the seller got his sales via digital marketing and the customer got his product.

Digital Marketing is a huge area to explore. There are various ways to advertise yourself or your products online.

The very first step we must take is considering our local landscape, local directories are a great way for local businesses to connect with potential customers in their area. We must create a listing in local directories and keep it consistent. There are loads of online directories to choose from.

The next thing we should take care of is the rank of your website. When a customer searches for your website via a search engine it’s a must that your website should rank at the top so that he does not miss your website. This type of searching by the customer is called organic search.

Source:https://www.bluecorona.com/

The process by which you optimize your site so that it ranks at the very top of the search results is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. For good SEO optimization:

· The keywords must be more specific.

· Only a small number of keywords have very high search volume. But there’s a large number that has low search volume. The rate that these keywords get converted is high. It’s also called the long tail of SEO.

· Don’t add extra keywords or variations of keywords to your pages. Repeating them unnecessarily is called “keyword stuffing” and is against search engines’ guidelines.

· The title and meta description are important because they both are used by the search engine to generate the actual search result for the specific page.

Similarly, we have SEM or Search Engine Marketing which lets you buy ad space in the search results. You pay to advertise your website to people searching for specific keywords online. So when a person searches a query online, the advertisers bid on the keywords, and the more the relevance, the higher the possibility of your advert showing up at the top of the results.

Search engines can show your ads based on a broad matching of the variations of the keywords.

So the successful recipe for SEM is competitive bid and strong keyword relevance. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or Bing’s Keyword Research Tool can help you find out which keywords are most relevant and will work best for your campaign.

A Quality Score is the rating where your search engines rate your advert based on the relevance of the search and then display the ad.

Another unique thing about SEM is the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad. So if your ad appears, but no one clicks on it, you won’t be charged.

There is a free Google service called Search Console. It has two handy features: Crawl reports and Google Index reports.

· Crawl reports let you monitor whether Google can visit your web pages so that google can include them in the search result

· Google Index reports show what information Google recorded about your site and tells you if your pages are accessible.

Now considering the customer has landed on your website. One must take care of his/her website’s:

· Mobile-friendliness

· Quick Loading

· Easy to navigate

It’s important to identify your Unique Selling Point or USP which would differentiate you from your competitors. Make sure you do a SWOT analysis of your USP. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. The words you use should not just be a simple sales pitch with technical jargon stuffed inside but rather explain how you can meet the needs of your customer or solve a problem they have. Tell a story to help connect with your visitors.

• Testimonials or videos starring satisfied customers, reviews about your products and services would directly connect you with your customers.

• Put the search box in the same place on every page of your site

• Ensure your logo is visible on every page so that when a user clicks on it, it navigates to the homepage.

• The selection of colors is very important. Don’t make your website too flashy as it would divert attention from the actual content your website is aiming to deliver. Keep it simple and clean. Also, it’s always good if you have dark text on a light background which would.

• Presence of backlinks which is a term for a link from another website to your site. The more the links the better it reflects on your audience.

If you own an e-commerce website then it’s likely that the customer would be engaged in four distinct stages: See, Think, Do, Care. Also, make sure that you use good payment services like PayPal and Nochex to make online payment easy.

Now consider you do not get much traffic on your website and this may happen in the initial days. Don’t worry there are ways to boost your traffic, like :

• Display Advertisement: Display ads appear everywhere online and come in many formats like text, images, video, and ads you can click on and interact with. Display advertising networks like *Google Display Network or Yahoo, *handle both the buying and the selling of display ads, linking businesses to websites that want to sell advertising space. Retargeting/Remarketing helps to bounce back your customer to your website. It’s also a wonderful type of advertisement.

Source:https://www.proideators.com/

• Social Media: It’s a wonderful way to advertise your products to a huge customer base. You can use sites like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin to promote your products. It’s important to note that you would not get a huge following in a day or so. It would take time to grow. Also, social media is not a one-way path. You must participate in conversations and do respond to feedback given by the followers. Negative feedback need not be a disaster sign instead it can be a good opportunity to customize your product and retain your customer. You can try paid advertisements on social media sites as well. It’s also important to manage and monitor your account. Tools like *Hootsuite, Buffer, and Everypost *can be useful for that. Tracking the impact of a social media campaign is really important.

Source:https://www.digitalvidya.com/

• Email Marketing: Do ensure that the email you send to your customers contains useful information and relevant offers. Also, it’s always good if you give your customer the liberty to unsubscribe from your emails (in some countries, not having this option can land you in trouble) Avoid including phrases or symbols like “free”, “percent off”, pound (£) symbols, etc. These are all known to trigger spam filters.A/B testing is when you create two versions of an email to see which one performs better. You can use this technique to test different email approaches. Click-Through Rate or CTR and Conversion Rate offer a top view of the success of the individual email campaign. There would be times when your email may bounce back. There are two types: Soft Bounces are ones that are rejected due to a full inbox or size limit restriction on your audience’s email server and Hard Bounces are those where your emails are blocked or the address you are using is incorrect.

Source: https://www.business2community.com/

• Content marketing: It’s a great way to help you attract your audience’s attention. Blogs are typically published as a subsection of an existing website and can include original content or guest-authored content. Infographics are informative and a great way to present knowledge visually. They work well online thanks to their eye-catching format and can help creatively present complex or unusual content. Ebooks are educational, easy-to-read guides focused on a specific topic. If you have video content to market then you must keep a few key things in mind: make it relevant, keep it short and finally have a clear call to action in your video. You can upload your video to popular video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and many others.

Source: https://www.elegantthemes.com/

Now, apart from using these techniques to market yourself, it’s important to keep an eye on competitors to adapt well in the market. You can sign up for alerts systems. Free tools like Google Alerts show you who is talking about certain topics online. Segmentation of your audience is equally important. You can choose whether and how you want to float in the red ocean or a blue ocean, it all depends on your segmentation.

And finally, keep a track of your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, which are quantifiable measurements used to focus attention on the metrics, most important to meet business goals. You can use tools like Google Analytics to keep track of them.

Now if we have a look at the number of phone users across the world, it’s increasing day by day.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/

We have discussed earlier that for our site to load on a mobile browser we must ensure that it is well optimized, loads without any much delay, and most importantly it’s mobile-friendly.

Now having your own app where you can run your business adds another feather to a successful strategy to reach out to potential customers. Since the number of mobile users is increasing you can surely reach out to your potential customers. Now a few techniques which you can use are:

• Make sure you integrate your business app with GPS functionality which would be useful to send sales alert to potential customers

• You may enable push notifications from your app so that your potential customer never misses a good deal.

• Also, display advertisements on the mobile can help you achieve a lot of different goals. If you’re using the Google Ads platform to run your ads, you can use the free Google Ad Gallery to quickly create professional-looking display ads, in all shapes and sizes. Some other mobile advertising networks are — InMobi, Mobusi, Applift.

Now looking at a global perspective, if you want to expand your business to new countries you must keep a couple of things in mind. In a nutshell, it’s language, localization, and country targeting.

You might need to translate and localize your website’s content. Automated translation services are rarely 100% accurate, so it’s probably a good idea to have a native speaker who can help you confirm the content has the right tone. Also, you can use Google’s, Market Finder. This free tool allows you to quickly analyze search traffic on keywords that are important to your business.

Once you’ve found some countries that do a lot of searching for your products, use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or Bing’s Keyword Research Tool to find out how much competition there is for search ads. Also if you are planning on email marketing then make sure that you are well aware of the different email marketing laws. You could also try retargeting. Search ads are great for growing your business in a new market. And at last, reviewing your business processes — especially supply chain management — will play an important part in your success. Also, note that different countries have different preferred payment methods, so you’ll need to investigate each to include them in your target markets. Online payment services like Paypal and Worldpay may be an easy solution since they work worldwide.

You may gather huge amounts of data from your international customers and your local customers. To store this data you may use a spreadsheet that is defined as an interactive software application designed to help organize, analyze, and store data. Spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Apple Numbers are incredibly useful when dealing with large amounts of data, such as financial budgets, project plans, and databases. Tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Webtrends can provide data on website visits, including pages visited, time spent on site, and whether users have completed a target action, like completing a contact form.

Hence with all the basics known you can scale up your business locally or internationally, on websites or apps.

There are plenty of options, now you can decide which is the best fit for your business!

---