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If you’re a business owner, you know that digital marketing is a must. It is the most important yet complicated aspect of running your business, especially if you aim to grow your business.
But do you know what it is? How much does it cost? And where to find the right resources for your needs? The following guide will answer all these questions and more as we dive into what makes digital marketing so important in today’s world—and how to make sure it’s working for your business.
Let’s get to it.
What is digital marketing?
Simply put, digital marketing is marketing done online! It is the process of promoting a business or product through digital media.
It’s similar to any form of marketing, like the traditional newspaper ads, billboards, direct mail, tv ads, and what have you. The only difference between digital marketing and the normal marketing we all know is that you meet and market to your customers online.
This media includes email, social media, and mobile advertising among other things.
Digital marketing has become very popular in recent years because it allows you to reach a large audience inexpensively.
From a few taps on your mobile phone, you can reach millions of people from every corner of the world. This makes it the most efficient way to market to a larger audience within a short time while spending less.
No wonder marketers love the term “digital marketing” that much.
Digital marketing may look so simple, but it is a bit complicated. It comes in different types and forms.
Types of digital marketing
Digital marketing has about six branches;
- Content marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
Content marketing
Content marketing is a form of marketing that involves creating shareable online content that’s aimed at educating and building customer interests around a product or service.
This online content includes blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, and so on.
Even though every form of marketing requires some content, the main reason for content marketing is to provide customers with the information they need before they decide to do business with you.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, involves all the practices you put in place to make your business visible to search engines.
Customers are using specific search terms or phrases to search for your services on the internet.
It is your responsibility as the digital marketer to make research and find those keywords.
Including those keywords in your headings, meta descriptions, and other strategic places on your website would tell search engines what your website is about and would drive relevant traffic to your business.
With proper SEOstrategies, you’re sure to get a lot of organic traffic to your website. That’s the beauty of SEO.
PPC
This is a slightly different marketing approach. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)is a form of advertisement in which the marketer pays a certain amount whenever someone clicks on their ads.
It is an effective way of driving quick traffic to your businesses because your ads are shown to a lot of people in a very short time; people that may be impossible to reach with offline or traditional marketing.
Most of all, it is cost-effective because you only pay when someone clicks on the ad.
Social media marketing
Using social media channels like Facebook and Twitter to promote products, engage with your customers, drive traffic to your website, or increase sales, is known as social media marketing.
Everyone is on social media these days. That is why it is very effective to reach various kinds of audiences on social media.
Apart from having conversations, social media users prefer to shop on social media. Research has shown that 80% of consumers make purchasing decisions on social media.
That is why social media marketing is an aspect of digital marketing that deserves to be mastered.
Email marketing
What is the most intimate way to speak with your customers, if not in their inbox? That is what email marketing helps you achieve. It is a form of direct marketing approach in which businesses share insights, updates, and promotions with their email list.
Learning how to market with email is one of the most effective ways to speak directly with your customers. It allows you to ask customers for feedback, notify them about upcoming product launches, and promotions, and inform them about new products.
These amazing customers gave you their email addresses. Therefore, they’re willing to hear from you time after time. Smart marketers take advantage of email marketing to increase sales and drive business results
Affiliate marketing
Instead of selling and promoting your own products, affiliate marketing makes you sell other people’s products in exchange for a percentage of the sale.
As your business grows, you might want to sell products that you don’t have, yet your customers would be interested in them.
For instance, if you run a women’s clothing store, you can sell women’s shoes and makeup too. It’s not compulsory to have those products. You can enter into an affiliate partnership with a vendor who sells women’s shoes and makeup.
That way, whenever there’s a sale from your website, you get an affiliate commission.
Why is digital marketing important?
Everyone is online these days, It doesn’t matter their age, gender, demographics, job description, race, and anything similar. That is why going digital with your marketing is a great idea.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a great way to connect with your customers and build relationships for the long term. It’s also a great way to sell more products or services because it’s so much more efficient than traditional marketing.
Digital marketing is more affordable and yet effective than traditional marketing.
It helps you connect with your customers online, create awareness about your brand, grow your audience, and generate a constant flow of sales. You might be wondering… can I do digital marketing for my business?
What kind of businesses can do digital marketing?
These days, when your business is not online, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Basically, every business can be marketing with digital marketing strategies.
Even though everyone can do digital marketing, those whose products and services can be sold online should take digital marketing more seriously.
For instance, if you run a consulting agency, then making sure your online presence is on point would do your business great good.
For someone who runs a hair salon, your marketing would have to focus on making people aware of your services and directing people to your brick-and-mortar store.
Whatever the case, whether you offer goods or services, you definitely need digital marketing!
How to do digital marketing?
Before you even think about dipping your feet into digital marketing, there are a few things you need to do. The most important is to have a plan in place. Digital marketing without a plan or a strategy is like building a house without a building plan; you would hardly succeed.
We’ll break down the how’s of digital marketing in a few steps as succinctly as possible;
- Set and define your marketing goals
- Know who your audience is and create a buyer persona for each
- Make keyword research to find the search terms that are relevant to your business
- Decide which type of digital marketing you want to start with and the platforms you’d use. You can start with just one and build up from there
- Create informative and engaging content consistently across your chosen platforms
- Analyze the data and make adjustments along the line.
When trying digital marketing, there’s a question about who should do it for you. Should you hire an expert, or it’s something you can manage on your own?
Who to turn to for doing your digital marketing?
It’s not a bad idea to do digital marketing yourself, especially when you’re just starting out and don’t have enough funds to hire experts. You can start with creating a social media page for your business and growing your following.
This is a slow way to drive eyeballs to your business. But as you keep engaging your followers with relevant content consistently, your audience would increase and you’ll find ways to market to them.
In the beginning stages, you’ll need to focus on providing a lot of value before selling to your audience. With time, you can graduate to other digital marketing strategies.
However, if you want your business to get off the ground quickly, then we’d always recommend hiring a.
Most digital marketing agencies have a team of experts that’ll handle every part of your digital marketing. They have the resources, tools, techniques, and experience to propel your business forward.
How to choose a digital marketing agency
When you are looking for a digital marketing agency, make sure they have a team of experts on hand to work with you. This will help ensure that your content is optimized and engaging across all channels, including social media and search engines like Google.
The experts you hire should;
- have a wide range of skills from SEO to PPC (pay-per-click advertising) and social media management so they can optimize your content for each platform.
- also understand the market you’re targeting, as well as what makes your business unique to create relevant messaging that resonates with potential customers.
- be able to show examples of previous working relationships with other businesses similar in size or scope to yours so that you can see how well they worked together before committing any time or money to their services
If an agency checks all these boxes, then you can feel free to hire them for your digital marketing endeavors.
Conclusion
Digital marketing has changed the way we do business, and it’s important to keep up with this change. It is advisable to at least learn the basics of digital marketing. That way, you’d become a competent marketer to oversee the marketing strategies of your business, even if you hired an agency to help. If you follow the tips above, then your business will be well on its way to success!
Author’s Bio: Robb Fahrion is a Co-Founder and Partner of . He is passionate about helping businesses grow using the power of the internet. Robb graduated from Chapman University in Orange, CA, and currently resides in Costa Mesa, CA. Robb enjoys writing about digital marketing, helping his clients turn their dreams into reality, and he is a HUGE Mike Trout fan.
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