As a rule, all businesses must reach out and publicize their services to draw the attention of potential customers. This simple yet foundational requirement is known as marketing. No business can survive without marketing – even in its tiniest detail. Marketing helps businesses reach out and connect to potential customers. This, in turn, drives sales and profit.
Traditionally, marketing involved having a business person standing with their goods or services at the marketplace, probably ringing a bell and calling out loudly to passersby to sample your goods or services. It gradually scaled into posting printed adverts on walls and lampposts across the streets. Ultimately, radio and television advertisement and marketing came into the picture and made things a little easier and better. But today, marketing has taken a much different form with global reach. It’s none other than digital marketing.
Digital Marketing
Like all forms of marketing, digital marketing reaches out to potential customers. However, it reaches out and attracts customers via digital channels, especially the online space. Digital marketing channels are primarily the internet and social media spaces and could take the form of video, picture, or text content. As such, digital marketing offers businesses a wider marketing reach to potential customers across the globe.
With the world becoming a global town that connects everyone via the internet, possessing an online presence is the first step toward digital marketing. Rather than opting for traditional marketing strategies that are limited in their customer reach and conversion rate, digital marketing offers a superior marketing strategy that guarantees a wider reach and greater conversion rates. What’s more, tons of digital marketing strategies and campaigns are available.
Five Major Digital Marketing Strategies
The list is endless when it comes to digital marketing solutions. This is due to the constant growth and the evolution seen in the online space. With the recent projections of Web 3.0, for instance, digital marketing is bound to evolve alongside the internet, which means new digital marketing strategies will be created. Some of the current and most actively used digital marketing strategies are:
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising is a form of digital marketing that offers unique conversation rates to businesses for their adverts (ads). Rather than pay for placing an ad campaign, businesses are only charged for each viable click on their ads. With PPC, it’s not just about businesses paying for their ads to be seen, but more importantly, it’s about clicking the ad. This way, businesses are assured of attracting potential customers that will genuinely be interested and ultimately buy their goods or services. Facebook Ads and Google AdWords are key players in the PPC advertising strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Standing as one of the earliest and commonest forms of digital marketing, SEO is a strategy digital marketers use to get a business or product to appear on the first page of a Google search. The beauty of SEO is that it is not restricted to a single category. A business or product can appear in as many Google searches as possible, so long as sensitive search keywords are used in describing or promoting such business or product. As such, a single product can appear in dozens of Google searches (related or not) thanks to the keywords used for such a product. Professional SEO services take a lot of expertise and patience in getting things done perfectly.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
This type of digital marketing takes advantage of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the likes to promote businesses and products. Here, social media influencers stand as paid professionals with a large social media following who can help in marketing. For a price, a social media influencer will use their influence to promote a business or product to their followers, who in turn might patronize such a business or product.
While businesses can freely promote their products and services on social media platforms, it is often time-consuming and frustrating, especially where they lack a strong social media presence or a follower base. Businesses have to plan out a social media content schedule that will first attract followers before executing marketing content to get started on social media marketing.
Content Marketing
There must be relevant and relatable content for every marketing drive. This is where brand positioning and awareness online come in. This form of digital marketing focuses on publishing text and video content such as blog posts, e-books, and short videos to first draw the attention of the internet and social media users to a particular brand.
After generating relevant content and carving out a niche with active followers, businesses can skillfully create content embedded with the promotion of a particular product or service. Usually, such promotions appear as in-content recommendations or direct content marketing such as a product review that strictly promotes a product.
E-mail Marketing
This is one of the earliest forms of digital marketing; e-mail marketing promotes businesses and products to online mail users directly. Often this results in spamming but has proven to yield profitable conversion just like other digital marketing strategies. E-mail marketing is most efficient for promoting special offers and reaching out to many internet users who actively use their e-mails.
The Future of Marketing – Going Digital!
Without a doubt, the internet space has changed a lot of things. Information and services are easily accessible online. This means that any business that intends to thrive must take advantage of the internet in promoting itself and its products.
While offline or traditional marketing campaigns can still go on, businesses would be positioned better and be offered a global audience when they take advantage of the online spaces via digital marketing. There are more than enough digital marketing strategies to use, and businesses can combine more than one digital marketing strategy to drive traffic effectively.
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