Everything You Need To Know About Digital Marketing

The way people shop for their needs has changed nowadays, and people are using the internet more than ever now. The rate of adults constantly using the internet has increased by 5% in the last three years as per recent research. But even with the internet being part of our everyday life, digital marketing is noticeable and has been around for so much longer. 

It’s not just a newly invented phrase that draws freelancers’ attention, in fact, digital marketing was used in so many different marketing strategies back before the internet was even invented; around a hundred years ago. If you are not familiarized with the basics of digital marketing, let us give you a detailed guide of all the things you need to know about digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

First of all, marketing has always been about engaging with your audience through the channels that gain their most presence. If you apply that to this decade, that would be the internet. With more than 81% of American citizens owning at least one smartphone and spending more than 8 eight hours a day using the internet, how else would you reach their minds? That’s why digital marketing transformed completely in the last ten years more than it has ever changed in the last 100 years. Companies and brands know that the best way to reach their audience is to get inside their digital region and track their sales pattern to tailor their shoppable content. This kind of marketing is noticeable in websites, social media marketing accounts, video marketing, and other similar online content channels. 

Basically, digital marketing is any form of product promotion through electronic devices. But digital marketing does not only target online platforms that require internet access, it comes in all other technological forms. Companies used to market for their brands through what we call outbound sales, by calling customers on their phones to make a sale or by broadcasting their ads on the radio. Marketing campaigns can include anything creative- starting with hanging posters in the streets to advertising featured videos through your 10k-subscriber webpage. 

Most companies hire content marketers to take care of this job for them. Hiring someone who knows how to build marketing strategies based on contemporary interests is a big step needed for boosting your company sales. However, some companies might decide to hire an in-house team of marketers and make use of solutions like this one that offers customizable templates to create their own ads and manage their campaigns by themselves. Because there are so many ways to use digital marketing, thanks to the internet, everyone has access to their audience. If you know where to find your customers and how to reach them, you pretty much have everything you need to promote your content and increase profit. Now take a look at some different channels you can use to gain digital access to your customers.

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Online Digital Marketing

Search Engine Optimization or SEO

This is the process of adjusting a website’s code or designing it to rank higher in Google’s search engine. This way a website gets more free or organic traffic. Think of it as a way of finding a common language to provide clues about the page for the web crawlers, one that will attract traffic. This is one of many ways to reach potential customers through their web searches. If you learn enough about it, you can use it too and market for your brand effectively. 

Social Media Marketing 

This kind of marketing is usually utilized when a company recommends its products through social media platforms to drive more traffic and gain leads for their brand. These platforms are what we now know as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other channels we open daily for entertainment. This technique needs to be backed up by paid marketing though, to keep your presence from gradually losing the audience. A social media management team would be able to ensure this wouldn’t happen. To avoid this, companies use a combination of organic content and paid social media ads to create more marketing campaigns and promote their products on a frequent basis.

Pay Per Click or PPC

This method is when you pay a publisher or a content creator every time someone clicks on your ad. A good example of this is how google allows some brands to display their ads in top slots in their search engine result pages at a price for each click. Business consultants at https://falcondigitalmarketing.com/ urge researching into customer’s backgrounds and information to come up with the most suitable ads for your business before paying for the service. Many platforms like Facebook use this technique to tailor the audience viewing your ads, you can also add a PPC service to your Twitter feed and brand your service through posts and news. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to the plan in which you create content with the aim of branding your business and promoting it. You can achieve this through many platforms like writing blog posts, releasing an ebook or whitepapers, or creating infographics for those who love to see their information instead of reading it. This way you are following the basic digital marketing standards and reaching customers where they show the most presence and also providing them with the content they show more interest in. Also, if you are starting a small business, posting a simple advertisement mockup on social media might already be enough. Although, you need to extract more effort to spread your business all over social media. Let your family, friends, and neighbors help you support your business page.

Email Marketing 

This type of marketing is exactly like it sounds; sending emails that contain marketing for your products. This helps companies engage more with their customers to promote their discounts, events, and similar activities like sending automatic replies to specific customers. Emails can be sent to customers to share the company newsletters with them, confirm a customers’ action after they download any new items from the website, or even to welcome new subscribers joining the page. 

Offline Digital Marketing 

This type of marketing is done offline without the internet but is supplemented with the use of electronic devices, which is what makes it digital. To understand it more, we need to establish that offline marketing is still a very successful technique to increase company revenue. Here are a few examples of how offline digital marketing is approached.

Radio Marketing 

This form of digital marketing started with the invention of the radio back in 1896 by Guglielmo Marconi. Ever since it was used, the radio has been used to broadcast messages across to listeners, and these messages were mostly all broadcasted for advertising purposes. 

Radio is different from TV though and because it was easily enhanced to be available online, radio ads are not as successful as TV ads. However, radio still has access to the homes of over 80% of the US citizens, and it is listened to for more than an average of 2 hours a day. 

Television Marketing

TV ads have been around for more than 50 years now, there was even a time for TV ads that was before there were TV’s that display pictures in colors. The TV industry makes more money than any other industry each year and most of it comes from TV ads. Now that everything is analyzed and specific, TV ads have been making fewer earnings than before the internet had access to every home. More people tend to watch simpler entertainment channels like Youtube rather than their regular TV at home because the online content they find on Youtube is more specific and targets the right audience. Either way, video content, whether displayed via television or Youtube, remains a very effective digital marketing technique. TV ads gain vast viewership, whereas adverts on Youtube will target those most likely to be interested in purchasing your product or service. To be sure you are creating effective TV or other video marketing campaigns, partner and collaborate with expert videographers or film production companies such as Ginger Whippet Films – this way, you can focus on doing what you do best while the video experts help you expand your customer base. 

Phone Marketing

They say that in  2020, more money is being spent on mobile ads than on TV ads. This could be true, but we want to highlight the offline ways in which you can create a phone ad rather than the online ones. Without the internet, there are only two ways of advertising through phones whether they are smartphones or not, sending text messages and calling customers. Calling customers on their phones is called “Cold Calling” due to not having any customer information before making the call. This method is super challenging and many calls have to be made per day to return a very small number of buying customers, but it is still a digital marketing technique. One way to increase the chances of getting a customer onboard through phone calls is to use sales call tags. These are easy to install on your devices and they let your sales team tag calls under certain categories. Using this, and other data analytics, you can see which types of calls bring on more customers, which scripts work better, and perhaps even identify specific employees who do well and assess why. Since the tags are customizable, it’s simple to swap the categories often to find out which divisions in your market work best. Texting comes after this method of marketing, and it can be more guaranteed because a text message is always viewable content.

Electronic Billboards 

We have all seen them, we know what it’s about, this is because the goal behind electronic billboards is attracting attention. They are probably the only thing you remember from passing by a busy street or a highway. Some of them even display interactive content that may show a live feed or an image of the people in the same square as the billboard. The prices for these billboards are extremely expensive but you can imagine how much revenue you will be gaining if you decide to display your advertisement on one of these billboards.

The Importance of Digital Marketing

People spend most of their mornings on their phones, and about 95% of people are constantly on their phones before they go to sleep. If you are driving past a billboard on the road, you will notice people sitting in passenger seats are either using their phones or engaged in something to keep them busy if not looking into a screen. Fewer people look at billboards these days. Not just billboards, digital marketing is all about changing and taking new forms to adapt to contemporary conditions.

Marketers have to keep finding newer ways to reach their audience through their technological and online presence, like Facebook ads.  Other companies already have specialists that do this job for them, so there’s a big competition for gaining customers’ attention. There are already apps that people use every day to locate their destinations and reach their jobs. People use their phones to order food, find rides to take them home, and most importantly, people use the internet to do their shopping and find the right products. By using the power of digital marketing, you will be able to keep up with your people and know what drives their interests to promote your content.

How To Come Up With A Digital Marketing Plan

The key to creating a digital marketing plan is to have a digital competitive analysis done for your business. This will let you know where your business stands and how far you need to go to catch up. This will also let you know what channels you need to direct your business, to find the same category of customers. Through competitor analysis, you can research and study the business characteristics and marketing targets for other companies in the same market. 

To start you will need to determine your business competitors, those are the other companies or organizations offering the same products or solutions you offer to the same audience. Here’s why you need digital competitive analysis.

1. To know where your business stands and how to meet goals with marketing standards followed in the same market
2. To stay aware of modern trends and keep up with the constant change in marketing strategies to reach customers
3. To collect common mistakes that most companies fall for and avoid practices that waste budgets 
4. To decide on your business goals even with the market changing and adjusting the targets whenever needed to conform with the new market

The point is most of the market is on the internet, but it’s not the only place where people make money. Knowing how to market for your services both online and offline will help you collect all key points to a successful business, so stay on top of it. Learn everything about online digital platforms that are taking the lead in the market and find the right ones for your business. Establish a plan for your budget, and choose where to spend it and for what cause, you can then choose which platform is going to be your target. And most importantly, keep up with the change happening in the market. The change that led to almost getting rid of radio ads and replacing them with online alternatives took place in less than seven years, so never miss a new opportunity to reach a wider range of audiences.