In the present scenario, digital marketing is the savior of a wide variety of established leading businesses and marketers and the naive startups in the market. Digital marketing is a tool by which the marketing strategy has been automated and highly sophisticated. After the pandemic onset, digital marketing is the only way the companies can reach out to the target customers. Therefore, to stand out from the crowd, companies alter their digital marketing by enhancing the accessibility and exposure of their website through multiple measures. These steps help the company to protrude among other competitors and increase the sales hence the business.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing involves all the strategies of marketing which include electronic means and the internet. Businesses and marketers use search engines, social media platforms, e-mails, pre-video advertisements, pop-ups, etc., to connect to the target consumers and build a new customer base simultaneously.
Why is digital marketing important?
The mission of any business is to increase sales by bringing to light all the products possible and introduce them to a wide variety of customers. The reason is not fulfilled with required efficiency when traditional marketing methods are used, including advertisement pamphlets, telephonic communications, physical group, or door-to-door marketing. On the other hand, digital marketing does the job better than the former also provides companies to save the costs on traditional marketing strategy expenses. Also, digital marketing is taken into consideration by small startups to gain maximum results with minimum capital investment on old-school marketing strategy as these companies are new in the market. Hence, these startups and all the other established businesses use social media platforms as the main sub-tool and manipulate it according to their choice.
Concept of digital marketing
People nowadays are spending much of their time on one or the other electronic devices with internet access. Digital marketing is a vast terminology that comprises all the digital tactics to reach the customers and connect to them. Depending upon the strategy and the marketing goals, a digital marketer can become a part of a larger operation that a well-known company may lead. Also, a digital marketer is responsible for brand awareness and the generation of leads by paid or free portals. In a nutshell, the concept of digital marketing is to exploit the tech-savvy consumers and lure them into buying the product (increase in business) by advanced methods, which will be discussed later.
Role of a Digital Marketer
Digital marketer is responsible for drawing the leads and publicity to the brand or the business by every digital channel possible. The channels include the social media, company website and blog, search engine ranks, visual-audio advertisements, and e-mail newsletters. Every channel has to be monitored by the marketer to keep track of each channel’s progress and work accordingly. To keep an eye on every channel, digital marketers need to fix each channel’s key performance indicator. Any small business might have one or two persons to manage the digital marketing department and would know the general idea of controlling the variables. On the flip side, established firms take their digital marketing department very seriously. They may have specialists for every channel, such as SEO manager, marketing automation coordinator, content coordinator, etc.
Top 9 digital marketing tactics used:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
No-Click Searches
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Ad-blocker Blockers
Content Marketing
Online PR
Automated Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Gamification
Let’s get started by knowing each of the above digital marketing strategies to boost your business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO refers to search engine optimization and is one of the highly used digital marketing tactics. It allows to bring in more organic and natural traffic to the result page. It enhances the ranking in the search engine and helps the query stand out among its competitors. Using this tool, the probability of your site appearing among the top searches increases by multiple folds. Search engines normally select those site links as a result which have a higher ranking and are user-friendly. To obtain the web traffic towards a particular website, the target website is subjected to optimization and enhancement according to the search engine. The search engine shows that particular website in top results and gets more hits. This helps in outreaching other web links and involves the interested customers that are more vulnerable to use the services.
Further, this tool includes three types of SEOs: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO includes the manipulation of the content present on the particular page, the exact keywords, and the nearby keywords that are closest to the searchers’ query to give the intended web page. Off-page SEO comprises creating backlinks to a particular webpage or a search query that leads to the particular web page hence diverting the organic web traffic. Technical SEO deals with the coding and the optimization of the target webpage, which increases the accessibility of your webpage by increasing the loading speed.
2. No-Click Searches
It is also known as zero-click search. This is the most favored digital marketing tool by Google. It allows the searcher to access the answer on the top of the page for the query without clicking any link. Any business’s motive is to appear in one of those zero-click searches so that the searcher does not get distracted by a competitor’s web links and is satisfied by the search engine results.
3. Pay per click (PPC)
It is the most common digital marketers technique where the publisher is paid when the digital advertisement is clicked. This drives the traffic towards your organization’s web page and targets the customers and finds potential leads simultaneously. Google Ads is one of the most successful publishers for digital ads. Digital marketers use social media digital advertisements, which have a link that leads to their webpage.
4. Ad-blocker Blockers
Ad Blockers were previously used to bypass the digital advertisements that popped up on the screen. This situation created a problem for PPC and other publishers. The influencer marketer replaced the digital advertisements to tackle this situation because the present generation denies clicking on the pop-up advertisements. Still, their response to someone convincing them to buy a product seems more interesting to them.
5. Content Marketing
This strategy involves creating and distributing the content that can increase brand awareness, lead generation, and traffic. Blog posts about a certain product can increase the awareness among the target customers and simultaneously create leads that can turn beneficial for the product’s sales. E-books can help create leads by exchanging the content with that of their basic info, including phone number and e-mail ID by which the sales team can target them. Generating visually interactive content can help the marketer convey the product or service concept to the consumer with high accuracy and efficiency.
6. Online PR
Online public relation is another very important tactic for a digital marketer. It allows building healthy relations online with the present customers and potential customers. The reviews given by the consumers have a strengthful impact on the reputation of the company. Interacting with those customers, accepting feedback, and taking positive criticism may help public relations, which can be beneficial for the business. Online PR also helps in brand awareness and gaining potential customer’s trust, which is good for sales. Communicating with the journalists on any social media platform can earn your business a media opportunity to improve the reach and expand the business multiple folds. Company creates a separate team to carry out online PR. The team tries to connect with influencers, social media influencers, public speakers, celebrities, journalists, etc., to expand the companies limits and maintain a healthy relation.
7. Automated Marketing
Marketing automation tools help regulate the basic marketing strategies that earlier had to be done manually. E-mail automation sends newsletters to the subscribers and also manages the list of subscribers simultaneously to target the potential consumers by not annoying the others who do not wish to see the newsletter. Campaign tracking automation allows the marketer to focus on multiple projects by keeping data, tracks, and progress of different campaigns simultaneously. Lead generation automation is another process by which the tedious process of converting the leads into customers is taken care of. Specific e-mails are sent to the leads, and when the criteria are fulfilled, the lead can turn into a customer where the marketer takes over the process. In the meantime, the marketer can focus on other content-related strategies. Social media post automation is used by social media influencers and publishers where the software generates a post regarding the company’s product or service for brand awareness. The software does its work in an equal interval of time to be socially active on behalf of the digital marketer.
8. Social Media Marketing
It is a type of web marketing that uses social media to achieve branding and publicity goals. It includes posting images, videos, cartoons, texts, updates regarding the product to be endorsed. It also includes maintaining healthy relations with the followers of the brand. Businesses also hire social media influencers and pay them to increase brand awareness by various methods. Social media marketing includes posting advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, and various other social media platforms. It increases the audience’s engagement with the brand, and people are more interested to know about it. Building and maintaining a relationship with the online market is crucial as the consumer’s reviews may hamper the brand’s reputation or the product. Here the online PR teams come into the play. The number of doubts cleared and the number of reviews by the consumers plays a major role in diverting the organic traffic towards your webpage. By this method, the lead can be converted into a customer. Product-related content promotion can be done on social media very effectively as most people use social media in their free time, and they prefer to read things that interest them. To gain public trust, influencers and publishers may use outside links for their followers, which might be useful for them.
9. Gamification
It is an excellent way to amalgamate the consumer’s interest and the product or the website. It includes incorporating gaming entities in a normal user interface, making it more engaging and interesting for the lead, which can be converted into customers. Businesses often use rewards to share their module or toolkit to increase awareness, simultaneously triggering the dopamine levels in an individual by gamification. For example, PUBG provides in-game currency if your friend downloads the game with the help of your invitation. Many well-known companies use these types of strategies to increase brand awareness and convert leads into consumers. Some businesses add a countdown timer on top of a product which creates an urge to take specific actions. Also, the interface is so luring that any individual could fall into a dilemma. Another gamifying strategy is to create a sense of healthy and fun competition by creating leaderboards that display points and rewards when your content is shared, viewed, or on referring a friend. This strategy is good for people having competitive nature and works well on them.
Conclusion
Digitalization is the future, and digital marketing is the key to the future. Post covid, people are anxious and scared to step out of the houses and are trying online stuff and online shopping from food to clothes. It is high time for digital marketers to shine bright like a silver lining in the dark clouds and support their companies by increasing business awareness and creating public relations to help them find useful leads. Digital marketers can use the above tactics to change their way of marketing and experience quick results. The market is shifting from passive consumers to active consumers, and therefore the marketing strategies need to be changed to digital marketing from physical marketing. Also, digital marketing is a low investment process where the capital saved in marketing strategies can be diverted to employee retention mechanisms and bonuses so that the employees are encouraged and give the best results.
Digital marketing is a growing field of business, and there is a lot of scope in it. Without investing much effort, one can make a career in this field and achieve all the goals.
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