Marketing entails creating awareness about your products. If you manage to convince your customers that you’re offering the best products, then you can be assured of frequent purchases.
While you can do this through channels like print advertising, billboards, radio and TV ads, door-to-door sales, brochures, free consultations, and the like, you don’t want to miss out on digital marketing.
- What Is Digital Marketing?
- Why Do Startups Need Digital Marketing?
- What Are The Key Strategic Options For Digital Marketing?
- What Are The Top Trends In Digital Marketing For 2021?
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing includes all online marketing campaigns you do on electronic devices such as phones, computers, and tablets. Typically, you convey your marketing messages through videos, images, photos, reviews, social media posts, or written articles.
There are quite a lot of benefits to reap through digital marketing. But take note that it requires generous time commitments and a high level of expertise. Fortunately, you don’t have to do everything by yourself. You can outsource the services of reliable marketing firms, such as Brainiest digital marketing agency, in case you don’t know how to go about it, your schedule is tight with other business stuff, you don’t have the necessary tools, or you don’t know the trends in digital marketing.
Why Do Startups Need Digital Marketing?
Here are some of the benefits you reap by using digital marketing for your young business:
- Reaching A Wide Customer Base
Digital marketing allows your startup to access new markets with no geographical limitations. You can set your advert to reach whatever size of the audience you wish to, whether regional, country-wide, global, or continent-wide. To see and track your data more efficiently, you can set up your own startup dashboard. This gives you huge exposure to markets that could help your startup grow into a large business.
- Low Operation Costs
Digital marketing is cheaper compared to traditional advertising channels, such as newspaper, television ads, and billboards. This should be great news for any startup as it’s very important to cut operation costs.
As a matter of fact, with some form of digital advertising, such as pay-per-click, you’re only charged when a potential customer views and clicks your ad.
- Measurable Results
Digital marketing involves the use of software, platforms, and tools that help you monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns. For example, you can easily calculate the number of ad viewers who proceeded to make purchases. This metric is better known as conversion rate, and it’s a great way to analyze your digital marketing success.
If the conversion rates are very low, it may be an indication that you need to work on the quality of your campaigns to get better results. You can as well drop a given marketing strategy if it proves non-fruitful after several attempts. If the conversion rate is impressive, you may want to capitalize on such successful campaigns.
- Allows For Personalization
Another good thing about digital marketing is you can constantly interact with your customers. Perhaps you’ve written website content that shrewdly advertises your products. When web visitors leave comments, you respond to each of them directly. For channels like email, you can use sophisticated software to send each of your customers personalized emails and messages that address them by name. Such direct engagement builds customer loyalty.
In the process, your customers can also make suggestions for product improvement to fit their preferences. You can then consider these and tailor your products to suit your customers.
- Quick Conversions
Conversion, most of the time, involves following a provided link and making a decision on whether to purchase a product, subscribe to a service, or sign up for newsletters.
As long as you use the right call-to-action (CTA) buttons, you can get customers the moment they click on that button. But even if they don’t make a purchase right away, you’ve already caught their attention, and they’re likely to return once they have some money.
What Are The Key Strategic Options For Digital Marketing?
Here are some of the options and tips you can use in your digital marketing campaign:
- Website marketing (SEO)
This type of marketing works by getting your site on the top of search engine results. To achieve this, use keyword research to know what people are searching for. Then, include the keywords in your content so you can increase your chances of ranking highly on search engine results.
If your site shows up immediately when a web user types in a query, your brand is seen as authentic, hence your customers can have confidence in conducting business with you. This is one great way to attract new customers.
- Content Marketing
You can create informative articles that educate your readers on how to use certain products or solve common life problems. Then, within the article, you naturally sneak in links to your products. This way, you attract the attention of customers with valuable content and stories, and then tell them about what products they can use to solve their particular issue.
- Email Marketing
In this method of digital marketing, you send direct emails to potential customers to create awareness of new products or discounts. The first step is usually to build an email list. You can do this by asking visitors to your website to sign up for free newsletters.
With good email management software, you can segment your audience and launch audience-specific marketing campaigns.
- Social Media Marketing
As the name suggests, this involves promoting your products and services on social media platforms. You can directly post ads on your social media pages if you already have a huge following. Otherwise, you may want to pay some cash to have your ads widely distributed to other social media users who don’t follow your page.
- Affiliate Marketing
This is the use of individual bloggers or vloggers to promote your products on their sites. It’s good to use people with a huge following. This is because their followers are likely to follow some of the links they include in their content.
The affiliate receives a commission if a customer clicks on such links and buys your product.
- Video Marketing
Video marketing is very effective since online video viewing is at an all-time high. Like content marketing, this usually involves creating videos that educate viewers on how to solve common life problems, and then suggesting related products.
- Mobile Marketing
This is also called phone marketing. Normally, you send text messages and push notifications directly to your target audience. This means that you must have their phone numbers. The good news is that you can legally collect mobile numbers for your SMS campaigns.
- Pay Per Click Advertisement
With this marketing strategy, you pay for every user that clicks on your ad. All you need to do is arrange with ad networks to have your ads displayed on websites of your choice. You can even set a daily target of the number of clicks you want. Once you reach the target, the ad is pulled down.
- Native Advertising
There’s no denying that most web users ignore ads. Native advertising partially solves this by placing ads that seamlessly blend with the layout of a particular website. When users see the ad, it seems a part of the content flow. This increases the chances of web visitors clicking on the ad and landing on your product page.
What Are The Top Trends In Digital Marketing For 2021?
Digital marketing has come a long way, and the evolution isn’t stopping any time soon. Here are some of the latest trends in digital marketing:
- Directly interacting with your clients: Today, you can communicate with your customers regardless of their geographical location. If a customer leaves a comment on your website or social media platform, make sure to give them a personalized response. Doing so builds customer loyalty.
- Chatbot for customer service: This is the use of AI-inspired real-time chat messages to communicate to your web visitors even in your absence. Its 24-hour availability ensures your customers get a quick response to every query. This is one way to ensure your customers are satisfied.
- Customer segmentation. Customers like it when you pay attention to their specific needs. Not all your products are appropriate for your entire customer base. Some are probably gender-, age-, or location-specific. You don’t have to burden your younger customers with product campaigns meant for the old. That’s why you need to apply customer segmentation in your campaigns.
- Influencer marketing: You can hire celebrities in your area to promote your products, especially since people adore these icons. If they get to know that their favorite people use a certain product, they’re likely to follow suit and start using the product.
- Interactive content: This kind of content allows your customers to interactively participate by answering questions and completing puzzles. If you use these on your online sites, your followers will be more endeared to your brand, which translates to better conversion rates.
Companies With The Best Digital Marketing Strategy
Many companies are already shifting to digital marketing because of the intriguing benefits shared above. It may be hard to pinpoint the leading company in digital marketing. Here are some examples of companies that are reaping big profits with their excellent digital marketing strategies:
- Zappos
- American Express
- Domino’s
- Airbnb
- Amazon
- Nike
- Starbucks
- Mc Donald
- Ford
- Red bull
Conclusion
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to successfully market your products and services. If done properly, you can successfully build your customer base and increase your profits. In case you’re short of time or don’t have the expertise, you can hire marketing agencies to assist you in your digital marketing needs.
