The future of marketing is digital. Gone are the days of cold calling and overpriced ad campaigns. Businesses used to rely on those marketing methods are looking at their ROI, wondering what went wrong. Others are getting great results with more modern tools.<\/p>\n
If you’re going to succeed in the online market, you have to do it digitally. Fortunately, digital marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. There are many ways to\u00a0use digital marketing without breaking the bank<\/a>.<\/p>\n When done right, digital marketing will boost your online marketing strategy, increase customer loyalty, and enhance your sales. But what is digital marketing? What should you be doing, and how can you know if it’s working? Read on to find out in this pseudo digital marketing bootcamp.<\/p>\n Digital marketing is a general term, but is a lot different than billboards and TV from traditional marketing. It’s used to describe\u00a0the advertising of products or services using digital technologies.<\/a>\u00a0This includes the internet, mobile phones, and display advertising. Essentially, digital marketing is the practice of reaching people when shopping online, researching new services, or reading articles and blogs like this one.<\/p>\n As the pandemic pushed people to use digital services to a greater extent, digital marketing is critical to growing every business. Whether you’re a small business owner who needs a way to reach more customers, a manager at a big corporation looking to engage your audience, or an entrepreneur trying to build your brand – digital marketing is your way forward.<\/p>\n The true importance of marketing in the digital space is often understated. Digital marketing is not just about brand building or having an online presence but about increasing leads and sales. Its importance lies in the ability of businesses to reach a broad audience at a minimal cost.<\/p>\n In today’s digital world, where consumers are constantly getting bombarded with information from all directions, getting them to pay attention to your brand can be challenging – to say the least. Ads flood consumers across all channels at practically all times. If you’re to reach your audience, you only have a few seconds (at most) to make an impact before a person moves on.<\/p>\n Moreover, consumers have gotten better at ignoring traditional forms of advertising. To cut through the clutter, brands need modern marketing strategies. They need to engage audiences with relevant and personalized content delivered in real-time.<\/p>\n Effective digital marketing must be:<\/p>\n But accomplishing these three points in an increasingly fast-paced online environment is far from easy. Businesses must develop robust information systems to capitalize on customer feedback and generate repeat sales.<\/p>\n Digital marketing has made this process easier than ever before. Retailers can build brand loyalty and grow their reputations through an array of channels,\u00a0including social media<\/a>, email, and personalized offers.<\/p>\n Digital marketing is also a cost-effective means of advertising, especially compared with traditional mediums like television and print. With the ability to retarget specific audiences or change ad copy on the fly, digital marketing campaigns are more responsive to consumer demands and market trends. Moreover, you get a chance to track and analyze many metrics in real-time with digital marketing. Later on, you can use the gathered information to fine-tune digital marketing campaigns in ways never before possible.<\/p>\n It’s also essential to note that every business must have a presence on at least major social media networks to be successful today. Digital marketing can help with that and allow brands to interact with current and prospective customers on a personal level without spending too much money.<\/p>\n Digital marketing is a wide-open field. You can use many tools and methods to achieve business success, depending on your industry, budget, experience, and goals. There are no hard and fast rules that apply to every situation, but here are some tips to help you get started with digital marketing.<\/p>\n If you don’t know who your customers are, how do you know what they’ll like? The first step of any digital marketing plan is knowing who you want to speak to with your campaigns. Although this seems like a simple step, small business owners often don’t take the time to identify the types of customers they hope to reach.<\/p>\n You can start your journey to understanding your audience by writing down all the characteristics you want your customers to have. Then, you can narrow it down to the top three or four most important traits. The method will give you a good idea about who your audience is and help you find them on social media, forums, and other places online where they might spend their time.<\/p>\n You’ll need reliable and consistent ways to gather actionable customer feedback, though. Customer insights can help you answer questions about your audience, such as age, gender, education level, income, and location. Once you have a specific group in mind, you can adjust your marketing strategy to it more effectively.<\/p>\n Some of the methods you can use to gather customer insights include:<\/p>\n In today’s digital age, customers easily get put off by a business with a poor website or no web presence at all. Thus, every company needs to have an effective digital marketing strategy.<\/p>\n The biggest part of every digital marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). This allows businesses to be competitive in the online marketplace. It can be a key ongoing generator of inbound marketing leads<\/p>\n Search engine marketing<\/a>\u00a0is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural” or “organic” results. In other words, SEO helps your business gain visibility on sites like Google and Bing. As such, it improves your chance of getting discovered by potential customers. Thanks to SEO, people will find your business first when looking for goods or services like yours.<\/p>\n SEO is going to involve optimizations to your website, including things like:<\/p>\n The truth is that most of your first customer contacts probably won’t lead to a sale right away. People online often don’t want to commit to a business relationship immediately. They want to get to know you first, trust you, and like you before becoming customers. That takes time.<\/p>\n Nurturing is the process of slowly building a relationship with your leads over time until they’re ready to buy. It’s about trust, not sales. Many entrepreneurs who have mastered the art of nurturing have built multimillion-dollar businesses on the backs of their loyal customers.<\/p>\n But how do you nurture successfully? It takes:<\/p>\n Marketing automation can be a key piece of nurturing. Having a digital platform like Scorpion and the experts who work there to setup email marketing and advertising campaigns that go out automatically can save you a lot of time. Marketing automation can also be a great way to create a content marketing journey for your potential customers. You can send out blog posts, eBooks, and other content marketing<\/p>\n Digital marketing is more science than art. You need to act based on data and leave your intuitions to the side as much as possible. A hunch that this or that will make a difference won’t drive success – measurements will. Its important to have the right marketing science professional also known as “data science” to help you make these decisions. Here’s what you can measure to make informed business decisions:<\/p>\n You know how many people visit your website from organic search, but how many come from email? Paid search? Advertising? Your traffic from each source tells you different things about your audience.<\/p>\n Once you know where your visitors are coming from, try to measure which of those sources is driving conversions. For eCommerce sites, this means measuring sales in totality – not just purchases but dollar value.<\/p>\n Beyond conversions, it’s essential to look at email subscribers, social media followers, and other key performance indicators (KPI).<\/p>\n This is particularly important for paid advertising campaigns. It’s not enough to count the number of visitors coming from pay-per-click (PPC). You need to know how many users you gained from that campaign and what you spent on acquiring them.<\/p>\n If you spend more than you earn from each customer, you need to either increase prices or find another way of acquiring customers that’s less expensive.<\/p>\n Conversion rate is one of the most popular marketing objectives to track because it measures how effectively your sales funnel works – how many people who visit your site purchase something?<\/p>\n To determine your conversion rate, divide the number of visitors to your site by the number of conversions (purchases). For example, say 100 people visit your site, and 25 of them buy something. Your conversion rate is exactly 25 percent.<\/p>\n As a general rule, if you want to increase sales, you can either increase traffic or your conversion rate. Improving traffic is usually more expensive than doing that with conversion rates, so many businesses try to improve the latter first.<\/p>\n Learning how to measure the results of marketing efforts separates pros from amateurs. The good news is that tracking and analyzing data is easier than ever before. With quality digital marketing tools, you can track conversions, clicks, and sales on nearly any marketing channel.<\/p>\n Before starting a digital marketing campaign, take a moment to understand the different tools at your disposal. There are a lot of methods and services out there that will help you achieve your goals, but it’ll take some trial and error to find the one that works for you.<\/p>\n Content marketing is an umbrella term. It includes all types of content strategy for content you share online to achieve your business goals. Content marketing can involve writing blog posts or articles, making videos, or posting photos.<\/p>\n The goal of content marketing is usually twofold. You either want people to think better of your company as one that shares interesting, useful, or entertaining information, or you want them to engage with your brand by clicking links, registering for events, or making purchases.<\/p>\n Either way, you’ll need a consistent and robust content marketing strategy. Therefore, content marketing is one of the best tools in the digital marketer’s toolbox.<\/p>\n Social media has emerged as one of the crucial battlefields for digital marketers to engage and connect with their customers,\u00a0drive brand awareness, and generate leads<\/a>. The problem is that social media is huge. It’s easy to suffer from analysis paralysis, waiting forever to decide on the best approach.<\/p>\n Narrowing the playing field with customer insights can help you choose channels and content strategies for your brand. Customer research tools can be used to identify your market segments and gather information about them, such as age, gender, location, interests, etc. These insights will help you craft a more effective messaging strategy that delivers more tailored content to the right audience at the right time.<\/p>\nWhat is Digital Marketing?<\/h2>\n
Why Is Digital Marketing Important<\/h2>\n
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Tips for Digital Marketing<\/h2>\n
Know Your Audience<\/h3>\n
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Establish a Strong SEO Presence<\/h3>\n
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Nurture Leads to New Customers<\/h3>\n
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Measure Everything<\/h3>\n
Traffic from Each Source<\/h4>\n
Conversions from Each Source<\/h4>\n
Acquisition Cost per User<\/h4>\n
Conversion Rate<\/h4>\n
Digital Marketing Tools<\/h2>\n
Content Marketing<\/h3>\n
Social Media Marketing<\/h3>\n
Email Marketing<\/h3>\n