Any business requires visibility for its growth. Thinking about a digital marketing campaign, then, involves communicating the existence of your business to the maximum number of people and convincing them to buy your products and services.
Television, radio and newspaper advertisements, accumulations, pamphlets, brochures, direct marketing are some of the traditional marketing methods, but what about digital marketing?
In the new millennium, the internet is the most powerful medium for business promotion, as billions of people have access to it and are the potential audience to receive communications about your products and services.
Also, as the use of smartphones has increased exponentially in recent years, the internet has gone mobile and is a very useful tool for the consumer to further increase its use.
This makes us realize why digital marketing is important for companies.
This trend will continue in the future and, therefore, it will be imperative for companies to go digital. Any communication or transaction with your customers through the Internet or Digital Channels can be defined as Digital Marketing.
In this article, we will see the various concepts and tools in Digital Marketing and how Digital Marketing helps businesses, especially for those who are just starting out. We will also take steps to implement a Digital Marketing project. Come on?
How to get started in digital marketing?
Digital Marketing is a rapidly evolving but also changing field, with immense scope for innovation. There are no defined principles of Digital Marketing like other branches of knowledge.
Here, we will present some basic concepts as well as tools in Digital Marketing.
After that you should see how best to implement it within your strategy. We wish you the best in your Digital Marketing journey, so we suggest the following steps below:
Build your website
Building a website is the first milestone in your organization's digital marketing journey. The entire Digital Marketing project revolves around the website. The site provides basic information about your company, your products and services and is therefore your first ad post in the digital world.
The website may also collect leads from people interested in your product or services. So, with a website, you can potentially reach the millions of visitors who visit the internet.
Internet users who visit your website become aware of your products and services and can contact you in case of any requirement. So you can increase your marketing reach.
Get a domain name
The first step in building a website is registering your domain name. If your business is pretty solid, your brand could be your domain name, if it's available. If it's a new business, you can create an innovative and catchy domain name for your website.
host your website
Hosting your website means creating server space and an IP address for your website on the World Wide Web. There are several hosting service providers such as HostGator.com. One of the crucial factors in selecting a website hosting service is page load speed.
Page load speed is crucial to website performance.
It also improves your SEO rankings on Google Search resulting in better rankings in your website's search results, as we'll see later in this blog. Obviously, a faster loading web hosting service will cost more.
Create content and design the website
Once your domain name is hosted then you have to design your website and create content for it. Well-written and relevant content will become popular on the internet.
So you have to create good content to spruce up your website. Content is the most important factor for your website's success. For starters, you can use WordPress to create content for your website.
WordPress is the best free or open source content management system in the world.
WordPress has been incorporated in 'plugins' for almost all the functionalities of the site. Some of them are: Creating posts, creating webpages, backing up data, Managing Comments (approval, disapproval, spam, reply or delete), Titles, Sub titles, bold letters, Fonts, Italics, Alignment, adding links, images, videos, etc., adding social sharing icons, adding meta descriptions, snippet views as well as tags, creating users and giving them permissions (read/write), managing subscriptions, analytics, improving performance, creating a mobile version website, SEO, etc.
Some of the functions are built in, while some plugins are free and some are paid.
WordPress also has several themes for different types and uses of websites and customizations for those themes.
Thus, WordPress helps you create a website without knowing the design and development of the web. Almost 20% of the entire internet is powered by WordPress. WordPress is also very easy to use with simple drag and drop functionality.
Think about mobility
With the increase in the use of cell phones to access the internet, it is necessary to have the website optimized for a mobile device, smartphone or tablet.
As the display sizes of a desktop, smartphone and tablet are different, we need to develop a mobile website.
A website that optimizes itself for different devices and gives a good browsing experience is called: 'Responsive Website'.
What characterizes a good website?
A good site has catchy headlines; there's a form to immediately capture visitor information, there's an easy 'Search' panel with contact information at the top.
Having created a website, we now delve into Digital Marketing. Your website is the digital asset of your business, but it will only be useful if people visit.
Thus, making people visit your website, that is, increasing traffic to your website is an important activity in Digital Marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Most internet traffic on the internet is driven by 'Search Engines'. All of you must be familiar with Google as a search engine. The user types in words relevant to the topic he is looking for (called Keywords) and then the search engine throws results from matching sites.
Needless to say, your website should be search engine friendly so that whenever people type in your keywords, your website should appear at the top of the list. The techniques used to improve your search engine rankings are collectively called 'Search Engine Optimization (SEO)'.
Since these search results are obtained naturally, they are called “Organic Search Results”.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
If you want a guarantee that your website will appear at the top of search results, you can pay the search engine for this service. That way, whenever people type in your keywords, your search engine will always place you at the top of the search results.
The search engine typically charges for the number of times people click on your site after it appears in search results.
This is called the 'Pay Per Click (PPC)' model. Of course, when two or more parties are vying for the top spot in search results for the same keywords, the one paying the most per click gets the top spot; the second highest takes second place, and so on.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an effective way to drive traffic to your website. This is an important tool in Digital Marketing for business growth. There are several SEM products available on the market.
Google Ads
Google Adwords, a product of Google SEM, is the most popular.
Google Adwords allows advertising messages to be displayed; thus, you can create copy for your ads on Google Adwords.
See the following appendix. You will see that all advertisers have written headlines about their business. You can also create ad extensions, meaning your communications for your different products.
A paid search result can be recognized by the presence of a small 'Ad' prefix in front of the website. Note that natural or organic search results for these keywords would be totally different. If you are in a highly competitive business and require a large number of leads, SEM is recommended as it definitely increases traffic to your website.
Google Adwords provides a range of analytical information about campaign effectiveness, revenue generated through the campaign, financial information such as number of clicks, number of conversions, orders and revenue, and therefore ROI, and so on.
E-mail Marketing
Email marketing is an important part of a company's digital marketing strategy. It relies on a database of email addresses to which you can send your promotional literature. There are several tools available to manage your email marketing campaigns.
They provide a lot of analytics, such as percentage of open emails, bounce rates, email campaign automation, effectiveness of an email marketing campaign, and so on.
You can subscribe to any of the email marketing service providers such as Zoho or Mailchimp.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing refers to marketing through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. As these media are very powerful and with a lot of traffic, social media marketing is an effective form of Digital Marketing.
Social media marketing works best for driving traffic to your website. Social Media Marketing (SMM) provides a lot of analysis on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, conversion rates etc.
Furthermore, it is important to add that there is an interdependence between the various Digital Marketing Tools. for example, Social Media Marketing and Email marketing go hand in hand.
Traffic derived from Social Networks contains details of users' emails. This data can be used to enrich your email marketing campaigns, which in turn would increase your conversion rate on social media.
So an important concept is that all digital marketing tools are interdependent and we need to integrate them to increase the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign as a whole.
Web Analytics
Web analytics plays a crucial role in a digital marketing effort. As digital channels can access users' digital footprints, they can provide a complete user trail into the digital world and customer behavior can be analyzed.
This is the basic difference between traditional marketing channels and digital marketing channels and therefore the effectiveness of digital marketing grows many times over.
Web Analytics is available at the individual Digital Marketing tool level, such as Google Adwords or any email marketing tool, and is available as a separate tool that integrates all digital channels and provides a unified view of the Channel's effectiveness. Digital marketing.
Google Analytics is a well-known web analytics tool, which comes in a free and a paid premium version.
Web Analytics provides a full range of data about the people who visit your site, their geographic location, their age group, gender and even their interests. These demographics are crucial to knowing your target customers and their behavior.
You can also get advanced information such as the user visited which website before visiting yours, how long the user was on your website, which pages he visited and so on.
With these detailed insights gained from web analytics, you can decide your marketing and communication strategy for your target customer segments and make your marketing more effective.
Google Analytics displays the number of sessions per day, number of users visiting the site, number of page views, new vs. visitors. recurring etc. It is a very rich tool that can give you great information about using your website.
Advanced Topics in Digital Marketing
Mobile apps
Mobile apps refer to apps for specific functions that are very easy and quick to use. They are very convenient for the user as they can be used on the go. This is an emerging field and has a lot of potential for the future.
Universal Analytics
Ever wonder why when you try to search Google through your cell phone, the cell phone displays the search results you searched for from your laptop computer. This is because of technology called Universal Analytics.
This technology revolutionized Digital Marketing and integrated all digital channels, such as mobile, portable or standalone digital devices.
Thus, the user can be tracked through all the digital media he uses. This increased the effectiveness of Multitasking Digital Marketing.
Advanced Analytics works on the concept of user identification. Thus, each individual user is given a unique user id and all devices he uses are tagged with that id. Thus, with a single id, the user is tracked across different channels.
Advanced Analytics can also integrate offline channels and data sources such as ERP systems or any other offline excel based data source with online digital channels. This helped Data Analytics a lot.
E-commerce
E-commerce has payment gateways through which customers can make online payments for goods or services.
Thus, the complete money request cycle can be completed very conveniently with the help of few clicks.
E-commerce also comes with a bunch of web analytics that help you convert prospects into customers.
Having the e-commerce channel promotes the business, as customers have another channel to consume your goods or services. Google Premium Analytics provides detailed e-commerce metrics; so don't be surprised when you get an instant email when you go to the payment gateway and change your mind.
As more and more people use online channels to consume goods and services, e-commerce will grow in the coming years.
Conclusion
We saw in this blog the importance of Digital Marketing for business. Digital Marketing helps to promote and grow your business.
Digital Marketing is a field of knowledge in constant expansion and thus, it can only be mastered by implementation.
So what are you waiting for? Learn the basics of Digital Marketing and then start implementing it in your organization.
With Colors Agency, we guarantee much more than just an attractive look as well as a modern layout for your website.
Our main focus is to offer companies around the world effective solutions, that is, to generate visibility on the internet.
Our agency develops SEO strategies, but also brand positioning for large, medium and small multinational companies, all projects are important to us.