Everything took a turn for the better, when, in 1990 computer scientist Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web or as we know the acronym ‘www’. Internet was an alien concept to people back in those days, not less than rocket science. But as the time passed people started admiring it for the wonders it could do, and now it has become a necessity to have an internet access. It has impacted our lifestyle to a great extent. We can now socialize, update ourselves with what is happening in the world, buy and sell things, get directions, check the nearest pets stores, food chains, and various services at just one click.
The emergence of internet has also affected the way we advertise. Gone are those days when we got to know about the latest models of cars through magazines, or saw ads of our favorite food joints on televisions. Internet has now become the king of advertising. So let’s take a look how it affects the way we advertise our brands.
What is Digital Marketing?
According to Wikipedia “Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium”.
Speaking in layman terms, Digital marketing is using internet as a tool to advertise your brand. Digital Marketing is a vast field and the way you advertise totally depends on how you want to reach your audience. It can be done in numerous ways. Take a look at some of them.
Let’s say you want to advertise your clothing brand online. What do you think will be the first step towards it?
Yes, you guessed it right. You have to attract the customers who are looking for services that you provide. This can be done in multiple ways.
Whenever a customer makes a search for the services you provide, he is shown countless result. So how do you make yourself seen by your potential customer? Well SEO takes care of this problem. Basically, in this process you optimize your website in order to rank higher in search engine result pages. As you will rank higher, your chances of getting seen by a customer increases.
But wait, isn’t everyone busy optimizing their websites to rank higher and get seen by customers. So what else can you do to leave your competitors behind and get a rank higher than them?
In this type of advertising you pay your publisher every time your ad is clicked .You participate in an auction where you bid for your ad to get a better rank. But making the highest bid doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get a better rank than what your competitor might get. Various factors play a role in getting a better rank for your brand. With this we come to next aspect of our Digital Marketing strategy.
Content Marketing
Well, let’s say that a user looks at your ad, what would lead to him clicking on it. Its either the product that he is interested in or it’s the content on the product that will lead to a click. Here we shall talk about the latter part, The Content part. Impressions about a brand either good or bad for that matter are put when details about a brand are shown on various platforms via Content. It could be the ad’s or the website or even their social media posts they share on a regular basis. Good content always appeals everyone. This is why content marketing plays a major role in advertising online. Creation of good and interactive content plays a major role in brand awareness, lead generation and traffic growth on one hand and retaining the customers that are already loyal to the brand on the other hand.
Social Media Marketing
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will be active on one of the social networking sites. Most of the time people spend online is consumed on Social Media sites. So why not make a use of this fact and advertise our business on this virtual hangout place. Social media marketing deals with advertising your brand on various social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter in order to generate brand awareness and grow traffic.
E-mail marketing
Email is the most traditional and used facility provided online. So how can you miss out advertising on the facility, used by billions of people worldwide. In this type of advertising email is used to promote content to generate brand awareness, lead generation and traffic growth.
Influential marketing
Today’s consumer is not naïve. He knows that experience says a lot .Keeping this in mind what else can be more beneficial than a person speaking highly of your brand. Influential marketing deals with taking help of influential customers who can praise your brand and create a buzz for your products and services. Having an influential speaker for you can help you in the long run.
Now you must be wondering that how is it different from offline advertising and will this new advertising technique will be able to compete with the conservative techniques?
How Digital Marketing helps you grow your business?
With offline advertising you won’t be able to gauge how effective your ads were. Were they able to grab eyeballs, and even if they did, did they lead to any conversions or not. Offline advertising leaves a sense of ambiguity. But with online advertising it is totally different. You are easily able to judge the effectiveness of you ads and also calculate your return on investment on these ads. Online advertising can help us measure our ads performance in innumerable ways.
With digital marketing you can easily see the number of people who saw your ads, and out of them how many clicked on it. Google provides tools like Google Analytics with which you are able to see how many people were drawn to your site by the ads you displayed, by organic searches, or some other source. Also you will be able to see what people do once they reach your website. Do they check your brochures, other services that you provide, how much time they spend on your website, add anything to cart and many more activities that they do on your website.
Digital Marketing also provides the amazing feature of Remarketing. It keeps on showing your ads to the customers who were about to make a move that could in turn be beneficial for your business but eventually dropped the idea of doing so. When these ads are repeatedly shown to the customer it might propel them to take action that might prove beneficial to your brand.
So this was a brief description of what digital marketing is all about. It is all about advertising online so that you are able to reach more customers and also gauge the outcome of your efforts. If you are someone who is looking for a way to reach a large audience then digital marketing is something you must consider.