Remember the days when you can rely on newspaper advertisements, xerox leaflets, and billboards to spread the news about your business?
Believe it or not, we enter the age when not many people will do it. Previous marketing tactics are still available, but they take the back seat for digital marketing efforts that do not rely on tangible and more on pixels.
Basics of Digital Marketing For Small Businesses
Although the amount of extraordinary information is available on digital marketing, it does not have to be an extraordinary topic for you and your business. Let’s define it, give you a few examples, and show you how to make a simple marketing plan to start today.
Digital Marketing Definition
Digital marketing is a type of marketing that uses electronic devices. There are two types of digital marketing: online digital marketing and offline digital marketing. Online digital marketing depends on the internet, while offline digital marketing uses avenues such as radio and television to spread the news about businesses or products.
Digital Marketing Role
This off-paper type of marketing relies on electronic devices to spread the message about a product, service, or brand. The role of digital marketing is to get as many eyes on your business as possible to bring you more customers, and therefore more sales. It helps your business grow, which allows you to keep expanding.
Increasing brand awareness and generating leads are the two primary goals of digital marketing. When you’re maximizing your exposure by going digital, you’re achieving both.
Benefits of Using Digital Marketing
Next time you sit in a restaurant, on the subway, or even in your own home, pay attention to how many people hold the phone at a certain time. As a society, we are addicted. In fact, Americans currently use several forms of electronic media for more than eleven hours per day. It was mostly our wake hour!
We do almost everything online now – socialize, shopping, streaming films and TV shows, listening to music, reading news, research, and more. People are online all day, every day. If you go where people are, you tend to reach more people.
Because the world of technology is heavy, we live, every business that does not utilize digital marketing will be pressed hard to find a stable flow of customers unless it has become an established business with solid roots and a good reputation.
Even businesses that begin and develop without the current benefits of digital marketing can benefit from updating their advertising methods to reach more people.
Digital marketing benefits include more website traffic, the main generation (which ideally produces more sales), and, with the right software, the ability to monitor the performance of various marketing tactics so you can see how people interact with your content and determine what The most effective.
Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is multi-faceted, which is good news for you and your business. This means there are many roads that you can use to increase brand awareness and promote your products and services.
If you are just starting with digital marketing, the infographics below summarize free or very low basic tactics.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a practice that optimizes your website so that it ranks as high as possible in search engine results. This means when someone looks for certain keywords, which are related to your business and hence appear on your website, then your website will appear when the keyword is sought.
SEO’s goal is to make your website appear as close as possible at the top of the search results. This will produce more website visitors, which in turn must increase overall awareness of your brand and produce more direction. In the end, this changes more sales.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a digital marketing tactic that promotes your products, services, and brands through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, and more.
This is the best way to get more eyes on your business, considering that most people have at least one social media account.
Content Marketing
Content marketing means creating content that leads to more website traffic and makes people aware that you and your business exist. It must also help your ideal customers solve problems or overcome pain points related to your product or service.
Content marketing usually depends on things that can be read by people, such as articles, blog posts, e-books, white paper, infographics, and brochures. Writing guest posts for websites that are relevant to the industry is a great way to share useful content and spread the news about your business.
Email Marketing
In other types of general digital marketing, email marketing only means marketing your product or service via email. Email marketing is a very good way to keep your message fresh in your potential customer’s mind, especially because most people in your email list have a proven interest in what you have to offer – they sign up for it!
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate Marketing works two ways: Advertise other people’s products and receive commissions with every sale, or pay for other people’s commissions to advertise your product.
As bloggers, for example, without physical products to sell, market other people’s products and services can be a great way to accept commissions and earn income.
As a business owner with products for sale, affiliates can help you advertise your product to their audience – your audience will not be able to access it easily.
Pay per click ad
Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising method where you place online ads but only pay when ads are clicked.
These advertisements usually appear on search engines above non-paid, organic results. For example, when you are looking for “outdoor furniture” on Google Chrome, the first few results determine the “AD” next to the website name and description. This website pays for each click they receive, but the trade-off is that many of the clicks can change to sales that they might miss. Small costs are generally pales compared to sales generated from placing ads.
Offline digital marketing.
The types of digital marketing mentioned above are all examples of online digital marketing, which means they are internet-based.
Other types of digital marketing, offline digital marketing, still depend on electronic devices, but it is not necessarily internet-based. Some examples include radio and television advertisements, digital billboards (Think Times Square), and telephone marketing such as cellular advertising.
Examples of digital marketing
Now we have feelings for various types of digital marketing out there, let’s look at some specific examples.
Your own website is the best place to start. SEO is the key to unlock your online presence to generate as many leads and sales as possible. With keywords and phrases that are well examined, your website will work alone to expand your audience and increase awareness of your brand.
Maybe the method of digital marketing is mostly more familiar with social media marketing. Specific examples include tweets, Facebook and posts and Instagram stories, and pins. In most platforms, this can be paid advertising or organic posts.
Even social media profiles generally function as a very good digital marketing tool because they expand your reach and, once again, increase the overall awareness of your brand. Think about it – Linkedin’s profile is basically a giant digital business card that provides a potential picture and employee about who you are. All of your social media profiles can function with the same purpose.