What, why and how Digital Marketing?

/ / Blog, Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Marketing & Brand Management




Very often we hear the of buzz of the digital ads, internet marketing, social media marketing, etc.  Today in this blog I thought of taking you into the world of digital marketing and how it can be a generate more revenues. In this blog I shall talk about digital marketing, its importance, the process, how it you can make it a part of your business and then I will touch upon types of ads, targeting, engagement and measurement.

WHAT is Digital Marketing?

Any marketing activity done over the Internet using various digital devices is called digital marketing. 

WHY Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is the most effective and widely used method of marketing in today’s world. The key reasons why it so popular among the marketers

  • Its wide and effective reach.
  • It’s cost effective as it’s measureable.
  • Easy process to target your niche.
  • Optimization based on the performance of your campaigns.
  • Due to the tracking and monitoring, performance and retargeting is made easy in Digital Marketing.

Understanding the process of Digital Marketing.

  • The first step and the most important step is to identifying your Customers, which will consist a detailed research in order to target the only the potential buyers.
  • Once the target audience is figured out it’s time to work on the brand awareness, that’s working on the visibility of your products.
  • Based on the brand awareness campaigns, we get in the targeted customers.
  • Once the customers comes in, it’s important to Engage with the customers.
  • After Engagement with the customers, they convert into Leads/Sales.
  • The fifth step is measurement of the campaign, based on which optimization becomes easy.
  • Retention.

 Before going forward i would like you to see the Video posted in this blog, in order to understand how digital marketing can change your business around.

From where do i start?

Assume I sell a particular cosmetic products which caters the need of a girls, from a store based out of Jayanagar, Bangalore. Let’s try to integrate Digital Marketing into my business.

  • Identifying the potential customers, so as the cosmetic product I sell is to cater the need of a girl. Say the age of my audience is aged between 18 and 24 years. Now moving towards to geographical research of the potential audience, say my business is set up in Bangalore and I want only people in Bangalore to see my ads. One more targeting I want to aim for is device on which I want to place my ads, say I want to display my ads on mobile only or desktop only.

   To sum up my research, the gender I am targeting is females aged 18-24 years, based in Bangalore using mobiles (you can also target specific areas in a city and particular digital devices as well). Suppose you don’t have an online store then you are restricted to put up ads which are aimed to get footfalls in the store, and target only people in Bangalore so your number of potential customers are restricted. If u have an online store then your target can be a country, just imagine the number of specific customers you will have!

  • Now the Visibility, Brand Awareness & Targeting. Increase visibility – It’s a good practice to have to an online store, as this helps to increase your horizons. So I will have a website, a page on various social media platforms like Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. These online properties are owned by you, hence we can call this a owned media it is to bring in traffic to your site by inbound or outbound marketing ways. You can say it’s like push and pull in offline marketing, however this is much more effective than offline world.  You can also go in for paid media, where you can advertise on various platforms by using various platform the best are one been Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Emails Campaigns, etc14438818027_85f923d0b9_b

   Google Ads – Google ads is an advertising program by Google, which lets advertisers target potential customers by showing ads on Google search engine result page based on the keywords. The other service of Google Ads, is the Display Ad Network where Google lets you advertise on the network of its partner websites, currently there are 2.5 million websites registered with Google to facilitate display advertisements. What makes Google Ads effective is you pay Google only when someone clicks on the ads, you don’t pay Google if people don’t click your ads, this concept is called Pay per click (PPC).

  Facebook Ads – It’s a service by Facebook that lets us advertise on Facebook which can be seen in your newsfeeds and right sidebar.

  LinkedIn ads – There are quite performance oriented as LinkedIn is for professionals. This service is effective when you wish to target professionals on the basis of work profile. However this service is expensive when compared with Google and Facebook ads.

   All these above mentioned services allows the users to target their audience as per their needs, in our case also, targeting is based on the gender, age, location, device and interests. So I would prefer to setup the online store and go for ads for my cosmetic product store.

  • The next step is engaging with audience. Now always remember not all people coming on to your site have the intention of buying but your conversations with every single customer matters. Don’t be always about selling, try to give value to your customers, like giving tips, market updates, etc. It’s also very important be act responsibly when you reply to your customer queries, reviews, comments and feedbacks. A new customer tends to go through reviews, comments and feedbacks so your replies matter a great deal to the existing customers. These things do have an impact on your new and existing customers. Remember conversions are based on how you engage with your customers.
  • Conversions in the form of Leads/Sales is the final objective of digital marketing. There are two types of conversions micro and macro i.e. when a customers does a small activity like visiting your site, downloading your freebies it is a micro activity. Macro on the other hand are bigger steps like buying a product or requesting a call back, filling forms, etc. When you go for ad campaigns, it’s very important to run relevant and specific ad campaigns so only the niche audience is targeted and interested people click on the ads. Based on the clicks on these ads, the price per click, is calculated. When people with irrelevant or no interest in your offering click on your ads it is a bigger harm done to you, how? Well when people click on your ad you have to pay the publisher, when they land on your site and don’t do any activity they increase your bounce rate of the site which affects your SEO.
  • Measurement –  This helps you to measure and understand your traffic and its nature for you to run ads more effectively, you can use a number of analysing tools, most popular one being Google analytics which is followed by Adobe, IBM. When it comes to Ad Campaigns, lets assume I have a ₹100 budget for a day which I distribute ₹50 for Google Ads, ₹30 on Facebook ads, ₹20 on others that is emails, SMS, etc. If we make some sales at the end of the day, by using the analytic tool we can measure the effectiveness of advertising platform used. Suppose our analytics say that our Facebook ads are generating better conversions then Google then digital marketing lets optimise these campaigns by simply reducing Google budget from₹50 to say ₹30 and increase Facebook ads by ₹20 spending ₹50 on Facebook.
  • Retention of customers  is also important to keep our sales ticking, when I say retention of customers it applies to new and existing customers. We can classify the retentions in 2 types Vertical & Horizontal. Say, when a customer’s wants to buy a facewash, but along with the facewash she also ends up buying a cream this is vertical retention. When a customer buys a face wash and returns to buy the same product again it is horizontal retention.

Conclusion

By taking the digital route, it’s easier and much more effective approach to grow your business as it increases your reach to a larger, specific audience at a cost effective price.

Read about how to setup an Ecommerce website for your company.

Shiv Mamadapur
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