What is Digital Marketing?
Definition: Digital Marketing means marketing of products and services using Digital devices (i.e. Computers, Mobiles & Tablets) and online channels/ Websites (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter etc.).
In a broad language, Digital Marketing is advertising our business on some of the already established & popular websites . These websites include search engines (like Google, Yahoo & Bing) & Social Media Sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ & LinkedIn ). Except these websites we can also use emails for promotion, mobile applications and content marketing to advertise our products & services. The primary benefit of Digital Marketing is that it’s cost effective. We need not to have a big budget to advertise. We can start advertising with a very small budget, even just INR15000 is enough to advertise for a month & to reach upto 1lac targeted customers. Check the cost chart below.
Although, this is just an example of the cost we need to spend to give a kickstart. Every website has its own advertisement programe (like Google has Google Adwords & Facebook has Facebook Business) where we can simply login & create advertisements for our business. Generally these kind of advertisements start working (goes live) in just 24 hours after taking a quick review by the company. This review ensures them that your not doing anything against their quality guidelines & country laws.
Execpt paid advertisements we also have an option to advertise at no cost, which is also called organic marketing. This means we need not to pay a single penny to advertise our business. But organic promotion required some efforts & skills which you can easily learn through a Digital Marketing Institute or can hire a Digital Marketing Expert for your company.
Advertisements Forms in Digital Marketing
In Digital Marketing we can advertise our products & services in three forms of advertisements. The very first form of advertisement is a text Ad in which we need to make an advertisement in a normal text format. As you can see the example below.
This term have large variety of marketing activities & most important and widely used activities are the following.
Paid Search
Another name of paid search is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, also known as sponsored result basically mention on the top or on the side of search engine result page (SERP). In this, the liability for paying arise only when someone have clicked your ad. You can make changes in your PPC ad regarding what search terms to be entered for your ad and have option which audience to be targeted.
PPC ads are easily customizable and beneficial for any type of organisation. One of the part of paid search is contextual advertisement-that ad which will appear only when specific term or keyword to be entered.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of managing the technical part, content and reach of a website so that it rank top of SERP for specific keywords. At last the objective of SEO is to attract more and more traffic to the website and it must be visible on the top of SERP when they are searching for any information, product or service regarding your site.
The main tool of digital marketing is SEO and it is most efficient and effective tool. It requires a well constructed site, good content, easy to use website, and creditability with other websites recommending your website by obtaining link from you or mention in social media post.
Content Marketing
A content is soul of every website. Without content, any website will be nothing. It is a fuel which drives rest of the digital marketing activities:
- If content is strong then eye grabbing on social media is easy.
- It is a key of modern SEO.
- It gives worth to customers in PPC and emails.
Instead of creating content more cleverful, emphasis must be given more on making content worthy and thoughtful. Posting relevant content to your audience will create a good impression on them. And it helps in giving sufficient boost in your ranking at SERP.
Social Media Marketing
People are not just sending their time in worthless videos or merely posting selfies on social media. Many of them use social media as a great source of acquiring information, research new thing and educate themselves regarding brand before contacting with the organization. Merely adding post on facebook and twitter handle is not enough for marketers. Incorporating more social strategies into your marketing scheme is very important and develop more and more strategies will help in emerging you as a brand. If your content is seen by more and more audience and appreciate it then they will not stop themselves from liking and sharing your post. By this, not only they become a customer but they will also influence others customers too about your offered products.
Email Marketing
It’s been about two decades that we are using email and many more years we all are going to use. It is one of the very easy and fastest way of reaching to customers with lots of information. Consumers have become habitual of using emails. Even you have been also using emails so frequently.
But good marketers are very well aware that not every email is relevant. They should use as it great too only when email are quite engaging, relevant, entertaining and informative. Making email marketing successful, it should contain following elements;
- Strategic
- conversational
- Entertaining
- Trustworthy
Mobile Marketing
We all are very well aware that as mobile device are indispensable part of everybody’s life so it is very good way of using it in your strategic scheme. Mobile devices are always get nearby us. It is with us 24*7 and very frequently check them throughout a day.
There are many ways such as SMS, MMS, in-app marketing etc to market your product but it totally depends on you how utilize these methods to promote your product and convert them into more fruitful result. Beyond this, you need to take care that there is perfect combination of digital channels and not forget to make mobile a part of that combination.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is unforgettable part that binds all the marketing forces together. Without it, campaigns will be like a tasteless food. It adds spice into and has important position in campaigns. Marketing automation software automates the marketing task and workflow. It analysis the result and ROI of online campaigns and helps in earning more.
It gives full-fledged knowledge regarding which program is working and which aren’t. It will give you data which tell you about digital marketing’s effect on bottom line.
Importance of digital marketing
In today’s era digital media become important part of our life which facilitates us in gathering information anytime and anywhere. That time had flown when entrepreneurs needs to tell about their product and no other much known source for customers that they got more and reliable information. Now-a-days customers has lot more sources from where they get information such as media, reviews from other customers, its social media popularity and many more. Digital Media has increased the space of every individual. Now, customers are not just confined to four walls for collecting true and reliable information about the brand. As the world get smarter then customers are also get smarter. Customers want to contact only those brands who are reliable to them, can come to know about the organization, many offers and discounted product and easily contactable.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
One thing that differentiates digital marketing from traditional marketing is that one can never know in traditional marketing its result, its impact and how many did actually pay notice to the ad for example- if you publish an article in newspaper then it’s very difficult to measure that how many did actually pay attention to the article.
On the other hand, in digital marketing, it is possible to measure ROI of each month or any specified time which make it possible to understand the rate of growth and its comparable and in turn it helps in what measures to be taken to increase the sale.
Below are some examples:
Website Traffic
In digital marketing, through digital analytics tools make possible that we can see how many visitors did actually visit to our website. Google analytics, HubSpot are example of digital analytics software.
Not only this, these software also give information regarding how many pages they visited, which device they are using and from where the traffic are coming etc.
These information helps in re-regulating our marketing strategy and get to know about which channel is more profitable to us. After that, we know that where we have to spend more time and money to leverage more and more profit from these channels. For example- if 15% traffic is coming from SEO, then it’s a time to concentrate more on SEO to increase the percentage.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Suppose, you gave an order of about 5000 pamphlets contain attracting content and distributing to audience without seeing whether they are interested or not but there is no guarantee that how many people find it useful and take desired step or any of them through them as trash.
Now, this time you are taking the help of digital media. You posted that pamphlet on your website. Here, you would get exact data regarding number of page viewed and can get contact details also of those who download it using forms. Most importantly, you will get contacts of who are genuinely interested in your business which after that turned into desired leads.
Option how to receive content
Different people means different choices. Some person like to read post or some person like to see videos. This choice is only available to digital platform. In traditional marketing, people get sales brochure in mail box or unwanted sales call which really irritates a lot and there is no choice left in the hands of traditional marketing.
Brand Development
A good website with high quality content marketing which will generate a great customer base as you target the key areas and result is lead generation. This can be used in social media channels and email marketing.
Audience interaction
Social media is a great platform for interaction with customers. Even, they encourage audience to interact with them by visiting their site, read about all the product, share and like them and provide feedback. All this is not possible in traditional marketing.
Recording of data
Using various analytics tools one can easily know the real time data and even one week before or one month before data is available but not in the case of traditional marketing.
Level doesn’t matter
In digital marketing, size of the business doesn’t matter to compete with the large size companies. Strong digital campaign can easily beat any size of business as in digital world, only service and product quality matter and creating your name as brand name can accelerate your growth It is not confined into scale of your business.
Viral
While distributing pamphlet, you cannot imagine that anyone is going to transmit to their friends and there is no proof of anything but in digital marketing, if you like any page or share any post on facebook, then it will be seen by most of your friends and think if your post is being supported by good quality content then there are more chances to be liked and shared by other friends also. Digitally, everything get viral easily.
Challenges for Digital Marketer
Digital marketing is a dynamic field, no things get constant for many years. In a very short span of time, maybe 2-3 months, techniques evolved better and better with the time. In today’s scenario, change is not a big thing but the pace of change matters. A digital marketer has to update himself with the latest techniques, softwares, devices etc. and which not only makes work easy but also helps in handling complicated issues better.
Following are some challenges which generally faced by digital marketer are discussed briefly:
Vast online market
As the world grows, all want to fetch the advantage first. Now a days, instead of opening physical stores all are preferring to come directly online which helps in cutting down huge investment, and sell their product. So, stand out from the dense competition is not a simple task. Here, it’s the time to think different and act differently that your competitors had not even seen their dreams also.
In this case, you need to understand what the customers want from you, your obligation how to cater the demand and how you can resolve their problem in systematic way. Creating brand awareness is necessary if you want to be on the top.
Security risk is on danger
We live in an era where every single thing is going digitally. While filling various online forms its mandatory for us to give our personal information, paying bills online requires our banking information and many more where our personal information are on stake. Here, a company should invest more in the security field as, these information are the crucial asset which no one want to disclose with wrong person.
Here, you have to get updated to new malwares which can harm your site and theirs solution regarding them. Use http encryption a good firewall and best antivirus softwares and even work with good web security team who can give best solutions to reduce the risk.
Ad restrainers
People are fed up with the ad system that sometimes it interrupt them a lot while working their work that they forcefully use softwares which restraint ad to pop up on their screen. It is a big loss to the marketers. If there is unseen by their customers then there is no use of posting their ads.
To overcome this problem marketers find out a new trick, where they use native advertising. In this type of advertising, these ads can only by relevant customers. As there are options or features available in which only targeted people can see your ad and no one else. This result in incrementent of leads i.e. is main goal of the organistion.
Ads getting expensive
When it comes to paid advertising, the objective is that you get the worthy result that you spending money on each add. In other words, we are talking about higher ROI. If spending in lakhs on ad and in return not getting or earning enough profit then it’s a loss which nobody want to incur. And every year Google and facebook increase their price for posting their post.
So, digital marketer has to take in notice, to whom our ad is showing whether they are interested audience or not and many more aspect that should be taken into consideration while posting paid ad. Because for every ad you are paying and in return you not getting profit then it is a totally waste.
Over focus on keywords
In the past, bloggers give more emphasis on keywords and try to incorporate in their post as maximum so that if Google’s spider comes to crawl to their site then it will catch their keyword from which they want to get their page appear on the top. Through this, the quality of content has to suffer a lot.
But this trick will get fail now because time to time google change their algorithm. Updated algorithm is that google crawl the page and analyze the whole content is related to the topic or not. That’s why, now more emphasis is given more on quality of content.
In reality, change is integral part of society and accepting that change and transformed the challenges coming from the change into an opportunity is a skill which is not difficult to acquire. Challenges exist in every profession, nothing remain same and accepting the change gracefully is really a very beautiful thing in the profession.
Future in digital marketing in India
In India, digital marketing knocked the door in 2010, when there was a big boom of Flipkart and Snapdeal. And people accepted the online shopping very excitingly and happily and at the same time, people also welcomed Facebook as a big social platform where they loved to share their events or day socially. And many more came but they create much needed buzz for themselves.
Now, India is seem to be a potential country where companies can explore and expand their business throughout the world. Many companies see India as a good source of place of business where there is demand of new technology, employment and have government support. So, now India is house of opportunity and ready to accept the change peacefully. India is on a verge of accepting challenges and wants to emerge as a developed country and set a niche in world.
Coming on the topic of social media, India would be on the top most position where not only youngsters but also elders too are big fan of social media and have accounts on various social channels and enjoying the benefit from these platforms. And spend most of their time on the social platforms in gathering information and for their enjoyment purpose also. So, entrepreneurs can see social platform a massive tool to influence the prospective customers and one of the easiest way to make healthy and direct relationship with them. It gives the feeling of belongingness to their customers. It requires a strong and quality content which can influence the customers and describe their product in attractive manner. Social media is a great hub for exploring new customers and adding brand value to their name which give a big boost to the business.
Even, Indian government is also taking many initiatives to promote people to go digital. They introduced many apps such as BHEEM, UPI etc. where they focuses on paying bills digitally and to encourage audience as they give various discounts and promotional vouchers.
Role of a Digital Marketer
The performance accepted from a digital marketer is to increase the lead generation and add the brand value into the company’s name and in result, company is being benefitted with huge customer base. All these to be done using the advantage of digital. He/ she have to use different digital channels or in best combination of. Some of digital channels are SEO, content writing, pay per click, email marketing etc.
The main goal of digital marketer is increase the traffic on website whether it is from paid or organic and turns them into ultimate customer. There is no set rule which defines the best combination of digital channels. It is up to the digital marketer that how he analyse the market and go through various metrics that are available from various analytics tools and find out the best cluster of digital channels. A talented digital marketer, analysis the various opportunities available at present and utilizes the best possible way.
I’m Ready to Try Digital Marketing. Now What?
If you’re already doing digital marketing, it’s likely that you’re at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.
That’s why we created Most Advanced Digital Marketing Course — a step-by-step & a basic to advance level Course to help you build a great future in Digital Marketing & to build a better digital marketing strategy that’s truly effective for your business needs, whether you’re a complete beginner or have a little more experience.
