It’s no great secret that, in order to run a successful business, you need to have more customers. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, because they give it a reason to exist and provide more profits. However, if you want more customers, you need to make sure more people know that your business exists. After all, people can’t buy a product they’ve never heard of. This is where digital marketing can come into play. So, how does digital marketing help your business and how can you make it more effective? Let’s find out.
By Team Savant
Image: Birgith Roosipuu
What is Digital Marketing?
First, it’s a good idea to define what digital marketing actually is. According to a quick Google search and an Oxford definition, marketing is “the activity of presenting, advertising and selling a company’s products or services in the best possible way.”
In other words, marketing is how you make sure that as many people as possible know about your product or service, and that they know how it can benefit them. As the name suggests, digital marketing is when you do all of this by using the internet.
This is in contrast to traditional marketing methods, which use physical or analogue devices like billboards, newspapers, and even the radio. Television ads technically use digital media, but because they predate the internet and often use offline media, they don’t count.
Digital marketing can involve a lot of different strategies, many of which we’ll talk about in this article. They include:
Content marketing
Affiliate marketing
Social media marketing
Influencer marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Internet ads
Email campaigns
The Benefits of Digital Marketing For Your Business
The simple fact is that digital marketing isn’t an optional feature of running a business anymore. It has proven to be one of the most effective ways to boost your customer numbers and improve your marketing efforts. Without digital marketing, it’s easy for your business to fall by the wayside.
Even smaller businesses can benefit from investing in digital marketing strategies.
Marketing as a whole includes market research, promoting a company, and trying to sell more products. By using digital marketing strategies, you can reach a much larger audience, which gives you more opportunities to sell more products.
You can also make almost any business an international business, especially if you sell physical products that can be shipped to other countries or digital products and services that can be delivered online. This means that you have more opportunities to make sales and further your business into other countries. You can also work from anywhere in the world, especially if you work on a digital platform.
Digital marketing is incredibly useful for market research, because it allows you to directly communicate with your customers. This means that you can find out more about your target audience and potentially tweak your product design and your marketing strategies to be more effective.
Marketing is most effective when it’s more visible. If you’re using traditional marketing, you might use billboards in busy areas to display your advertisements to as many people as possible. Digital marketing reaches people when they’re at home, when they’re relaxing, and all through the day, no matter where they are.
These are just a few of the benefits of digital marketing, so how can you use it?
Outsourcing Your Digital Marketing
One of the best things you can do to improve your digital marketing efforts is to outsource them to another company. A digital marketing agency has the right tools and connections to massively boost your digital marketing efforts. They are experts in the field, so rather than trying to market using your own knowledge, you can invest in a digital marketing strategy that will actually work.
An agency will help you come up with a campaign to reach as many people as possible. They will first engage in market research to make sure that you’re targeting the right customers. A targeted marketing campaign will be considerably more effective than a general campaign that hopes to appeal to everyone. After all, if you try to appeal to everyone, you don’t really stand out to anyone.
They will increase brand awareness, meaning that more people will have heard about your brand. They will also create leads that will actually lead to customers, rather than dad ends. This can boost sales and help you have more loyal customers overall, so people will come back for more.
When hiring a digital marketing agency, make sure to set a budget before you start and to come up with some goals. This will allow them to be more targeted and ensure that your resources all go to the right place.
Because marketing can generate more sales and profits, you can then extend your contract with the added income from new customers and sales. This allows you to constantly grow your company over time, improving your marketing efforts as it goes.
Coming Up With a Strategy
One of the first and most important steps you can take when thinking about how to revamp your digital marketing is to come up with a strategy to start with. You can’t just throw things at the wall and hope they will stick. This is why market research is so important.
First, you need to know your audience. Sometimes it’s fairly obvious when you’re trying to work out who will be most interested in your product or service. If you’re selling toys, then children and parents are going to be more likely to buy them. Adults might be more interested in electronic devices. The design and cost of your product will also inform who you will market to.
Next, come up with a strategy and a few different techniques that will appeal most to your target audience. You might also create promotional deals to win more customers over with discounts.
When you have a strategy, you need to have a goal as well as steps to reach that goal. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, then mass advertising and links with influencers and other companies might be helpful. If you want to get more repeat customers, then email campaigns and loyalty promotions will be ideal.
Improving Your Website
If you want to improve your general digital platform and identity, it’s worth starting with your website. Your business website can act as a shop, a portfolio, and a marketing machine. However, it’s only as effective as your website is functional.
So, make sure that your website is easy for customers to navigate through and use. You also need to make it easy and pleasant for people to buy products and read more information about your company.
Once you know your website is working properly, you need to maintain it. If you have a blog, keep it active and regularly updated. A blog can be a fantastic tool for SEO and content marketing, as it can make your website more visible to search engines. This means that, when people search for something on the internet, they are more likely to find your website.
This, combined with paying for ads on Google, do wonders for getting more people on your website.
Social Media Marketing
Another thing to consider is your social media presence. The type of social media you use might change depending on your target audience. For example, older adults might prefer Facebook, while young people often use TikTok and professionals might use LinkedIn.
Your social media profile should be regularly updated with relevant, interesting posts. This is a great place to talk about business news, promotional deals, and upcoming events, as well as to help people get to know your business more. Some companies post videos of their workday, which can be interesting for people to watch and raise brand awareness.
You can also use social media to reach a larger audience by linking up with influencers. Find influencers who have a similar or complementary niche to your target audience. For example, if you sell cookware, then cooking influencers might be a perfect match. They can then offer specific promotions and talk about your products in exchange for a sponsorship.
Repeat Customers
As has been mentioned a few times, repeat customers are a specific target for marketing campaigns, and it’s well worth trying to get more repeat customers. It’s often much easier and cheaper to get people to return to your business than to try to get completely new customers. This is especially true if people are happy with your services in the first place.
People like to be sure that they will receive a good product or service, so proven past services can be helpful. You can further incentivize customers to return by offering loyalty programs so that they can earn discounts by buying more products or referring new customers.
Another strategy is to have special discounts on your social media or emails, so people can benefit from following your profile or signing up with their email address.