In today’s fast-paced digital world, connecting with your audience is key, and that’s where digital marketing shines. Forget the old ways of reaching customers. Online marketing opens up a universe of possibilities through your website, mobile devices, social media, digital ads, email campaigns, and even influencer collaborations. It’s not just about selling, it’s about building your brand’s story, fostering a loyal community, and offering stellar customer service that truly resonates. Imagine your brand gaining exposure, driving traffic to your site, boosting your search engine ranking, and expanding your reach to entirely new audiences, while keeping marketing costs in check compared to traditional advertising. Get ready to transform how you connect with the world.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, allows you to connect with your audience using tools such as:
- Your website
- Mobile devices
- Social media
- Digital advertising
- E-mail marketing
- Influencer marketing
Seven Key Aspects of Digital Marketing
- Showcase your brand: Social media offers another marketing channel for creating brand awareness, relationship building, or driving new sales.
- Develop a loyal community: People enjoy being part of a business that is proactively building a lively community. For example, an online community can help you establish an emotional connection between your company and your prospects, which is essential for your long- term success.
- Improve customer service: Social media is a great feedback source. Enabling your prospects to communicate with your company and each other can greatly improve your customer service and increase brand trustworthiness.
- Increase digital exposure: Interacting on social networks can significantly increase your online presence. Social media leads to massive exposure due to its worldwide access, sharing capabilities and huge amount of daily users.
- Boost traffic in search engine rating: Social media is a major lead generator that constantly brings high volume traffic to your website. They can also help with SEO since search engines significantly reflect your social media content.
- Expand sales in reaching a new audience: Listening to your prospects on social networks can help you respond to their specific needs. This will most likely cause an increase in sales but also expand your customer base.
- Cut marketing costs: Compared to traditional channels like printer advertising, social media marketing is affordable for any business. Remember that the channel itself is free. Managing social media taking care of all the content tweets or feedback can get pretty time consuming and you need to focus primarily on your business.
Traditional vs. Digital Marketing
Traditional Marketing
- Brands communicate AT customers
- “Outbound marketing”
- Communication is one-way
- The channel audience
- The goal is to reach a wide audience for awareness and recognition
Digital Marketing
- Brands communicate WITH customers.
- “Inbound marketing”
- Communication is two-way
- The brand audience
- Shifted from a monologue to a dialogue
Permission-Based Marketing
Reaching the right target with the right messaging will help your brand stand out and make it easier to build a community–permission-based marketing makes that community building a little easier. Author and marketing expert, Seth Godin, coined the term “permission-based marketing.” He explains that consumers should have the power to choose how they ’re marketed to.
Finding ways to use permission-based marketing, your audience can opt-in by clicking “follow,” “like” or “connect.”
Since each person is actively giving you permission to send them information about your products or services, they are much more likely to buy from you.
Before social media, one of the only ways you could reach your audience was by spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to generate awareness through ads.
Social media marketing helps to level the corporate playing field. As a small business owner, you can build an audience of followers and raving fans without having to hire an advertising agency.
Your Brand and Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
- What do customers think about or how do they feel when they hear your company’s name?
- Your UVP is a promise of the unique value you deliver and what makes you different from your competition,
- A good value proposition should include:
- The benefits your products or service offers
- What makes these benefits valuable
- Your customer’s main pain point or problems
- How you uniquely solve this problem
While a big component of your digital marketing strategy will focus on your audience, you first need to understand your business. Your brand is much more than just a logo; it’s the specific perception you leave in your customers’ minds. It’s what they think about or how they feel when they hear your company’s name. It’s the core of your competitive advantage.
To be successful, your brand has to be different from every other brand. Your unique value proposition, or UVP, is a promise of the unique value you deliver and what makes you different from your competition.
What Goes into a Marketing Strategy?
Step 1 – Defining Your Goals: S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound)
Step 2 – Defining Your Audience: Demographics/Psychographics
Step 3 – Choose Your Channels: What are the best channels to reach my audience?
Step 4 – Develop Your Content Strategy: Set goals for your content mix
Step 5 – Sharing Your Content: When and how often should you post?
Step 6 – Listening and Engaging with Your Audience: Respond to each post. Prepare to face negative posts.
Step 7 – Finding Influencers: What influencers should you work with and how to connect with them?
Step 8 – Measuring, Monitoring and Evaluating Your Results: Review your goals, track success factors, analyse your metrics
What does success look like to me at this stage in my business?
- Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
2. Having a comprehensive understanding of your customers is the key to achieving many of your core business goals. Understanding who your ideal customers are, what they want , and where they spend their time online, will help you deliver strategic messaging that leads them through the sales funnel and builds long- term loyalty.
3. Choose your channels. Ask yourself: “What are the best channels to reach my audience?” Each media channel has their own demographics and psychographics.
4. Develop your content strategy. Set goals for your content mix: What are you trying to do with your post? Are you trying to build awareness? Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? Are you promoting a one – of event or sale?
5. You must manage how to successfully reach your audience. Revisit your analytics and metrics to determine what days and times work best and how often you should post.
Who uses these?
What are the target audiences for the social media platforms? Think about demographics and psychographic for the following:
- TikTok
