Digital marketing
is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones, social media platforms, search engines, email, etc. It represents a completely new approach to understanding customer behavior, starting from measuring metrics like downloads, likes, visits, views, comments, and interactions, and ending with evaluations, reviews, and surveys.
Digital marketing tools align with these digital technologies:
To engage in digital marketing activities, the starting point should be building an online presence for your company, by creating an attractive website that provides comprehensive information about the company. In addition, creating accounts on social media platforms to promote your products and communicate with your audience is essential.
Digital marketing is characterized by being easier, cheaper, faster, more effective, and more flexible than traditional marketing methods in terms of Ease:
It doesn't require any routine complexities or meetings; just create an account on the relevant platform to start marketing.
Lower Costs: The costs of renting a billboard or advertising space in a well-known newspaper could cover the costs of a social media advertising campaign for three months.
Speed: Your ads start appearing to your audience moments after designing and publishing them.
Effectiveness: Digital marketing gives you the advantage of customization.
When narrowing down the scope of your ads to target a specific audience based on age, country, city, and interests related to your products, you're only spending your money where it matters. Flexibility: Numerous measurement tools provide sufficient accurate information about your marketing efforts to determine which ones to continue and which ones to stop.
6 Key Steps to Begin Your E-Marketing Process Properly:
Step One: Choose the Right Audience Some may be eager to start a business without considering first, "Will anyone buy my products? Can I reach them?" When thinking about who your products are for, the typical answer should prioritize those who want and can afford them. Thus, the initial phases of marketing should focus on answering the question: Can I provide a customer base for my products? Moreover, can I reach them? So, what is the benefit of marketing a great product to people who either are not interested or interested but cannot afford it? Therefore, it is crucial that your e-marketing efforts are directed towards a demographic that desires and is capable of purchasing your product. Conduct a screening process to exclude all other categories from the general audience and target only this specific demographic.
Step Two: Know Your Customers Well Understanding your customers is not a simple or intuitive step where you can define them in one line - age, country, gender. Instead, it's a complex step that, if done properly, will make you know your customers better than they know themselves. Search your customers' minds for 5 emotional triggers that drive their buying motivations: pain, fear, hope, dream, obstacle. Use brainstorming and imagine yourself in their shoes, or design a survey using Google Forms and send it to them via email. Record any information related to the five motivators in your product market. Use Google to search for topics related to your market, read audience reviews and ratings of products in your category. Deal with an open mind as you try to understand your customers; do not limit your understanding. Whatever their assumptions and interests, you should take them into account in your e-marketing plan.
Step Three: Define Your Goal Reducing goals might seem unappealing for the enthusiasm of starting e-marketing, but focusing on the bigger goal you want to achieve helps you grow step by step. For example: Do you want to collect an email list of 500 users, or do you want to generate revenues of $10,000?
Step Four: Calculate Your Expectations Return on investment is the essence of this step. Some e-marketing methods, such as search engine advertising, require funding. So, in this step, you need to answer the following question: Will I recover the money I spend through the marketing method I will use or not? The expected return on investment will tell you whether to proceed in this direction or change to another. Expected return on investment can be calculated as follows: Expected Revenue from E-Marketing: Its Costs. In e-marketing, a ratio of 5:1 is considered good; it may vary depending on your expense structure and field of work.
Step Five: Monitor Your Competitors As the saying goes, "You don't have to reinvent the wheel," but rather "Start where others have finished." The importance of this step comes not only from giving you the opportunity to outperform your competitors but also because it saves you a lot of trial and error at the beginning of using this type of marketing. Monitor your competitors to learn from their mistakes, encourage their successful experiments, discover your distinguishing points from them, and use them in your e-marketing for your business. The most reliable way to monitor them is engagement. Act as if you were one of their customers, buy their products if possible, read others' reviews of them, browse their websites online, and subscribe to their newsletters. Notice where and when you see their ads, and follow them on their social media accounts. If you want more "legitimate spying," use a tool like Alexa Competitive Analysis to analyze traffic movement on your competitors' websites and learn about their performance in search engines.
Step Six: Chart Your Path to Achieve the Goal
E-Marketing Methods Content Marketing "Content is King" is not an empty phrase; it's one of the axioms of e-marketing. Your successful marketing message includes good, relevant content. Today, with many companies online, it's necessary for your e-marketing efforts to stand out with "content."
Content marketing
involves sharing various forms of content that meet the needs of your audience and provide them with value to attract their interest. But what's the importance of attracting the audience's interest in e-marketing? Attracting the audience's interest is vital because it brings visits to your site from search engines, gives the audience an idea about your products, provides an opportunity to communicate with the audience, thus building trust between you and them. Content takes various forms, such as a blog post, a post, a video, an infographic, a book, or a catalog. Start content marketing from day one, and it will achieve your goal in the future and give you organic traffic from search engines.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is using these platforms to attract your audience's attention to your website by creating engaging content that encourages them to share it. There are many social media platforms experiencing continuous growth, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, so don't stress yourself by managing many of them and focus on the ones that matter to you the most and expand your e-marketing activities there. Key Steps in Social Media Marketing: Create an account on the most useful social media sites for you and pay attention to choosing a cover image, putting your website link in the post's image to represent a link leading to your website. Include pictures of your products or use Facebook templates like "Business" and "Shop" to make it easier to post your special offers on your page and display your products in a store format. Social media sites are social in nature, so when using them for e-marketing, don't limit yourself to posting commercial content, and use a 3:1 ratio (1 commercial content, 3 useful or entertaining content) in determining the quality of the posts. Avoid being generic in non-commercial content you provide and make it relevant to your company's field (for example, if you're using e-marketing to sell sports equipment, don't share learning-inspired phrases). Learn when your followers are most active using a service like Facebook Insights, then schedule content posting using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to keep the content flowing regularly at those times. Engage with your followers by answering their questions, responding to their comments, and addressing their complaints. If your budget allows, use social media advertising, and be precise in targeting the category that the ad appears to match your target audience. Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing means marketing through one of the influencers on social media platforms (who has a following and is trusted). This method of e-marketing is characterized by the high credibility it provides for your products. Instead of the audience receiving your promotional message directly through an advertisement or email, they receive it in the form of an objective review from an influencer they love, follow, and trust. The idea of e-marketing through influencers relies on leveraging the growing popularity of influential personalities on social media platforms. Major companies compete to win top influencers to promote their products. Before starting to use this type of e-marketing, you need to consider how much of your marketing budget you will allocate to your influencer marketing campaign. The answer to this question will impact your available choices, as the higher the number of influencer followers, the higher the amount they will charge for promoting you.
Banner Ads
Banner ads online, in their simplest description, resemble billboards we see on roads or main streets. In addition to images, banner ads may contain texts or short video clips. Banner ads give you the opportunity to reach your target audience while they spend time reading the news, watching videos on YouTube, or browsing various other websites they wish to visit. Thus, this method of e-marketing stands out as it helps you reach your audience anywhere on the internet. Digital advertising networks like Google Ads enable you to create your banner ads, acting as intermediaries between advertisers and websites that own advertising space for sale.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO means optimizing your site properly with the aim of raising your ranking in search results when people search for keywords related to your product market. In other words, making your site understandable by search engines. Improving your site involves making changes to individual pages on your website to make the content of each page clear and consistent, enabling search engines to understand the content of the pages better and faster. This leads to an increase in your ranking in search results and hence higher chances of clicking on your site. Offers and Discounts Somewhat traditional marketing solutions but good during exceptional circumstances where the project does not have enough resources to implement other marketing strategies. Offering some discounts, launching offers, even with a small margin, can be effective means to promote your project. Whether you sell services or tangible products, it's good and motivating for customers to get them for a material benefit in the form of a discount.