With the evolution of modern technologies, how businesses conduct has also evolved. Small and big businesses have moved towards digital platforms from traditional media. Businesses around the world have become aware of the many benefits of going digital. They are not only making changes to the existing business models but are also beefing up their digital marketing strategies to better target their niche market.
Apart from huge enterprises who have the resources to make increased investment in digital platforms, small and medium business owners have also seen an opportunity of capturing this fast-growing and profitable online market. Especially with the ongoing pandemic, most businesses have shifted at home. People are on the computer more than ever, browsing through unlimited content across markets.
This is a great time to utilize the digital platform and fuel your business with digital marketing strategies to reach your target market. With correct strategies and planned techniques, anyone can grow their business online.
Digital Marketing is here to stay. And it’s only going to get bigger. So if you’re looking to switch from traditional means of marketing to digital platforms, now is the time.
Role of Digital Marketing
1Wider Reach and Target Audience: Incorporating digital strategies and expanding your business in new and old geographical locations anywhere in the world. By using digital marketing techniques and tools one can easily market their business based on location, demographic, age, etc.
This is a great tool for businesses trying to reach a wider audience to sell their products and services. Different from what traditional media does, digital platforms are now accessed by millions of people around the world that gives access to retaining information to your business and as well.
2Brand Reputation: If you can convey your brand story and deliver great content to your target audience it helps you build a stronger brand reputation and trust. Once you’re able to gauge the attention of your customers and can deliver great services, they will turn into permanent clients. Once that trust forms, you build on that and provide better and many improved results moving forward. Your customers relate to you and your product.
Small or big business, effective digital marketing solutions will help you gain trust and build a strong brand name apart from its logo and design.
3Cost-Effective: Small and medium-sized businesses do not have the resources as huge as large enterprises to market their products and services. Tv ads, print ads, even billboards are expensive and not all businesses can afford to spend large amounts of money on these funnels of marketing.
That’s where digital marketing plays an important role. It reaches a wider audience with half the capital needed in other forms of marketing. Digital marketing experts offer solutions to promote your business cost-effectively more efficiently.
4Higher Revenues and Improved ROI: Isn’t it great to see your business flourish. That’s exactly what digital marketing aims to do. With effective strategies and solutions, one can reach a wider audience and have increased conversion rates which ultimately increases revenue. Businesses using digital marketing are expected to grow and convert much faster and efficiently while those using traditional marketing channels.
As for improved ROI, digital marketing helps enhance brand value and revenues. It helps generate better and improved ROI. There are various easy to use tools that help to track and monitor your growth and results.
It’s very important to have a steady plan and regular activity on digital platforms to keep a steady continuous flow of traffic that will convert into leads.
Types Of Digital Marketing
Let’s take a rundown to some of the most useful digital marketing channels and solutions for business growth.
1Social Media Management: Social media management enables you to create, publish and manage your social content across platforms. Various free and paid tools help you manage your content and social media accounts through only one channel. With millions of people using social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest businesses need to leverage the reach of these platforms for their business. And social media tools such as Hootsuite, creators Studio etc. help experts in social media management for different accounts and brands on one platform.
Whereas talking about Leveraging YouTube, It has come far from just a video sharing channel. Irrespective of the industry Video content sharing has become all the rage. YouTube also gives brand accounts and users a chance to monetize their channel.
Social Media has become an important part of digital marketing. Various new platforms such as Tiktok as well have gained much attention from users as well as marketers. Leveraging these platforms for brand reputation, brand growth and awareness is the sure path to success. Think, Strategize and Implement. Every industry who wants to tap into a new arena, this is it.
2Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It’s one of the digital marketing tools that optimize your website to rank higher in search engines which in turn increases organic traffic to your website. Websites, blogs, articles, classifieds, etc. all benefit from using SEO to optimize your content for better reach and visibility.
Search Engine Optimization is approached in two ways to generate qualified traffic to your web page.
1On-Page: On-page SEO is the content that exists on site which one can locate when viewing the website. Such as setting up heading and title tags, content optimizations, performance optimizations and setting up meta descriptions and permalinks.
2Off-Page: All the activity that takes place outside the website is called off-page. Keyword research, backlink generation, social bookmarking, business listing threads are some of the off-page content that makes a website reachable.
Thorough research is needed for optimizing your website and incorporating SEO techniques. And making informed decisions will help you rank higher on search engines and make your website stand out.
1Influencer Marketing: It is not a new concept and has been around for a while now. Yet many people don’t understand its importance. Influencer marketing mixes traditional and digital marketing where celebrities endorse your product or service through a content-driven campaign on their social media pages. It includes not only celebrities but influencers from different niches who have a considerable amount of social media following and audience. This helps your product or service to stand out and reach a wider set of audience which otherwise would be difficult to reach.
Thus, it’s wise to incorporate influencer marketing in your digital marketing strategy to have a wider audience and better brand visibility.
2Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC is a method that helps to drive traffic to your website through posting ads on different channels by paying every time your ad gets clicked. Google ads are one of the most used and famous platforms for promoting your brand. It allows you to pay for top slots on its search engine with a pay per click on your ad.
3Social Media Advertising: Instagram and Facebook both have paid advertising to drive traffic to your website and social pages. It allows you to post ads and customize on the basis of videos, images, carousel ads and target them according to locations, demographics, etc.
4LinkedIn Marketing: For all those B2B professionals, this is the place to go! LinkedIn is one of the main hot spots for professionals networking inside and outside their respective industry. This is where all the action is. It not only helps you generate leads, build awareness, drive traffic but it’s the place that helps you to connect and engage with the community and market professionals to drive actions. LinkedIn is also said to have a higher lead generation rate than Facebook and Twitter in terms of B2B market.
5Development: Developing an effective website and mobile app as per your requirements is imperative to sustain your business. Apart from that, it helps reputation building and visibility that also earn consumer trust.
6Website Development: Considering the number of time people spends on internet surfing, it’s only fair to say that if you got a business you have to have a website. No matter how small or big your business might be, having a website is crucial. If you do not have one, you may be losing potential online customers. the 24/7 presence of a website gives consumers unlimited access. It helps them gain information and knowledge about the product and make an informed choice, which ultimately might turn into sales. It helps you create credibility and trust among other millions of websites online. When a customer can view your products, it becomes easy for them to choose which ultimately drives sales.
With millions of mobile phone users, businesses should look to optimize their website not only for desktop users but make it mobile friendly as well.
7Mobile App Development: Small businesses who do not have enough capital, developing a website is a crucial and viable option. But businesses and brands that have higher revenue and capital should go mobile apps that make accessibility even easier. Mobile apps are a great way to have a personal connection with your customers. It makes checkouts even easier without the friction that it creates on websites. Apps allow you to feed your information and preferences and makes shopping an easier task. filling out information repeatedly on websites cuts down on apps.
It increases customer retention, improves operational efficiency, reduces operational costs and increases the frequency.
Developing a website and mobile apps drive growth and build brand growth and reputation.
Content Marketing: Creating and strategizing content for generating leads, brand awareness and brand reputation. Content marketing focuses on generating useful, impacting and interesting images, videos, text, gifs, etc to make the brand stand out and make an impact.
1Content Strategy: It’s the process of transforming business goals and objectives into meaningful content to achieve the desired goals. There is so much information available at hand, that it may become cumbersome to pile it down to brief content for social media or any other platform. Thus strategizing means where this content can be scaled down and presented in a visually pleasing way is what is called content strategy. It takes a good expert to understand the business goals and then direct techniques and ideas to make content the driving force.
Content strategy has four elements:
Information: What are the actual messages and you wish to present it? Is it informative, entertaining, Just a practical message or a combination of all?
Context: What is the context of posting the content? What are you trying to achieve? Who is your target audience?
Medium: What are the different channels you’re going to use? How are you going to present the said information to each?
Form: Is the content going to be plain text? or you’re going to be showing it through images, videos, gifs, etc.
2Blog Writing: Writing and publishing blogs on your website or other platforms helps you gain expertise among industry experts. Blog writing should be done keeping in mind specific keywords and SEO strategies so that content can be optimized to increase traffic and generate leads. Not only should the content be optimized but images as well. Always use high definition and high-quality images.
3Video Content: Marketing content with visuals to engage your audience through informative, entertaining or a mix of both content. With so many online users, presenting content more engagingly becomes the norm. According to a study, normal human beings’ attention span while surfing the internet is about 4-5 secs. Keeping that in mind content creators should create visual content that’s not only able to give out the desired information but is also entertaining and engaging to keep the user from swiping ahead.
Thus, it’s very important to curate content that’s precise, brief yet informative. It should be optimized through SEO techniques to increase organic traffic and generate leads.
Visual Production (Digital filming and Shoot): Video content has been dominating digital marketing for a while now. Video marketing is not only engaging but interesting. With various platforms available it’s important to create visual content which can be utilized in various platforms.
It’s extremely crucial to set goals and expectations before you shoot a video. It’s a long process and planning is a must.
1Purpose of the video: Is it educational? Is it for brand awareness? For internal use? Or more specific reasons like customer conversion?
Target Audience: New Customers? Existing Customers? Employees?
Target Platforms: Broadcast? Website? YouTube? Instagram/Facebook?
Outcome: Subscribers? Conversions? Sales?
The key to creating a planned pre-production schedule is to understand the needs and outcomes one expects. It’s very handy to have short scripts, long scripts, extended versions, etc. so that the video can be used in multiple platforms accordingly. Irrespective of the industry a good visual content carefully created to cater audiences on multiple platforms is a win. Never overdo it. Keep it simple yet elaborate.
But always create a plan with your goals and desired outcomes to target production in a similar way.
From the point of view of business growth, nothing is more engaging than a well-shot video which is not only informative but also engaging. Humans react more to visual content now more than ever, thus it’s a great way to retain old customers and new customers while enchanting the existing ones.
Branding: Creating a design, logo, name is critical to brand recognition for any business, small or big. Creating a unique identity for your business and marketing that story helps create a unique experience in the mind of consumers. Implementing great branding techniques helps businesses stand out. It distinguishes them apart from their competitors in the market. Branding changes how people perceive your brand which drives brand awareness. Branding increases business value, recognition, generates new customers, improves employees pride in the company and creates trust in the market.
A few things that are a part of the branding and sets your business apart are-
1Branding Kit: It focuses on the details of brand identity. Elements such as the brand logo, colour palette, fonts, etc make the brand visibility. Creating a unique experience through creative symbolization, a unique colour that defines your brand.
2Packaging: Branding kit sets the brand apart and so does packaging. It’s more than just the face of your brand, It’s about design, products, display, and promotion otherwise. If you put efforts in making the product deliverable intact it drives customer satisfaction and creates trust in your brand.
3360° in Marketing: A complete brand strategy for promoting the business across all platforms. It’s a marketing campaign that reaches all potential customers across platforms. Businesses that need to establish themselves from the start of the ones who want to go for rebranding to give a fresh outlook, 360-degree marketing is a great strategy to brand building.
Small or huge businesses, digital marketing will surely transform your business. It will not only make you move ahead and tap into a new market industry but will prove a great decision for business growth. Scaling up digital strategies and using appropriate technique will surely get you ahead in the game.
Digital marketing will enhance customer communication by helping your business communicate with potential customers on a global level. Distributing content through various channels on social media like instagram, Facebook, twitter, pinterest, LinkedIn, and others will help you get your message delivered. Images, videos, memes, reels, titbits, are some of the great ways to engage your customer. Innovation and smart technologies will enhance your efforts in getting the business the right amount of bump and growth in the right direction. Always keep transparency between you and the customer to build trust and mutual recognition of that effort.
Apart from the social media content strategies and ads, using great tools to track your progress will help you analyse your growth and manage your resources accordingly. Timely feedback from customers will help improve any lags and work for better customer service.
Triffid Marketing is a full service branding agency that specialises in the various services mentioned in the blog. We have a great team of experts ready to engage and strategize to scale up your business and take you to the right track for the business growth you’ve been looking for.