No doubt, you understand what marketing is – raising awareness and generating interest for a business or brand (in a nutshell!), but what’s Digital Marketing? Of course, it’s another form of marketing, and it relates to everything done online relating to marketing a business or brand, but perhaps you’d like to know more about what’s involved? This guide to Digital Marketing by Armeva will give you all the information you’re looking for.
With nearly 5 billion people using the internet across the world on a daily basis, offline marketing is no longer enough to get a business or brand in front of the right audience. The opportunity for online marketing is enormous but so is the competition. By using Digital Marketing, you improve the visibility of your brand or business online and because of the power of technology and data, you can easily ensure that you reach your target demographic. It is definitely something that any business with an online presence should adopt as part of its overall marketing strategy.
We’ve summarized that in the opening paragraphs but let’s delve a little deeper. Digital Marketing (sometimes referred to as online marketing) relates to any type of marketing that happens on the Internet. This means a business or brand can market themselves using their social media channels, or through a blog, on their website or through other websites to get their messages across.
The reason that any online business needs Digital Marketing is to connect with their audience, to gain leads, to grow a community and the biggest prize of all, to increase sales.
There are lots of ways of doing the above, but mainly it’s through sharing relevant, useful and engaging content, images, video, multimedia and more.
In short no but it is similar. It is not the same, but it does come under the same umbrella as Digital Marketing and should be treated as part of any overall marketing strategy.
The main difference between advertising and marketing is that advertising is paid for, whereas marketing activity isn’t (or isn’t directly!).
The Importance
If you’re a business or brand online and you’re not using any form of Digital Marketing, you might be lucky and just rely on organic search methods that take people to your website, but success without any marketing is quite rare. Especially as there’s so much competition out there. Even if you don’t publicize what you do and you still generate business, imagine how quickly you’d scale up your business if you used the power of Digital Marketing? The truth is that Digital Marketing will always increase your audience reach. Employing clever Digital Marketing tactics will target new customers and home in on your audience too, keeping your brand or business high in mind. The other big bonus of Digital Marketing is it’s easily measurable, with so many online tools that show you how your business is performing, web traffic, conversions, click-throughs, likes on social media, when your content is shared etc. It’s far more measurable than offline marketing!
Cost-wise, Digital Marketing is generally more cost-efficient than offline marketing but of course, it depends on what you spend offline. However, social media networks, Google and other search engines have cheaper advertising options with their PPC (pay per click) ads. Every time you use PPC, you only pay for each time a customer clicks on the ad, and you set the budget, you set the pace – so if you want to pause, deactivate, or delete your ad, you can – no questions asked!
Bonus of Using Digital Marketing
Bonus of using Digital Marketing is that it delivers the right leads because it uses demographic information, so with technology, it gets your information in front of your customer. You have more opportunity to convert those leads. For example, take the social media networks. All of these have tracking and metric information, so you can narrow down your Digital Marketing efforts to include the location you’re looking at, the gender, the age of your ideal customer, and even more! You can also look at their interests, the time of day that they use social media, marital status, job type and other useful information. Then there are keywords. These are the terms that your customers use to search for what you’re offering. If you use those keywords within the body of your content, your product or service becomes more searchable and should appear in your customers’ search results.
If you’re wondering how to use Digital Marketing to your best advantage, we’d advise talking to a Digital Marketing Agency such as Armeva, especially if you’re unfamiliar with creating a Digital Marketing strategy and implementing it.
To start with, you should conduct a thorough online analysis of what you do marketing-wise. You should also research your competition. Check out their social media channels, where are they highly visible? Which channels gain the best engagement? What are their top performing posts? Do they use an Influencer to help promote their brand? Look at their blog, if they have one. How active is it? What do they post about? How many comments do they get? What is their website like? Is it easy to navigate and can you view it on a phone? What advertising do they use? Are they at the top of search engines for the same keywords as you? There’s so much to look at and it will take time but it’s worth doing.
Next, try and create a strategy for the type of marketing you want to use for your business. It doesn’t have to be huge, especially if you’ve never done it before. It also doesn’t have to be over an extended period of time. We’d suggest, to begin with, you create a three-month strategy to help you get to grips with how to do your own Digital Marketing. It shouldn’t be set in stone; it should always be fluid so you can add ingredients when you need to.
Advantage of Digital Marketing
There’s another advantage. Using Digital Marketing, you see what your competition does well, what they don’t do as well as you and you also see their marketing efforts. This is good for inspiration and can help to leverage your own business. However, remember, your competition can also see what you’re doing, but when you identify a gap in the market, you can quickly respond to it, that’s much harder to do offline.
Those are just a few ideas to begin with, there are more techniques and marketing activities that are ideal for getting your brand or business noticed online. Really, if you’ve never thought about Digital Marketing before and you want some help from professionals, it’s best advised to talk to an agency. At Armeva, we can tailor something to suit all budgets and as Digital Marketing is more measurable than offline marketing, you’ll start to see real, exciting results very quickly. Get in touch to discuss a Digital Marketing strategy for your business or brand, by clicking on our contact us page.
