TOP DIGITAL MARKETING TRAINING CENTER IN KOCHI
Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is any and all marketing efforts that rely on electronic devices, and in extension, the internet.
It’s the group of activities that a company (or individual) performs online to attract new business opportunities, create relationships, and develop a brand identity.
Digital Marketing is very diverse and versatile.
The sheer amount of tools, data and channels available on the internet creates opportunities for marketers to deliver effective content to specific people, through personalization.
Are you looking for a more direct advertising strategy for a very particular audience, that will help your brand to grow?
Well, Digital Marketing strategies such as using emails or sending out ads in specific social media groups can attract a very niche audience with a tailored message based on their intentions.
Are you looking forward to advertising your company to a mass market, garner massive appeal and brand awareness?
Video ads and regular ads on social media applications and search engines should put your brand in front of millions of people.
Regardless of the type of audience you want to reach and how niche your product may be, you can easily find the public that you want.
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
Although you may occasionally see the terms “digital marketing” and “inbound marketing” used interchangeably, it’s essential to understand they’re not the same thing.
Digital marketing is a much more general term that applies to any marketing tactics involving digital media, platforms, or communication methods.
That said, inbound marketing is actually a type of digital marketing, especially as compared to outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing is probably what you think of when you picture a more traditional marketing approach. Think marketing tactics that attempt to reach as many people as possible, regardless of whether they’ve shown interest in the advertised product.
Examples include offline approaches like trade shows and cold calls, as well as online tactics like old-school banner ads and untargeted email blasts.
On the other hand, inbound marketing is about focused strategies designed to reach an ideal audience of potential customers.
These are people who have either shown active interest in the type of solution being sold or are struggling with pain points the solution could address.
Inbound marketing content is designed to be helpful, entertaining, or otherwise valuable to this audience.
Popular examples of effective inbound marketing techniques include subject-specific blogs, ebooks, videos, social media posts, and web-based seminars.
Why Your Company Needs Digital Marketing
Not all the people that have told you that Digital Marketing is the greatest thing since sliced bread are wrong.
A single place where you can have access to unlimited information, leads, and potential customers is an offer that no one should look over.
If you are not utilizing Digital Marketing, you are giving up on an incredibly lucrative marketing space.
That said, the most important reason for why your company needs to use Digital Marketing is simple: the internet.
The online world allows brands to communicate with all of their clients and possible clients. You don’t even need to be in the same country to find and engage your public.
And the technology turned simple phones, designed to make calls, into true computers with all the access the user needs to connect with other people. Apps, emails and websites are literally in the palm of their hands.
Smartphones are incredibly popular, especially among Millennials and Generation Z. With applications like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat taking up hours in their days, companies have very much found a direct link to their lives.
Facebook is a very famous social media site that has over 2 billion users and is a popular choice among companies to market their products.
Ads play before videos on Facebook, and it also has sponsored posts that appear on everyone’s news feed.
Instagram is another incredibly famous and popular social media site that companies use to market to a wide age group.
Although Instagram is mostly a photo and video sharing platform, companies are still able to make use and take advantage of it.
The best part about websites like Instagram and Facebook is that they all have a very wide and massive age demographic. So, on the same site, you can reach customers that are in their teens or customers that are reaching retirement age.
With such a massive reach, advertising for companies is often like shooting fish in a barrel.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools for any company to use. And to prove our point, here are some of the benefits of using Digital Marketing.
1. The most measurable form of marketing
Let’s start with what is possibly the most obvious benefit of using Digital Marketing: you can track it.
We all know that the only way to ensure that a marketing strategy is working is to check its success over time. Since everything on the internet runs on numbers and algorithms, it is easy to keep track of just how effective a marketing strategy really is.
Although that may be a little difficult with more traditional mediums, it is very simple measuring the effectiveness of a strategy with Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing analytics takes away the guessing games related to traditional forms of marketing.
2. The most cost-effective marketing technique
Other than being able to track all of your posts, along with all of the likes, comments, and shares that it receives, it is also the most cost-effective marketing technique.
Now it is important to note that Digital Marketing is comparatively cheaper than most traditional forms of marketing.
While there was once a paywall between major companies and smaller ones in terms of advertising and exposure, that is no longer the case. Nowadays, smaller companies can get the attention of people that they otherwise could not.
Competing with bigger companies for the ad space in most forms of traditional marketing can be almost impossible for smaller businesses.
This is something that they can cover with the help of Digital Marketing, as they can reach an audience of their choice with minimal effort.
3. Allows you to choose any audience
Speaking of choosing your audience, another great benefit of Digital Marketing is that it can be as specific or broad as you want.
You can find specific groups or forums on social media websites like Instagram or Reddit to market to a very niche audience.
You can also market to a very broad audience through internet ads or sponsored posts on Facebook and Instagram. No matter who your target demographic is, you are sure to find them through Digital Marketing.
Other than directly marketing to your audience, you can also make use of influencer marketing, which allows you to directly tap into a specific market through mediators and familiar faces.
Sometimes influencers need the support of sponsors, and to help them, users will often follow the links they provide.
Moreover, getting a respected figure in the community you are tapping into can grow trust for your brand.
4. Everyone is already there
A common problem that people face with traditional forms of marketing is the question “Will anyone see it?”.
Most crowded places in the city are very expensive to rent. With Digital Marketing, you don’t have to worry about such a thing.
With billions of people using the internet and social media daily, the question is no longer will anyone see it, but rather when.
Print ads and other forms of traditional advertising also have a limit on just how many people they can reach.
No matter how big the network might be, there is a cap on just how many people a traditional marketing strategy can connect to.
On the other hand, Digital Marketing strategies have no peak of exposure and can grow along with the company itself.
5. Customers start their buying journey on the internet
Customers depend on the internet for everything, including their buying options and choices.
For more and more customers the buying journey starts with research and insight into the product or service. What better place to find out more about something than the internet?
Since the term “Google it” has become such a common part of our language, the first instinct of most people is to search for something on the internet.
A study published by Bazaarvoice in 2018 registered that 82% of smartphone owners consult the internet on purchases they are about to make.
That is the goal of designing a great Digital Marketing strategy: you can be the answer that these people are looking for.
6. The message can be customized
Another big advantage of Digital Marketing is that this strategy allows you to customize your message to the public.
Advertising today is different from the old days. Back then, when you wanted to talk to you public, you needed a generic message, that could be used in mass media such as billboards, TV broadcasts, flyers, etc.
The conversation with the public was not so effective, once you were talking to people of different genders, ages, interests.
Now, you can target groups by their similarities, customizing the message and making it more real and directed to them.
Email marketing, online advertising, niche marketing: all of these strategies can be customized to reach the audience that you want.
Best Digital Marketing Strategies
Now that you have a better understanding of Digital Marketing and how it is important for your company, we can move on to marketing strategies.
There are various types of Digital Marketing, each aimed to help a company in a specific area.
Each type has a different objective and is based on specific channels. It’s really important to mention that they are not mutually exclusive.
Every company, before starting its marketing, has to come up with a proper marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy often consists of all sorts of planning, from the financial side of marketing to the more intricate planning of software that they will use.
A good Digital Marketing strategy can go a long way in getting your company and brand the attention that it needs.
Choosing the right Digital Marketing strategy can be very difficult, seeing how each of them has its specific utility as well as its downfalls.
Therefore, if you are wondering what some of the best marketing strategies to use are, here is a list of the most effective Digital Marketing strategies for any company.
#1. Social media marketing
Social Media Marketing is possibly the most popular Digital Marketing trend of the current generation. It can be very hard to ignore the sheer force that social media has become over the past decade.
Applications like Snapchat and Instagram allow users to connect with their friends and even celebrities. But it is also a great place for brands to show off their products and services, seeing how both the platforms rely on people sharing short videos or photos.
Other sites like Reddit rely greatly on the power of groups that share a common interest, making it a place for companies to know about the public’s current perception of their brands and publish content
These social media platforms only scratch the surface in terms of what Social Media Marketing can achieve. With over 2 billion people connected to each other through platforms like Facebook, social media cannot be ignored.
Nearly every company relies on social media to market their brand and for a good reason. To quote Todd Howard from Bethesda, “it just works.”
Since social media is so massive and branches out into various other platforms, it is difficult to be certain about which social media site to use.
The general rules fall into Facebook being the biggest social platform for any product regardless, while Instagram relies only on visual content and attracts more teenagers and young adults.
So, even though marketing is rarely about absolutes, we can certainly say that if you have a brand that’s targeted toward young adults, you need to be on Instagram.
There are many more social networks around: LinkedIn is focused on professional interactions, TikTok is a brand new contender and there’s always a new one just around the corner.
The “secret” to success in Social Media Marketing is having a valuable message on the right social network and to keep the conversation with your audience alive.
It’s a two-way communication platform. And people love to chat.
#2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a specific form of marketing that caters directly to people and what they are looking for. This can be done by two ways: buying ad space on search results page or by SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
When you use ad space you basically pay the search engine — oftentimes Google — for ad space on specific pages.
This means that your page will not appear as a regular search result and will be visibly different from the rest. This technique also applies to social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, seeing how both rely heavily on a search bar.
On the other hand, SEO is a organic way to attract more traffic to your blog or site by offering to the public relevant content that clarifies their doubts.
To better understand this concept, stay with us through this article.
#3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a very powerful Digital Marketing strategy. This is a set of techniques that optimize your blog or site to rank better in search engines, like Google and Bing.
This is one of the most important strategies you can do to create authority for your brand and increase your leads and clients.
SEO’s biggest goal is to rank your content higher in the search engines, increasing the organic traffic your blog or site receives. This is so relevant in a world where 90% of the people who make Google research click on the results that are shown on the first page of the engine.
If you write relevant content that answers the questions of the audience, while offering a good experience on your page, you have good chances to make it to the top of the search engine.
This allows companies with relatively less funding to still compete and acquire the exposure that they want.
#4. Content Marketing
This strategy is based on the education of the market towards the solution your company offers. Using relevant content, you can increase your clients and possible clients by educating and engaging them.
This way, they will trust in you and advocate for your brand, creating a bond of fidelity between brand and customer.
While most people think that written content is the only thing that companies use in content marketing, the truth is there are different types of content that you can use for Digital Marketing.
Since your entire audience is living in the information age, traditional marketing and advertising methods are not as effective as before.
Catchy quotes, eye-pleasing pictures, and incredibly detailed videos of your brand and its personality can reach them just the way you want.
#5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is the type of marketing where the affiliate receives a commission on every post they promote.
So an affiliate may make multiple posts and receive payments for each of these posts, based on sales they generate.
Anyone can be an affiliate: from customers to salespeople.
And if you wanna crossover strategies, you can join affiliate marketing with influence marketing. This way you’ll bring new audience by the popularity of those you invited to be affiliates.
This is often an option that companies offer to smaller influencers, like smaller YouTube channels.
#6. Blog
If you have embraced Digital Marketing as a way to get to more people and turn them into clients, you know that a website is an important tool for the process.
Blogging helps a website do its job. By posting relevant content on your blog and using the appropriate keywords, your website will be on a higher page rank at any search engine.
The higher the website ranks, the more likely it is to be seen and the more traffic you will have. That means that business blogging helps with SEO.
Providing content through a blog that answers your customers’ questions and offers real solutions, you will turn traffic into qualified leads.
By doing that you are building a relationship with those leads and nurturing them through the customer journey, which we will talk about later.
#7. Email Marketing
While each of the marketing tactics mentioned has its advantages, email marketing is the king of content and brings in an unbeatable return on investment compared to other Digital Marketing strategies.
By using email marketing, you can attract and retain customers with personalized messages that promote your content, product, and brand.
In addition, you can segment contacts and use personalization techniques to deliver important messages to your customers.
The fact is that email marketing is effective and cost-efficient. Besides, this is an incredible tool that allows you to measure the results of your campaigns.
#8. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the key to scaling your marketing production. By using marketing automation software your department can automate basic tasks and optimize its workflow.
Email marketing, social media posting, lead generation, lead nurturing workflows and metrics analysis can all be done with a marketing automation software.
Working with these tools, your team will be able to increase sales and leads, as well as decrease the customer acquisition cost.
All of this while having more information on your clients and potential clients, mapping all steps of the buyer’s journey and having more time to think about your marketing strategy instead of doing the manual work.
#9. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is perhaps one of the most critical, relevant digital marketing strategies today, so it’s crucial that you make it part of your ongoing approach.
As a methodology, it’s about more than simply driving traffic to your website and generating leads. It’s truly about making genuine connections with your potential customers and building strong long-term relationships with them.
You do this by creating content and presenting insights that deliver genuine value to your target audience.
And how do you provide value? In one of the three following ways (or any combination of them).
- Attract: Bring your audience to you by creating content and starting conversations that position you as a trustworthy authority in your field.
- Assist: Provide your audience with solutions that either directly address their most pressing pain points or answer questions they have about a topic.
- Empower: Give your audience compassionate authority-level support that helps them make solid purchasing decisions and empowers them as consumers.
When you, as a marketer or brand representative, give a consumer what they need in the form of helpful information, genuine assistance, and authentic connection, they’re much more likely to buy from you.
In this way, inbound marketing helps your brand build serious momentum.
#10. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has been a digital marketing mainstay for a long time and with good reason.
When approached correctly, it’s highly effective at driving high-quality traffic to your website and generating leads that are highly likely to convert.
Today, PPC ads — paid advertisements designed to accompany a variety of web experiences — can take a couple of different forms.
The one you’re likely most familiar with is the paid advertising that appears at the top of Google search results. However, advertisements that appear before YouTube videos, in mobile apps, and so forth also follow the PPC model.
One of the most significant advantages of PPC is it’s easy to scale your campaign to match your current budget since you only pay when someone clicks on an ad.
However, the actual cost of a particular campaign can vary greatly from one project to the next.
How much it will cost to run a particular ad depends mainly on how competitive your chosen keywords are, as you must bid on the key phrases you want.
But PPC as a digital marketing discipline is highly flexible. You can target consumers located anywhere globally, including local customers you want to attract through the doors of a brick-and-mortar business.
#11. Sponsored Content
Branded content is a huge deal in today’s digital marketing world for more reasons than one.
Not only does branding your content help boost ongoing brand recognition, but people tend to remember branded content roughly twice as long as they do standard content.
That’s because brands have more in common with people than you might realize, including distinct personalities, voices, and values.
So when you brand your content, you give it a unique identity that sets it apart from all the rest of the noise out there.
However, it’s not always time-effective or even desirable to produce all of your branded content yourself.
Sponsored content is content you pay an influencer or another brand to create or distribute on your behalf.
It offers you a great way to generate more of the type of branded content that delivers results and leverage other people’s followings to expose your brand to a larger audience.
Sponsored posts are most successful when you partner with companies, influencers, and other content creators who already specialize in topics that align with your brand.
The ideal result is material that is so in sync with your brand, it feels less like an ad and more like any other piece of helpful, entertaining content.
#12. Native Advertising
Native advertising is paid advertising that fits so seamlessly into the design of the surrounding media or website that it feels like it’s part of the experience.
Consider the way the ads you see while scrolling through your social media feeds look just like the rest of the posts versus how an old-school banner ad on a website sticks out as something that doesn’t quite belong.
While traditional online advertising can be jarring and disruptive to a person’s user experience, native advertising blends nicely into the editorial flow of the content around it.
It makes it easier to expose an audience to advertising without also making them feel intruded upon or otherwise interrupted.
Like other forms of paid advertising, native advertising can take many forms. One of the most popular, effective options is in-feed advertising that appears as part of the news feed flow on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
However, native ads can also occur as content suggestions at the ends of articles and promoted listings on SERPs or in sidebars.
#13. Online PR
Also known as digital PR, online PR is a digital marketing tactic focused on distributing select content to choice media outlets.
The idea is to boost coverage of a brand, company, product, or service and build that brand’s catalog of high-quality backlinks.
When a brand’s being talked about and linked to online, especially by trusted news sources and high-quality authorities, that’s a signal to search engines that it’s relevant and worth taking seriously.
An excellent online PR campaign also works wonders for building brand awareness and increasing a consumer’s likelihood of buying from that brand in the future.
Online PR differs from traditional PR in several fundamental ways. Traditional PR typically leverages standard media formats like radio, television, and print to spread the word about a brand and get people talking about it.
Since these methods tend to be less targeted than online alternatives, it can take longer to see the desired result.
Online PR tactics are more finely focused and use specially created content (like infographics, videos, articles, and interactive content) to reach specific audiences.
The results tend to manifest more quickly, and progress is much easier to measure thanks to extra-precise metrics and user-friendly tools.
#14. Instant Messaging Marketing
Over the years, instant messaging has become so much more than just another convenient way to keep in touch with friends, family, or colleagues.
It’s now a preferred means of communication for many people, including when communicating with businesses.
In fact, according to a recent survey by Avochato, nearly two-thirds of modern consumers — 63 percent — far prefer doing business with companies who offer text or instant message as a contact option.
Not only are instant message and text far more in step with the amount of time modern consumers spend on their phones, but they’re also more personal.
And although text and instant message are both good options for companies looking to stay connected to their customers, instant message marketing has some distinct advantages.
You’re far more likely to forget about a standard SMS text you receive from a brand about a sale or special deal.
However, an instant message integrates seamlessly with the rest of a person’s social media activity, so it’s more likely to attract a response.
Plus, instant marketing messages can transition naturally into a conversation if needed or desired, making it a terrific way to establish and maintain ongoing communication.
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