Digital Marketing 101 - What Every Business Needs To Know

You might have heard about digital marketing and advertise your business online. But as far as it goes, digital marketing is not as easy as it was in 2009.  As the years go by, the advancement of the technology has caused a shift in the digital space, and it is more saturated than ever.

Emerging companies, startups, and different types of e-commerce store are sharing the same digital space, fighting for attention with one goal in mind – who has the ability to outshine the other and profit the most?

Digital Marketing becomes an essential operation for any business who wants to stay relevant in current context and win. With proper online presence and digital marketing strategy, businesses can level the playing field against the competition.

Digital Marketing & More

What is Digital marketing? Digital marketing is a way to build brand awareness, develop a presence online and interact with customers online through digital channels. This includes digital platforms like website, social media, display advertising space, search engine marketing etc.

You’d be able to filter and select specific target audiences when you’re advertising, which is something that cannot be achieved using traditional marketing (i.e. television, radio, etc.)

With the accessibility to these digital channels, you can reach prospective consumers, boost your business awareness and encourage customers to become advocates for your brand.

Without it, your business will not be able to profit if you purely have just a standalone website or social media profile. It’s easy to create a website, but not as easy to make a profit out of it without web traffic. That’s why it’s important to know digital marketing for business and use it effectively.

As you explore different ways to use digital marketing, you should consider implementing these few components of digital marketing for your business.

The Core Components of Digital Marketing

Website

Your website is your storefront on the world-wide web. It is the face of your brand to your consumers/potential clients and will largely base their perception of your brand and business on it. That’s why it should be attractive, fast, secure, easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and optimized for SEO.

In fact, your website is a digital asset that ideally should not be replaced by your social media account. Your business website should be considered as a central hub where your visitors will land.

Whether the main objective of your website is to process transactions, collect leads or educate, you have complete control of the message your place there.

A good website that serves your business well should be able to provide a positive user experience, drive traffic, and converts visitors to leads with the help of online advertising and web design.

Search Engine Optimization

Think of search engine optimization as the driving force behind Google’s algorithm. It’s one of the go-to ways to drive organic traffic to your website.

Over the past decade, search engine optimization has matured into more than a way to rank websites for keywords. It’s now used by marketers to make their websites more visible to the public by outranking their competitors.

This has several benefits for businesses, including Better user experience, More View, and Clicks. Searches are always ongoing and active.

So the longer you are able to stay on the first page in the search rankings, the higher the number of people that visit your site.

You want to optimize your website, so it appears high on the search engine list.

This means you need to pay close attention to things like page titles, meta descriptions, image tags, file names, the use of bells and whistles, and so forth.

You need to make your site look attractive to people searching for your products or services. You can do this by Optimizing pages: Make sure your content is keyword-rich.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has become a marketing channel where small and big businesses can reach and engage their target audiences, through platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.

You should build a social media marketing strategy around social media, not against it because these platforms have amassed millions and millions of users, according to WeAreSocial.

Let’s take Facebook and Tiktok as examples.

Both social media platforms are huge, and they have great number of user. The difference between the two is TikTok’s adoption rate which took the world by storm with a shocking rate of 87.1% in 2020 and 18.3% in 2021 versus Facebook with a conservative rate of 3.3% in 2020 and 0.8% in 2021 (InsiderIntelligence 2021).

If you must know the numbers, you’re looking at about 1.1 billion active Tiktok users to date on with over 62 million downloads on January 2021.

You can utilize these platforms by engaging with the users online and connecting them with your brand if they fit your digital marketing strategy. You’ll need to advertise your business in order to gain attention.

Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to be the primary method to connect with your consumers and convert sales. The problem is that some may see that email marketing was taken a backseat to social media marketing.

That is not entirely true. Email has a way to remain effective over time. The key is in knowing how to manage your email list with a properly curated email marketing strategy you have set out for your business. Especially, if you’re curating personalized emails to your readers.

Other factors that can affect your email campaigns are things like the written messages if they are able to get the reader to open after reading those subject headlines and the actions that are taken after.

These can translate to metrics like Click-Through-Rate, Open Rates, Unsubscribe rates & Spam rates which are indicators for your email marketing performance.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

One of the ways to promote your brand is to use a pay-per-click advertising model like, Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is the process of generating clicks and views through paid advertising methods on your preferred search engines.

This form of advertising is straightforward, and grants quicker gratification when someone clicks on your ad and becomes a paid lead.

The concept itself is simple: Search Engine’s algorithm delivers relevant ads based on keywords and the ads placement can be above/below organic search results. Advertisers compete for the ad space at the top by outbidding the competitors.

The biggest issue with pay-per-click advertising is that it isn’t cost-effective for small business owners who don’t have a big enough marketing budget to spend to the stage of optimization purposes.

Video Marketing

Today, Video Marketing is considered as the most effective method for businesses especially if you have managed to build an audience or want to build brand awareness for your business.

Businesses are taking advantage of the nature of how consumers consume video content while browsing through their social media feeds. Like other form of digital marketing, video marketing helps to stand out from your competition in order to achieve your marketing goals.

On average, a person spends about 145 minutes daily on social media. With the incremental growth on a year-to-year basis, this statistic is to be taken into serious consideration when it comes to implementing video marketing into your digital marketing plans.

Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools

Digital marketing encompasses the broad spectrum of what’s available to help you better your business in all forms.

You can use the following to get the most bang for your buck by using these Digital Marketing Tools for your business.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that lets you monitor traffic, conversions, bounce rate, and more. You can add a number of metrics to analyze and develop more knowledge about your website.

One of the most important metrics is conversion rate. While it doesn’t completely define the success of your campaign, it can help you determine how well you’re doing. You can set up custom reports to analyze the most lucrative channels for your business, customer acquisition and so much more.

According to Google, 4.40% conversion rate for search network and 0.57% on the display network is a good benchmark for most business across the industries.

SemRush

Here are some great website optimizer tools to help you search your site for keywords. This is a job that Google alone cannot do.

SemRush tool helps you to conduct an audit, conduct keyword research for your website, and also to research what your competitors are doing in their space.

Based on the information, you can decide how many ads you need to run to stand out from your competitors.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is one of the email marketing tool that companies can use to execute email automation for their email marketing campaigns.

Email automation is executed when a certain set of conditions are met, these conditions are usually set up internally to ensure that the correct email sequences are delivered in a timely manner to the email list.

With a fully in-built email builder and email funnel visualizer, email marketing just got a lot easier to manage.

Summary

Every business needs to understand digital marketing on some level to bring their business to the next level. There are many components of digital marketing that you can use. When combined with a well-planned digital marketing strategy, it can greatly benefit your business.

Do you know if you need digital marketing for your business? This article probably can give you more insights into the matter.