If you are reading this article, you have been manipulated by the owner of this website without realizing it. Do not be alarmed! This is perfectly natural. You are simply the subject of digital marketing, and there have probably been a wide range of behind-the-scenes activities that have brought you to this website to read this content. A pat on the back for the webmaster. Keep reading? Excellent, a pat on the back for you.
Digital marketing has been around for quite some time, although the phrase is starting to see more mainstream usage since the recession forced many marketing teams to look for cheaper, measurable, and responsible alternatives. Traditional marketers have been forced to familiarize themselves with search, email marketing, paid search advertising, affiliate marketing, article marketing, and social media. These are no longer magic words, they are the main marketing channels that are rapidly increasing their share of the marketing budget.
Define your goals
As with all marketing, choosing the right tool for the job is crucial for a successful digital marketing campaign. The first step in deciding which tool to use is to clearly define what your marketing goals are. What do you need to achieve? By when do you need to accomplish this?
The next stage in your marketing plan is to understand your audience. Who are they? Where do they go online? How do they want to find you? Once you have these answers, choosing the tools to use becomes much easier.
Search
By its very nature, search marketing requires patience, as your customers must search for you or the services you offer before they are exposed to any type of marketing message. In classic marketing, this is the way of extraction. Search continues to grow in popularity as the web itself grows and content becomes increasingly scattered.
Ranking well for search terms is no longer the walk in the park it used to be. Ranking well requires a dedicated approach to creating useful, unique, and authoritative content. Search has more in common with public relations than ever.
To be successful, the first step in understanding search is determining if there is enough search volume for your chosen phrases to keep your business or return on time. If a visitor usually buys a low value item, he should generate a high volume of them. If they don’t search online for those items, then searching isn’t a viable option.
Search has two options: paid or organic. Which one you’ll target will depend on your budget, your commitment to building a brand and accompanying content, and the time frame within which you want to start generating traffic. If you’re not ready to invest in a branding campaign or need immediate results, go for the paid option.
Paid search is great when you need a quick search presence and need to start driving traffic right away. Care must be taken to understand the value of a visitor to your site. So divide your average revenue per customer by the number of site visitors it took to earn that revenue and you have your value per visitor. Now bidding on keywords becomes easier and the whole system becomes easier to manage.
Junk mail
Email is a form of push marketing, whereby information is sent to potential customers. Email is a great digital tool to use due to its proactive nature. While search is all about waiting for people to search, email actively reaches out to your audience with your marketing message. Getting email marketing right takes some experience, and getting it wrong can cause your campaign to fail more dramatically.
We are all bombarded with emails on a daily basis. Email marketing is a noisy channel. To stand out from the background noise, your email campaigns need to be very specific, very relevant, very helpful, and perhaps quite creative in their approach.
social networks
The new kid on the block…or is he? The web is actually one big social network, with references to other people’s content. Social networking sites simply allowed two-way interaction on this content, all within the same page, but before there was nothing to stop me from commenting on someone else’s content on my own website and linking to that content.
Social media is a collective term for a number of marketing channels: blogs, social media, micro-blogging, comments, reviews, etc. Anything that is interactive, that invites reader participation and two-way dialogue could be considered a social network.
The rules of engagement within social networks for marketers are different than those employed in many other channels. Social media frowns on overly promotional interaction. The goal of social media is to build advocates for your brand based on trust, authority, and expertise, demonstrated by providing leading knowledge information that is useful to other members of the community. Sales increase with increasing brand popularity and demonstration of expertise in a field.
Measure!
The strength of digital marketing over other offline forms is its measurability. Being able to effectively put a cash figure into marketing activities is very attractive to many businesses. This level of smart business data requires careful and extensive monitoring, and a good analytics suite is a must for any digital marketer. Some of the above marketing activities may have an immediate effect on your site’s traffic and “sales”, but others may take a long time to have an effect. The art of digital marketing is knowing when to be more patient, or identifying when something just isn’t working, and then being prepared to spend the time elsewhere.