Digital marketing is a must do

Wikipedia defines Digital marketing as the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

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More and more people are spending time online and marketing executives all over the world are becoming increasingly aware of this fact. Marketing executives are trying to leverage on the different digital platforms to move their products and services.

It is important to understand your business goals and objectives before establishing a digital marketing campaign. Your digital marketing goals need to be aligned to your business goals and objectives.

Digital marketing is the most effective way to reach your potential customers at a time when they too are also probably looking for your product or service. It provides a way to engage leads and customers through very easily accessible channels. Other benefits of digital marketing include:

· Cost effectiveness

A well planned, structured and coordinated digital marketing campaign can help you reach many of the right customers required to grow and sustain your business. This can be achieved at a much lower cost as compared to using traditional methods of marketing such as television ads, radio ads, billboards and newspaper ads. Traditional methods of advertising require big budgets to be effective.

It is never easy for startups that normally relay on small budgets and limited resources to compete with large well established companies. Marketing and advertising budgets can be very huge. Digital marketing has no hidden costs and allows small businesses to get more from their small budget marketing campaigns. Any small business can afford to design and create a good looking and effective website. Email marketing can tremendously increase your leads. This provides a level playing field and allows startups to compete with well established, well funded big brands and multinational companies.

Your business is not limited to one location and you can market your products or services to an international audience and on any market using digital marketing. Small businesses and startups also get to have an international audience using digital marketing.

Even though SEO, social media engagement and content marketing will take time; other digital marketing concepts such as pay-per-click, social media advertising and display advertising produce fairly fast results allowing big and small businesses gain exposure online.

The return on investment (ROI) is tremendous since the cost and investment put into email marketing and social media campaigns is low as compared to the use of traditional forms of marketing.

· Measurable results

Digital marketing provides measureable and trackable results using web analytics and online metric tools such as Google Analytics. Other tools include Woopra, Chartbeat, Clicky, Mint,Crazy Egg, UserTesting.com, Spring Metrics and Mouseflow. Using reliable reports, businesses can track and establish how effective a digital marketing campaign has been.

You do not have to guess whether or not your marketing campaign is working for you. Using web analytics and online metric tools you can know how many people have visited your website, what activities they have conducted, how long they spent on your website, how long they spent on each page, number of subscribers, conversion rates, increase in traffic, decrease in traffic and how much they purchased. You can know the peek days and peek times when you have the most traffic and trade. This information is available in real time. This is not possible with traditional marketing methods where results can only be seen and measured after the campaign is complete.

You can always adjust or change your marketing campaigns and marketing channels to achieve your desired goals. The various marketing and communication channels offer many opportunities to marketers and consumers.

With real time data you can understand the effectiveness of each marketing campaign. You can learn from present marketing campaigns and improve on future marketing campaigns.

This way you can plan, allocate and effectively utilize business resources to optimize on each marketing campaign by investing only on well performing marketing campaigns for your business. You can try many other different marketing channels, a combination of channels, measure what is working for your business and select the best options.

With traditional marketing, you will have to wait for months before determining which campaign worked, improve on the campaign or change the campaign.

With Google analytics you can monitor the performance of your ads on Google search and you can also know the number of people visiting your web page or website, the bounce rate of a web page or website, the sources of traffic to your web page or website, how traffic has changed over a given time period, the time spent by each visitor, the locations of your visitors, what your visitors are interested in and the ages and gender of your visitors.

When using email marketing, you can know which emails were delivered, how many were read and see their conversion rates.

· Targeting ideal buyers

Unlike in traditional marketing where ads are just thrown out there, digital marketing allows for targeted ad campaigns based to previous customer online activities. As customers visit your website you get to profile them, understand their needs and package products to target them. The more they revisit and purchase from your website, the more you refine their respective profiles and target them effectively. The likelihood of making a sale is increased with the use of intelligent algorithms on various digital platforms that study and collect customer preferences. This allows you to show ads to a specific group that is most likely to make a purchase. This is not possible with other traditional methods of marketing.

By showing ads to specific groups of highly potential buyers, you also get to reduce your marketing cost.

SEO, display advertising, social media advertising and pay-per-click allow you to target your ideal customers who get to view your website content. Your ideal customers in this case are those customers that are interested in your products or services and search for information, data, topics and content in your line of business.

You will spend your time and resources on marketing campaigns that actually meet your business and marketing objectives. You can use opt-in forms to collect contact details of visitors to your website, use email marketing to nurture solid leads and even build brand awareness and loyalty by blogging, using social media and continuous communication with your audience.

Not all visitors will make a purchase, others will not make a purchase on the first day but targeting a few of the right kind of audience will help you grow your business in the long run. All this will also help you gain valuable customer insight and feedback.

Customers today are keen on personalized and customized products and services and only digital marketing can help you achieve this by collecting useful information on customer preferences. You can ask very specific questions or send out tailor made messages to a group. You can even trace your buyers from the start of the buying journey till the end, their activities, preferences and insight.

Again, be creative and find time do your market research.

· Building brand loyalty and trust

Digital marketing can help you reach and engage with your customers who are already present on various social media platforms such as twitter, face book, LinkedIn and snap chat. There are billions of people on these platforms each day and they are your next customers. According to statista.com, as of the second quarter of 2018, Face book had 2.23 billion monthly active users.

You can build customer loyalty around your brand and a good reputation by effectively managing your business social media presence. You can have an attractive interactive website, have quality blogs, write quality articles, publish the best articles and promote unique content on social media. This can be achieved by also advertising on social media such as the use of face book ads and sponsored ad campaigns. Chatting with your customers and communicating about your business, products and services also helps build brand loyalty and trust. Digital marketing helps you to not only target but also connect with the audience on these online platforms.

Having social proof and adding testimonials from already existing customers increases your trust levels. People will generally trust information from people they already know. Having this will give you a good brand reputation.

It is important that you research on what your competitors are doing online. Use this information to gain an advantage in the market by developing counter marketing strategies and attracting more customers by creating a campaign for being easy to engage with.

· Improving conversion rates

You do not need to move around with your products. With a website, your customers are “right under your figure tips” and a few clicks away. Using various graphical, sound and animated content, digital marketing helps create very appealing and engaging marketing campaigns that can easily go viral and are shared amongst millions of online users. Changing the way we find and engage with our customers today.

Most buyers will start their purchasing process online. Buyers will go online to find what they need. Even after a purchase, they will still go online to share their experiences on a particular product or service with other users. By creating good, relevant and engaging content, small business owners have the opportunity to connect with potential buyers. Small business owners can educate online buyers on their products and services in the market and use ads and SEO to improve on their visibility; creating a steady and constant flow of traffic. Continuous engagement with customers is the key to allowing your business remain competitive in the market.

Another huge advantage of using digital marketing is that it allows you and your business connect with mobile customers. These are customers who browse the internet using their mobile phones, tablets and other mobile devices.

By just sending out emails, important leads are generated and from these interactions conversion rates increase. Targeted traffic increases the conversion rates. Higher conversion rates means, more revenue. With effective tracking and monitoring, businesses can take corrective measures if and where necessary by simple analyzing results collected.

Multiple followers are able to share articles on all digital marketing channels. This allows for even more improved sales levels across all digital marketing channels.

Digital marketing is very important for any business because, right from the comfort of their homes, offices or hotels, customers can find out all about your business, products and services. Customers can also visit your website to rate your products or services, provide feedback or make a purchase.

You can make use of market leaders, influencers and professionals to add credibility to your website, business, product or service. In so doing they will have helped you meet your marketing goals. You can tap into your personal and professional network. Also make use of marketing campaigns that have had the greatest positive impact on your business.

It is important that you make use of various digital marketing channels when gathering customer preference information and customer purchasing patterns, present accurate and relevant information that meet the needs of buyers in your present market and have a well designed, attractive, easy to navigate and engaging website.

Cheers,

Peter Kirimi Mburugu.

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