Understanding What Is Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the art of promoting products on electronic media. One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that your customers get to have access to your information any time and any place. As a digital marketer, you have the benefit of tailoring your advert to the specific people that you are looking to reach. Compared to the traditional way of marketing, digital marketing is much cheaper.
Platforms involved in digital marketing
There are plenty of marketing platforms that you can use in digital marketing. They include:
Email: Almost everyone has an email address and what better way of reaching people than using emails. Email marketing is where you reach out to people that have subscribed to your list. There are many reasons why you can write to these people: to let them know of your latest blog posts, available products and services, and any offers that you are offering.
The cool thing with email marketing is that you send your message to the people that are already interested in your products and services thus you have higher chances of your message being opened. The easiest way of correcting email addresses is giving a free product. After you have the email addresses, send emails to the people that have subscribed to the updates.
When sending your messages to be cautious of how you do it. As rule of thumb avoid sending too many messages or those that don’t have value to the subscriber. This is to prevent the subscribers from unsubscribing or ignoring your messages. To increase the chances of people opening your emails you should have good titles.
SEO: Popularly known as search engine optimization, SEO is the practice of ranking your website in the search engine results so that as many people as possible can find you and visit your site. The cool thing about it is that it’s free and when done right, your efforts can pay off for years. To do it right you need to research and find the best keywords to use in your content. While you should sprinkle your keywords in the content, you shouldn’t write for search-engines—you should write for people. Remember that user experience is a strong ranking factor thus if your users have a bad experience with your content you have minimal chances of ranking high in the search results.
While SEO is great, its major flaw is that it’s prone to penalties. The penalties result from overstuffing your content with keywords and using other black hat SEO techniques. To be on the safe side only use white hat SEO techniques.
Pay per click: Also known as search engine marketing (SEM), this is a digital marketing platform where you use Ads to advertise your products or drive people to your site. The most attractive thing about it is that it’s highly targeted; therefore, you reach the exact people that you are interested in seeing your Ad.
How the system works is that you create a campaign and bid at the keywords that are relevant to the products and services that you are promoting. To be successful you should aim at keywords that are as relevant to your content as possible. You should also create irresistible landing pages.
This method of marketing is highly effective; however, it can burn plenty of your money if you don’t put effective money management systems in place.
Social media: Social media sites such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and others provide a great place to promote your products and also build relationships with your customers. Just like in other online platforms, you shouldn’t use the social media sites to simply sell your products and services as you won’t go anywhere with it. The best way of going about it is posting information aimed at helping your customers and lightly sprinkle in information about the products and services that you are selling.
Mobile phone messages: The messages work just like emails. You have to collect the phone numbers of the people that are interested in your products and services and regularly send them messages about the information that you want them to know about. The good thing with the messages is that you have higher chances of getting them opened compared to emails. Just like with emails, avoid boring your subscribers with irrelevant or too many messages.
Tips on how to be successful with digital marketing
For you to be successful in digital marketing you need to consider a number of tips. These tips include:
Go with what is working for you: As you have seen, there are many digital marketing platforms that you can use to promote your products. Different areas work with different platforms. To avoid wasting time and money you should work with a platform that you are getting the most success from.
Have a tracking system in place: You could be a hard working digital marketer but you will not know how you are progressing if you don’t track your work. The good thing is that there are many tracking tools in the market that you can use. You only need to find the most effective and easiest to use.
Stay up to date: Just like any other technology related area, the tricks that you use today don’t have to work tomorrow. To avoid getting caught by surprise when you use a technique that isn’t working, you should stay up to date with the latest digital marketing techniques. The good thing is that there are plenty of resources that you can use to get as much information as possible. You can use blogs, sites, and even videos to stay abreast with the latest digital marketing information. As rule of thumb ensure that you follow the leaders in your industry.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is highly effective and cheaper than traditional marketing; however, you need to do it right to get ideal results.
