The phrase, “Digital Marketing,” gets bandied about quite often nowadays more than ever. However, the use of the term goes way back to 1990 when it’s believed to have been first used.
While there are many definitions of Digital marketing, it is obvious that it is a form of marketing that makes use of digital means to enhance its effectiveness. Thus it’s an umbrella term for all forms of marketing that use digital technologies mainly on the internet, including display advertising.
Based on this definition, digital marketing can be both online and offline.
The history and the evolution of digital marketing goes back to the times when the first personal computer was invented in 1981. The online marketing has seen an interesting evolution altogether over the past three decades, with web analytics becoming a major concern for Digital marketers in the recent past and present, and even much more, the future. It’s projected that Data science Marketing will be a major component of Digital marketing in the year 2020, and hence the sprouting of data scientists.
While you might opt to learn digital marketing yourself, you may want to hire professional Digital Marketing firms that do the hard work so that you can focus on the bottom line side of your business.
How to Use Digital Marketing to Promote Your Business.
Promotion involves brand awareness and product and services accessibility to a maximum reach. Digital marketing is an effective way of promotion nowadays more than ever since most people are using internet and doing web searches on a daily basis.
To promote your Digital marketing effectively, you need to understand your potential customers and/or readers, their pain-points, their desires and hopes. Every sound and effective marketing involves psychological approach and Digital marketing cannot be scrubbed off of this important aspect. Your readers are lazy and impatient more than they are willing to admit, therefore, your marketing strategy should ensure that you have a fast way of serving information that they are looking for.
Before, we look at the evolution of Digital Marketing, let’s have a look at ways of using Digital Marketing for Online Business Promotion.
Build a Fast-loading, Responsive and Professional Website.
Digital marketers and Digital marketing specialists understand that the patience limit of their readers is less than five seconds. If you can make your website pages load in under three seconds the better.
Most of the readers access the internet via their mobile phones so you want to ensure that your website is quite responsive across various devices. Professional websites come at a certain cost if you are not a professional designer yourself. If your website looks amateurish, with poor logo resolution and lack of coherent brand, then you won’t be able to earn their loyalty; a component which is quite critical in your Digital Marketing Strategy.
Design and Develop a working Content Strategy.
It’s one thing to have a solid brand, and another one to match its expectations.
Your site can be professional, but that won’t keep your readers engaged long enough to make a financial engagement with you. Your readers are coming to your website to find a certain solution and so your blogging for content marketing is a very important component of your content strategy. 75% of your visitors first land on your single blog post pages before landing on your homepage.
Remember your visitors are following a blog post and if they like what they read then they’ll surely love to hang out a little more, hence low bounce rate and possibility of conversion.
Content strategy plan thus is everything involving content creation, publication and governance of useful usable and remarkable content as well as their distribution to the target audience. Often times, it’s a repeatable system that involves a solid creation, curation and editorial process.
Churn out highly informative content.
Now that you have a solid content strategy, it’s time to build great content based on this strategy and schedule them to go out on a regular basis. By creating highly informative and targeted content, you set yourself apart from competition, get referrals, earn back-links, rank highly on search engines, increased brand awareness and possibility of escalating your incomes hence better Return on investments (ROI)
Perform Search Engine Optimization.
Your great content and your highly informative website needs to be found online.
By optimizing your content accordingly, this should take you a couple of months. While there are 200+ ranking factors that search engines like Google use to crawl, index and rank your content, Content relevance and usefulness are two merits you should pay close attention.
Write amicably. Perform keywords research while settling for long tail keywords. This is important as it’s often easier to rank for “SEO hacks for beginners” than ranking for header keyword such as “SEO.” Long tail keywords have low competition. Installing an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO helps you to set SEO title, SEO metadata as well as monitor your keyword density and several other ranking parameters.
Make sure you optimize all of your website pages such as About Us, Resource Page, Service page etc. as well. Performing an in-depth On-Page SEO can help you get discovered by search engines.
Perform Digital Marketing.
Digital marketing, as described earlier, is an umbrella term that comprises other forms of online marketing such as content marketing, social media marketing (Facebook marketing, Attracting twitter followers, instagram engagement etc) , search engine marketing, email marketing etc. These types of Digital Marketing will be discussed later on in this post.
Perform web analytics.
There is no one sure approach to marketing. It’s all trouble shooting, figuring out what works and intensifying them, and dishing out what doesn’t. Data is important part of marketing and by performing web analytics, you will gain insights that will help you tweak your online marketing approach
Evolution of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing dates way back to 90’s and probably even way earlier to the day when the radio was invented. However, there are important days that mark the evolution of digital marketing which are worth considering:
- 1981: First Personal Computer was invented by IBM
- 1990: ‘Digital Marketing’ Term was first used
- 1990: Launch of the first search engine called Archie
- 1993: First clickable display banner on websites goes live
- 1994: First eCommerce transaction done
- 1994: Launch of Yahoo
- 1998: Launch of the most popular search engine today, Google. Birth of Google
- 1998: Yahoo launches web search
- 2001: First mobile marketing campaign
- 2002: LinkedIn released
- 2003: WordPress officially released.
- 2003: Launch of MySpace
- 2004: Birth of Gmail by Google
- 2004: Google goes public
- 2004: Facebook goes live
- 2005: Launch of YouTube which revolutionized content marketing by bringing video marketing hence vlogs and video SEO
- 2006: Amazon eCommerce sales crosses $10 billion
- 2006: Split testing in digital marketing performed
- 2007: Tumblr was launched
- 2010: WhatsApp launches and gets acquired by Facebook in 2014
Developing a Digital Marketing Strategy
Having a solid, smart and working marketing plan helps you get ahead of the stiff competition in the digital marketing world. You want to focus on the following when creating a digital marketing strategy plan:
Reader profiling: Define Your Target Audience
Know your target audience like the back of your hands. Any marketing strategy isn’t complete until it has an extensive and comprehensive reader profile. Your reader profile in many cases equals your customer profile.
Many bloggers and marketers fail because they do not take time to think deeply about their ideal reader. It’s not anyone who wants to learn freelancing, if you are into freelancing, neither is it anyone who wants to start an online business if you are into start-ups.
These are generic and too broad to be useful. You need to narrow down to something that is more descriptive. Look at the example below:
“My ideal reader is a 26-40 years old single mom with two to three children. She speaks and writes in English and currently struggling to earn passive income so she can eventually quit her 9-5 job. She hopes to be financially stable so that she can provide for her children and have more time for family. She intends to do this by starting her own online business doing freelance writing.”
A reader profile like above acts as a road-map and a guide to what types of content to churn out for them and how your content marketing strategy should look like.
When developing an ideal reader profile, you need to cover basic demographic information of your ideal reader such as:
- Gender
- Age
- Languages
- Income
- Location
- Profile
You also need to think about personal preferences such as which blogs do they like reading, which social media sites do they hang out, what other interests do they have etc.
It’s also critical to analyze some motivational factors such as their hopes and desires as well as their pain points.
Define Your Goals.
What do you hope or aim to achieve with your content marketing strategy
Categories of Online Digital Marketing
- Pay Per click advertising
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
Your Turn
What Digital Markeing strategies have worked out for you? We would love to know your thoughts in the comments section below
2 Responses
this is really a wonderful post regarding digital marketing. very informative. indeed you have a strong grip in this concept.
Thanks Venkatesh for your comment. I noticed all your blog posts are shelved under the ‘uncategorized’. You may want to create specific categories such as data analytics, social media marketing etc.