Reaching the global market would take upto 8-10 years during the early 2000s and require huge capital investment. But today, with the help of search engines such as Google and social media platforms such as Instagram & Facebook, you can market and sell globally within just 8 minutes.
You can either do this by doing a post-graduation in digital marketing, getting certified with a short course or hire an in-house digital marketing team that handles all your marketing needs. Find out how Sephora achieved unprecedented marketing success by analyzing data and leveraging insights in our feature on their journey.
With the correct set of digital marketing strategies that help you reap all the benefits of online platforms, you can take your business online and sell to a large audience.
Benefits of Taking Your Business Online
Why should you take your business online? There are many benefits of digital marketing and some of them are:
1. Increased Visibility
Digital Marketing strategies will help you reach a global audience. For example, someone sitting in the USA will be able to discover your business from social media or Google and interact with your business. Hence, digital marketing is a must if you want to scale your business rapidly.
2. Niche Targetting
Now, you do get to reach a global audience but with the help of data analytics, you can know who your target audience is. What is their age, what kind of content do they like, how much time do they spend on social media/online and their preferences.
For example, if your ideal lead is someone who wants to learn digital marketing and is aged between 18-25, you can easily push all your resources towards marketing to that audience instead to anyone and everyone.
3. Data Collection
When you learn digital marketing, you will also have to learn to set up data analytical tools. With the help of analytics, you can collect all the data and make informed decisions about your budget, advertising, etc. This can only be done if you are marketing online where traffic can be tracked.
4. Increased Lead Generation & Sales
When you get traffic from your website and social media platforms, you can collect those leads by asking them to fill a form and then nurture them into becoming your customers. Hence, with digital marketing, you can increase your lead generation and sales.
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Now that you know the about the benefits of digital marketing, let’s get on to the process of getting started with digital marketing and then we will understand the digital marketing strategies as well.
How to Get Started with Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing may seem like all your business needs but to get the foundation of your digital marketing strategies right is a ‘trial and error’ method. Here’s how you can get started:
Here is a checklist for you that can help you brainstorm your initial process:
1. Website Planning
Create a list of pages that must be on your website- About Us, Contact Us, Product Pages, Terms & Conditions, Reviews, etc.
2. Start Tracking
Set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics for your business. GSC will help you index your website, understand where you are on the search result page. Google Analytics will help you understand the traffic that is coming on your website.
3. Build A Team
You can either outsource tasks to a freelancer or hire a web developer and content writer in-house. The apt strategy would be to hire a digital marketer who can plan and execute your goals. However, you should also learn digital marketing to understand whether whatever is being executed is ethical or not. Discover what’s new in 2024 Digital Marketing Executive Training by exploring our latest updates.
4. Get Started On Website Content
Get started on the website content (for each page) once you have the list of pages ready. Content should be crisp and also written according to the keywords you are targeting. Keywords are the search terms your customers are typing on Google when they are looking for your product/service.
5. Research About Your Customer
Research a little on your target audience and what they expect when they land on your website. Study your existing customer a little and communicate it all with the designer and developer.
6. Put Your Business On Google
Make sure that your business is on Google My Business so that anybody looking for you can know about your business, with address and contact information. Not just that, you can ask your customers to leave a review for you on Google so that it builds your online reputation.
7. Social Media Profiles
Create your social media profiles on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. The idea could be either to start aggressively marketing on one platform or market the same content on all platforms. Make sure that you plug in your website on all social media platforms along with your contact information.
These 7 steps will strengthen your foundation and even if you take time to set it up, it’s alright!
5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for you Business
Now that we know how to get started will digital marketing, let’s understand what are the 5 effective digital marketing strategies for your business in 2023:
1. Media Planning
Media Planning is the process of choosing the media platforms for your digital marketing, distributing your resources amongst them and then allocating budgets.
In simpler terms, it is the process of researching and deciding which platforms you want to do marketing on.
The idea is to decide a correct combination of media platforms so that it gives you as much benefits, lead generation and eventually sales as possible.
Media Planning as a digital marketing strategy should happen at the start of every financial year so that all resources and strategies can be allocated a budget.
Doing this at the start of the year will also help you get the best ROI and also allow you the flexibility to change anything whenever it is required.
2. Website Maintenance
Just creating a website isn’t enough if you build one of those digital marketing strategies that work al around the year.
Optimising the website’s technical aspects and content on a weekly basis will help you keep your website updated all the time and also fix issues whenever they arise.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is one of those digital marketing strategies that will help you reach a wider audience faster and at no cost. All you need to do is create a profile and start uploading.
When you are creating a profile, make sure that you give complete details about your business like what are the products/services, contact information, website link, etc.
Also, when it comes to planning content for social media, it is advisable to create a content calendar so that there is never a lag in your content creation.
For example, you can decide that in the month of May, you will upload 3 reels in one week on Instagram.
4. Search Engine Optimization
SEO needs the most effort and takes the longest time to show effective results. Hence, it is necessary that you create a strategy from scratch before starting SEO.
First step would be to do keyword research. Keyword research is the process of understanding what are the search terms that your target audience is typing on Google when they are interested in your product or service.
For example, if you are a brand that sells ice-cream, your keywords would be ‘best ice creams near me’ and so on. The idea is to target those keywords by including them in your content on the website. Empower yourself with the personal branding essentials you need to succeed, all available at no cost.
Next would be to create a list of blogs that would target those keywords. Blogs are user-friendly and build credibility for your brand.
Now, SEO is a continuous process hence one day you will see success and the next day you might not even rank. But the idea is to keep changing and evolving your SEO strategy according to Google’s updates, user-friendliness, and it will easily rank.
5. Paid Advertising
Paid Advertising is one of the key components of a digital marketing strategies. While organic marketing is necessary, paid advertising also gives a boost to your business.
First step would be to decide a budget for your paid advertising needs. Do you want to spend INR 1 lakh a month or 1 lakh a week?
Next would be to divide that budget between Google Ads and Social Media Ads. Doing this will help you break down your each penny and put it to effective work.
Where do you want to spend and who do you want to show your ads should depend upon your experiments.
For example, if a certain ad worked well on Instagram and didn’t work well on Quora, then market that ad more on Instagram and think of something else on Quora depending on the intent.
You should keep changing the goals, target audience and communication monthly depending upon your data.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is very important for businesses as digital technologies shape our future. Hope that through this blog, you have a clear understanding and direction on how to get started with digital marketing and what are the best digital marketing strategies for your business.
But the key to get the digital marketing strategy that brings traffic to your website and ultimately sales is to understand that strategies change overnight. Since digital marketing is constantly evolving, so should your strategy evolve according to what your audience wants to see!
