We are in the middle of 2021. You will hardly find a person without a smartphone, and you will hardly find a business person who hasn’t tried digital marketing at least once. Of course, a lot of micro-businesses are doing it unknowingly – sending prices through Whatsapp, and the like.

But they should go beyond that. In fact, digital marketing is such a dynamic subject, with so many innovative techniques to cash in for better results and sustained growth that it’s practically a loss for small businesses not to adopt online marketing early on.

And the first step to doing that is to understand the purpose and processes of digital marketing efforts. Although it’s likely to be managed by specialists, it’s always a plus for the business owners to take interest in various methods and their scopes in order to build strategies. This article is an effort to present digital marketing for beginners, to help small business owners understand the digital marketing fundamentals.

What is digital marketing? Why you can’t do without.

As a budding entrepreneur or small business owner of today, you are using smartphones and mobile apps. Apps are now a strong digital marketing medium. So you are already promoting the digital marketing concept, though unknowingly. Therefore, what you need now is to update yourself about the power and ambit of digital marketing tactics and how it can take your business to the next level.

Internet and social media have made deep inroads into the lives of humanity across the world and given rise to many databases of people with names, sex, age, contact details, and other data. For a business, digital marketing basics entail a flurry of digital procedures to identify the potential customers, monitor & analyse their behaviour, and communicate with them.

Digital advertising has made doing business a lot easier. Think about the traditional way of starting a business – you would have no or little information about your market and your customers at the initial stage, which increased the risk factor as you were compelled to guess a lot of things.

And there you have digital marketing helping you alleviate risk through pre-launch marketing. You can identify your customers and create buzz for your venture before getting started.

Marketing is essential for the survival of a business unless it’s a monopoly. Traditional marketing imposes heavy financial burdens on small businesses. Moreover, options are few and there is no way to see if your marketing campaign is creating interest and awareness among customers.

By contrast, a digital marketing plan is at least 10 times less costly and has many techniques that ensure business growth. Most importantly, you can demarcate your customers, run your campaign focused on them, measure the results and recalibrate if required.

As said earlier digital marketing has many procedures. Your business may not need all. You need the expertise to make a winning digital marketing strategy that will have the right combination of these procedures. Here are some of them –

Social Media Marketing

A very penetrating marketing method that is carried out on various social media platforms to reach out and engage with large numbers of people of the chosen demographics. Social media marketing requires in-depth knowledge, skill, and dedication for success.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves developing relationships with prospects and customers through special-purpose e-mail content that usually carries announcements of product or service launches, special offers, and the like. The advantage of email marketing is that your message can be sent to a large number of prospects in one shot at a cheap rate, and you can automate the entire process.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing or SEM refers to the paid search or Google ad search campaign, which is an inexpensive way to advertise your product or service and connect your target audience to your website. The common terms used in search engine marketing are Paid Search Advertising, PPC, CPC, and CPM.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of generating traffic to your website organically through publishing content with key-words or key-phrase and ranking them on top of the list of Google search pages.

Website Building Strategy

A smart and informative website is at the center of the digital marketing strategy and should be your number one priority for your business. Design of an ideal website should focus on the primary requirement of your business.

Remarketing

A lot of visitors to your website or mobile app may not buy your product in the first instance but leave an opportunity with you for future business. This is called remarketing, which entails acquiring their cookie ID to communicate about the new launches, value additions, new offers, etc. This tactic is an effective and economical way to increase your sales conversion rate.

Content Generation, Optimization and marketing

Content marketing is a universal method for gaining organic traffic to your website. The process involves generation of relevant content and optimizing them by inserting appropriate key words and phrases, adding meta and title tags, and links.

Quality Link Building

Good quality link building is a crucial SEO exercise that acquires backlinks from third-party websites that drive quality traffic to your website. It also helps with ranking your website as a credible and trustworthy site. Link building is a very important SEO practice that requires high expertise.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate or referral marketing is a commercial arrangement (against compensation) with a third-party marketer who can generate rich organic buyers for your products or services by generating relevant content and links on their websites or YT videos that redirect the interested parties to your website.

E-commerce Marketing

This entails both inbound and outbound marketing strategies to find and communicate with people who have shown interest in a product or service and also serving the incoming queries of a potential buyer.

This is not all. As one of the fastest growing fields, digital marketing is being enhanced regularly with the introduction of new techniques. However, it’s advisable to take the help of an expert agency to work out a bespoke strategy to achieve rapid growth of your business.

Source- Fluidscapes
We are one of the best digital marketing companies in India that provides online reputation management services to all types of organizations. We assist businesses to stay on top of the game by leveraging the latest technologies and breakthroughs in marketing strategies and business processes. Want to grow your business, even more, get in touch with us and we’ll tell you how.