Digital marketing is the umbrella term used for all your online marketing. 50% of the earth’s population are online and using the internet. Due to this vast percentage, traditional marketing efforts are no longer enough. Today’s digital marketing is about communicating with your customers on a personal level in a place they spend most of their time. It’s about attracting those new customers in intuitive and abstract ways. We believe the real skill in today’s online marketing is about spotting opportunities you didn’t even know existed and acting upon them in the most efficient and cost effective way.
What are the benefits of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the most cost effective way to market your business. It’s efficient, versatile but yet complex and unpredictable. With digital marketing businesses can promote their business and adapt strategies at any time with the data collected however, there’s a spider’s web full of methods and hubs. Choosing the right ones are critical to making your marketing efforts worthwhile.
Apart from all of the above, digital marketing has the following benefits:
- Grabbing users attention in places they spend their time – online
- Allows for reaching users all over the globe
- Trackable and measurable results
- Build strategies with reliable data
- Connect with your audience on a personal level
- Ability to compare your business against your competitors
Okay great but, what is Digital Marketing?
Fair enough, you want to know what it involves?
Well the way we put it is there are digital hubs which need techniques to grow the hubs. Both of these are crucial to any strategy working and business growing. Let’s break it down.
Digital Hubs
- Social media channels – Your channels can consist of anything from your most popular channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to other more targeted platforms like LinkedIn, Google + and soundcloud.
- Video content – Video marketing is a new way to interact with users and visualise your content. A way to increase customers attention and emotional attachments.
- Your website – This one is well known, a website should be a key part of your business. It’s the most cost effective way to keep your business open 24/7. A place where potential customers can find you at any time, anywhere in the world.
- Your online written content – Any content belonging to your business or about your business gives consumers an insight into the type of business you are. Content should be written for your audience but also optimised for SEO.
- Your imagery & photography – The photos presented under your business’s brand will help users visualise. The quality of your imagery is what can put you ahead of your competitors when attracting new customers.
- Your Branding – Similar to your imagery, your branding is how consumers will envisage the business. Branding should suit the business but be attractive too. It’s important that branding is consistent across all platforms and always gives the same message. This will help make your business memorable and recognisable.
You get the idea… Any digital elements or platforms that form part of your business count as a digital hub.
Techniques
- PPC & Paid Advertising – Pay per click and paid advertising can be used for both B2B and B2C. It’s quite a complex method that has real potential for high conversation rates.
- Social media marketing – Getting in front of audiences on platforms they spend most of their time. Most social platforms offer paid targeted advertising. Targeting adverts is incredibly valuable and offers the opportunity to get your adverts in front of the right people.
- Search engine optimisation (SEO) & Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – A key part to any digital marketing strategy. If google can’t find you then people can’t find you!
- Content marketing – A technique which involves creating and sharing content across multiple platforms.
- Email Marketing – Using emails to share content and messages with your audience. Driving traffic to your website and using strategies to raise conversion rates
- Online PR – Very much the same as PR but it’s all digital!
- Marketing automation – Taking the need of a person doing the work and allowing clever software to automate services for you. A vast amount of strategies available to raise customer service, generate leads, increase conversion rates…ect
- Affiliate Marketing – This is a type of marketing where businesses will reward their affiliates for diverting businesses there way. A popular example of this is the ‘refer a friend’ scheme.
- Video Marketing – Visualising content with video will help increase user engagement, retain user attention to your content and help with SEO. Don’t forget YouTube is owned by google, having a good video marketing strategy will help your rankings.
- Integrated Marketing – This technique is about unifying your message and creating a seamless appearance across all platforms.
- Influencer Marketing – Getting others with large followings to shout about how great you are. People trust the recommendations from they follow online.
I understand! Is Digital Marketing for everyone (B2B & B2C)?
In short, yes absolutely! Since B2B and B2C use completely different business models, this will reflect in the methods used to market the business. For example a company selling clothing to consumers will have a completely different strategy to a business who sells CRM software to businesses.
Business to Business Digital Marketing
This strategy is normally more based around lead generation and creating content for business platforms. It’s about connecting with businesses and finding way your business can help them be more efficient and generally ‘be better’. Affiliate and influencer marketing are popular for B2B strategies.
Business to Consumer Digital Marketing
On the other hand, you will often find B2C strategies based around social media, automating customer service whilst still being able to connect with consumers on a personal level and targeting advertisements on a personal level. B2C would be generally be more about creating user engagement and persuading consumers without even having to physically talk to them.
Of course, you do have to keep in mind every strategy should be planned and built around the company, the audience they want to reach and the data collected.
Can I actually afford Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is becoming more and more affordable. Businesses (like us!) understand and appreciate a small business cannot afford to spend thousands on digital marketing strategies but on the other hand businesses with large marketing budgets are able to achieve much more.
We like to build our clients businesses with them. We will help, guide and advise our clients on the best methods and strategies making sure we are sticking to your budgets but also ensuring you there a plans in place for your businesses future growth.
If you are interested in getting your business growing with Redder, we would be happy to help! Please get in touch anytime.