Introduction
At this day and age, if your business does not have an online presence, it does not exist at all. It is because people spend so much time online – on social media and e-commerce sites – they are constantly exposed to several products and services. So, if they don’t see you, they won’t know who you are and what you offer.
As the days of billboards and pamphlets are gone, you have to adopt digital marketing strategies for promoting your business. Going online will boost your marketing campaigns, promote your brand, and help you understand your customers better.
In this article, we will learn how digital marketing helps businesses. But first, let us understand the basics of digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is a set of all marketing strategies that use electronic media to promote their businesses. This includes social media platforms, emails, search engines, videos, and websites. While traditional marketing strategies include print ads, billboards, hoardings, pamphlets, telemarketing, and physical marketing – digital marketing is done online.
It is estimated that the US digital marketing industry will be worth more than $330 billion by 2022. According to a study conducted by TechCrunch, around 80 % of the people shop online. These statistics prove how important digital marketing has become for companies.
Below is a quick rundown of the most popular digital marketing tactics used by businesses around the world.
Read: What Does a Digital Marketer Do?
Content marketing
This is the process of creating content with the aim of promoting a brand, generating leads, and increasing traffic to a company’s website. The authentic content is presented to the audience through blog posts, infographics, articles, e-books, and whitepapers. This content talks about your products, services, expertise, and related topics that the customers will love to read.
All this will convert the website visitors into potential customers.
Read: How to increase sales with content marketing
Social media marketing
This is the use of social media platforms to promote your brand and the content to generate leads for your business. The most common social media channels used for driving traffic are –
- Snapchat
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website so that it shows up higher in any search engine’s search results. When a user looks for information similar to something on your website’s blog, SEO will make your site rank higher, enabling the user to find it easily. This will increase the organic traffic to your company’s site.
Affiliate marketing
In this form of marketing, you get a commission when you promote someone else’s product or service through your website. For this, you can use YouTube’s Partner Program to host video ads. You can also post affiliate links on your social media accounts.
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Email marketing
Email marketing is the process of interacting with customers via emails to promote products, services, discounts, offers, and events. Most of these emails are sent to customers to redirect them to your website, so they know more about what’s going on.
Email marketing tactics include:
- Newsletters for subscribing to your blog
- Welcome emails
- Holiday promotions for loyal customers
- Follow-up emails for customers who have downloaded something from your website
How Digital Marketing Helps Businesses to Develop Themselves?
Digital marketing is helping small, medium, and large corporations to make themselves more visible to their customers and sell their products. Here are the top reasons why digital marketing is acting as an important growth promoter for companies across the globe –
1. Brand development
Your company website and social media profiles talk about who you are and what you do. Be it a small startup or a huge corporation, these are the most effective ways to promote a brand these days. When you launch a product or service and showcase it on Facebook or Instagram, millions of users will know about it within a couple of seconds! using facebook marketing, How amazing is that?
If your product is good, customers who have purchased it will comment about it on social media. Others will notice these good reviews and decide to purchase your stuff. This process is light-years faster than the traditional “word of mouth” process. In no time, your brand is developed, recognized, and will have a pool of loyal customers.
2. Geographic expansion
Expansion is no longer just a dream for a small company. With social media marketing and email marketing, you can market and sell your products to any corner of the world. So, without having a physical store or office in another country, you will be able to make some money there!
Plus, setting up these social media and email campaigns don’t take much time. So, you save a lot of money and effort as compared to traditional marketing campaigns.
3. Providing a better customer experience
Digital marketing lets you understand your customers better and provide them with personalized services. For example, if you launch a social media campaign about a product, you will see customers commenting on it. You can arrange quizzes and Q&As about your product. Within no time, you will know a lot about the choices and preferences of your customers.
This also helps with target marketing. Based on the quiz answers and comments, you can target specific groups. For example, some customers might want to get discounts on every offer. So, you can send emails and notifications to these customers whenever you offer a discount.
Furthermore, using tools such as Google Analytics, you can analyze every click and search performed by a customer on your site. This lets you understand consumer behavior and buying patterns.
4. Reaching customers on a variety of devices
Another answer to the question – how businesses can use digital marketing to grow? – is by fetching your customers from all devices. More than half of your potential customers are accessing content and browsing websites on their smartphones. Then there are tablets, phablets, laptops, and desktops. So, your website or social media account can be accessed by users on all these devices.
With such increased visibility, you have more opportunities to sell your products or services to the market.
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5. Ease of adapting or modifying strategies
Traditional marketing strategies such as print ads forced the companies and marketers to wait until the campaign ended to see results. Using web analytics, you can view the number of people visited your site, sources of traffic, searches performed, and also how many are reading your blogs.
You can also check out how well your site is ranking on search results. If you are successful, then you can continue with the campaign. Otherwise, you can launch a different one or tweak the existing campaign.
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Conclusion
With digital marketing, even small companies can market their products globally within a matter of seconds. Whether it is a startup or a corporate giant, these marketing campaigns can be initiated with a small budget, unlike traditional marketing.
If you are just starting, there are plenty of digital marketing resources online. Learn the basics and apply it to understand more about “how digital marketing helps businesses”. Check out our Digital Marketing Ultimate Tutorial to learn more about every element of digital marketing.
If you wish to explore and become an expert in Digital Marketing, check out MICA and upGrad’s Advanced Certificate in Digital Marketing & Communication. Become an expert in social media marketing, content marketing, branding, marketing analysis and PR.
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