As a business owner, you’ve probably had the same question pop in your mind at some point, which is why you’re reading this article: Is digital marketing effective? Not in theory. Not in case-studies. Yet in reality, for your actual business, like yours, with your actual people. I’ve got the real answer for you in this article.
Now that you know you want to learn more about digital marketing, what do you do?
If you’re sitting down to analyze the digital marketing arena, the initial question that comes to mind is what is digital marketing? The simple answer: Digital marketing is anything you do online that helps you build your business. It’s also referred to as online marketing or internet marketing and by no means is it just an option. It is now a must.
Internet marketing is an extensive field. It entails everything from SEO to social media, from e-mail campaigning to PPC advertising. However, it is not essential to do all of this at once. The better option is to determine where your business is going, and where your customers are going.
Digital marketing is more than technology, it’s about knowing what your customer is thinking, when they are thinking it, and why.
The Most Sure-Fire Long-Term Strategy: SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique involved with the procedure of securing your website a higher position on search engines such as Google. It’s the internet marketing component which continues to reward. If you do it right the first time, you can receive free traffic for a long time without having to pay for every click.
At the same time, SEO is not all about keyword stuffing. It is about producing content that is genuinely useful, maintaining a fast and clean website and getting links from other reputable websites. It can be even more effective when used in conjunction with search engine marketing (which involves paid search ads). Many businesses promote paid ads to gain traffic and work on organic traffic while doing SEO.
Content Marketing: The Power of Customer Trust
As you’ve heard, content is king. It is a cliché, but it’s true. Content marketing is a process of producing content that is useful, interesting and relevant to your potential customers and that they actually need. As you write your blogs, or create your videos, or write your guides, they begin to trust you.
The key to lead generation is trust. The human heart seeks happiness and fulfillment. Just pushing products with no return of anything will not lead to their being around for a long time.
Social Media Marketing For Business Growth
These are no longer just platforms for entertainment – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. They are the place where businesses interface with their clients every single day. Social media marketing allows you to use social media to post organically in addition to using digital advertising to run paid social media campaigns.
Evaluate the Digital Marketing Through Email
Email allows you to contact your customers directly, whether you’re communicating offers, giving helpful hints or just keeping in contact. But best of all it can all be automated with marketing automation. Once you’ve set it up, it continues to work while you get on with other activities.
Evaluate the Digital Marketing with PPC
Pay per click advertising is ideal if you wish to get traffic today and not three months in the future. When you use Google Ads or social media ads, you’re advertising to a specific audience and you only pay for visitors who click on your ad.
There is a lot of measurable digital advertising. You can view all your spending and the number of leads coming in.
Marketing Automation: Work smarter, Not Harder
Once you start to grow your business, manual operation becomes unfeasible. Marketing automation comes in handy there. Triggers can be automatically triggered based on customer behavior. For instance, if they visit your website, add a product to their cart without following through with the purchase, they’ll automatically receive a follow-up email reminding them.
This saves time, and more. It makes your lead generation more systematic and consistent. That’s the whole concept of conversion rate optimization and automation scales it.
Evaluate the Digital Marketing Activities
Now, the questions are! You can’t simply ask “are we running campaigns?” when assessing the digital marketing efforts you are conducting. You have to question if those campaigns are effective.
Here are some items of interest to measure:
- Audience – number of visitors and where are they coming from?
- Conversion rate – do visitors take action, do they buy, do they complete a form, sign up etc?
- Cost per lead – what is the cost of getting a lead?
- Customer lifetime value – what is the true value of one customer to your business over time?
Conclusion
When you take an honest look at the digital marketing that you are (or will be) doing, you can see that the one thing that stands out is this. It is not a magic solution. It is a system. But like all systems, it must be put together, monitored and continually improved over time.
Online marketing, internet marketing, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click marketing, marketing automation, and lead generation strategies are ineffective when used on their own. They are linked elements of a larger plan. That’s when businesses really are growing when they work together.
The bottom line, based on all the above, is that yes, it can work for your business, but it takes a solid strategy, a commitment to making it happen and a willingness to try new things based on the data that you have at your fingertips. Those that look for shortcuts rarely are satisfied. However, for the ones who stick with it, keep monitoring the numbers and continuously improve their strategy, digital marketing really makes a difference.
