Are you a solopreneur or a business owner? Want to share your product, service, or idea with the world. Then you must know and understand the basics of digital marketing, and how it could help you and your business.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is the process of promoting your services, and products through the medium of internet which includes but not limited to email, websites, and apps.
Present technology makes marketing an easy, and approachable means to all of us. We can promote our business, a book, a webinar, or professinal services in few clicks, and track its performance in the live settings.
Marketing Vs Advertising
Marketing is the umberella term that includes Digital Advertising. Let’s say you want to promote your bicycle store on the internet.
Marketing includes,
- Creating the strategy, which includes where, and how to promote the store.
- Creating the advertising materiel. Whether it is the design of the banner if you are running banner ad, or creating and editing the video for video ads. It includes the creation of that too.
- Publishing the ad on the platform(s), which we called advertsing.
Therefore digital advertising is a process comes under digital marketing. Advertising includes:
- The people to target.
- The platfrom on which ad would be run.
- Daily spend limit on the ad.
Business Models: Target the right audience
The promotion on a wider scale involves various step. First step would always be to who you are promoting to. Are you targeting individuals or businesses.
B2C
If your targetted audience are individuals. Then you are doing Business to Customer (B2C) marketing. And you business is also B2C.
Let’s say you are an author of a book, then your readers are your customers. And your goals must include selling the book to more and more individuals.
For B2C, the best and most popular way is to market through Search Engines and Social Media.
B2B
If your targetted audience is business, then model would be B2B ( Business to Business).
In this model, you are selling products, or providing services to another business. Listing your product, services, and business on online business directories is the most popular way to market.
Different mediums of Digital Advertising
Digital advertising mediums are not limited. There are unlimited opportunities which internet has brought on the table for marketing and digital advertising.
But here we are discussing some of the mediums through which you can promote your business, products, or services online.
Through Search Engines
If you have your own website, or app. Then you can promote your business for search results on Search engines.
There are two ways of using Search engines:
- SEO, Search Engine Optimization
- SEM, Search Engine Marketing
Breakdown of the Google search results
Let’s search “mountain bicycle” on the search bar of google.
SEO
SEO helps to promote your business in the unpaid search results. Good ranking could be attained by using right amount of keywords and writing articles arough that keyword.
For SEO it takes time to grow your ranking gradually. It’s a slow process, but would give long-term returns, and profit to your business.
SEM
SEM lets you buy ad space in the search results.
The win in the SEM is all about optimizing and understanding the auction system. Because the ad space would be acquired using the auction system.
SEM is fast, if your website is completed, and new. And it’s ready to do the business. You can leverage, what Search engine marketing offers to the website.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is one of the most effective and not to be mention most trending promotion methods.
The strategy is good for gaining audience who have similar interest. It is best to promote your business to the audience who are not directly looking for the products, and services you are providing.
On the other hand, the targetted audience have interest similar to what you are offering.
SMM is a lot economical. Different social media platforms has different ways, and rules for promoting stuff. But overall, the process is same.
A usual approach to SMM:
- Creationg of creaative. This process includes the designing of the post, content, or video to promote.
- Upload the creative, with good caption, or tweet depends on which social media you are promoting.
- Then select the desired audience.
- Decide the daily spend limit, and run the ad
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a directing marketing. Here a business sends promotional emails to their customer base.
Let’s say you are an author. And you have email subscribers. Then you can promote your new book to these email subscribers.
The ROI (Return on Investment) on Email marketing is quite high.
Display Ads
Display ads mostly work for re-targeting.
Re-targeting is targeting the viewers again who have spend time on your website.
Let’s say, you have a website of bicycle, and some viewer visit your website for finding hiking bike. Through cookies your site collect that data, and using google adsense you can target the same viewer again and again through display ad.
Whenever that viewer visit other website, he could see the ad of your store.
Video Advertising
Video advertising is popular on YouTube. You can promote your business, and work through video. It is advertising in the form of long or short video.
Platform oriented advertisement
There are also different platforms out there, which offer their own way to advertising on their own platform.
You can try platforms liker Indiamart if you are targeting B2B audience. Another example is Amazon if you are targeting B2C.
Future of Marketing strategies with Web3.0
As we can see that there are a lot of buzz going on for Web 3.0. And successful marketing strategies are already started to implementing on this modern shift on the web.
Brands like nike, are creating digital ad placement in Augmented Reality, and metaverse. So there is a new door, and a lot of opportunities are at the door.
Right now only big or luxurious brands are taking part in the marketing on Web3.0 because of it’s constant changing infrastructure.
But in few years, a new type of marketing is on its way.
Conclusion
There are many ways to market your product, idea, or your services out there on the internet. With the upcoming new markeitng methods that would be bring by Web 3.0, there would be a lot more to choose from.
But from now, we can create different marketing strategies for our business, and target the right audience. Capture the market from fast and expensive, to slow and resilient methods.