We live in a digital age and it is important that every business have a good online presence. This brings tremendous awareness for the brand. And can further convert into sales of your products and services. This is why Digital Marketing plays an important role in growing and achieving business goals.

Every Business Needs Digital Marketing

In recent years digital marketing has become very popular and every business is competing hard to utilize digital marketing for their growth.

This has brought too much competition in the market and it has become difficult than ever to get high returns on investment from your marketing efforts.

You might be a business owner or a small startup or just an Entrepreneur, you might be wondering what value does digital marketing bring. And why everyone is looking to invest in it.

In brief it is about creating brand awareness, bringing you more visitors, creating a trust in the mind of your audience, and finally selling the services or products to earn money.

Let’s see the main components of digital marketing.

1. Good Business Website

2. Email Marketing

3. Awesome content that helps others

4. Search Engine Optimized content

5. Paid Ads Campaign

6. Social Media presence and optimization

7. Lead Generation and management

8. Marketing Automation

9. Analytics

10. Tools for increasing sales

Now that we understand there are 10 essential components of digital marketing. Let’s discuss each of them in brief and try to understand their importance in assisting the business to grow.

A Good Website

Your website is a vital part of any digital marketing mix. A good website can bring awesome result when combined with good digital marketing strategies. Your website is your businesses online face and you should always try it pretty. Every visitor to your website could be your potential customer only if he finds that your products or services are delivering some value. This is why you should design your website very carefully and make sure that the value is showcased correctly.

With the current landscape, there is are a lot of websites out there and you might have a hard time to rank your website and get huge traffic on your site. To get high traffic your website should be:

1. Fast loading, and well designed

2. Should have product/service specific pages

3. Up to date and relevant content

4. Should communicate your company’s value upfront

5. Optimized for search engines.

Email Marketing

A lot of people may think email marketing is an old strategy but we should understand that it is the most effective one as well. It is one of the most effective ways to communicate your services/products and brand to your audience. It helps you build a loyal relationship with your customer.

Having a good Email marketing strategy will bring you:

1. High volumes of traffic on your website.

2. Keep your audience informed about new products and services

3. Build credibility with consistent and helpful content

4. Establish Thought Leadership

Awesome content

Consumers today have access to high-quality digital resources that give them the power of independent decision making. It is therefore important to deliver good promotional content to the user. A user will not visit your business website if there is no good content. A user can buy your product and services if your website post amazing content that the user will like and is likely to buy from you. The user today like the business who provide correct information instead of just promoting the product and services. Right information helps a user to make the right decision and that is why the content that put out should be trustworthy.

Consider the below factors while planning your content strategy as most of this is applicable to most of the businesses.

1. Your content should represent your businesses values and vision

2. Share relevant content across all your social media channels to showcase it to a broad audience.

3. Offer a variety of content but it should be meaningful.

4. Align the tone of your content with the brand’s overall Mission and Vision.

5. Create content that is suitable for your target audience.

Search Engine Optimized content

Once you have created good content, it’s time for the content to be searchable by your target audience. This is where search engine optimization comes in picture. Online users always search on search engines for almost everything. It is therefore essential that you use keywords that are relevant and most searched for in your niche. Keywords are the start point of any search and hence while creating content one should give importance to use of right keywords.

Some general strategy for an SEO optimizing site is:

1. The website should load quickly.

2. Your webpage should be searchable by the search engines

3. Add alt text to images

4. Promote your Backlinks to Build Authority

5. Using correct tools to analyze your SEO efforts and optimize

One should note that SEO is a long-term process and no one can guarantee that the site will definitely rank on the first page of the search engine.

Paid Ads Campaign

Any marketing strategy is incomplete without paid ads and the same goes for Digital marketing as well. Paid ads campaign give quick visibility to your brand. Without paid ads, no user would get to know about your new products as services once they are released. Traffic that comes to your site is very valuable but paid advertisements play a crucial role to boost the visibility of your brand in search results.

Few reasons for a brand to invest in paid promotions:

1. You are charged only when someone clicks your ads.

2. The budget can be completely controlled

3. Good ROI

4. Quick results can be seen

5. Reach target audience with the right paid promotion mix

6. In-depth metrics of your ad spends

Social Media presence and optimization

Social media has tremendously evolved in the last decade. Word of mouth which is the most effective and trusted channel of marketing commonly takes place on social media channels. Times have changed and every individual prefers to express their opinion on social media platforms. Being present on the social media channels helps the brand to engage with key influencers which can boost the online reach of content and brand. Brands should be active on multiple social media channels for a broader reach. In addition to sharing the content on multiple platforms, brands should use social listening tools to learn what their consumers are saying about their brand. And brands can directly respond to consumers needs. This helps to build a positive relationship with the consumer and build trust. Social media listening tools also help to keep track of the brand image which is very important from the branding perspective.

In general B2B marketers gets more than 50% of leads from Social Media platforms.

Good social media strategy should include

1. Posting viral content relevant to the brand’s niche

2. Consistent posting

3. Promoting post

4. Building a community of genuine users

Lead Generation and management

The primary objective of every digital marketing effort is to generate leads for the business. A brand should effectively manage and nurture the leads. Provide the leads with appropriate information that they are looking for so that they eventually turn into paying customers. Most of the leads do not convert to paying consumers. This is caused due to lack of nurturing the leads before trying to convert them into consumers. When a lead generation campaign is being strategized, there should also be a lead nurturing program put in place.
Only matured leads should be sent to the sales team to have a successful Lead generation campaign.

Best ways to do Lead Generation and Lead management.

1. Provide good blog posts, advertisements, white papers, social media, to attract the user.
2. Show what value the user is getting if they provide their details to you.
3. Keeping a separate strategy for the different target audience
4. Filter out the lead by doing some kind of survey with the leads initially collected.
5. Keep nurturing the prospects before trying to convert them into customers

Lead Generation and management is a very important element of Digital Marketing and should always be planned wisely.

Marketing Automation

Every business needs a process in place to function smoothly. Digital Marketing Automation is important as it helps to increase the number of leads. It also helps to increase the conversion rate. Only generating leads is not enough as it would have no value if your brand is unable to nurture the leads and finally convert them into consumers. This process simplifies to monitor leads as they move through the consumer funnel. An advantage of having marketing automation in place is that a brand can have set automation process based on various target audience, promotions or sales cycles and multiple strategic plans.
This way once a lead enters consumer funnel, the potential for conversion is high.

Analytics

Digital marketing provides us with continuous monitoring of marketing efforts. This differentiates Digital marketing from traditional marketing. We should make good use of analytics to understand the campaign results and further optimize for best return on investments. Analytics assist to track your marketing efforts so that the content is optimized

Tools for increasing sales

Every business needs sales to keep functioning and growing. For this, there should be an active and effective workforce. But is that all? No, we should also have the right set of tools. The sales team is the one who brings business for the company, they should always have the best tools in their arsenal. Use of best tools drastically improve sales. And brings more sales and more money for the brand.

A robust sales team should have:

1. Brochures

2. Sales presentations

3. Mobile sales apps

4. Sales deck

5. Company profile in video format

6. Competitive pricing details

Traditional Marketing is not dead but when complemented with Digital marketing, it can bring tremendous results to the business. We all spend much more time on our tech devices then we spend on traditional resources. It is therefore advised that every business should give proper attention to setup up and invest in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
We should also ensure that we track the progress of our digital marketing efforts and keep optimizing to be updated with the market trends. After all the efforts are focused towards getting more business for ourselves, build a brand that can sustain in the long run and be the best among our competitors.

This article is inspired by – Business 2 Community