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In the Era of Digital marketing, We often get to hear from people what digital marketing is all about? What is such a big deal about digital marketing? Why is everyone saying to do or learn digital marketing? Why do we have to learn digital marketing?
So I am here to answer all these burning questions that everyone has about digital marketing. When we say digital marketing, all we can hear people talking about is search ads, display ads, video ads, podcasts, social media, and many more. .
Sometimes it can be overwhelming to see so much content about digital marketing around us.
Are you just starting your career in digital marketing ? or planning for your own business?
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Not to worry !! I have created a list of the crucial points for digital marketing that anyone can follow.
So I am here to give you a list of topics on how to understand digital marketing in easy steps.
In this article, we are going to discuss what digital marketing is all about.
This article can be useful for anyone who wants to start a blog, business, or career in digital marketing.
The following are the topics I will be discussing.
- What is Digital Marketing? How Traditional Marketing is different from Digital Marketing? How does one do digital marketing? Different ways to do digital marketing?
- The Crucial Fundamentals Of Marketing.
- How Communication Skills play a role in your marketing? How to improve communication skills.
- Why does digital marketing never work out the way you plan? What is Integrated Digital Marketing & how you can use it for your advantage.
- Understanding the target audience(niche). What is a niche audience?
How to select a marketing niche in digital marketing? How to choose your niche audience? How to classify your audience? - What is a Marketing Funnel? Do you know about CATT Marketing Funnel?
- What is branding? How does Marketing Defer from Branding? What is personal branding? Have You Heard about the mass trust blueprint which will help you to build your personal brand?
In simple terms, If I have to define it. Digital Marketing is promoting a business or a product on any of the digital platforms.
Let’s take a look at how Traditional Marketing is different from Digital Marketing? How digital marketing works?
Traditional marketing consists of newspapers, tv ads, banners, hoardings, and pamphlets, and digital marketing is all about promoting the products on websites, social media, email, display ads, SEO, SEM.
Traditional marketing always is focused on the older generation from the mechanical or industrial era as they are more inclined to reading newspapers and watching the news on televisions. This strategy is for big brands that want to reach a mass audience. The only issue here is it takes months to gather the data of sales and results.
In digital marketing, you target the younger generation who are tech-savvy or affluent towards digital media, this smaller group of audiences who have an interest in a specific topic or hobby, and they become your selective small audience. Once you define your target audience, it becomes easy to promote the audience of your choice and get a better result. which you can track in a few days.
We take an example to see how digital marketing works?
Consider you have a shop which sells gifts. Assume you are the owner of the shop, and you decide you want to grow your business.
You decide to take Digital Marketing as an option.
Here are the things you will do.
1) Set a goal: You define your marketing goal. Here you decide what you want to achieve( increase product sales).
2) Target:-You decide here who is your target audience. Who are you going to sell your products to, what is the age range you wish to target?
3)Audience:- once you decide your target audience, you analyze their behaviors of shopping, their interests (likes and dislikes). You get an idea about who fits in that criteria of your target audience.
4)Marketing:– Now that you have decided your goal, audience, and buyer persona. Here you figure out what marketing channels to choose. You might target them from google ads or Facebook ads.
5)Results:- So here you start showing (targeting) your ads to people who fit your buyers’ persona. You analyze the results of sales and conversion here.
It is how digital marketing works. You run a campaign on your ideal audience and generate sales or whatever the marketing goal you have set.
Digital marketing is a broad marketing channel that uses different marketing channels to achieve any one single goal to sell your products or services. It has many sub-channels.
Here is a list of marketing channels in digital marketing
1) Search Engine Marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC)
3) Content Marketing
5) Affiliate Marketing
Search engine Marketing: Here, You show your ads in search engines ( google and bing), where people come to search for a product or gather information about the product in search results. Here you place a bid in google ads(advertising tool) to rank in the top search results of search engines.
Search Engine Optimization: Here, you optimize your website using On-page and Off-page Seo techniques to rank your website in the top ten google search results.
On-page SEO: On-page SEO, you optimize your site to load faster. You focus on the keywords people are typing in google to get results on the things they are searching for on google. You optimize your content for those keywords and get your website ranked in google search results. Everything here you do is on your site hence On-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO: In Off-page Seo, you build your authority (social presence) on the Internet by networking with other online bloggers and asking them to give a link to your articles. It is called a backlink. You may acquire backlinks from writing guest posting on other blogger’s sites and get a link back to your site. Gaining authority for your site helps you rank in search engines better. These activities of getting backlinks are off the page(not on your website), hence called off-page SEO.
Content Marketing: Here, write a blog, and promote your content to your relevant readers who like to read about the topics you write. As the name suggests, it is the promotion of content.
Also read: How To Write A Better Copy That Sells: 6 tips for writing a better copy
Social Media Marketing: Here, you promote your products on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram & Snapchat.
Affiliate marketing: Here, you will promote the products which you don’t own. You work as a third party promoter where you will earn commissions/bounty from the product owners for promoting their product.
Email Marketing: Here, You will promote products to your email list of subscribers by promoting newsletter emails or promotional emails.
To start a career in Digital Marketing, you will have to learn the above-listed skills and master any one of them and become an expert in that particular marketing channel.
The Crucial Fundamentals of Marketing.
First, let us talk about the fundamentals of marketing.
Marketing is selling the right merchandise to the correct person at the right time.
Let us go deep into The four Pillars of Marketing.
Product: What kind of goods you are going to sell to the customer. Is it a commodity, apparel, a business software? You may have to think of packaging and purely presenting your Products. Your Marketing team should know everything about your Product offers.
Place: You will have to make sure that you are available for the customers to buy the products online. You have to make sure the website is listed on google so that the customers can purchase online or visit your store. What are the timings of your store? Customers should be able to find your products hassle-free and be knowledgeable about it.
Promotion: In the current world of digital marketing. You have to make a choice in which marketing suits your business best. Is it traditional marketing like newspapers or radio ads? Or Digital marketing where you can choose from search engine marketing (google & bing). Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest & Snapchat).Video marketing(Youtube, Vimeo) Podcast Marketing.
Price: To decide how much your merchandise should cost. You have to do market research on your competitors. You are competing against How many competitors? How to give competitive pricing? What advantages does your commodity have as compared to other products? Is your merchandise unique?
To elaborate or to give an example, if you sell term insurance to a 25 years old man who is a working professional, It makes sense, And If you target a 60 years old retired elder for term insurance. It makes no sense. So we have to always target the right merchandise to the correct person at the right time.
So sell only to those who want to buy or have shown interest in a product.
As a Marketing person, you should also understand how the economics of a country works.
Global economics gives you ideas and facts about the market. You can find out what is trending all over the world and use it for your benefit in your marketing strategies.
To research a market, you can go to google trends and find out about the topic you want to write about or do marketing on that topic.
You will get an idea of how the market is doing for your chosen topic. Are there enough people discussing the topic?.
You can see the results on google trends and decide to choose the topic or find any other marketing topics which have enough demand in the market.
The Role of Communication Skills in Digital Marketing
The whole point of marketing is to communicate with the mass audience. Always listen to your consumer requirements, first listen, and then give a solution/advice(selling products). You should know what you have to say and whom to say in marketing. Good communication skills are always essential for good interaction, content creation, and conveying or selling in digital marketing.
Ways to improve communication skills
Read a book daily
Write 500 words in a day on any topic.
Watch English sitcoms to improve your English.
Why does digital marketing never work out the way you plan?
What is Integrated Digital Marketing & how you can use it for your advantage.
Digital marketing never works the way you plan because You focus only on one single channel of marketing and expect sales.
Without building trust, no brand history (no one knows about you),
no social proof. The customer is clueless about your brand.
By just running Facebook ads and google ads, they expect results. (We should ask ourselves, would we be buying a product on unknown websites?).
Collecting an email list and bombarding them with marketing emails will not get you any sales. You might find success in the short run, but you might fail in the long run. So If you don’t have an effective digital marketing strategy, you are doomed to fail.
Let’s take a look at how integrated digital marketing can help you achieve success in digital marketing.
Integrated digital marketing is nothing but having a structured and definite marketing plan.
Initially, you run Paid-advertising, promote your content to the consumers, build awareness, and convert the content readers into leads by encouraging them to signup for your email list.
You will list your content in search engines, once you write a new article, you will send those articles to your email list, and from the email lists, they come to your site. you share your content on the blog, Facebook, Twitter, and youtube.
When people start interacting with your content on-site, on Facebook, and other social media, This interaction sends social signals to the search engine, which will help your content to rank in search engine results when people search for your products online.
Let’s take a look at an example of Go Pro’s Integrated digital marketing strategy.
GoPro has been using their theme “Be a Hero” to reach their niche audience with an emotional touch. They use brand sponsors, search engine optimization, sales pages, and have an interactive social media campaign where GoPro allows users to upload their original videos on GoPro social media pages and have a contest of video of the day. They scaled their campaigns by a user-generated video, which increased the popularity of their brand, and that’s how you use an integrated digital marketing strategy to generate a scalable business.
Also read: Network Marketing in India – the sleeping giant
What is a niche audience? How to choose your niche audience?
A niche is a definite set of a defined audience.
What if I don’t have an idea on how to choose a niche?
Here are the Ways to find out your marketing niche.
List your skills and passions, find out the problems you can solve, find out your competitors in those, and calculate the probability of profit in that niche.
For example, Dog owners is a broad niche. Dog owners in India are a sub-niche. Dog owners in Pune become your micro-niche. So My target audience will be Dog owners in Pune, which becomes my micro-niche. In this way, you can find a micro niche for any mode of business.
So find a niche in which you are an expert. Once you figure out your marketing niche, it will set the foundation of your business and help you succeed.
How to classify your audience?
Price (basic, standard, premium )-You may classify them based on the choices of the products they use on daily basis eg:- phone(basic phone, android phone &iphone, expensive modules of AndriodMax Huawei (Mate 20 ), and iPhone( XS Max ).
Demographics(education, age, gender, income level) -You may classify them based on education, age, gender, earning economy, which car they own.
Quality level(handmade, economical, premium)
Viewpoint(interests, values, attitude).
Place(urban, rural)- You may target them based on the city they live in, town, or rural village.
What can we understand about Marketing Funnel? Do you know about CATT Marketing Funnel?
Marketing Funnel describes your consumer’s journey from learning about your business from the initial stage to the buying stage.
You will have a road map of your customers’ journey.
The marketing funnel has these stages
Awareness: the person is aware of the product
Interest: he shows interest in the product.
Desire: he searches for a particular brand in the product.
Action: He decides to purchase the product.
Now, let’s look at the CATT Marketing funnel?
CATT stands for (content, attention, trust, transaction)
Wealth = n^ CATT
n(niche): as already discussed above, the niche is key for your success, and wealth comes from the niche you choose.
C(Content): Engaging and interacting with content is always essential for your niche. You may write blog posts, create a video around the topic, do a podcast, webinars.
A(attention): Drive awareness from your audience using social media marketing, Advertising, and drive their interest in your blog posts by doing search engine optimization, so when they search for your product, your blog shows in search results for them to read.
T(trust): Build trust with your audience by showing customer testimonials, product reviews, marketing automation, and retargeting.
T(Transaction): You can convert your leads into customers by providing a demo/webinar and send them to the sales page where they will convert. You can optimize the sales page for better conversion by using conversion rate optimization.
How Marketing defers from branding? Have You Heard about the Mass Trust blueprint in Personal Branding?
To build a brand, you have to focus on the quality of the products. The product quality helps you market the products effectively. Never compromise on quality.
The point to remember never to promote a product that lacks quality.
Think from consumers’ view and decide will you buy a product which lacks quality, you will have your answer.
People start recognizing your products from your name of company or organization.
If you are a business owner who is about to start a startup, you need to define what your company(Brand) stands for and what values and principles.
Marketing is how to build awareness. Branding is who you are.
Branding will be the first thing you do to yourself or the company.
And in the Next steps, You will communicate your message or promote products to your target audience.
Personal branding defines authority. Personal branding always leaves an unfathomable impact on people’s minds. Personal branding is that people know you for your unique work. There is a reputation built around your work, and people admire or follow you for that. Eg:-Elon Musk, Steve Jobs.
Now let’s take a look at the evolution of personal branding. Let us Learn How you can develop your branding from The mass trust blueprint with an example:-
Learn: let’s say you learned about google ads.
Implement: You start implementing the new skills which you have learned. You have to test your skills practically. You come to know how good you are at google ads.
Blog: write a blog about google ads strategy and how to execute the google ads. So that people can know you are an expert at those at google ads, and people write to you on your blog regarding their doubts.
Consult: Your blog has become your branding. You can consult people for projects or approach companies for your services for google ads.
Mentor: When you have a grasp of google ads, you may start teaching to others. Now you will have a better understanding of the concept.
Startup: Once you become a pioneer in your google ads, you may start your consulting firm and provide your services to others who need those services by forming an agency or consultancy firm.
Conclusion
In the above article, we understood the fundamentals of marketing, learned how digital marketing works, how to build a personal brand, and the importance of CATT funnel and integrated digital marketing strategies to build a successful business. I hope my guide in digital marketing was helpful to understand what digital marketing was all about.
Kindly leave a comment or do share your thoughts on the article.