What is digital marketing?  Why it’s important for every business’ success. How to get started now.

Digital marketing is a must have for every business’ success in this online era. Apart from flexibility and being able to reach a wider audience any time anywhere, this also has numerous other advantages that bolster the growth of a business.

Digital marketing is just marketing that is carried out on digital platforms and across digital devices. It involves;

1. Social media marketing
2. Email marketing
3. Display advertising
4. Search engine optimization
5. Content marketing

It’s carried out across;

1. social media channels
2. Emails
3. websites
4. Entertainment

The content can be;

1. Written content
2. Imagery
3. Video
4. Audio content
5. A combination of all the above

Through digital marketing a business promotes its products and services in the above ways through show casing them and creating content for their target audience.

1. Helps you reach a wider audience. Today about 5 billion people are now online or have a smart phone . This is a great opportunity for business owners to reach more people through digital marketing .

2. Increase sales. Online marketing increases sales especially through inbound marketing that targets business customer personas that will actually buy from the business online. Sales increase through mass advertisation and retargeting.

3. Engage with audience. Online you can talk to your customers on mass scale, know their needs and build loyalty through interacting with them and creating content tailored to their needs.

4. Cover a wider area. Reach more customers. Through digital marketing you can expand your business beyond local borders and reach people in other areas and countries. This helps the business to expand and grow.

5. Reduce on business operational costs. Digital marketing is carried out on online digital platforms that use software. It reduces need for a large number of employees to do most administrative work and buy office space as most operations can be done online.

6. Provide support. Your business can provide support online to clients as you market to them online, help them with their needs and issues while growing your business.

7. Easy to measure performance. You can use analytics and metrics on digital marketing platforms to measure the performance of your business against business goals and metrics e.g Google analytics, hubspot, facebook analytics, business website analytics.

Before going online, there are some factors every business owner to consider first ie;

1. The target audience. define buyer personas; who’s your ideal customer, what are their likes and dislikes, what are their problems that you want to solve, where are they found, their age, gender, etc

2. The location. Where is your business found relative to your customers, what are you offering to solve their problems, when, where and how.

3. Type of content. Which type of content will you be posting and promoting on the digital marketing channels depending on what you offer and the tastes of your customers?

4. Which platforms to use. Depending on customer content taste; imagery, audio, video, text etc you can then decide which platforms to use. Instagram, Pinterest are good for images, YouTube, vimeo for video content, spotify for podcasts and blogs for text content.

5. Define business goals and how to measure metrics. Lastly define business goals i.e sales, leads, conversions, engagement and how you will measure metrics that define growth in accordance with set goals. For example; social media analytics, web site analytics, google analytics, and code

Steps taken to take your business online?

After considering the above requirements as well as the business goals, a business owner should take the following final steps to take get started with digital marketing.

1. Finalise defining business goals, customers, metrics and projections. Write goals, metrics to be measured, the audience and activities to be carried out during marketing.
2. Check for any legal obligations. Different platforms have different rules whilst using them. Some don’t allow certain products, imagery etc. Make sure your business is following the rules.
3. Get and hire a digital marketing expert or team. If you have a digital marketing expert on the team, it’s all set if not hire freelancers and experts to do the marketing for you .
4. Set up business social media channels and email addresses. Join the appropriate social media channels, email marketing platforms and other support software required to market the business.
5. Set up a business website, email addresses.
6. Create content, post regulary, promote goods and services, monitor metrics

Conclusion;

Digital marketing is a must do for any business that wants to grow today because of its outstanding advantages and the fact that alot of people are online today. A business can reach a wider audience, grow and increase sales. Just follow the above simple steps to get started. You can also reach out to us for any inquiries and pointers.