Marketing has consistently been about connecting and linking your brand to your target audiences at the right place and at the right time. That means you need to reach your clients where they are spending their time. In today’s day and age, most of the world’s population is spending their time on the internet. This is where the digital part comes into play. Digital marketing can mean many things, but in it’s simplest form, Digital marketing is any form of marketing that exists online. Due to the wide-scale nature of it, it has boosted marketing reach for companies and broadened the spectrum of brands having world-wide recognition.
Digital marketing can function for any and all businesses in any given industry. Regardless of what your company may provide sell or service, digital marketing still involves constructive ways to out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs and wants.The Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers completely based on the market research about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona, you will need to take into consideration the customer demographics, behavioural patterns, motivations, and targets. The more detailed you have it, the better your chances are in reaching your ideal consumer or client.
However, not all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way. The reason for this is that every brand still needs to have a unique vantage point over another. If every business chooses to replicate the same digital marketing strategy, they will inherently lose their edge to compete in the market. This makes it harder for potential clients to identify and select your business when looking for a product or service provider.
What are the benefits of Digital marketing?
Digital marketing is one of the greatest tools in adverting as it allows marketers to see exact results of who and when their adverts are being seen or clicked on in real time. It is nothing like antiquated methods such as newspaper (print) advertising. If someone places an advert in a newspaper, you can never find out or know how many people actually turned to your advert and actually paid attention to it. There’s no particular way to know if that advert was responsible for any sales at all, unless the viewer specifically states that they found your advert in the article or newspaper. That is why the world of marketing has progressed so much. You can now track who and how many people actually click on your advert. With the right tools you can hypothetically reach half way around the world, if you company does in fact reach the international audience.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Brochures, flyers and letters are referred to as content method advertising. The biggest problem when using content method advertising is ,again, that you have absolutely no idea how many people picked up and opened your brochure. If your marketing aim is to reach more than just your local people, you could have that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed that brochure/page, you can then collect the contact details of those who download it by using online forms, giving you a solid lead.
Since you can now measure how many people are engaging with your content, you can now generating competent leads when people download it.
What types of digital content should I create?
The type of content you need to create depends on your audience’s needs and availability to your provided sources. You should start by creating your very own buyer personas (As mentioned earlier) to identify what your audience’s areas and encounters are in relation to your business. On the most basic level, your content should aim to help them meet these goals, and you will need to assist them in overcoming their challenges.
You need to consider a very important aspect about when they will most likely be ready to use the said content in relation to what stage they’re at in their buyer’s journey, but this is after you have developed a client basis. This is called content mapping; this entails what the goal is to the target content according to:
- The features of the person who will be consuming it (buyer persona).
- How close that person is to making a purchase (Payday)
In terms of your content, there are:
- Blog posts, with a strong SEO and keyword strategy (great for increasing the organic traffic)
- Infographics, which are increasingly shareable, (this increases your chances of being discovered via social media when others share your content).
- Short videos, similar to infographics are also extremely shareable and can help increase your reach by new audience attraction and by using YouTube which is accessible on a daily basis.
- Research reports are of high value in content. This can turn into lead generation.
- Webinars, these are considered more detailed, but these are an interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective because they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.
- Case studies are also extremely detailed content forms on your website, which can be an effective form of content for the clients or consumers, who are ready to make that eagerly awaited purchase decision, it assists you and has a positive influence to their decision.
- And for those great clients that have a good relationship with your business, ask for short testimonials to fit within your website.
In Conclusion
Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands using electronic devices or anything that is is created and distributed online. It also includes a wide range of formats or platforms such as, text and instant messaging, video, applications (apps), social media, even electronic billboards, pop ups, television and so on.
Digital marketing uses multiple platforms and technologies that allow an organization or business to analyse their own campaigns, content and strategy to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and it is typically in real time. Meaning once you send out the content using whatever online platforms, you can monitor the clicks and who and where they are usually access it from.
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