With an increase in internet users from 2 billion in 2010 to nearly 4.6 billion in 2021, practicing online marketing is becoming the need of the hour. There is no exaggeration of the fact that this is the era of digitalization and your business needs to have an online presence. With the ease in use of internet services, online marketing is the future of marketing with added advantages that it is cost-efficient, consumes less time and can be measured using various KPI metrics. As a digital marketing agency, this data can help you target potential customers with pinpoint accuracy and provide them with content that resonates. Let’s see ahead how you can use online marketing to build brand awareness and increase the conversion rate for your business.
What is online marketing?
Online marketing involves placing your products or services digitally in front of the target audience for them to can take the intended action. The objective of online marketing is to reach the targeted customers through the channels where they are spending most of their time reading, shopping, searching and using social media platforms. Online marketing is an ever-changing dynamic process and with appropriate digital marketing strategy, you can drive inbound leads, drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales.
In today’s digital world, where internet facilities are becoming accessible in every household, having a website or app is a must for a digital advertising agency to get in touch with the target audience. Unlike traditional marketing where it is hard to contact the advertisers, online marketing provides an avenue for two-way communication between the digital marketing agency and the customers.
Online marketing is quite different from traditional marketing benefitting both the digital advertising agency and the customers who are willing to take the intended action. Using this method of advertising, digital advertisers save a lot of money on hoardings, billboards, commercials, television ads, etc. As a digital marketing agency your primary expenses include creating a website, developing a mobile app and web hosting charges.
Once all this is done, the expenses that you will incur are the PPC ads that you will run on the search engine platforms. These pay-per-click ads can include any form of advertising like search ads, video ads, display ads (also known as banner ads), mobile ads, etc. However, by performing an efficient PPC audit you can work on adjusting your bidding strategy and saving your ad budget. If you are not willing to spend on the PPC ads you can consider SEO techniques for online marketing. SEO (search engine optimization) process is different than PPC advertising and requires you to have the patience to achieve your desired business goals.
Online marketing strategies
With appropriate digital marketing strategies, you can build a cohesive customer relation that entails the trust of visitors with your brand in the long run. Although there is constant change happening in the digital advertising world, you need to focus on the prime aspects so that the visitors finally convert into customers. Some of the main objectives that you need to keep in mind while working on digital marketing strategies are mentioned below:-
- Define your goals – The first and foremost thing in your digital marketing strategy should be to define the goals you wish to have with digital advertising. You should be very clear with what your target goals are like generating high-quality leads, grow and maintain thought leadership, build brand awareness, developing a relationship with clients, etc. You should be transparent in your digital marketing strategy whether you wish to use PPC advertising model or SEO technique best suits your business to achieve your target ROI.
- Target audience – One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that you can target your specific audiences that have a very high chance of reaching your landing page and finally end up buying the product. Your target audience may vary depending on the channel or social media platform you are advertising on. For instance, say you mostly have young age people on Instagram whereas LinkedIn is mostly used by business owners and professionals.
- Budget allocation – In your digital marketing strategy, you must have an allocated budget for every ad campaign that you wish to run on the search engine platforms. Even when advertising on the social media platform like running Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, etc. you need to spend a set amount of budget. You can consider working on optimizing landing pages, optimizing images, etc. to improve the performance of your ads.
- Engaging content – Next step to work on after setting a budget for advertising is to write engaging content. Writing appealing content becomes very crucial as it helps to convey your messages virtually to the visitor navigating through different sections on the landing page. This content could be in various forms like social media posts, ad copies, blog posts, sponsored content, email marketing, etc.
- Keyword research – Digital marketing is all about reaching your target audience through personalized content and conducting keyword research becomes an important part of it. Keyword research is critical in optimizing your website and helps you to write adequate content for every section of your website. When displaying ads, it helps your ad to appear for every relevant search query and you can add negative keywords for every irrelevant search query that you want your ads to trigger. Even if you use SEO, you need to figure out high-performing keywords as per your product or services and if you face any difficulty you can outsource SEO plan and strategy services to a digital marketing agency.
Online marketing platforms
- Google Ads – Considering Google Ads for online marketing would be one of the best profitable decisions you can make in your digital marketing strategy. Google Ads is the world’s largest advertising platform and provides your ad campaign with the opportunity to reach a large base of customers.
These are paid searches that focus on targeting keywords in the search box entered by the user. When using Google Ads for digital marketing, you bid on keywords i.e. specific terms or phrases and pay money to Google every time a click is made on your ad. You should have a set plan for PPC bidding and work on bid optimization so that your money does not get wasted on irrelevant clicks. You can even link your Google Ads account with Google Analytics account to see how your ads are performing.
- Facebook – With 56 billion daily active users and still increasing, Facebook is the largest online marketing platform to target a large scale of users globally. Through Facebook ads manager, you can target users based on their location, age, gender, device usage, etc. Facebook allows you to create custom audiences to reach current customers via phone number (if provided) and email address who have already visited your website. You can even create business pages on Facebook so that the relevant audience can like the page and get notifications whenever you post any content on the page. You should always remember that Facebook algorithm prioritizes content that sparks conversations and meaningful interactions between people, especially those from family and friends and helps in peer-to-peer marketing.
- Instagram – Instagram is now a company that is owned by Facebook since 2012. With more than 1 billion active monthly users, you should work on including Instagram in your digital marketing strategy. The popularity of this platform is because of its simplicity as you just require a mobile to upload photos and videos. You can also post ads on Instagram and since Facebook owns this company, you can even run Facebook ads alongside Instagram ads and this can boost your posts to get more visitors.
Instagram is and always was about pictures, but now videos have started gaining likes and the reels can be used in digital marketing strategy to put the short videos and present it to the customers. Try to put text formats, photos from your brand, questions in text format, use of hashtags and providing an appropriate call to action, so that the relevant audience can reach your business page.
- YouTube – Youtube is owned by Google and is the best video-sharing platform. It has the channels of most popular brands of the world, so you cannot think of missing the opportunity to advertise on YouTube in your digital marketing strategy. The content in YouTube is present in video formats and there are options to show ads in the beginning, in-between and at the last of the original video.
YouTube marketing can prove to be the best, as most internet users in one way or other use the videos of YouTube to get the information they are wishing for. You should consider optimizing the YouTube ads campaign as per your products or services so that the relevant audience are always provided with the updated content. You should consider YouTube advertising to reach a large base of customers and attract maximum users so that the ROI of your business increases.
- LinkedIn – This platform is mainly used by corporates, business professionals and job seekers. You can this online platform to connect with industry partners, update customers on your business, and recruit new team members. LinkedIn ads help in connecting with like-minded people, is an inbound marketing platform and has many other benefits especially in the B2B marketing
LinkedIn has the highest ROI as 4 out of 5 people drive business decisions. This happens as you do not target keywords on LinkedIn as in other PPC ads. When advertising on LinkedIn you should first create a business page, optimize your profile and link your website. You should then begin posting content on a regular basis so that the relevant user makes a click and reaches your website.
Methods of online marketing
There are many ways to deliver your messages to the target audience in online marketing some of which are discussed below:
- Search engine optimization – Search engine optimization is the process of improving elements of your website to rank higher in the SERPs. Google’s ranking algorithm keeps updating regularly so that the relevant websites appear at the top for the search query made by the user. So, you should always keep an eye on optimizing your website and conducting SEO audit to figure out that you are getting the desired results. Your website should address the technicalities related to content matching, proper indexing and interpreting non-text content.
- Content marketing – Content is said to be the king and rightly so as all your business is conveyed to the visitors via content. You need to write effective content that entices the user to your website. Having great content is most important that helps your website to appear in the search results. Content marketing can be done in different formats like blogs, FAQs, webinars, how-to guides, news and updates, broadcasting business messages, etc. You need to optimize your content for mobile devices so that the users do not face any difficulty in buying your products or availing of your services.
- Social media marketing – With nearly 3.8 billion social media users and growing, you cannot miss advertising on these platforms to reach out to potential customers. Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to improve customer engagement, build links and promote a brand. Social media is a great way to promote your product or services to your followers.
With various social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. you need to choose the platform appropriately that best suits your business. You should focus on content marketing for all these platforms depending on the audience using them. You need to keep your services updated with the latest social media trends to make sure that the user feels you are providing services that meet their needs.
- Email marketing – Today email has also acquired a place in the digital advertising world and is a great way to reach out to job seekers and professionals. When you send a commercial message through email to potential customers it is known as email marketing. The key to generating the required ROI here is making sure that your email is getting delivered to the prospect’s inbox, generating engagement so that the prospect takes the action you are asking for. Remember to send personalized emails to develop the trust of the user and make sure that the user does not mark your mails as spam.
- Affiliate marketing – Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing program, where you pay publishers who bring you customers. Essentially, the publishers will give you space in their pages to advertise your business and help you generate leads or improve conversion rate and you will have to pay some amount for the same. This form of digital advertising is very useful for small-sized businesses, as it will bring in more traffic to their business through high-traffic websites and also increases brand recognition. Sites with high traffic like Amazon, eBay and Walmart run affiliate programs. So it is beneficial for both the merchants and publishers.
Benefits of online marketing
- Global reach – Unlike traditional marketing, online marketing is not bounded to a specific geographic location. As the internet is accessible all across the globe so you can reach out to customers across any region or country and the domain of your customer reach expands globally.
- Low cost – Traditional marketing had a high cost as once the banners, posters, print materials, etc. got disrupted or damaged the advertisers had to pay again for the same. But with digital marketing, you have to spend the major cost once you are taking the first step. After all the setup is done, you just need to perform a regular audit and work on changes which is very low compared to traditional marketing thus saving your time and money.
- Measurable ROI – The best part of online marketing is that you can measure the performance of your ads and monitor your ROI to maximize your profits. Digital marketing provides real-time visibility of your ad campaign, enabling you to make well-informed decisions to drive revenue and increase profit. You can even a/b test an ad campaign, to figure out which version of your ad format yields a better result.
- Immediate connection – Modern-day customers generally search various brands, compare products or services, check reviews and evaluate the cost ratio before they finally make a purchase. So, with a proper digital marketing strategy on SEM, SEO and PPC you can easily have an immediate connection with the users that works in the long run.
- Relationship building – The rise of digital advertising has led to constant communication between advertisers and consumers. Consumers can easily get in touch with your business anytime when they wish to without taking the effort to travel anywhere. So, with effective SMM practices, you can build a longtime and loyal relationship with current and prospective customers.
Wrap up
Now you must have got an idea of what online marketing is and how it can benefit your business. Before beginning to work on digital advertising you must review your target goals and then make a plan. You should work on developing a strong digital marketing strategy that helps in attracting new customers to your business and retain the trust of the consumers who are already availing of your services. You should work on creating a user-friendly website, optimizing your website for mobile devices, improve page loading speed and write great content that builds customer engagement. If you still find online marketing difficult, you can get in touch with a digital marketing agency that can help fine-tune the results you are looking for. So, businesses of all size and in any industry can leverage online marketing to great effect.
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