There’s a buzz about digital marketing. There are numerous specialised agencies that help one create and manage an effective digital marketing strategy. It is imperative for every marketer to understand what a good digital plan will entail and what it will help one accomplish.
The basic objective of every business is to increase customer inquiries, generate revenue and increase the volume of business and maybe even create a brand presence. The digital marketing plan works on exactly these objectives just that it’s online. So a good digital marketing strategy will firstly ensure there is better visibility for your business online by buying premium placement in Local Search Engines, engaging in Search Engine Marketing, and Social Media Marketing; that there is excitement and interest generated in your business by Online Advertising and more prospects are directed to your website finally culminating in enquiries/shopping cart transactions.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is concentrated on driving maximum traffic on the website. SEM deals with a much popular term SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. The sole focus of SEO is to ensure that the website on the first page (if not on the first position) on search engines like google, bing etc. Google is indeed the unquestionable ruler of search engines and hence, most focus is on Google. SEO manages the keywords used in the creation of the website to include those that people would mostly have the propensity of using while searching for the activities/products the business deals with. So a restaurant may use ‘restaurant’; ‘take-away’; ‘fast food’; ‘Chinese/Thai’ etc while describing their website. Good SEO monitors every aspect of the website, right from naming the images on the website accurately to refreshing the content on the website very frequently, to using blogs to bring fresh and original content and generating attractive content to create viral campaigns. The final destination of SEO is also to drive traffic to the website.
Digital marketing also uses online advertising. Most search engines sell space on the search pages when relevant key words are searched on a Pay Per Impression (Eyeballs) and Pay Per Click (Conversion). Google adwords helps with an in-depth understanding of how to use keywords. These display banner ads along the sidebars or floating on the top or bottom of the screen and even pop ups can be directed to targeted viewers using the geographical and demographic information apart from a basic sense of the areas of interest of the viewer from the browsing history. In fact the ads are so programmed that they correlate your emails/conversations/searches/previous clicks/browsing history etc with the possibilities of what you are seeking and flash the relevant ads across your screen.
Online advertising can create a strong brand recall for your brand. These ads generally don’t have an immediate call for action and are usually paid on Pay Per Impression model. When advertisers want a specific result from the advertisement, they include the call for action in the advertisement e.g. an ecommerce portal may display the exact product that you have viewed earlier and include the button to ‘Buy Now’. On clicking it, one is directed to the shopping cart and check out. So the advertiser will increase revenue by such advertising. Such ads are always Pay Per Click and will be directly proportionate to the incremental sales. We even look at mobile advertising on mobile browsers and even on in-game screens on mobile games.
Social Media is become an extremely powerful medium of advertising. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn etc have extremely high traffic and also give access to a lot of critical profiling data on the viewers of the ads. So one can device a good social media campaign and display it to a very clearly defined target audience thus increasing its effectiveness and results.
Social media uses a lot of viral content to create an indelible impact in the minds of the viewers/readers. Hence, a lot of smart advertising campaigns are disguised as user generated content and propagated on social media. This is very true for political parties, social causes, and negative publicity. Testimonials and User Reviews are a very powerful tool in social media marketing.
Using attractive graphics is key to the success of online advertising. A creative copywriter is also very critical for a successful digital marketing campaign. While having professionals will add value, there are innumerable tools available online that can be used to edit free images available online and create an attractive banner etc. Similarly, there are tutorials available online to help anyone learn the nuances of running good online campaigns, apart from the in built analytics which give you the statistical data to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. It can be a daunting learning curve and one is bound to make a lot of mistakes, but a quick look at the analytics will help one understand what’s working and what’s not, learn and master the art of Digital Marketing.
