How To Choose The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business?

Digital Marketing is undoubtedly one of the newest yet one of the most popular forms of marketing as of 2020. There are various forms and branches of marketing within this stream – email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, content marketing, etc., among many more. As of 2019, Search Engines drive 93% of all website traffic. Also 90% of searchers haven’t made up their minds when they are trying to look up for a product on the internet for the first time. Hence, if you market your product well in the virtual world, you would untap a raging source of continuous revenue. There was a time when digital marketing was just something that only a handful of people knew about, but in today’s day and age if you still are skeptical about it, you might be missing out on a lot. Here is why!

Importance of digital marketing

As a matter of fact, an average internet user has about 7 different social media accounts. So if you market your business, you will reach a number of different people that share the common interest. Facebook says 22% of the world’s population is on Facebook. Instagram is another strong platform to market these days with 51% of it’s active users daily. An average person spends about 2 hours daily on various social media, and a teenager more than 9 hours on average. They spent about 37% of their time on social media interacting and scrolling with branded content. Likewise, only having social media accounts and marketing randomly might get you very less or no results. You need to have a proper social media marketing strategy.

We have seen it many times how new companies come in the market wipes out all the competition sometimes. Therefore, it is very important to hold your position, especially for the small scale businesses. Digital marketing has a very dynamic advertising rate, which helps the small scale businesses have a much smaller advertising budget. Another very effective and awesome feature of digital marketing is that you target the audience you need for your business. While creating an ad, you can specify the type of audience you are looking for, to guarantee the maximum number of people seeing your ad is interested. You can specify people based on their interest, goal, profession, education level, buying behavior, region and many more. There are more functions of social media marketing like segmentation and automation which will allow you to send your content at the optimal time to your audience to obtain the desired result. You can study a customer on an individual level and you can recommend the best product/service to them seeing their past purchases, interests, etc. One huge benefit of these online marketing ads is that you get a massive ROI (return of investment), it allows you to run these ads again and again. It is very important to create a strong digital brand reputation for your organisation, online Marketing again offers you to do so.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

1. To strategize and analyse the valuable data

With digital marketing you can analyse the data you get of all the people that interacted with your content and you can strategize your next ad accordingly. You can get informations like the number of people visiting your content/page, their age, sex, location and interests, amount of time they are spending on your site, the sources of traffic on your website, page and many more. By getting all this information you can strategize your upcoming marketing in the best way possible so that you get optimal results.

1. Huge ROI (return on investment)

Digital promoting organisations enhance transformation rates to accomplish the maximum return for your investment. With smarter brading and better income, advanced advertising can bring a superior ROI than traditional marketing. WIth powerful tracking and monitoring methods, results can be examined in the best possible way. It helps the organisation to take fundamental measures at the earliest. With advanced advertising you can generate a consistent flow of targeted traffic that gets converted into deals and leads. The more your business creates this sort of traffic, the quicker you can make the most of your audience.

2. Much more cost effective than traditional marketing

Digital marketing lets you set aside your cash to a considerable degree. This will definitely replace the expensive ads such as billboard posters and television advertisements. With E-mail marketing automation, you can create your leads to income. You can also pre-load your content and send it at the optimal time for your reader.

3. Target the audience you want

The best part about digital marketing is undoubtedly the fact that you can reach any audience based on your preferences, regardless of their demographics. If you are a company based out of India, willing to sell organic tampons online. You can reach your target audience based in the United States since tampons are very popular there, while they are hardly used in India.

4. It will ensure your business that survives online

Numerous people will come and go, yet a focused few will really buy. If you target the correct sort of individuals who will be your potential clients, the best outcome will definitely come. By executing keen strategies, such as blogging and web based social networking, you can connect with the interested group of people. It will further assist you with their valuable feedback and insights. With these, you can plan and guarantee the survival of your business.

5. Real time result

In this type of marketing you can actually see the statistics of your marketing and can take real time decisions that are best for the organisation. There is no way you could have done this in traditional methods. These are the number of visitors coming to your site, peak trading times, conversion rate, the increase in the number of its subscribers/followers, bounce rate, increase/drop in the website traffic and so much more. Not to forget these are super easy to analyse and evaluate with just a click of a button. Carefully analysing the data and making suitable changes improves the results every time and glides you to your desired outcome.

6. Increases your reach

This is definitely one of the most obvious benefits of digital marketing. You can easily broaden your reach by reaching people all across the world by means of the Internet – social media, emails, blogs, website, etc. Digital Marketing evidently thins out the lines of geographical boundaries of a business.

Tips to choose the right platform

Now that you know all about the importance and benefits of digital marketing, listed below are a few tips on choosing the right platform.

1. Understand and determine your goals:

One of the first steps to choosing the right platform is to determine and set realistic expectations of what you want from the digital campaign. It is important to be able to map out a clear plan and make a list of short term and long term goals. This is extremely important as you will have to choose your platform based on it. Do you want to reach a large number of people at a very small time? Then you must use Instagram, Facebook, Youtube advertisements. If you want to want to expand your reach gradually, over time, then you need to focus more on building a website, email marketing, blogging, etc.

2. Research extensively to find out about the various available platforms:

There is absolutely nothing in this world that you know enough about and we have been barely able to scratch the surface of what the Internet actually contains. So you must do your homework well and research extensively about digital marketing and its various forms. This will help you align the offerings of the various platforms with both the short term and the long term goals of your assignment. You also must know how each platform works and how you plan on harnessing the resources and tools provided to you.

3. Determine your budget:

One of the most important steps to choosing the perfect platform is determining well in the advance the amount of money that you will be willing and able to spend on your online campaigns. Various platforms have different tariff rates and it will do you good to be well aware of them in advance so that you can build and strategize a concrete plan around it. More often than not, advertising in social media can be fairly cheap. So to meet your goals, it is important that you allot a reasonable sum of money to your digital marketing stints.

4. Find out about the benefits of the platform for your business in particular:

There are a large number of online campaign spaces available, as we have already emphasised on and established by now. Each of them comes with their own sets of benefits. If you are a documentary filmmaker, the best platform to promote your next project wouldn’t be a blog announcement. Instead you must advertise on a more visual platform to reach the right audience, like Facebook, Instagram or Youtube. Every platform out there may not be useful for your business in particular. It is important to identify the ones that are.

5. Target a specific audience and then choose your platform wisely:

What is the kind of audience that you particularly cater to? If you are a publishing agency specializing in comic books, you need to understand that your biggest consumer base are school and college going children, or young adults basically. These young adults can mostly be found on Facebook and Instagram instead of Reddit or Twitter. This is why you must understand your customer base and the demographic of the users of these social media sites and then choose your platform(s) wisely.

6. Identify the talent available in your organisation for handling the platform:

A very talented team, well affluent with the nitty gritties of the Internet is required to manage your online profiles, so as to generate the most traffic. With the intense amount of cutthroat competition out there, you need specialists with degrees in Digital Marketing to direct your team into the right direction. If you don’t have someone already, you must hire a new employee. And also remember that you will have to pay them a salary, thereby increasing the budget of the whole operation.

Steps to follow after choosing the platform

Your work doesn’t end right after you are done choosing the platform. There are several plans that need to be laid out in order to ensure that you harness your opportunities completely and do not let them go to waste. Listed below are a few steps you need to follow.

1. Research about the particular features of the platforms and how you can use them. For example, Instagram lets you track the age, gender and location of your viewers. So does Youtube. This will help you target the right audience and also customise your future advertisements accordingly.
2. Set up a proper and easy digital payment service. If you need to charge for your products, it is important that you set up an easy and accessible payment option. For example, Amazon Prime gives a free one month trial to select debit card users and all credit card users. This is helping them earn money through partnerships however they do lose out on a large audience due to this inconvenience.
3. Search Engine Optimization, though a proper technique of digital marketing, is all pervasive, regardless of the platform. This is because no matter how efficient your team is, if you do not optimise your content, you are bound to fail since your posts will never even show up on the feeds of your customers and your contemporaries will eat into large chunks of your market share.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a fascinating way of expanding your business. Since it is a fairly new area of marketing, it is still a largely untapped resource. Studies have shown how massive the positive effects of email marketing are and how compelling this module is for a buyer. Yet, not many firms and businesses have adopted it yet. There are several other forms that you can learn. Maintaining the rules of generality, we have focussed on the most common ideas here.