Digital marketing is now the trending way to do marketing. It is a convenient and cost effective way to get your audience to notice you and what you offer. Everything is done online where you do not have to incur a lot of cost from traditional marketing methods. Here are the four main ways to do digital marketing.
Search Engine Marketing
Since more and more people are on the Internet using search engines to find information and products, search engine marketing (SEM) is extremely important. SEM is a form of digital marketing is makes your company or brand more discoverable on major search engines like Google and Bing. It directs organic searches (people manually searching for a query) to your website and leading to your product and service.
Search engine marketing can come in two forms: search engine optimisation and pay-per-click
Search engine optimisation is when you optimise your website to make it more discoverable to the search engine and also to the users. Doing things like putting relevant keywords into your website and indexing your website will allow it to appear on the search engine rankings, especially on the first page. The higher the ranking, the more likely your target audience will notice your website.
Pay per click is a paid ad that appears at the top of the search engine results. You would need to pay some money and craft out a short ad with the keywords that you are targeting. After that, if someone were to type the keywords into the search engine, your ad will appear at the top of the page, making it the first thing that person sees. However, every time someone clicks on the ad, you would need to pay (hence the name pay-per-click).
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Social Media Marketing
Almost everyone in your target audience would have a social media account, which is an opportunity to reach out to them. You can do it in two ways: branding yourself at no cost or through paid advertising.
You can build your brand through social media by creating company pages and getting people to subscribe and follow updates. It is a great opportunity to reach out and communicate to your target audience. Users can leave comments or reviews on certain issues and companies can find ways to interact with the audience directly too. For instance, a restaurant owner can create a new Facebook page containing opening details, menu pictures and announcements. They can also create an Instagram page and post pictures of the food featured. This way they are directly showing their target audience what they can expect and connect with them.
Companies can also engage through paid advertising through the use of sponsored posts and engaging influencers. Sponsored posts are ads that appears on the target audience news feed, even for those who are not ‘following’ the company. Companies can also engage social media influencers to promote their products and services to their audience and get them. It is a potential to increase their sales.
Content Marketing
You might have noticed that many of the companies’ websites have an article or a blog section. The aim of this section is to engage in content marketing. Content marketing is about educating and informing your target audience about what you are delivering. For instance, a writer at a cosmetic company would post articles about beauty tips and skincare routines. If the piece is well-researched and written, many people will appreciate how informative the article is and will share it on the Internet or on social media. This means that more and more people would know about the article and the website it was from.
Apart from educating the people, search engine optimisation techniques can be incorporated in each article. The relevant keywords can be included in the article and allowing it to be indexed by the search engine can make it discoverable to your target audience. The user goes to read the article and, if they are interested, they can be redirected to the main page of your website for them to check out for more information.
Email Marketing
Instead of mailing out flyers and letters, email marketing involves sending emails about new products, promotions, newsletters of your company to your customers. It is a cheap and effective way of reaching out to your audience at little cost. It is not the same as spam emailing (though if done wrong it can become like that); you would need an emailing list of those who consented and gave you their email. These emails can be personalised with image attachments and offers to your target audience to get them to become your loyal customers or clients.
These are the four main types of digital marketing where it is best to engage in two or more types in order to get the best reach to your audience. Tell us what you think about digital marketing. Is this the future of marketing for companies?