Suppose you want to get organically grown apples. How will you find them? Many would resort to the Internet or their network of friends. Now imagine finding a business person who sells fresh apples from his orchard. He also grows other fruits and makes wine. His whole business depends on the growth and well-being of his plants. Now, he needs to spray his trees to be safe from bugs. What will he do?
If it were 1999, he would’ve asked his friends and relatives for advice, but it’s 2022, and he has internet. So, he googles the best tree sprayers in the city, finds one he likes, and calls them for help.
You, orchard owner, and tree sprayers are a part of an elaborate digital marketing web as a business, a customer, or both. Since everybody on the planet has Google on their phones, it’s foolish not to market your business digitally.
By doing that, you’re losing thousands of leads each week, a percentage of which gets converted into customers. If you’re still skeptical about digital marketing and want to know about it, keep reading.
Different channels of digital marketing
Digital marketing is a huge umbrella term for many underlying marketing concepts. It broadly contains everything that pops up on your screen when you’re surfing the web, be it an ad on Instagram or the websites on Google’s first page. They’re all using digital marketing to have themselves in front of your eyes.
Businesses use both paid and free channels of digital marketing. You can start doing social media marketing, e-mail marketing, and content marketing yourself, but the rest of these are a little technical and require knowledge of SEO and how things work on the web. Let’s understand how you can use these channels.
Social Media Marketing:
Social media marketing is the most popular marketing method on the web. No matter what your business is, your audience is on social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This includes everything from content creation to posts, captions, and reels. SEO on social media marketing is not as complicated as Google, so you can try doing this yourself. You begin by creating a profile and optimizing it for the platform, followed by creating content and networking with people in your niche and clients.
E-mail Marketing:
E-mail marketing is quite popular amongst B2C brands, but B2B brands are also catching. It will have 3.9 billion users worldwide in 2020 and will reach 4.9 billion in 2021. According to a study conducted by Oberlo, every $1 spent on e-mail marketing brings you back $42, so it’s quite a lucrative deal. E-mail marketing is best for lead nurturing as people provide their e-mails when they’re interested in your product. This provides a higher chance of a conversion. You can use software like MailChimp to send e-mails in bulk.
Content marketing:
Content marketing is a broad term that contains every piece of content posted with the intent of selling. It includes website content, blogs, landing pages, social media posts, or videos. Content marketing is a creative mode of marketing that generally requires writers and content creators. Without content, your business can’t exist on the web. You build your brand image through the content you create, so this is quite important for marketing.
Influencer marketing:
Influencer marketing is the process of reaching out to influencers on social media and asking them to promote your products on their posts. This is a great method to increase sales, and influencers have several people following them who look up to them for inspiration. If you’re a food business, you can reach out to food bloggers or other people on YouTube or Instagram who create content around food.
Pay per click
When you search for something on Google, several results are on the first page. The top 3 with ‘ad’ sign, as paid ads. Businesses pay Google to rank their websites on top for certain keywords. Different keywords have different rates depending upon their search volume. A popular keyword is generally costly but pay per click is worth it as you pay only when people click on those ads.
These are the top five digital marketing channels that are widely used. There are other options like affiliate marketing and organic search, but they require SEO knowledge. You can hire a digital marketing agency to handle these things for you. Digital marketing is necessary as you must be visible on the web for people to visit your website and buy from you. E-commerce can’t survive without it.