When compared to the cost of traditional marketing, the digital marketing is cheaper, cost effective and you can take your business to a wider audience quickly. This has led to the rapid growth of digital media marketing. Traditional marketing methods include advertisement in newspapers, Television commercials, radio broadcasts, billboards, brochures etc.
For a new business all these are costly advertising methods. The methods of marketing have changed a lot in the digital age. Thanks to the internet and electronic channels. Small businesses and marketers have recognized the importance of digital marketing. They now know, it is affordable and the fastest way to market their products and services. With a proper digital marketing strategy, any business can make a brand name and get sales. Let us see what are the various digital marketing channels used by businesses.
Search Engine Marketing:
First things first. If you are a new business, you need to have a user friendly website with an attractive design to kick start your search marketing campaign. You can make use of the search engines in two different ways. One is the search engine optimisation (SEO) and the other one is the paid marketing, also known as “pay per click”. Once your website is live, you are ready to go.
Search Engine Optimisation:
Let us see how the search engine optimisation works. Search engines like Google and Bing have spiders or robots that crawl your website. These spiders visit your website and log the contents and stores in their database. When someone searches on Google or Bing to find out the services they are looking for these search engines will return results that has relevant content and credibility. Credibility is determined by how other websites are linked to yours. The websites with relevant content and credibility will get good visibility in the search engines. This will lead your potential customers to your website. Optimising your website is a time taking process, but over the time when your website starts getting enough visitors you will start getting leads and sales.
Pay Per Click Marketing:
In the pay per click marketing campaign, the user clicks on an advertisement in the search result. The user is then redirected to a landing page or a website. Google AdWords is one of the popular pay per click marketing platform. Let us see how a PPC campaign works.
Setting up a PPC campaign starts with finding the right keywords for your business. You must know what exactly are you going to market and then select the right keywords. Write an attractive Ad description giving importance to what you actually offer. Then make sure you have set up a landing page (It is the page, the user arrives after clicking on the Advertisement) for the customers.
Affiliate Marketing:
This is one of the oldest digital marketing technique in which you sign up with the companies or marketers who promote your products for a commission fee. You can place an advertisement of your products or services on the affiliate’s website. This helps your business reach a broader audience. For example, businesses such as hotels and tours, uses affiliates like “Hire a taxi”. Affiliate marketing can generate up to 10-30% sales. Even though it is cost effective for your online business, affiliate marketing is a time consuming marketing technique. We recommend you to leave it to digital marketing specialists. Below are the different affiliate marketing methods and how you have to pay them:
- Pay per click: When a visitor clicks on the advertisement on the affiliate website and reaches the business owner’s site, the affiliate receives a pre-fixed amount of money.
- Pay per lead: A pre-fixed amount of commission fee will be given to the affiliate when they refer a potential customer to the business owner.
- Pay per sale: The affiliate receives a commission fee when a sale happens through the advertisement.
Display Advertising:
Display advertising is a digital marketing technique that uses banner ads, animated images, videos and rich media contents which are displayed on a third party website. Display advertising help businesses drive traffic to their website and improve brand identity. The best part of display advertising is that, it capture information such as location and interests of users through browser cookies, which helps the advertisers to target the right audience. Suppose if someone has recently searched different travel websites or blogs, advertisers will be able to display travel related advertisements when they visit other websites. You can also track the number of users who has seen or clicked on the ads.
Social Media:
To put it simply, social media marketing is a digital marketing strategy that helps businesses reach their customers and drive traffic to their website or blog. If managed well, social media is a great tool for business to reach their audience without investing much. Creating social media accounts on various social media websites is just the first step. To begin with, it is important to have a social media plan. Firstly, determine who you are going to target. Make sure you have a business website or a blog. Sharing blog posts with helpful content is an important part of the strategy. Images, videos and infographics are some of the multimedia contents that your followers would like to see. Constantly monitor your social media posts and update them.
Now that you know about some of the cost effective digital marketing strategies, kick start your digital marketing campaign for your new business. If you have used any other digital marketing strategies, feel free to share with us.
