Introduction to Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing channels like print media and billboards can be very effective for small businesses. But if you rely only on them, you are missing out on a huge pool of potential customers that are comparing services like yours online.

As of 2021, a staggering 4.66 billion people around the world are connected online, so it's time you build a digital presence for your business.

Digital marketing

Digital marketing is a branch of marketing that uses a range of platforms and techniques including social media, email, content, SEO, affiliates, and pay-per-click, to reach, interact, and engage with customers online.

From the smallest startup to the biggest long-established organization, every brand is trying to grab their audience's attention, so there's a lot of competition to stand out from the crowd. Let's look at how you can use different marketing tactics to enhance your digital footprint.

Pay-per-click marketing

In a nutshell, pay-per-click marketing is putting an ad in search engine results and paying a fee every time a prospect reaches your website by clicking the ad.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a form of digital marketing focused on creating valuable, consistent, and relevant content to attract and retain customers. Some examples of content marketing are blog posts, webpages, ebooks, visual content, and podcasts.

Search engine optimization

OK, so you have a highly captivating page of content ready to publish, but how do you make sure people actually see it? That's where search engine optimization comes in. It's a marketing tool that helps your content rank higher in search engine results using a pre-defined algorithm.

Digital marketing for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs)

Digital marketing is evolving by the day, and brands are adapting too. Brands increasingly need to find new ways to communicate and strengthen their relationship with their customers—the last thing you want is to lose your customers to a competitor due to an underwhelming experience with your brand.

Digital marketing channels like social media and email level the playing field. They allow businesses of all sizes to compete on the same platforms, so they can hugely benefit small businesses, enabling them to reach a larger audience and drive more traffic to their websites to build a loyal customer base—without needing a huge marketing budget.

While every digital marketing approach is unique, we think these two tools are best suited to small businesses to kickstart their digital marketing journey in the right direction.

Social media for small business

Social media marketing focuses on promoting products and services, increasing brand awareness, and driving traffic through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. It can help small businesses create a niche for their brands and reach a wider audience.

• It's easy to get started: You can start building a social media presence for your brand very quickly with little to no marketing experience. Popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter allow you to create a business account, page, or group. Create a business name, add a link to your website in the bio and a display image, and you are ready to start posting.

• Increased brand visibility: Leveraging social media gives a small brand a better chance of becoming popular. Consistent, engaging, and relevant campaigns can strike the right chord with your target niche and expose your brand to a global audience.

• It's cost effective: Creating a business profile on most platforms is free. Even paid promotions are relatively cheap compared to conventional marketing techniques, and you can get a better ROI.

• Focused social media analytics: Individual social media platforms give real-time metrics like page reach, impressions, and profile visits. A holistic marketing tool can give you the bigger picture with instant insights into how your posts are performing across multiple platforms, helping streamline your social media activities.

Email for small business

Email marketing has stood the test of time. It is the easiest, most direct, and most effective way to connect with your prospects and convert them into customers.

• Targeted and personalized: Emails are one-to-one communication, allowing for greater personalization, and you can tailor your content to the preferences of people who have chosen to subscribe to your brand.

• Make things simpler for your audience: With a link to your website and a call-to-action button in your campaign, it is easy for your audience to see what you have to offer and convert to customer at the click of the button.

• Instant email reports: An email analytics tool can give you instant, powerful information on the email click rate, open rate, and bounce rate for your campaign and help you monitor its performance with reports and dashboards.

• Build lasting relationships: Email is often the first tool customers use when they want to reach out to a business. An active email presence with regular updates and prompt responses to customer queries can increase the customer's trust in your business and foster a healthy customer relationship.

We hope this blog provided you a brief understanding of digital marketing and the various platforms that it encompasses. If you have any questions or think we have missed something, you can reach out to us in the comments below.