Unit 1 (RM) Introduction To Digital Marketing
Unit 1 (RM) Introduction To Digital Marketing
What Is Marketing?
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a
product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers
or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company.
Let’s face it, to the average business person, marketing equals’ promotion.
Marketing is what you say and how you say it when you want to explain how awesome your
product is and why people should buy it.
Marketing is an Ad. Marketing is a brochure. Marketing is a press release. And more recently,
Marketing is a Facebook page or a Twitter account.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Digital marketing is the use of the Internet to reach consumers.
Digital marketing is a broad field, including attracting customers via email, content
marketing, search platforms, social media, and more.
The company also conducts effective market research that would tell him the value able
information about the customers, competitors, general trends, and any extraordinary change
occurred in the market that can be useful for the company. Then company identifies the
potential opportunities from the collected information and split the whole market into different
segment. These segments are based on some factors like age group, geographical location etc.
The company evaluates each segment separately to check the potential of the segment in the
light of its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, it selects the target market segment to proceed
further.
Analysis of the Market in which the company identifies the internal strengths and
weaknesses along with the external opportunities and threats.
Marketing Planning in which certain marketing plans or strategies are developed so that
the overall objective of the marketing should be accomplished.
Marketing Implementation in which the developed plans and strategies are practically
implemented in order to achieve the marketing objectives.
Marketing Control in which the performance results of the marketing plans and strategies
are evaluated and necessary steps are taken to ensure the accomplishment of overall
marketing objectives of the company.
1) Visibility
How do you make your target market know that you exist? Perhaps by
advertising on TV, Radio, newspapers, web and so on. So in a way you
do it by getting yourself visible. What so ever be the mode. Isn’t that?
3) Engagement
Your end objective is to get some sales, for that you
need to generate some leads and for generating leads
you must engage your customers, you must make them
do some activities on your website. Not everyone who
visits your website has a buying intention. So serve the
purpose for which they have visited your site, it could be
anything, they might have embarked upon your website
just like that while browsing the website so do some
activity to engage them. Let that person do something
on your website and this is what we call engagement.
4) Lead Generation
Once you engage people, you generate leads. It can be micro
or macro leads. Now, what is micro and macro leads.
Micro Leads
Micro leads are those lead which although have been filled up
by people however they are not interested in buying your
product at that point of time. For example, a lot of people have
downloaded your white paper or e brochure or have subscribed
for your blog or newsletter and you got some information, you
got some activity going on your website by your target customer
however they are, at this point of time, not interested in your
product or services or rather not ready to buy them.
Macro Leads
Macro leads are those leads in which the person is more
interested to buy and they have filled up an important lead. For example inbound call, someone
subscribing for free trial or someone walking in to your center. Macro leads are actually those
leads in which chances of visitors getting converted into customers are higher.
Once you convert, it results into sales. You generate micro leads, you nurture them and convert
into macro leads, and then you nurture your macro leads and convert them into sales.
5) Measurement
Best thing about digital marketing is that it is not only cost-effective or has wider reach but that
you can also measure it at its every part. You can track and measure every single penny that
that you spend online. You can calculate ROI on every single penny spent, can figure out which
channel are not performing well and can make investments accordingly. Suppose a particular
channel isn’t performing well, so you can relocate that budget on a better performing platform.
This is how you can increase sales and increase revenue in same amount of money.
You do this through Web Analytics, which is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting
of data over the internet for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
6) Retention
The last step of digital marketing is retention. Retention is
getting the same customer back to your website and
selling again. You can do this through email marketing,
remarketing and so on.
Inbound marketing pulls visitors in, increase brand exposure, and creates brand authority
through the creation of valuable content.
This new marketing strategy is called inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is slightly more
complicated and indirect compared to outbound marketing, but it’s a more effective way of
reaching your target audiences.
57% of marketers who blog monthly acquired a customer directly from their blog.
77% of businesses that market directly to consumers have acquired a customer with Facebook.
• Notification Bars:
Notification bars also known as the announcement bars usually flaunt on top of the website,
displaying the messages such as asking users if they want to allow the website to show
notifications or that contains the link to email forms or landing pages.
Such bars are generally the complete width symbols that are configured to stick on the top even
when the user scrolls down across the page. This fascinates the attention of users.
•Relevant Calls-to-action:
A suitable call to action acts as a key element in the marketing strategies for any website. By
adding relevant CTAs to the blogs and other content & non-content posts, marketing become bit
more effective at converting the traffic into leads each time.
The marketer must keep in mind that the powerful call-to-actions drive the visitors towards
taking the desired action of mentioning their names and contact information. And the posts must
include those CTAs which are relevant to the post.
Reach local audience: Use of traditional marketing can make your task easy to reach
the local audience. Radio is definitely the best option and the quickest way to advertise
your business and put across your message.
Reuse and recycling possible: Online marketing will not require any physical material
like posters or pamphlets, but the sole advantage of having hard copies of the advertised
material is an added benefit. The fliers, posters, pamphlets, etc. can be reused and re-
read anytime and anywhere wherever you are located and for this, no internet
connection is required. These promotional media can also be kept for future use and
recycled.
Familiar marketing mode: Traditional marketing is a familiar mode of advertisement for
older people and businessmen, as they don’t need any explanation about the
promotional material. They will accept the flier or pamphlet distributed, and will read it
whenever they get time and in no time, the old people would understand that it is an
advertisement for any brand or a product. Digital marketing is not a cup of tea for older
customers.
Hard copy easily processed: Traditional hard copy marketing is always easy to
process mentally and recall in future.
Greater exposure: Traditional marketing always has a high success rate. This method
of marketing is tried and tested method, and thus every businessman believes that the
traditional method will prove and provide them success. Online marketing might reach
most of the population, but there is no guarantee of reaching it to all the targeted
audience.
New audiences: Traditional marketing will allow you to reach a large population and
across many demographics. You can use billboards, television, and radio for
advertisement. These will also spread your message across the various geographical
area and also reach your targeted audience, and it might be possible that new
audiences might get connected to your brand and business.
The use of print ads on reporters and magazines is a simple example of traditional marketing.
Other examples include flyers that are put in mailboxes, commercials both on TV and radio and
billboards. On the other hand, when a business invest on building a website, advertising the
brand name through different social media such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube,
this kind strategy is called Digital Marketing. Let us find out what traditional marketing vs. digital
marketing statistics say. Traditional marketing was a thing only because digital marketing did
not exist.
One of the primary disadvantages of traditional marketing is that the results are not easily
measured, and in many cases cannot be measured at all. In most cases, traditional marketing is
also more costly than digital marketing. In Digital Marketing we can see everything in real time
including, number of visitors, most active time of the day, conversion rates, bounce rates.
Newspaper ads, television ads, and the likes cost a lot. Online advertising on the other hand is
something even young entrepreneurs can afford right out of some saved up money.
Brand development
Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing statistics can be measured but one thing these
statistics don’t take into consideration in comparison to online advertising vs. traditional
advertising is the brand image the online advertising gives rise to. We can have a whole website
instead of a column on a newspaper page. We can put forward things to people whenever we
want once our own a blog or a Page on social media. With this space, we can create a
consistent image for our Company. This is something one advertisement aired on the radio or
posted in the newspapers cannot give us. And will also help in branding our business.
Higher exposure
Now, we can’t claim that a television ad or an advertisement on every newspaper in town is
going to cover the majority of the population. Any means of traditional advertisement is limited to
a certain locality.
With traditional marketing, we cannot really interact with our target audience. We need to wait
out for the responses to come in before we plan our next step. This is a long and tedious
process.
Higher engagement
Online marketing allows us to engage our audience in real time. We can chat and discuss a lot
about our brand or company with the actual audience immediately. We need to be prepared to
invest that much time or a public relations team into the marketing budget.
Quicker publicity
Very much due to the real time results of online marketing, we get instant publicity. If we don’t,
we at least instantly know that this particular ad isn’t working for us. Traditional vs. digital
marketing is an almost unfair comparison here because the former has no scope to deliver in
this regard. Whereas with the latter, there is a chain reaction of shares and comments helping
us reach new audience and earn new visitor every nanosecond.
Strategy Refinement
The very point of getting results and the analytics in real time is to be able to catch up in real
time. When we know how things are going down, we will have a chance to improve them from
bad to good and good to better. With traditional marketing, a host of negative feedback won’t
bother us much because our business might already have gone down the drain by the time we
receive them.
Easy analytics
With online marketing we instantly know what is working for us and what isn’t via Google
Analytics. We can measure the inbound traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, profit, and the
general trend of interested audience, all in real time.
Combining both marketing methods helps a company reach a wider range of their
audience.
Traditional and digital marketing methods used together are an excellent way for companies to
reach more customers and create more conversions.
Both digital and traditional marketing offers many benefits to businesses. While most people are
online nowadays, traditional marketing still has leverage in the marketing world. This is because
not everyone is online all the time.
When companies use both marketing methods, they cover all their bases to ensure that they
reach their entire audience. Traditional marketing is passive marketing and customers are most
likely passively participating. A great use of traditional marketing is to create a call to action in a
magazine ad or television commercial. This call to action should enforce the viewer to visit a
website or somehow to participate in a digital experience and transform them into active
participants. This is an excellent way to get both traditional and digital marketing to work
together.
Another way to get both traditional and digital marketing to work together is to deliver a
personalized experience to your customer. Traditional marketing uses demographics like age
and location, as well as, psychographics like interests and lifestyle. This information can be
used to target specific audiences with a particular Ad. This ad can also use a call to action to
lead viewers online to continue their personalized experience in a digital format. Using calls to
action in traditional marketing to encourage customers to continue their experience digitally is
an excellent example of the major impact digital marketing can have on traditional marketing to
enhance a company’s marketing efforts.
Digital marketing strategies integrate with traditional marketing when customers are offered calls
to action that lead them from one marketing method to the other. Combining marketing methods
is the best way to guarantee a company’s audience is reached effectively. When a company
uses every method available to them, they will reach and convert more viewers to their
business.