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Are you a company looking to transition from traditional marketing to digital marketing? Or maybe are you trying to decide on whether digital marketing is the right marketing strategy for your business?

Then you might want to continue reading this post. This is because, in this post, we will walk you through everything you need to know about digital marketing and the forms of digital marketing services available for your business.

So, without wasting time, let's dive into it.

The attention of the global population has gradually been changing from traditional media to digital media. In 2021 alone, there was a 5.8% decrease in the average time spent on traditional media. People across the globe are getting hooked to their phones, computers, tablets, and any device that enables them to access the internet. This means companies need to capitalize on this opportunity to stay on top of their game by leveraging digital marketing to get their brand out there to consumers.

Let me share with you more facts that show that your company needs to emphasize digital marketing.

There has been a steady and somewhat exponential growth in the number of people that have access to smartphones and the internet. Surprisingly, about 66.92% of the world's population has access to mobile, and also, 59.5% of the global population has to the internet. These stats combined show the potential audience reach you can have with an effective digital marketing campaign.

More and more people are spending time on their phones, especially when connected to the internet. This means if you can come up with a compelling digital marketing plan you should be able to steal some screentime from your target audience. The average American spends 6.3 hours a day on the internet, and this means the more screen time people spend on the internet the higher the chances of them seeing your digital ads.

Most digital marketing strategies give companies the ability to track the success rate of their digital marketing solutions to get an insight into what works and what doesn't work.

This gives digital marketing an upper hand over traditional marketing because, with traditional marketing, there is no real way to measure the success rate of your campaign.

3.Huge Returns On Investments

Thanks to the insight or real-time analytics provided by most digital marketing methods, companies can tweak campaigns that aren't performing well to bring in the results they desire.

This can be a great way for companies to get substantial returns on the investments they make. Also, with digital marketing, you can make huge returns with little investment. 

4.Companies Can Test Waters

With digital marketing, companies can easily switch from one marketing method to another if one digital marketing strategy isn't effective. However, with traditional marketing, most companies go into long-term deals with traditional marketing companies without testing the waters to visualize the effectiveness of the traditional marketing campaign they are to embark on.

This can cost companies thousands of dollars if a traditional marketing strategy proves futile. However, with digital marketing, companies can invest as little or as much as they want to test the waters before going all in.

Learn more about Why digital marketing is important?

There are various ways you can propagate your ads using digital marketing, and in this section, we will explain the various forms of digital marketing to help you choose the best type for your business.

One of the most used, effective, and affordable digital marketing strategies is SEO marketing. SEO marketing enables you to drive organic traffic to your website, webpage, or social media page for free if used right.

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, involves, tweaking or implementing certain parameters into your content and web/social media pages to enable them to rank higher on search results. What this means is that search engines look for certain parameters on your website or webpage, and they use these parameters to show your content to the relevant audience.

This creates an opportunity for your business or brand to be shown to people who are searching for them. By driving organic traffic to your website, through SEO, you are guaranteed a higher conversion rate.

With SEO, you are getting your web pages and social media pages to rank higher on search engines such as Google, Bing, YouTube, or even the search engines of the various social media sites.

So, why is SEO important?

Well, each day, there are 5.4 billion Google searches, and 71% of the 5.4 billion people do not look beyond the first search result page. This means, if your website doesn't appear on the first SERP, then the chances of driving organic traffic to your website are slim. This is why SEO is vital in every digital marketing strategy because, by tweaking your website or webpage for SEO, you get to rank your website on the first SERP and enjoy free and continuous traffic to your website.

It is important to note that SEO isn't only limited to dominant search engines like Google and Bing. Social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other digital platforms have search engines that lookout for certain metrics to rank your content.

So, regardless of your digital marketing campaign, we recommend you implement SEO.

The downside about SEO is that it takes time for you to see results and drive traffic. Also, the search engines (especially the major ones like Google) keep updating their algorithms, which means you will have to change your SEO strategy with time. Finally, SEO marketing can get expensive over time, however, it is cheaper than other digital marketing strategies such as PPC.

Another digital marketing strategy people use is content marketing. Content marketing involves creating and distributing informative and relevant content to attract and engage potential customers.Learn

Content marketing involves posting relevant articles or posts to help people understand certain topics or answer any questions they may have. This can be in a form of blog posts, YouTube videos, or social media posts. The goal here is to make it informative and tweak it to spark user engagement to produce the results you desire.

Building an effective digital marketing funnel can be a great way to build trust with your prospects because through content marketing, you get to answer all the questions the prospect might have. This enables them to view your company as a reputable source and they tend to trust you with their problems for solutions. This is true because companies that use content marketing, have a 6X conversion rate than companies that do not use any content marketing strategy.

So, with the right content marketing strategy, you aren't only assured traffic, you are assured to convert most of the traffic you drive to your website into potential customers.

It is important to note that combining content marketing with SEO can be effective in getting your brand out there. These two strategies work best when implemented simultaneously. Because content marketing gives you the chance to implement all your on-page SEO strategies for a higher ranking.

Also, if you implement the right SEO strategy with no content marketing strategy, most people will click off your website. This can lead to you having a high bounce rate which can drastically affect your ranking. Therefore, you must have the right SEO strategy to direct traffic to your page and the right content marketing strategy to keep people on your page.

People are in constant search for information on the internet, so, with the right content marketing strategy, you will be able to provide people with what they want, and then win them over with an effective call for action.

Learn more about enhancing your digital marketing skill to get the most out of your marketing campaigns.

If you have some money to invest upfront to reach your target audience, then PPC might be the right strategy for you. PPC is one of the best ways to attract visitors online and this online marketing strategy involves you paying to place your ads on relevant and strategic places online.

Just as the name implies, you only pay once a visitor interacts (usually by clicking) with your ad. So, until a person clicks on the ad, you do not pay. So, instead of going the organic route of attracting visitors to your website or social media page, you are rather buying these visitors. PPC ads come in various forms, and some of the most common digital advertising examples include: 

• Video ads: These ads automatically play for a certain duration (usually 10 to 15 seconds). They appear before you watch a video on YouTube or access content on a website. 
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• Search ads: These ads are typically seen on the top of organic SERP and labeled as "ads." 
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• Display ads: These ads are usually displayed on the sides of web pages to get you to click on them. 
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• Social Media ads: These ads may appear as "sponsored" on a social media feed. 
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There are various forms of PPC you can look at to see which works best for your company's internet marketing strategy. 
 

One benefit of PPC compared to other strategies such as SEO is that the results are instant. Once your PPC strategy is ready, it gets deployed to your target audience instantly. However, you want to ensure that you have all the elements of an effective PPC campaign to ensure that you reach the right target audience, and not push your money down the drain.

With over 70% of the American population and 4.48 billion people globally activity using social media, it is no surprise that social media has become one of the forerunners in the digital marketing space. Social media marketing is effective because there is a wide variety of demographics that use social media, and this gives companies the chance to target any relevant demographic and interact with them.
 
 

Social media is a little town hall where people across the globe can interact with friends, family, and brands with a click of a button to entertain or educate themselves. This creates an avenue for companies and brands to leverage the people drawn into these social media platforms to promote their brand, product, or service.
 
 

However, it is important to note that people do not want to come to social media to have a sales pitch thrown on their faces. This is why companies must create an effective social media strategy. So, companies and brands must create a social environment (an interactive, engaging, and fun environment) on social media before actually selling products or services.
 
 

One benefit of digital marketing (social media) is that it allows brands to interact with customers and get feedback from these customers in real-time. This is because all social media platforms are built for engagements, therefore, they enable people to interact with their favorite brands through likes and comments. This enables brands to use social media as a yardstick to measure how people like or dislike their brand. This enables brands to make the necessary adjustment they need to keep their customers happy.
 
 

Besides that, social media marketing helps brands serve all stages of the buying cycle. For example, social media helps brands to create awareness to prospects that might not have known about them. Let's take a look at how social media does this:
 
 

The awareness stage: By allowing companies to reach out to people that are talking about problems their companies can help these people solve, these companies can create awareness about their company.
 
 

The consideration stage: Once, the prospect are informed about the solutions your company can offer, they are most likely to go through the comment section to see what other customers are saying about the company.
 
 

The purchase stage: The prospect will go through the comment section to search for more testimonials and comments to help them make an informed decision. And when they realize that you have great ratings, reviews, and engagement, then they are more likely to go with your company as the right choice by purchasing either your product or service.
 
 

Retaining/Repurchase: Social media marketing also, allows companies to keep interacting with not only new prospects but old customers as well. Through this interaction, old customers can repurchase any old or new product or service you come up with.
 
 

One downside of social media marketing is that brands will have to be on the good side of their customers. This is because one negative comment can drastically affect a companies reputation on social media. In addition, it is time-consuming, and companies will need to keep updating their social media pages and interacting with their followers to prevent customer churn.
 
 

However, social media allows companies (both big and small) to show their personality to their customers because customers and prospects want to feel like they are interacting with humans. This enables companies to build a strong relationship with the people that matters the most to them.

Email marketing is the old-fashioned and still effective way of reaching out to your target audience. All major companies such as Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, etc use email marketing to interact with prospects and customers. This is because of the high ROI (about 3800%) and 4 times organic reach email marketing offers.

Surprisingly, 50% of the global population has an email address, and this goes to show the potential and reach email marketing offers. I mean, not everyone has a social media handle or not everyone goes to the internet every day to search for information. However, almost every internet user has an email, and they are excited to check their emails for new emails. This makes email marketing is the most underrated and one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. Companies that use email marketing have a 100.95% click-through rate and a 760% growth in revenue.

Email marketing involves sending bulks emails to interact with prospects and customers, and it has so many advantages.

A major advantage of digital marketing is that it enables companies to build leads. With email marketing, you get to build and grow an email list, and 9 out of ten, your email list is made of people that want to hear from your brand. This is because most people that sign up to be on your email list gave you their email address willingly through an opt-in page on your website. And this is a great way to build your cold lead list.

Another major advantage email marketing has over other digital marketing options is that you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Because through email marketing, you can see how many emails have been delivered, opened, and read, and this gives companies the ability to tweak any marketing strategy that doesn't work to help them choose an effective email marketing campaign for their business.

Finally, email marketing enables you to interact with your cold, warm, and hot leads by enabling companies to create highly personalized emails through the various touchpoints of the customer journey.

Email marketing can be a powerful lead and sales generation tool if done right, which is why brands and companies must incorporate it into their marketing strategy.

One major disadvantage of email marketing is that most emails end up as spam, and even if they make it to the inbox of the prospects without following the email marketing rules, the company can get sued. In addition, the open rate of the average email marketing campaign is 21.33%, which can be low for small business advertisers.

Similar to email marketing, SMS marketing involves sending bulk messages to potential customers to provide awareness of your brand or promote a service.
 
 

Everyone has a mobile phone, and for them to use their mobile phone, and whether they are connected to the internet or not, they can send or receive SMS. This makes text marketing or SMS marketing a powerful marketing tool businesses can use to interact with their customers.
 
 

Also, the first thing people do is to check their phones when they wake up, and we will want to highlight the importance of SMS marketing.
 
 

The first major advantage of SMS marketing is that it is highly measurable. You can see who opened your text or ignored your text. And similar to email marketing, this gives you an idea of the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy, to help you determine what works best.
 
 

SMS stands for short message service. This means you get to create a brief and targeted message that will not bore your prospect or customer out, but compel them to take any relevant action.
 
 

However, the major advantage email marketing has is its high opening rate. On average, 97% of text messages from SMS marketing campaigns get opened within the first 15 minutes of delivery. This means if companies can send out targeted and compelling SMSs to their prospects and customers, they have a high rate of their SMS being read by their recipients. I mean even if the recipient wants to delete the message, they have no option but to open the message before taking such action.
 
 

SMS marketing makes it easy for recipients to opt-out of campaigns they do not like. By simply texting stop, recipients can halt any campaign from getting to their phones.

However, one major disadvantage of SMS marketing is that your message has to be precise, and this can limit the information you might need to put across to convert prospects into customers. Also, most recipients view many SMS they receive as a scam, and they end up ignoring it. Also, even though you can know who opened your message, there is no way to tell if someone read your message.

Another digital marketing strategy gaining momentum now is influencer marketing. The digital marketing strategy involves leveraging the audience of popular social media users. So, you pay people who have large followings or audiences on social media to advertise your product or service on their platform.

Over the years, influencer marketing has proven effective and par with other digital marketing methods. Because, most of the people that follow these influencers have a sentiment towards these influencers. This causes them to trust them and believe anything these influencers recommend to them.

 80% of digital marketers think influencer marketing is effect as other digital marketing strategies. And 71% of digital marketers think influencer marketing can help businesses drive quality leads and traffic. So, if you are looking for a way for your brand or company to reach an already established and relevant audience, then influencer marketing can be right for you.

There are two ways to utilize influencer marketing. You can either:

• Pay these influencers up front to advertise your product or service.

• Or you can utilize affiliate marketing as a way to pay for the traffic or sales these influencers generate.

One major disadvantage of this marketing strategy is that any negative image attached to an influencer can greatly affect your brand's reputation. Also, unlike other marketing methods, it can be quite difficult to measure the results influencer marketing makes. Check the latest trends of digital marketing in 2021.

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