The world has evolved over the years, and the internet has played a significant role in this transformation. As everyone is adapting to the new era, some practices that had a more physical approach are beginning to embrace the online platforms. Marketing, for instance, has upgraded from billboards, posters, and referrals to a more digital strategy. So what is digital marketing?
Digital Marketing
Also referred to as online marketing, digital marketing uses the internet through online-based platforms and digital devices to promote a brand and connect with potential clientele. The approach includes doing a campaign on your products and services through emails, web-based platforms, and social media. The digital technologies and gadgets used are mobile phones, laptops and desktop computers, tablets, etc.
The different digital marketing tactics include;
- Mobile marketing
- Analytics and BI
- SSM/SMO/CM
- SEM/SEO/Traffic generation
- JV’s/Affiliate marketing
- Automation and outsourcing
- Mindset
- Content creation
- Email marketing
- Multimedia marketing
- Branding
- Online infrastructure.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Before we can head to the useful components of a digital marketing plan, let’s learn why you should opt for this marketing approach. Some benefits of digital marketing include;
- Frequent communication increases the client’s loyalty.
- There is constant engagement with the customer at any purchasing stage.
- It allows a business to address the precise audience.
- There’s a generation of a constant lead pipeline.
- Obtains and generates more excellent conversion rates
- Measures all results accurately
- It helps the brand gain credibility.
- It has leveled the playing ground.
Digital Marketing Plan
A digital marketing plan is a document where all your projects on digital marketing actions and campaigns are contained. There’s further information in the document, including short-term, long-term, and medium-term goals, the strategies to use, and
How to Come Up with a Digital Marketing Plan
For a team to develop an ideal digital marketing plan, there are a couple of questions that will ensure you get, grow, and retain clients. So what are some of the questions?
- What are the marketing and business goals of your company?
- Who is your target market?
- What are your customers’ online platform preferences?
- What benefits are you seeking to promote?
- What’s the needed change to upscale your customer’s experience?
- What information is required by the company to be more familiar with your customers’ preferences and behavior?
- Who else should access the plan?
- What is your digital marketing budget?
- Is it possible to describe your audience using buyer personas?
- What are your expected customer outcome achievements?
- What your customers’ potential alternative solutions?
- What improvements are expected from the digital marketing methods?
- How will you measure success?
Components of a Digital Marketing Plan
Now that we’re familiar with a digital marketing plan, let’s consider its elements. The twelve useful components of a digital marketing plan that you go to have are;
Advertising:
Advertising involves selling out your brand, products, and services to your potential clients. Online advertising comes in the form of ads. These ads are bought from third-party sites, and they are to be displayed on blogs, advertising websites, or even forums. Ads come in various ways, including pop-ups, videos, images, banners, and shapes.
One essential aspect of online promotion is by retargeting. To do so, you have to use codes that include anonymous browser cookies to track any new person that visited your site. When the particular user visits other sites, they’ll be getting ads of products and services from your site. It is smart to focus the attention on the people who have previously expressed their interest in your company.
Paid Search:
Every company wants to be among the top results on a search engine whenever a customer is looking for something related to the products or services that they offer. Paid search is a marketing method that involves an increase in search engine visibility. Companies usually bid for particular keywords and, in turn, purchase advertising spaces in these search engine results.
The catch is, your ads will only be visible to the web users who are searching for the exact keywords that you purchased. That’ll put you at an advantage of your keyword selection is a common need for many internet users.
There are, however, two types of paid search advertising; PPC (Pay Per Click) and CPM (Cost Per Mille). In PPC, you are only required to pay for the ad when someone clicks on it. As for CPM, payment is based on the impressions made by the ad. Google Adword tops the list of paid search platforms, with the likes of Bing also involved.
Reputation Marketing:
As the name suggests, this form of marketing is focused on building a good reputation and maintaining it. Reputation marketing is done through compiling and promoting positive reviews. The second thing, after specs, that customers look at before purchasing a product is the kind of thoughts that previous buyers have given of the product and company.
Reviews stretch from the products and services to how the company attended to the individual, and customers consider that. Reputation marketing seeks to improve and maintain a good picture to draw new customers to your company’s services and products. It all happens on review sites where they also allow ads on competitors’ profiles if you turn out to be as good as what your customers say.
Social Media Marketing:
Many firms widely use social media marketing. It is proven to be very effective as it reaches out to many users at a go. Social media marketing refers to promoting your products and services, including your rand, using social media platforms. The likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Tumblr are the platforms that are mostly used.
Usually, a company should have its handle or accounts in platforms of choice so that the identity is followed through quickly. Social media marketing involves campaigns in the form of frequently posted ads by accounts with many followers. Companies introduce digital marketing managers who have paid opportunities to reach out and interact with multiple potential clients. Social media marketing combines both the companies’ social media management efforts in getting additional followers and the use of sponsored content to reach out to many users.
Web Analytics:
Every company is interested in knowing their customer’s behavior and preferences to understand where to improve. This information also tells the company were to change and what to add or deduct since the best gift to customers is satisfaction. With web analytics, you can track the activity of your customer to get more information about them.
Some of the information will come from their taste, preference, change in desire, willingness to explore, etc. Tools such as Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Adobe Analytics, Crazy Egg, etc., help companies get familiar with their customers’ purchase behavior. The data provides quality information that’ll help you know where to beat your competitors and satisfy your customer needs and wants.
Content Marketing:
Your customers would want to know more about your products and services. What problems do you solve by offering what you are putting out there? How will the services and products help these customers? That’s the kind of information that the customers are looking for, and that’s where content marketing comes in.
Content marketing is probably one of the best digital marketing strategies as it offers quality and reliable information to your customers. The case studies, blog posts, and white papers available to your customers contain information that educates your customers. It is a smart approach since it sells your products by offering their benefits and reasons why customers should go for them.
Good content about your products on your website will boost SEO ranking, thus making you better positioned to get more site visits. With many site visits or by using paid efforts, you will attract many potential customers in the process.
Mobile Marketing:
Mobile marketing is as simple as marketing your products and services by getting to your target market through mobile phones. Mobile marketing is a direct approach and precise also since people are always using their phones. Furthermore, mobile phones are portable and are widely used devices worldwide.
Mobile marketing is commonly done through text messages. It is simple that way because service providers already know their target clients, existing and new ones, and communicating something new. It can be introducing a new service or product or offers and discounts.
Mobile marketing is also approached through other means. Optimizing landing pages, content creation, websites, and emails can also be referred to as a comprehensive mobile marketing strategy.
Programmatic Advertising:
Sometimes you have to be systematic with how you approach digital marketing, and programmatic advertising does precisely. Programmatic advertising is an automated approach in bidding for online marketing. It works based on on-site visiting.
Every time a customer visits a web page, his/her profile information is utilized to sell out your ad. You are also in the space of competing with similar adverts. This programmatic approach gives you significant control over the kind of sites that displays your ad. You also get to control who will view these ads to go to the right target market.
Search Engine Optimization:
According to how many of us know it, SEO is the creation of traffic to your website. Search engine optimization focus on the competition on which website will be displayed as the first results when a customer is looking for a product. These results are seen from Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results as it rates the results depending on the kind of traffic that the website generates.
Ensuring that you generate traffic is by offering information in the form of blogs and articles that are packed with the essential levers. These important levers include tools such as keywords, original content, backlinks, and crosslinks. These are the keys to maintaining a good ranking and awareness in the search results.
Video Marketing:
In a more entertaining, engaging, and visualizing approach, companies can opt for video marketing. Video marketing makes the whole marketing approach interesting as people get to see your product, how it functions, how it looks like, and probably how to operate or use it.
Some of the rules of video marketing include keeping your videos short for about 5 – 10 seconds. It ensures that you keep it precise and go straight to the point without addressing irrelevant information. Another approach is a pre-roll ad before a video, and it would be better to use the few seconds to drive the point home.
Vimeo and YouTube are the most common platforms for video marketing. Some of the information you can share on video marketing includes special announcements, event advertisements/reminders, product launches, testimonies, or customer testimonies.
Webinars:
Webinars are seminars; the only difference is that they are carried out through the internet. One of the advantages of webinars is that multiple existing and potential customers worldwide will be connected on a single platform, and none of them will miss out on anything. It is an excellent way to showcase relevant content to a specific audience in real-time.
Webinars allow companies to directly interact with the customers as they ask questions and express their concerns. Further communication after seminars is done through calls and emails where there is that tie between the management and interested parties.