462.12 million. That’s the number of internet users in India today, making us the second largest online market in the world.
India is fast becoming a digital-first nation by adopting new trends and changing conventional practices. Internet penetration is rapidly growing and we are forecasted to reach a user base of 555.3 million by 2021. This growth forecast of the internet user base in the country proves the huge potential for trade & commerce.
Digital medium has become a primary channel for distribution as opposed to being just an alternative. Channeling your marketing efforts on digital helps you reach a larger audience, analyse their interactions with your product/service and customize your business strategies accordingly. It makes advertising to various segments and getting real-time data on customer preferences possible. By finding the most effective medium & message, Digital Marketing further helps you optimize your spends.
How does digital marketing help your business grow?
Marketing on the digital platform does not limit to advertising online. It’s a multi-faceted tool. Here is a quick guide on how to capitalize on Digital Marketing for your company.
Content Marketing
When you think of how to spend your marketing budget, content marketing might not immediately come to your mind. Creating valuable content for your business is an investment that needs both sufficient time and money before you reap its benefits.
When you are rejuvenating your energies on your FB timeline. You are actually consuming a lot of brand content in the form of videos with brand messages or political agenda propagation and your comments and likes are proof that it works. Content is really the king today – it is the foundation of everything you do. It is the fuel that your digital marketing efforts run on. You can use content in different forms – text, images or video to connect with your prospects and customers alike. The content you create can further be repurposed as case studies, infographics, whitepapers or even GIFs/ memes in order to support your efforts on different channels.
Pay per Click (PPC) & Banner Ads
The magic of Digital Marketing is that you can decide who you are reaching your ads to. Targeted paid search shows ads to users based on their recent searches. These searches suggest desire, need or interest in a product that your business provides. With paid search, you are reaching out to users who have identified themselves as potential customers. This strategy is far more targeted and cost-efficient than traditional ‘spray and prays’ methods.
The tools and tech available assist you to identify interested user groups based on the host of parameters with accurate data. Again FB has a lot of data which comes into lay in the background to our help (at our as a user’s expense, pun intended). Similar is the case with Google across its platforms.
The results of paid searches start almost immediately by generating traffic to your storefront, making it easier to assess the impact of your brand/product. You can start advertising on small budgets initially to test the market and gradually increase your daily spends once you have analyzed your campaign performance, and learned to optimize it.
SEO
Supposedly the free source of digital marketing. Write good and relevant content on your digital assets. Link them back to each other keeping user flow as smooth as you expect while surfing and you are bound to get reasonable success here. Based on your digital strategy, you may want to generate a good volume of traffic or cost-effective leads from SEO.
Remarketing
Remarketing simply means that you are showing targeted ads to users who have searched for your product or visited your site. It is a good way to recover prospects or even sales, once they have left your site and continued to browse elsewhere. It is comparatively inexpensive, so it’s useful if you are looking to support other channels at a low cost.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the oldest and highly cost-effective tool to generate fresh interest and convert leads into sales. Users, who have submitted their mail IDs in order to keep themselves posted on your updates, are a valuable audience; they have already displayed a level of interest in your brand. Communicating with them builds a relationship, further influencing their lifetime value as a customer. Running an email marketing campaign is also very economical. You can create templates that can be repurposed for different mailers and distribute them for a minimal cost.
Website
Oh yes, this is the biggest digital marketing asset. All your online activities are to converge on the website. Websites have plausible purposes, information (akin to a brochure of the company), lead or interest generation and revenue or sales. Sales are not only possible for eCommerce retailers, even if you have a small portfolio of products or services with buyers who can pay online you have online sales potential.
Landing pages
This is your biggest lead generation tool. Technical a part of your website but a custom page with a preferably single call to action so as to direct the campaign paid traffic to one, single most important activity you want from your money spent.
Analytics
This is phase 2 of digital, tracking and collecting data of all your activities and user reactions to that. A host of data is there to be collected. Many great tools are available, Google Analytics is the basic and most important one.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is about making the most of all the traffic you generate from various digital marketing efforts. Leads often fall out because they face a difference in their experience of your website as compared to that of your ad. By testing and optimizing the performance of certain elements of your website, you can stop losing such potential customers. User experience with your website is more likely to convert leads and make long term customers. Focusing on conversion rate optimization will help you ensure fewer sales are lost by regularly optimizing your website performance.
The world is getting smarter, and brands understand that Digital Marketing is giving rise to lucrative avenues for them to succeed. Insights into consumer behaviour are vital towards ensuring the longevity of the brand. Online Digital Marketing Courses will help you connect meaningfully with your TG while also determining how best to optimize your spend and focusing on channels that deliver proven ROI.
Conceptualized and made your digital marketing strategy? Rolled it out? Now when you evaluate the results does it seem like there are elements of it that you should be changing? Almost all organizations who venture into the space of digital marketing have to revisit its approach or how it works and reshape it. Getting it right the first time is a rarity. Online digital marketing courses also share strategies of when to figure out the need to change and how to change.
Let us take a look at when you should change your digital marketing strategy.
When your product or service changes – This could be true for startups where the product or service itself might undergo changes and iterations. The digital marketing strategy needs to be revised immediately since it is the widest form of visibility and the best source to get information updates out to a larger audience. If you are launching new product lines that are diverse, the strategy needs to be revisited to include that.
When the strategy does not yield results – This seems logical, but a lot of companies fail to do this. They do not let go of their digital marketing strategy because they are concerned about the changes it might lead to. But one has to assess whether it is meeting its purpose or not and then revise it if it is not yielding the optimal results. There are many parameters that different organizations use, for assessing the strategy’s success or failure.
When you change your vision – As your company’s vision changes, you need to adapt your digital marketing strategy to reflect that. The entire strategy might need overhauling if the changes are big.
When it does not resonate with your values – Many organizations try and apply a strategy that seems to be relevant as per market best practices or what their competitors are doing. However, if there is a clear disconnect with your values and philosophy, chances are that it will not work well. There will be discrepancies in the way you truly want it to be and the manner in which it is being implemented to suit external market needs. Social media is a powerful tool. It can be used to create a brand and position is correct. Remember to retain the brand value you want your organization to stand for.
These are some major reasons for changing your digital marketing strategy when the need arises. It cannot remain as is if it loses its relevance on any one or more of the above aspects.
More Information:
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