
Digital Marketing: Shaping Businesses in the Modern World
What does it mean?
Digital marketing means promoting products and services on online platforms using the internet. It mainly uses social media and search engines for the marketing. It has changed how people used to market their businesses. As social media and digital platforms have become a crucial part of everyone’s life, digital marketing has also become more effective than other marketing strategies. Digital marketing also has one advantage: we can have an idea of our competitor’s strengths and strategies and plan ours accordingly. It also helps us in keeping pace with the ongoing trends in the market.
Digital marketing works on 3 simple steps: Aware, Attract, Convert.
- Aware: make people aware that this brand exists. And make them know about what our brand does.
- Attract: show the pros or the benefits of choosing our brand. Give them the answer of “Why us?”.
- Convert: Now convert the customer towards our brand by differentiating from the competitors brand.
Digital marketing involves regular communication with the customers about the product so that we can get the feedback from them, identify the problems or bugs in our product, and then optimize our product accordingly. This is helpful in building customers’ trust and the brand’s image. Customer satisfaction is the main goal for any business, which is possible only by communicating with them.
What are the techniques?
There are various components of digital marketing, such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, online advertising, email marketing, paid search marketing, video marketing, etc. Each component has its own role and importance in digital marketing.
SEO:
It is used to achieve a ranking for any website so that its visibility on search engines is good and people can notice it. It is done by use of relevant keywords related to our business so that when people search for them on a browser, our website will be shown in results at the top.
Content Marketing:
It mainly focuses on the content of the website. It checks whether the content is relevant to the business or not and whether the content is structured or not. For effective content marketing, we should first identify the group of customers we are targeting. Whether they are adults, children, or old-aged. Whether they are poor, middle class, rich, or ultra-rich people. This will help us in creating content that is more relatable and engaging to the audience.
Email marketing:
This technique is simple. It involves sending promotional messages and expecting the viewer to click on it or to take an action. The emails should be sent only to the customers who have subscribed. An option should be given to unsubscribe from the emails.
Paid search marketing:
This includes buying paid ad space in the search engines alongside the result section. These ads will be visible only to the ones who search for the sponsored keywords.
Video marketing:
Marketing through videos is more engaging. It allows us to show product changes, upcoming events, and important announcements.
Pay-per-click (PPC):
The advertiser will pay according to the number of clicks on his ads. The ad will be placed beside the links or URLs so that there are high chances the user will click on it.
Social media marketing:
The social media platforms are used to advertise the products or services. The company will post on a regular basis to be in the feed of many social media users. Platforms like Facebook or Instagram are used for this strategy.
Influencer marketing:
In this strategy, the company pays the influencer to market their product on their social media channels so that they can reach out to the influencer’s current followers. The audience will already have trust in the influencers, so this will be a bonus point to the company.
There are many such techniques for marketing any businesses online that help in growing and targeting audiences more effectively. Choosing from these marketing strategies is also a crucial task. It depends on the type of product we want to advertise, the audience we are targeting, and the current market trends. We also need to take feedback from the users and collect the data about the growth of the sales after doing the marketing. If the marketing strategy is not adding up to the sales, then either we should stop or modify our strategy.
Let us understand this through the Spotify case study.
Spotify has made over 547 million customers since 2006, among which 227 million are paid users. Spotify has become a synonym for music for many of us since then. Almost every top singer and artist is using Spotify to reach their audience. Spotify’s target audience was the people aged 18-24 years. Mostly students and young corporate workers were the target.
The strategy that proved to be the most effective was the freemium model. Spotify initially allowed its users to stream music for free and gave ads in between the streaming. These ads were given to attract the customers to buy the premium plans so that they can get more benefits and listen to music without any ads in between. They showed the pros of buying a premium plan in order to convince users to subscribe.
Spotify also gives emotional ads sometimes to attract customers from the 25-40 year age group. The customer might get related to it culturally. For example, it gives Christmas ads or Diwali ads whenever these festivals are about to arrive or going on.
So these were some key insights from Spotify’s marketing strategy, which made it such a huge business all over the world.
Another important thing is to study the companies in the same categories that have become huge by marketing. This will help us to get an idea of how to start marketing our company and also save us from repeating the mistakes that other companies might have made.
Conclusion
It’s not the product that sets brands apart; it’s the digital marketing that sets them apart. In the modern world, reaching out to the customers and attracting them is a bigger task than making the product. So do it wisely and effectively.