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| What is Digital Marketing? |
Digital marketing is just marketing using digital tools.
Yes, that’s kind of it meaning the same concepts and principles and theories that apply when marketing your business.
Well, these are all going to be applied but done on digital platforms like social media, through email and other online channels.
Basically, if you’re using a digital platform to communicate your business’s value, to your customers then you are in the digital marketing world.
How Does Digital Marketing Work?
Digital marketing does have some complicated and technical aspects involved but that doesn’t mean you need to know every single one of them and how to do them all.
In fact, even just a broad or general understanding of all the different pieces will allow you to thrive in today’s digital marketplace.
Because at the end of the day digital marketing is actually a pretty simple concept.
Digital marketing works much the same way as offline or traditional marketing does.
These are some steps you need to follow in Digital Marketing:
Step 1 – Identify Your Market
The very first step when it comes to creating an effective digital marketing strategy is to first identify your market.
You see this is going to be the same whether we’re talking traditional or digital marketing.
But the first step is always in identifying that target market that ideal customer or prospect or potential person that you really want to connect with.
This is such a foundational piece of an overall strategic campaign is.
Because without the right person in mind well nothing else is really going to matter.
So spend a little bit of time and do some digging into your ideal target market about what are their demographic details like their age, gender, income, occupation things of that nature.
Also, what are their geographic details, where do they live, what city, state, province, country and things like that.
And lastly and maybe most importantly what are their psychographic details things like their attitudes, interests, opinions, and behaviors.
The better you’re able to form a really clear picture of who your ideal market is well the more effective your digital marketing strategy or marketing strategy, in general, is going to be.
So once you’ve got your market clearly identified it’s time to move on to step 2.
Step 2 – Message
When it comes to creating a really effective message one of the things that I like to advise is that you take a look at your clients or your customers.
Basically, the market that you’ve just identified well takes a look at their miracles and miseries.
Their miracles are going to be things like their wants and their needs, their goals and their dreams
Again the better you understand your market well the better you’re going to understand their miracles.
And ideally, your business is going to be the one that’s positioned to deliver those miracles for them.
The flip-side of that, of course, is their miseries, what are their fears, their frustrations, their pains, their nightmares and all the things they’re trying to avoid.
Again step 2 is going to be pretty much the same whether we’re talking traditional or digital marketing
Step 3 – Media
And the 3rd step is media and this is where things really differentiate between traditional and digital marketing.
Because it’s here that we’re going to be making the choice for which platform we’re going to be using to communicate our message with our market now.
When we’re talking about traditional media we’re talking about things like the newspaper or the radio or Direct Mail or any form of print.
Digital, on the other hand, is going to include things like social media, online video, email marketing, online pay-per-click advertising things of that nature, where
things get really exciting though and where digital marketing is such an effective overall strategy to deploy is that well pretty much everyone regardless of age or gender or income or occupation.
Everyone is online these days which means that no matter who you’re trying to reach you can reach them with digital marketing not only that but digital marketing also has some other benefits above traditional marketing.
Namely the fact that the targeting is just so dialed in with digital platforms. Also, the time to get data back is significantly reduced meaning if you create an ad and put it in the newspaper or in a magazine you’re gonna have to wait a period of days weeks maybe even months for your market to see your message and react or not react.
on the other hand in Digital marketing you can create an ad and put it out to your market in as little as a few hours and get immediate response letting you know if you’re on track or if something needs to be changed.
