Digital marketing can bring a lot of opportunities and growth to businesses. It can lead to exposure and more sales. After all, your goal as a business owner is to increase your profit.
If you want to see improvements in your business or increase your sales, you have to get your hands into digital marketing
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach consumers. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing.
Why Digital Marketing is Important for your Business?
1.YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE ONLINE:
There are 4.80 billion internet users in the world today. The total number of internet users around the world grew by 257 million in the past 12 months – more than 700,000 new users each day.
2.COST-EFFECTIVE AND FASTER:
Digital marketing is affordable than traditional marketing.
3.BETTER ROI
Many businesses claim that doing advertisements online, whether it is paid or free, has a better return on investment. It’s possible to have a higher conversion rate or return on investment because most of your customers can be seen online.
4.Brand Awareness
Through digital marketing mediums, you can potentially reach your audience anytime they check their smartphone or desktop. And if you want a particular product or aspect of your brand to reach a well-defined segment of your audience, you have the ability to do that as well.
5.Lead Generation
One of the biggest issues with traditional marketing is tracking your performance,Digital ads allow you to attach contact information forms to the ads that you run. This has a threefold function: First, it tells you how many people engaged with the ad in the way you wanted them to; second, it enables you to add them to your email and phone lists; and third, it gives you the immediate opportunity to qualify the lead.
6.Customer Engagement And Retention
Technology gives business owners endless opportunities to engage with their customers, whether it’s through review management, social media posts or email newsletters. Through digital mediums, you can respond to a customer’s negative feedback in a public forum, which not only means you can quell their concerns, but everyone who reads the review will see your response as well. And by engaging with customers who have had a positive experience with your company, you can build a loyal community around your organization online.
7. Get advanced analytics
When you run a traditional advertising campaign, it’s challenging to see how you drive results.
With Internet marketing, you can measure the analytics of each of your campaigns to see how they perform. You don’t have to guess if your campaigns are successful. Analytics allow you to see different metrics of your campaign and see how your campaign performs. With advanced analytics, you’ll create better campaigns that help you grow your business.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is used to track website activity such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, etc. of individuals using the site, along with the information on the source of the traffic
To learn more about google analytics you can join google analytics academy and start your learning Journey
Types of Digital Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- SEM
- Affiliate Marketing
- Influencer marketing
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.
There are a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:
On-page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the content that exists “on the page” when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
Off-page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place “off the page” when looking to optimize your website. “What activity not on my own website could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative “authority” of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
what are the backlinks:
Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent another website’s traffic coming to your own site. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing.
2. Content marketing
is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.
3. Social Media Marketing :
The term social media marketing (SMM) refers to the use of social media and social networks to market a company’s products and services. Social media marketing provides companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones while allowing them to promote their desired culture, mission, or tone. Social media marketing has purpose-built data analytics tools that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts.
here are the steps to create a social Media Marketing strategy:
- Set goals that make sense for your business
- Take time to research your target audience
- Establish your most important metrics and KPIs
- Create (and curate) engaging social content
- Make your social presence as timely as possible
- Assess what’s working, what isn’t, and how to keep improving
4.SEM
What is search engine marketing?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engine marketing is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay per click (PPC).
The two primary search networks that SEM professionals target are Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and Bing Ads.
Google AdWords is actually two networks: Google Search Network and Google Display Network. The first network consists exclusively of search-related websites owned by Google, while the second includes properties such as YouTube, Blogger and Gmail. The Bing Ads allows customers to buy ads on both Yahoo’s network of websites and Bing’s network.
How Google Ads work
Google Ads operates under a pay-per-click (PPC) model. That means marketers target a specific keyword on Google and make bids on the keyword — competing with others also targeting the keyword
you can set a maximum daily budget for your ad. You’ll never spend more than a specific amount for that ad per day, helping you get a better sense of how much you should budget for your digital ad campaign.
Marketers have three options for their bids:
- Cost-per-click (CPC). How much you pay when a user clicks on your ad.
- Cost-per-mille (CPM). How much you pay per 1000 ad impressions.
- Cost-per-engagement (CPE). How much you pay when a user performs a specific action on your ad (signs up for a list, watch a video, etc).
Types of Google Ads
- Search campaign
- Display campaign
- Shopping campaign
- Video campaign
- App campaign
Google Ads in Sudan
Sudan is now removed from the US sanction list, and now Google Ads is actively working allowing Sudanese companies to use digital advertising platforms.
benefits of Google Ads:
Google Ads allows you to take advantage of the benefits of online advertising: show your ads to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time. Google Ads offers several benefits, but here are the key ones:
1. Target your ads
Targeting gives you the ability to show your ads to reach people with specific interests — namely, people who are interested in your products and services — and show them relevant ads.
2. Control your costs
Google Ads gives you control over how you spend your money. There’s no minimum. And you can choose how much you spend per month, per day, and per ad. You’ll only pay when someone clicks your ad.
3. Measure your success
With Google Ads, if someone clicked your ad, you’ll know. If they clicked your ad and then did something valuable to your business — purchased your product, downloaded your app, or phoned in order — you can track that, too.
4. Manage your campaigns
Google Ads also offers you tools to easily manage and monitor accounts.
HOW TO START USING GOOGLE ADS IN SUDAN:
first Create a Google Ads account: How to sign up
To create your Google Ads account, you’ll need an email address and website for your business.
Instructions:
Google Ads provides 2 modes when you’re creating an account. These are Smart Mode and Expert Mode. By default, you’ll create your account in Smart Mode. However, if you’re a professional marketer, you can switch to Expert Mode
When you create an account in Smart Mode, you’ll also have to create your first campaign.
- In Google Ads, sign in to your existing Google Account or create a new one.
- If you already have a Google Account (in other words, if you use any other Google product, such as Gmail), enter your Google email address and password, then click Sign in.
- If you don’t have an existing Google Account, or want to use a different email address to sign in, click Create an account at the bottom of the screen and follow the instructions to create and confirm your new Google Account.
- To create your first campaign, set up the following:
- Campaign goal
- Business name and website
- Ad (including headlines, descriptions, and a phone number)
- Keyword themes
- Location settings
- Budget
- 5. On the last page, set up your billing information
- 6.Click Submit to create your campaign and complete your account setup.
to dig deep you can take the free online course from google
5. Affiliate marketing
Because affiliate marketing works by spreading the responsibilities of product marketing and creation across parties, it manages to leverage the abilities of a variety of individuals for a more effective marketing strategy while providing contributors with a share of the profit. To make this work, three different parties must be involved:
- Seller and product creators.
- The affiliate or advertiser.
- The consumer.
How does affiliate marketing work?
To participate in an affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to take these five simple steps:
- Find and join an affiliate program
- Choose which offers to promote
- Obtain a unique affiliate link for each offer
- Share those links on your blog, social media platforms, or website
- Collect a commission anytime someone uses your links to make a purchase
6. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing, also called influence marketing, is a type of online marketing focused on working with individuals who have a certain influence in a particular sector.
The influence means they have the power to influence and persuade their followers. This way, an influencer is able to sway the audience and affect their buying habits.
The influence is built slowly over a course of time and it represents a cumulative effort of an individual to establish a name and an authority for themselves in a particular sector.
Even though it is a long-term effort, creating influence opens up so many opportunities to influencers, especially in terms of business opportunities and chances to work with renowned brands from the industry they work in.
The characteristics of the influencers include:
• Being an expert in the industry
• Knowing the market and current trends
• Having the group of followers and supporters
• Earning their trust
• Knowing the group well and being able to address them directly
Major benefits of influencer marketing
- Expanding reach
When you decide to work with influencers, the most obvious benefit is the possibility to reach their audience. This kind of campaign is oriented toward the audience that does not necessarily have connections or know about your business at all. In this case, you have the opportunity to
expand your reach, which usually results in expanding the number of leads, customers, website visitors, etc.
2. Boosting sales
Since influencers have the ability to affect their audience and their buying habit, it is only natural to expect to boost sales through such actions. To make sure you are able to track these sales and actually account them to influencer marketing, make sure you use trackable links for the products mentioned by the influencer.
Resources:
- https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/d
- https://www.webfx.com/internet-marketing/why-is-internet-marketing-so-important.html
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-digital-marketing
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/08/02/why-digital-marketing-is-important-for-business-owners/?sh=8e522d06f866
- https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/why-digital-marketing-is-important-for-small-business
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/digital-marketing.asp
- https://www.marketo.com/digital-marketing/
- https://www.marketo.com/digital-marketing/
- https://www.mmmatters.com/blog/why-digital-marketing-is-important-for-businesses
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6123875?hl=en