Digital marketing is an essential tool for businesses. A business that does not use digital marketing strategies limits the growth opportunities for its business.
This article explains what digital marketing is. It also shows how it helps businesses to grow and what the impact of digital marketing is on companies' growth.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is
“Online marketing. It refers to all inbound marketing communication channels on the Internet.”
Businesses use digital channels to connect with prospects and existing customers. Such as search engines, social media, email, text messages, and websites.
Digital communication channels can act as lead generation tools, which help your business grow.
How to do digital marketing?
To create a digital marketing strategy for a lead generation campaign and lead scoring, you need to consider the following steps:
Define your business goals.
Identify your business target audience.
Conduct keyword research.
Add a call to action to a landing page.
Investigate the sales funnel.
Allocate a budget for each digital communication channel.
A balance between paid and free digital marketing strategies
Create engaging and valuable content.
Optimize digital assets for mobile usage.
Improve digital marketing based on data analytics and conversion rate.
The six pillars of effective digital marketing
Any effective digital marketing strategy consists of six pillars:
#Pillar1: Strategy and management
Set up business goals. Create an Analytics strategy (customer segmentation, targeting, brand positioning), align marketing and sales, resource, structure, marketing technology and data.
#Pillar2: Goals and measurement
Create forecasts and digital reporting, including KPI, attribution and customer insights.
#Pillar3: Media
Paid media, owned media, and earned media, including Search, Social and Display ads.
#Pillar4: Customer Experience
Customer service.
#Pillar5: Brand messaging
Provide brand communication via email, chat, social media, customer service, on-site interactions, and personalization.
#Pillar6: Content
Produce product and blog content for content marketing, create PDF downloads and Interactive tools.
Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what a company sells, digital marketing build buyer personas to identify audience needs and create valuable content online.
Customer Journey in Digital Marketing
This is what a customer journey looks like in digital marketing. A digital marketing customer journey consists of five phases:
Plan – Create a digital marketing strategy
Reach - grow your business target audience online
Act – Encourage brand interactions and leads
Convert – Increase online and offline sales through continuous optimization
Engage – Build customer loyalty and advocacy
Resource: customer journey (Smart Insights, 2022)
How can digital marketing help business growth?
Any business can benefit from a strong online presence. An online presence offers businesses a greater opportunity to sustain, compete and grow a business. This is how digital marketing can help business growth:
1. Wider reach and worldwide expansion
Digital marketing help to expand a business to new areas and locations more easily. You can set up a digital marketing campaign for a specific area and location and add the desired target audience.
2. Build a brand name
A business logo, tagline and slogan are part of building a reliable brand. Brand awareness will help customers to trust a business and business to build stronger relationships with their customers.
When a business delivers what it promises to its target audience, it can build a positive brand reputation. Satisfied customers will share their positive experiences with others. This will increase market opportunities for a business.
3. Affordable communication strategy
Digital Marketing provides businesses with affordable media solutions. A digital marketing plan does not require a huge investment. Instead, it provides any business with an affordable communication strategy to increase its customer base.
4. Increase revenue
A digital marketing plan help businesses increase their revenue. Digital marketing can generate much higher revenue compared to traditional marketing channels.
5. Improved Return on Investment (ROI)
Digital marketing strategies help a business increase its revenue and create brand awareness. It also improves a business's Return on Investment (ROI) compared to traditional marketing. Digital marketing is easier to monitor and measure results.
Producing a continuous flow of traffic, which can be converted to leads, is the key to a successful digital marketing strategy. The higher the traffic, the quicker the return on investment (ROI) will be.
6. Expand your business globally
Via digital marketing, businesses can reach out to a global audience worldwide. Anyone who uses the Internet from any device can become a potential customer for your business.
If you have an online shop and worldwide shipping, your business can sell to any customer, anywhere.
7. Lead generation strategies
Traditional marketing makes it extremely hard to track your brand performance. With digital marketing tracking your business brand performance is much easier. Via analytic tools, your sale team can see how many people have visited your advertisement online.
Moreover, digital advertisement allows digital marketers to attach contact information to the ads. This makes it possible to investigate if an advertisement converted into a sale or not:
It gives insight into how many people are engaged with the online advertisement
A business can add the email and phone of prospects to their prospect customer database list.
It allows a business to respond to convert the lead into a sale.
The impact of digital marketing on companies' growth
1. Create an online presence
If your business is not online, chances are low that people can find you. Modern customers search online. They use Google to search for businesses, brands, products, and services and ask their friends on social media channels. If your business has no website yet, it is missing growth opportunities.
Find out where your target audience is interacting and create a social media account there.
Most of the searches happen on the Google search engine. Create a Google Business account. Your business location will show up in a local Google search and on Google Maps.
This will help bring new customers to your business. Don't forget to include a website, business address and phone number so that customers can contact you.
Creating an online presence helps potential customers find you online and trust your business.
2. Find customers via Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a wonderful way to find new customers and grow your business. Of all online searches, 75% are done on the first page of Google search results. Ranking high in search engines is essential for businesses.
The higher a business’s website ranks on search engines, the more traffic a website generates. The higher the chance potential customers will read your content, visit your website, and eventually buy your products and services.
SEO also builds credibility for a website with Google. Link building can help to expand trust in your business website on other web browsers. A higher brand authority score will improve the ranking on search engines.
3. Understand what online channels drive sales for a company
With an online presence, it is possible to directly see the results of digital marketing on business growth. Launch a Google Ad campaign and see an increase in sales.
Several digital marketing tools also help to see which online channels and advertisement brings your website the most traffic.
Set up a business goal and business objective. Brand awareness and sales are examples of business goals.
Also decide what metric you want to measure, before starting a marketing campaign. Once you know your business goals, it is easier to get online campaign results.
Using digital marketing platforms, such as HubSpot, Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Hootsuite, can help you track your results more easily.
4. Connect and communicate your message with prospects and customers via social media
Social Media Marketing helps businesses to connect and communicate with new and existing customers. It is a great tool to react to customer feedback and respond to their questions quickly.
Social Media channels can be used to
investigate how competitors communicate with their audience.
promote valuable content
5. Take control of your brand and messaging
A business is in control of its brand message and response to customer feedback when they own its communication channels.
Responding to Google Reviews can help customers see a business as trustworthy.
6. Use tools that allow your business to the target audience.
Digital marketing provides valuable data about customers to a business.
Data analysis and Email marketing can improve your business growth over time. It helps businesses to position themselves, by providing valuable content to prospects and existing customers.
7. Provide value to your customers with high-quality content
Content is one of the most important parts of any digital marketing strategy. Develop a content marketing strategy that includes web copy, blog posts, videos, social media hashtags and pictures. In this way, your business provides your customers with what they need.
Providing high-quality and valuable content for your customers can improve lead generation and sales for business growth.
Xplore Digital is a professional digital marketing agency providing on-demand marketing services. Our marketing team of specialized b2b marketers help companies achieve their business goals by removing financial, technological, and human barriers.
Contact us to establish an online presence for your B2B business.
