Typically, digital marketing efforts drive user intent and action towards a website or specific landing page where a conversion - defined either a sale or lead enquiry - takes place.
By our standards, digital marketing has to drive measurable results, so that improvements and refinements can be constantly made to maximise ROI for the business. Any digital marketing campaign that does not end with a well-defined and measurable call-to-action (CTA) is not a good one and should not be carried out to begin with. Otherwise, it is simply a waste of time and resources.
What are the types of digital marketing?
You need to know that all digital marketing activities boils down to just 2 types: Paid and Organic. Every variant and form of marketing in the online space out there is either one type or the other.
Paid marketing essentially refers to PPC - or Pay-per-click - advertising such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Instagram Stories to name some.
Organic marketing then refers to online marketing activities that you can perform on your own and entirely within your control, even without incurring costs and external resources, although those would help make it easier. These activities include content marketing, email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) for example.
Why is digital marketing important?
Over half of the entire world’s population is on the internet now. You are reading this off a webpage, which is a digital medium.
If all your customers are looking for information and buying things online, it only make sense that you have to be there as well, right? Otherwise, your customers will simply go to your competitors who are already there.
Digital marketing is not important; it is downright essential. If you want your business to survive - not to mention thrive - in the new world order that is today’s digitally driven world, you need to be doing digital marketing. There is no out from this.
Top digital marketing channels that your business should consider
In terms of the outlets and platforms that you can do digital marketing on, we can also rattle off a laundry list of the various digital marketing channels and mediums out there, and there are more new ones emerging everyday, but that won’t do you any good, cos’ you would just be lost in a sea of options paralysed and not sure where to start and what to make sense of.
As Gary Vee puts it (we are heavily paraphrasing him here), what matters is marketing to the present, the now, where the attention is at the moment. So focus only on the platforms where everyone is on:
- Google search
- Youtube
Of course, there are also other very popular platforms such as Twitter and Pinterest and also messenger apps like WhatsApp and WeChat that you can engage your audience on - and they may be suitable or recommended depending on the nature of your products and services as well as the target audience that you are trying to reach out to - but for the most part, it is more effective and easier to achieve results if you just focus on being very good at 1 or 2 channels rather than being all over the place. You can extend out to other channels once your core few are firmly established.
Since we at Stridec are firm believers of email marketing, we strongly suggest that you start there. As long as you know how to type on a computer or smartphone, you can do email marketing. It’s immediate and it’s free, at least until you decide to scale it up.
It can be as simple as emailing your existing customers to ask for referrals. Or you could offer something of value to your target audience free and drop that in a cold email straight to them. Nothing opens folded arms and closed doors faster than a freebie.
If you find writing emails to pitch for business relatively easy, chances are you are good at creating content, so the next thing you may want to get into is content marketing, building up a reservoir of valuable information that can be shared freely and widely on your own website, as well as top content platforms like Youtube and LinkedIn.
You’ll be amazed at the traction that these channels can get you, if what you are putting out there in the world truly helps people. These content help builds up your search visibility as well, so in essence you are hitting multiple goals with just one action. Talk about being economical.
Once you are comfortable with the above, you can start venturing out to more advanced stuff. Don’t worry about not knowing what to do, just go to google.com or youtube.com and ask away. “Ask and you shall receive” has never been more true than on the internet.
If you prefer engaging a professional to help, we at Stridec offer a few assistance options that you can consider, from coaching, consultation, to campaign runs and full-on managed service. Just drop us a note and let’s see what we can do together.
Where to learn digital marketing strategies and tips?
We recommend checking out the Neil Patel’s blog posts and videos, as well as those from recognised authorities in the genre such as Ahrefs and Backlinko among others.
Or, you can simply join our mailing list and receive weekly doses of simple, practical and actionable digital marketing tips and tricks curated from above-mentioned gurus and others, as well as lesson points from our own experience and work done for our clients.
Sounds good? Let’s get to work then and rock success!
Ready to ignite your marketing strategy?