Digital marketing is a term that is used quite often today. But what does it actually mean? Digital marketing refers to all of the marketing efforts that are conducted through electronic channels. This includes everything from websites and social media platforms to email and search engine advertising. In other words, any type of advertisement or promotional content that you see online is considered digital marketing.
It’s an important term to know because nearly every business conducts at least some aspect of their marketing digitally these days. Digital marketing is more important than ever before. With so many people spending time online, it’s essential for businesses to have a strong digital presence if they want to reach their target audience.
If you want to make a strong digital presence for your business, view our 10 lists of digital marketing agencies and take a look at what they have to offer.
As the internet increasingly becomes a part of people’s daily lives, more and more companies are also taking their businesses online. This need for businesses to advertise online is resulted in what is now known as digital marketing.
At its simplest, digital marketing services involves marketing activities conducted on the internet and combining other technology. It encompasses different marketing tactics to promote or sell products and services through various digital channels. Digital marketing agencies provide professional services that help clients with online marketing.
The prevalence of the internet and other digital technologies have made it essential for businesses to establish an online presence. This makes business sense because offline, your business is only visible to your target audience. But with online marketing, anyone and everyone can be your target customers.
Taking your business online increases the reach at which you can advertise your products/services and increase your brand awareness.
For example, start-ups and small businesses that don’t have a website can still have some digital presence on digital marketing channels, video, and content marketing.
Knowing more about something that piqued a customer’s interest is as easy as clicking a button: They don’t have to go out and go to a physical store to learn more about something and decide if they want to buy. These are just a few key reasons digital marketing is essential for almost any business today.
The importance of digital marketing underscores the benefits of utilising digital marketing strategies.
Here are some other significant benefits:
This is perhaps the most significant advantage of digital marketing services for businesses: higher exposure at a lower cost. Let’s take billboards, for example. If you advertise using a billboard, you’ll have to pay for it regardless of whether it boosts your sales.
With digital marketing solutions, you have the choice to pull out of a platform that’s not giving you any returns. That means you have control over where you want to invest your money. This can be blog content, SEO, social media advertising, inbound marketing, and other marketing services.
The ability to zoom in to specific measurement areas is one of the most significant benefits of online advertising.
Another significant advantage is identifying and targeting only the audience you want to engage with. If you create an advertisement for one of your products, you wouldn't want to pay to broadcast to people who are very unlikely to enjoy them.
You can use targeting features in digital marketing campaigns and social media platforms to run your ads only to a particular audience. The system will take variables like location, age, and interests and show the ads only to individuals who are highly likely to be interested in the type of product or service you’re offering.
The use of digital marketing services spells numerous benefits to small businesses. It allows these businesses to put their name out there and gain leverage on more prominent brands in the industry.
While significant brands can invest in traditional marketing strategies like billboard campaigns and TV commercials, small-medium enterprises can cause online opportunities to showcase their products without spending as much.
If you advertise in a magazine or newspaper, it’s almost impossible to measure how many people saw and paid attention to your ad.
With digital marketing services, you can use many tools and systems to view all of the metrics you need from start to finish. A digital marketer can see how many views and shares were gained on the uptime of your ads or how many people viewed your page or site.
You can adjust your strategies accordingly to gain more clicks with all this information. This is one of the most significant benefits of digital marketing services.
There are many different strategies in digital marketing. Here’s a rundown of the most common ways to attract potential customers.
Search engine optimisation optimises your content for your website or specific web pages to appear on the higher search engine results pages.
How exactly does this work? We can better understand by learning about on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO focuses on content that is currently on the page or website. When you search for a keyword, click the first link, and search for the keyword again, the keyword should be present on the webpage. This is based on the reasoning that people are generally satisfied if they find a search result that provides them with the information they are searching for. You can create content relevant to the keywords you want to rank for to help in on-page SEO.
Alternatively, look for content marketing services to help you reach this goal.
To successfully use on-page SEO, you have to focus on enhancing the quality of your content across different articles in your business. That might sound like extra work, but the returns are often worthwhile, as search engines such as Google are increasingly focused on quality content to rank a site.
On the other hand, Off-page SEO creates backlinks and has people talk about your brand online. This involves creating articles and having other reputable websites link to your website to position your site as an authority in the field.
SEO optimises your content to earn traffic freely; SEM gets traffic through paid marketing. Essentially, this means you are purchasing ad space, which will drive more organic traffic toward your website. Naturally, this is an effective method since it's very likely that your site can instantly get displayed in the top search engine rankings.
With SEM, you’ll have to first think about how much you want to invest. Given the flexible nature of this digital marketing strategy, small, medium, or large businesses can adopt it to increase awareness coverage and website traffic in the short and long term.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC ads) is one of the marketing techniques of SEM and is its most common form. Here, you pay the publisher every time your link is clicked.
In Google Ads, for example, you can pay for the top slots so that your site is one of the first few results people see whenever they search for anything related to your products or services.
One of the most common digital marketing strategies used today is social media marketing. This is because almost everyone already has one or more social media accounts. For this reason, businesses should share their content across social media to drive brand awareness and gain even more leads.
Social networking sites are the main channels for this inbound marketing strategy. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most popular social media marketing platforms because of their massive online population.
Businesses doing SMM or engaging social media agencies generally utilise tools that connect all their accounts to one platform. This is so that they can synchronise the posting of their content across all accounts.
This also helps monitor clicks, views, likes, and shares, which the company can use for analytics to improve its tactics in the future.
Social media marketing is one of the easiest and most cost-effective online marketing tactics, especially for newer businesses.
Email marketing is a strategy used to connect with the company’s subscribers. This involves sending various types of content in emails for multiple purposes.
One of the advantages of email marketing is that it allows the company to keep interacting with the customer. This drives more traffic from new and loyal customers and encourages more product sign-ups.
Of course, your subscribers still have the choice if they want to receive this content or not. And even if your subscribers don’t always open your emails, your initial approach will still prove to have an influence, especially if the offers fit the customers’ needs.
Web design involves the creation of a company’s website or online platform.
Firstly, the business must invest in web design to have a professional and attractive website. After that, they have to create relevant, engaging, and helpful content for their target clients to gain online traffic.
Depending on the size and nature of a business, it’s generally better not to stop at just running a Facebook account. When your company is big enough, your customers will want to view your products on a dedicated site.
When your customers are looking for specific products or services, it is more practical for them to search directly on a website than scroll through social media accounts to look for what they need. This is why businesses should eventually invest in their website if they want to leverage digital marketing.
Digital marketing service companies that focus on web design will help you create a professional and user-friendly website that will potentially attract more online customers.
You should also pay attention to the content you’re going to put out – what your customers are reading on the website. Engage in SEO services to create professional content. This can include guides, blogs with helpful tips, details about your company, product listings, etc.
When it comes to digital marketing, it’s common to prioritise gaining an online following or having as much traffic to your site as quickly as possible. However, your internet marketing campaign might be short-lived if you concentrate solely on that.
When developing a successful digital marketing campaign, it is better to prioritise scalability rather than instant returns. This is because adjusting your strategy as time passes ensures consistency in terms of customer engagement, viewership, and traffic. Therefore, developing your marketing plan starts with identifying your goals.
At the beginning of your internet marketing journey, a typical goal is to increase brand awareness. The most common objective is to be active online and engage with your customers.
Post updates more frequently and is sure to respond to inquiries – and the faster, the better. Measuring ROI won’t be much of a priority yet since you’re still raising awareness.
If you maintain an active online presence, you will gradually gain more followers. You can consider building your website simultaneously as your goal shifts to increasing web traffic and sales. More website traffic translates to more leads and sales.
Developing your internet marketing plans also means using certain tools that serve specific purposes. One good example is a social media account aggregator where all social media accounts are connected to make scheduled posts simultaneously. Different business needs require other tools, do experiments and see what works best for you.
Here are some of the commonly asked questions when it comes to digital marketing services:
"Do digital marketing services work for all types of businesses?"
It can work for any business regardless of the industry. Today, you will find tech enterprises, restaurants, hotels, and even laundry services with dedicated social media accounts and websites. Of course, this does not mean all businesses will follow the same marketing campaigns and strategies the same way.
"How much budget do I need for digital marketing services?"
The resources you currently have and your budget will dictate how your internet marketing plans progress. Though creating social media accounts are generally free, you’ll have to invest money in content creation like product articles, promotional images, and videos.
PPC campaigns are also great ways to gain instant traffic from current and prospective customers, but they are also costly. On average, pay-per-click costs per month can run from S$300 to S$6000. So if you have limited resources, you’ll want to make the most of what you have.
"How long does it take before I see visible results?"
The short answer is that it can take months or even years before you start gaining traction in your online marketing strategy. If your social media posts go viral because you have followed and leveraged online trends correctly, it might be time before your online traffic takes off.
However, keep in mind that it may not always be the case. There are many instances of websites that did not get an immediate bump in traffic but only experienced an increase in traffic over the years.
If you are unsure how to get started in your digital marketing journey, engaging an internet marketing company is one of the best ways to jumpstart the process. It can be a trying process to manage your business while working on a content marketing strategy on your own.
A digital marketing agency can expertly devise an internet marketing services plan that your business can benefit from the most. The agency will take a holistic approach to formulate strategies that will provide maximum ROI when used in conjunction.
The online marketing services might include SEO, email, content marketing, video marketing, dedicated account manager, social media ads, lead generation, marketing automation, etc.
Explore all the possible opportunities with the digital marketing service provider you partner with. There are many variables to consider – especially with the internet’s ever-changing algorithms – and enlisting the help of marketing professionals is a great way to maximise your resources.
There is no doubt that businesses need to have a good digital marketing company to ensure their success. However, choosing the right company can be a bit tricky. Here are some tips on how to look for a good digital marketing company:
Learn more about agencies that offer digital marketing services.
Boost your business with these exclusive deals by our esteemed Becozon partners
Looking for a CRM software?
Get customisable, cloud-based sales and operations CRM software suitable for any industry. Contact us for a demo today!
Contact Us