Implementing Digital Marketing in your business

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is Digital Marketing?
3. The process of Digital Marketing
4. Traditional Marketing VD Digital Marketing
5. Outsourcing Digital Marketing
6. Digital Marketing in steps

Introduction

Since the dawn of the internet, advertising has been a major part of the internet’s economy. In the beginning, it was search engines. Yahoo used to advertise on their homepage, then google went with advertising search results. Move forward to 2020, a time where everyone is connected to the internet from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, and you find that online advertising has become a multi-billion dollar industry. In contrast to the early days of the internet now we have more than pay-per-click ads.

What is Digital Marketing?

Most people might think that digital marketing is the advertisements that they see on the internet, while advertising is an essential part of digital marketing it is not everything. It is an entire process that builds on top of the field of marketing that has existed for decades. In simple terms, Digital Marketing is the process of using the internet to reach the business’s target audience, build the brand’s identity, and boost sales.

The process of Digital Marketing

Before preparing the marketing strategy for any business, the business must have a clear strategy with specified goals to measure against. We can split the process into 10 stages:

1. studying the market, and knowing the demand for the product or service
2. knowing the competition’s strengths and weaknesses
3. knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service “SWOT Analysis”
4. capitalizing on the strengths and choosing one to be the center of the campaign
5. specifying the target audience (Location – Age – Gender – Preferences and interests – Socioeconomic Status)
6. choosing the best platforms to reach the target audience
7. scripting the ad in a way that fits the target audience
8. starting the campaign
9. measuring the success of the campaign
10. Analyzing the data and adjusting the campaign

Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing

As mentioned earlier, Digital Marketing builds on Traditional Marketing, yet there are a few differences between the two. The main difference is in the delivery of advertisements. Traditional Marketing advertises on billboards and magazines, while they work they present a problem, which is lack of measurement. It is seemingly impossible to measure the results unless you run only one ad at a time. In Digital Marketing you are presented with many metrics for campaigns and ads which allows you to improve the campaign. Another difference is the use of Data Analysis, with the large amounts of data presented from advertising platforms it makes sense to analyze the data. Data analysis, done correctly can make a campaign or break it

Outsourcing Digital Marketing

When it comes to small and medium-sized businesses it might be a good idea to outsource the Digital Marketing of the business. There are a lot of marketing agencies that focus only on Digital Marketing and depending on the size of your business you might want to consider hiring them for the following reasons. The first reason is cost, small size businesses cannot afford to hire more employees to create a marketing division. Medium-size businesses can afford to hire more employees, but it may not cost-effective. The second reason is experience, if the company can hire more employees, it would be difficult to find people that are as experienced as the people in the marketing agencies.

Digital Marketing steps in detail

In this part we will go through the stages mentioned earlier in more detail, allowing any business to move its work to the internet and reach a larger audience. Pairing Digital Marketing with E-Commerce is a great idea for any business nowadays, possibly in the future it could be the only way to survive as people move their purchases to the internet.

1. 1. Studying the Market

Before any business decides to market their product and invest large sums of money doing so they must consider if it is worth the investment, not every product that is marketed succeeded. In fact, many of them fail and the company ends up losing money. One of the best ways to measure the level of interest for the product is google trends. Google trends is a service provided by Google; it allows everyone access to the volume of searches on a given subject over time. This tool can be used to see what regions seem to be more interested in the product or service than the rest, it also shows the time of year which can be helpful for seasonal products and services.

1. 1. Knowing the Competition

After studying the market, we move to see whether the demand is met or not. Looking to see who else is providing a similar service or a product, and how are they targeting is helpful. Also, it allows us to know how to position ourselves. It could also help as a feedback to the research and development department.

1. 1. SWOT Analysis

After gathering data about the competition, we move on to collect data on where we stand. We do the SWOT analysis. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Each one of those elements is important. The strength gives us what to capitalize on when writing the script for the ads. The weakness gives us what to avoid mentioning or what we need to further develop. Knowing the opportunities allows us to seek them. And knowing the threats allows us to avoid them.

1. 1. Capitalizing on Your Strengths

After the SWOT analysis is complete, we end up knowing all the strengths of our product or service, but we cannot use all of them in the campaign, using all of them makes the message vague and unclear. We must pick a strength point and make it the center of our marketing campaign.

1. 1. Specifying the Target Audience

After knowing our product, we need to specify our target audience. The same product cannot be sold to everyone, people have different needs, preferences, and budgets. We must take that into account and pick the kind of customers that are in alignment with what we are offering. There are many metrics to be taken into consideration, but the most common ones are Age, Gender, Location, and Interests.

1. 1. Choosing an Appropriate Platform

After specifying the target audience, we pick the platforms that our audience is using. For customers looking to buy immediately, it’s suitable to use search ads “PPC – Pay Per Click ads”. Depending on the age of the audience we use Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook Ads.

1. 1. Scripting the Ad

Depending on the Ad forms offered by the advertising platform (banners, video, text) design and script our ad. The script must be in alignment with our audience, for business it is preferred to script the ad in a formal tone. The value structure of the company is also taken into consideration.

1. 1. Starting the Campaign

After all of that we implement our planning, this includes the graphics design, filming, editing, and inputting all of that in the advertising platform. This step is done by the creative team in a marketing agency or gets handed to a creative agency. This is the part that most people think is Marketing but as you can see, it is one part of the process.

1. 1. Measuring the Success of The Campaign

After the campaign starts, we start collecting data on its performance. After the campaign finishes, we compare the results to our target to see whether we achieved the goals or not.

1. 1. Analyzing the Data and Adjusting the Campaign

Before starting another campaign, we must use the gathered data to see what ads or target groups had the best return on investment and adjust the next campaign accordingly.