DIGITAL MARKETING AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUR BUSINESS

It is assumed that everyone is familiar with the term Digital Marketing or Internet marketing but would not know what exactly is its scope and how can it help your business. Let’s first understand what internet marketing really is before coming to more about how it can help your business it getting the desired outcome.

What is Digital Marketing?

Also called internet marketing, is the process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Its broad scope includes email marketing, electronic customer relationship management and any promotional activities that are done via wireless media.

Digital Marketing is often used interchangeably with Internet marketing.

Most businesses are now using Digital marketing popularly known as Internet marketing because of two primary reasons:

1. It is a cost-effective channel for marketing
2. Media consumption trends are moving towards the internet and therefore you can easily reach out to the masses using the online medium.

Let’s now look at some of the key types of digital marketing otherwise called Internet Marketing with their benefits along with some useful examples and case studies.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the key types of Digital Marketing. An SEO strategy helps you to get your business website to rank on top of the search results for specific search queries popular in your industry.

How is SEO done?

SEO starts with keyword research that helps you to understand which search queries are important for your business. You can do free keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest. Suppose you sell shoes online and you wish to check which keywords you need to target, you can open the Google Keyword Planner and add terms like ‘buy shoes online’ and ‘buy shoes online Lagos’. The tool will give you a list of keywords that are related to these search terms. It will also tell you the average monthly searches for each of these keywords and their respective level of competition. You need to select those keywords which have a high level of monthly searches and a low or medium competition level.

Once you have selected your targeted keywords you need to make sure that your website content and meta-content is optimized for these keywords or similar meaning words.

This helps you to showcase the relevance of your content to search engines and therefore helps you to rank higher up in the search results.

Next, you need to ensure that you are consistently doing keyword research and creating SEO friendly content for your business blog. This will help you build an audience for your business and eventually achieve more authority for your site.

Furthermore, you need to build backlinks to your site by publishing quality SEO friendly content on third party sites in your niche.

Last but, not the least, you need to ensure that your website is built according to search engine guidelines, so that it can easily rank in search engine results pages. Upperlink.ng

Social Media Marketing

Billions of people across the globe are using Social Media platforms like Facebook and Instagram on a daily basis. Did you know you could create a free business profile on these channels and promote your business? You can even run ads on these channels and get your business noticed.  Social media is a great channel to make your Internet Marketing more interactive. You can regularly produce engaging content for these channels, build followers and generate leads.

Email Marketing

Email is a widely used channel for communication in today’s times. You can actually benefit by using this channel to build a relationship with your prospective customers.

The first step for email marketing is to build an opt-in list for your business.

WHY SHOULD YOU DO THAT?

Building an Opt-In list ensures that you are not spamming your target customers with unsolicited emails. Cold emails will spoil the reputation of your brand and your audience would be least bothered about engaging with it.

SO, HOW CAN YOU BUILD AN OPT-IN EMAIL LIST FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

You need to create contact forms on your website and landing pages where you let your target audience choose to subscribe to your emails while sharing their details with your business. This way you will get permission to contact them via email. It is therefore imperative to have a functioning website. Domain.upperlink.ng can help your business acquire their own domain name and successfully host their website, making it possible for your business to take advantage of all digital marketing tools.

Once you start building your email list, you can send out useful content, product promotions and company updates to your target audience. It will help you to build a strong relationship with them. Once you start getting consistent with your lead collection and email marketing efforts, you will see a significant improvement in your conversion rates from the channel.

Chatbots

Chatbots are an interesting technique using which brands are providing improved customer service and support to their clients.  Mastercard is now making use of Facebook messenger bots to help its customers. Mastercard users can easily inquire about their transactions with the help of the bot. They can also chat with the bot to inquire about and purchase other products and services. With Upperlink.ng your business can acquire its own chatbot and integrate it into your website or mobile application.

Inbound or Content Marketing

What is content marketing? Content Marketing is a strategic approach to creating and distributing audience-centric content to drive engagement and conversion for the business. Inbound marketing is also known as Content Marketing and can help you to build a loyal audience for your business. You can explore different content formats like quizzes, polls, and contests to make sure your audience is interacting with your brand. It is a useful technique to educate and entertain your audience and build a relationship with them.

Digital Marketing also known as internet marketing is a strategic process of using online channels to build a brand and eventually get more sales for your business. The internet is where your audience is and so you can’t afford to miss out on this medium.