Gone are the days when people used to put a 100 feet hoarding for their brand promotion and advertisement of their products and services. We have seen giants investing thousands and millions on the traditional marketing tactics, which rendered them results back then. But this is 2020 and things have taken a humungous swing from that time, we are talking about the time people used to rely on Traditional Digital Marketing strategies and action plans. No, we do not say that Traditional Marketing was a fad, and was not effective or worth the money invested. But if we compare that to the new age of Digital Marketing it is an outdated affair, an obsolete package which should not and cannot be used for your Business.
Let us understand the scenario with the help of a Business Branding idea. Given an example, you are running a shop where you make and sell desserts. Some of the most exotic ones and you are one of your kind. You are wanting people to know you and want them to drop by your cafe cum lounge and enjoy the amazing piece of happiness.
You plan to put up a huge hoarding that displays details of your shop with some real mouth-watering and pleasing visuals, and maybe a discount offer too. You might know that these kinds of hoardings will not charge you peanuts, rather if the finances are not on point Business owners will only be left with peanuts. They charge a lot, and a lot is an understatement here. But how can you make sure that the footfall you are getting inside your cafe cum lounge is coming after viewing that advertisement you put up? You cannot even figure out how many people viewed it, liked it, or hated the ad. Yes! There might be some element of the Ad that the people didn’t like if you knew that you may have done changes too.
Also, with this, you won’t be able to see how many men, women, boys, and girls are viewing or liking your big fat hoarding. What are their interests, rather what is your clients’ interests, likes, dislikes? What are their demographics, psychographics, you won’t be able to document anything? And today’s new-age Digital Marketing and Online Business works on data and not on perception or ideology. So the problem here was not belief, it was the drawbacks and to overcome all of those Digital Media came into existence.
It has been almost more than 30 years, three decades we have seen exponential growth in the online business world and also in the ways Digital Marketing works. This is the age where people cannot live without the internet, cannot survive without mobile phones, tablets, cannot work their day out without their laptop or desktop PC. People are every day uploading millions of footage and data on their social media platforms, tonnes of searches and downloads are happening on Google every day. People engage with a lot of their age-old and new online friends and followers on a day to day basis. The eCommerce industry has seen a boom over some time and people’s purchasing capacity of products and services has taken a spike, whether it’s their needs or wants but the ability to make online transactions has been increased. And this is the best time for Brands, Businesses, Online coaches, Consultants, and Growth Hackers to be online and utilize the power of Digital Marketing, take advantage of the current machinery.
To be honest, this eBook is not just a handbook that teaches you Facebook and Instagram Ads, but this will even show you the platforms which are less exposed to people and marketers, also business owners mostly go with Facebook, Instagram, and Google to fulfill their Digital Marketing needs. But platforms like Reddit, Quora, Twitter, etc. are also there you must know and available to publish and promote your business and sell your products and services online.
This book will explain to you the ins and outs of Digital Marketing, some of the topics may include Social Media Marketing, channels of products and services’ promotion, Quora Marketing, using TikTok for the benefit of your Business, Going viral with tweets and videos, and a lot of strategies that you can use for the benefit of your business.
You might get a lot of articles, blogs, and other readable materials to learn and imbibe the advantages, disadvantages, ideas, and strategies related to Facebook Advertising, Google Advertising, etc. But here we are trying to go a bit further, walk the extra mile to show you various other available channels on the internet. Digital Marketing is all about telling a story with your brand, making a full proof indisposable funnel so that the customer goes through a journey where you add value to his/her life, make things better for them, solve their problems, entertain them, educate them, and a lot many things which depend on what industry you are working in and what is your niche.
Understanding the idea of Digital Marketing
Whether you are a Service based company or you are into sales of products, be it manufacturing or trade. Your main idea of running a business is generating revenue and making a change in your market. Now how will you reach the target audience of your choice, how ill the audience be able to see you as a brand in the market, how will the transactions happen? Your communication vehicle in the new era is Digital Marketing.
Today brands and businesses in the new age are using the technology, taking advantage of the platforms available on the internet and making good sales, and generating appropriate revenue out of it. Mobile applications, websites, social media platforms, forums, Facebook pages, Facebook groups, promotions can happen anywhere and everywhere and to do this you have to create a Digital Marketing Strategy.
Digital Marketing Strategy: How to create one?
Creating a Marketing or a Business strategy can be different for different brands and businesses, if you think that you can rig a game of copy-pasting someone else’s ideas, some other brands marketing gimmick, or the strategy with which they work, you will not see any fortune for your business. You see it takes time to build a business fortune and hence you need to be patient with the Digital Marketing Strategy, you should be investing the maximum amount of your time here. If you take this step with proper execution, fifty percent of your job is done there. Yes! It is true, to build a strategy it may take some time, to take the initial step you may feel a bit frustrated but this is the time you are making your business learn. And you must know are learning with your business.
It may seem a bit difficult to create a bulletproof Digital Marketing Strategy, but we have subdivided the process into a few steps, easy to understand, simple to execute, so let’s check it out.
Create your Buyer’s Persona
To build a business you must know who is your target audience and where is your target market located. The buyer’s persona or Customer’s persona is something like an actual human being, consider calling him/her as your best friend, you know everything about them, rather you need to research to know everything about them. This can be considered to be the most time-consuming step and if this is done, next all the steps will be in a proper flow.
You need to ask yourself a few questions like;
Who is your target audience
Where are they located?
What is their age group?
Are they female or male or you want to target unisex?
What are their likes, dislikes?
Are they interested in your product/service?
What are their demographics?
What is their psychographics?
Which platforms are your people most active on? etc.
When all these questions are answered, you are done with the first step of creating a Digital Marketing Strategy.
Figure out your goals
Your goal with the marketingstrategy should be decided well in advance. So for a particular product launch, you want to make sure the maximum number of people join in for a conference call and a webinar event. So possibly there can be a minimum of two strategies. One, you run a lead generation campaign, collect the data, call everyone, and close the deal. Another option could be running a campaign that asks your audience to join in for the event by paying a small amount as a registration fee.
Cent percent, the second option is less time-consuming but for that to be pulled off, your storytelling, copywriting, and social media creative needs to be superb, so good so that the user gets converted.
You need to make sure your goal is set and then you can move ahead.
Write a fantastic copy
Your prospective consumer will convert when the copy you are writing the content that he reads is touching for them, doesn’t matter it is a touch of emotions, or you are entertaining them or educating them, you need to add a bit of value to sell your product/service.
Given an example, if you are a Travel Agency, you can create a blog and write about international replacements of the monuments and most visited places, ten places to visit when you are in Italy, etc. etc. Your content should be SEO based so that the reach of the content is also on point.
Create engaging Ad Media Creatives
When a person is scrolling down the aisle of a website or a social media page, you plan to keep them hooked. Even before reading what’s there in your copy or what content is written, they will watch your Ad creative. Now, this is the most vital step, you can shoot up your engagement by working hard in this step. It may ask you for a bumper bonanza of creativity, but that can be learned in the run of time.
Choose the right platform
If you are a hip fashion wear brand, advertising on Linkedin is not for you. You should be choosing Instagram or Facebook for the promotion of that kind of product. So in this manner, you need to select which platform works right for you and if you are confused between two to three platforms we suggest you take some recommendation from an expert Digital marketer, by this, you will save a bunch of your effort, time, and money too.
Keep a close watch
The beauty of new-age Digital Marketing is they provide you reports, analytics, enough data for you to tweak into your sales funnel or your Digital Marketing strategy. And this was the thing that was missing in the traditional marketing process.
You should never underestimate the idea of analytics, keep a close watch on the execution of your strategy and you should always after time try to change the things which are not in favor of your business.
Hereafter, we will be getting into the precise Digital Marketing process of Quora, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, etc. So buckle up, good things are coming your way.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
