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What Is Digital Marketing? How And Why It Has Changed Us

Digital marketing is the means to express the evolution of the discourse between marketer and user/consumer. The relationship has changed over the years through its means, yet the essence remains the same – there’s an exchange happening, but whereas before the seller would have to entice people through the shop window and some adverts, now the seller can bombard the consumer with information literally all of the time.

The consumer comes to them now, the problem is no longer how to get the customer into the shop alone, but also creating a loyal and trusting relationship to secure sales.

What is important are the various techniques that develop due to digital marketing strategies, including: search engine optimization (also known as SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), digital advertising, social marketing, email marketing, website design and development, content development, e-commerce and mobile marketing.The conversation develops depending on the developments of technology.

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Defining Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is also known as ‘online marketing’ or ‘web marketing’, and it was a term that started to be put into use in the early ‘90s.

Brands have to nowadays resort to some form of digital marketing, they have to have a virtual presence to remain relative. Being an online presence implies that they are available for their customer 24/7, which makes one globally available.

Another benefit is the conversation between the customer and the seller, the latter wants feedback from the consumer.

Platforms such as Instagram now give companies the opportunity to interact and create a loyal following – it’s not about the one-time purchase, it’s about engaging them enough to do so again.

Of course this means that you might have to deal with some negative feedback and comments too, but that is to be expected – you can’t please everyone and you’re not meant to. Keep your target audience in mind and you should be able to move along swiftly.

Do encourage client conversation and make use of bloggers to advertise your products through blogs, websites, videos, you name it.

Another benefit is the conversation between the customer and the seller, the latter wants feedback from the consumer.

Platforms such as Instagram now give companies the opportunity to interact and create a loyal following – it’s not about the one-time purchase, it’s about engaging them enough to do so again. Of course this means that you might have to deal with some negative feedback and comments too, but that is to be expected – you can’t please everyone and you’re not meant to. Keep your target audience in mind and you should be able to move along swiftly.

Do encourage client conversation and make use of bloggers to advertise your products through blogs, websites, videos, you name it.

Content Marketing 2.0 – How to Plan and Execute an Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign

Integrated Digital Marketing is the art and craft of using all the digital marketing methods available today in such a way that each digital marketing channel complements the other by playing it’s strengths rather than trying to reach the goal of increasing revenues and customer base on its own. Investment of time, energy and money in building an integrated digital marketing process for your business is like investing in a machinery which will magically multiply the effectiveness of each component in it.

Challenges with ‘Traditional’ Digital Marketing

Before we dive into the Integrated Digital Marketing process and learn about its immense benefits, let us have a look at the evolution of digital marketing and why it is no longer effective.

We all have heard the quote “I Know Half My Marketing Works, I Just Don’t Know Which Half”. Digital Marketing is so powerful because with digital, you can track the performance of each advertising campaign and actually find out which half of your marketing works.

Some of the common digital marketing methods are:

  • Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

  • Search Engine Optimization (Organic Traffic)

  • Email Marketing

  • Social Media Marketing

  • Digital Display Marketing

  • Content Marketing

Digital Marketing Solutions

Search Engine Marketing: Out of the above digital marketing methods, SEO and SEM caught the limelight in the early days of digital marketing. SEM (PPC ads) was so powerful because it helped marketers connect with prospects who are already looking for them. For example, if someone is searching for an acne cream, the ads will be only be shown to them and charged only when they click on it. This helped marketers save a ton of money because no money was wasted in untargeted ads. The reason why search engine marketing was so powerful was that it was measurable, targeted and active in real time. Due to heavy competition for high value keywords, the prices have shot up – sometimes as high as $30 – $40 per click for certain keywords such as insurance loans, mortgages and attorneys. While SEM is still effective for many marketers, a large percentage of the marketers – especially the ones in the start-up scene find SEM not longer a viable means of marketing online. When Dropbox was launched, they were spending $228 to acquire a customer who paid $99. They had to abandon SEM.

Search Engine Optimization: When the cost of the ads got higher because of the competition and higher bidding of keywords, marketers focused more on search engine organic traffic (SEO) because investing in SEO produced long-term returns. If you rank in the top 5 for a highly paid keyword, you would get more traffic than the advertiser who is paying so much for every click on the ad. But today “investing in SEO” has become obsolete because of the various algorithm updates by the search engines. Old school SEO methods are actually back-firing now because the search engines do not like to be manipulated.

Email Marketing: Email marketing was (and is) a separate wing in itself without much connection to the other digital marketing methods. The goal of email marketers was to collect leads and subscribers and send marketing messages to them. While some of the marketers still do content marketing within the emails, most of them just used email to “blast” the marketing messages. It worked for a while – until the people started getting too many emails and started unsubscribing to all the marketer’s messages which added no value to their life.

Social Media Marketing: As social media became famous and websites like Facebook started posting record traffic numbers, marketers flocked to the social websites for ads.

marketers realized that social media advertising gives a very low conversion ratio and can never be the next ‘Search’. That’s because people ‘hang out’ in social networks like they hang out in a bar and they are there to connect with their friends and to have some fun. Interrupting them with a marketing message is not effective when they are not proactively looking for a product or service like they do while searching in the search engines. But Marketers need not completely abandon social media and treat it as a 3rd class advertising option. Social media, when used in a proper manner can bring intangible benefits to the table that other channels never can.

Digital Display Marketing: Display ads are like ads on newspaper. They find their place between useful pieces of content and interrupt the user with a marketing message. With magazines and newspapers, the ads cannot animate and sometimes readers may even take some interest in it. But online ads are despised at best. Those animated and interactive banners distract the readers – and the very nature of internet with so many distractions built in make it a very poor branding channel. Ad blocker plugins for browsers are hitting record numbers in download volume and as people spend more time online, they develop ad-blindness. Forbes recently published an article about how display ads causes a brand awareness black hole. It should be an interesting read if you feel the same about display ads.

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Content Marketing: Content marketing is basically an inbound marketing tactic where you attract visitors, readers and potential customers by creating good quality content. This is one of the best ways to do online marketing and it hasn’t failed anyone who has tried it. Forbes had mentioned “The bottom line is that there is only one true branding mechanism online and that’s content marketing.” I am a huge fan of content marketing and I believe that even though the world’s information is exploding, content marketing can still find its way in several markets. But content marketing won’t be effective if the other digital marketing methods are not used in conjunction with it. That’s what integrated marketing is all about. Integrated Digital Marketing is content marketing on steroids.

Is the gold rush to digital marketing finally backfiring?

Digital advertising technology has the potential to reach consumers based on their online behavior, show them relevant advertising, monitor click-through rates and even attribute those clicks to sales.

And advertisers have shown no sign of reducing their spend on search and social platforms, with Facebook and Google together controlling 54 percent of the global digital advertising market in 2016, up from 44 percent the year before, according to figures from MAGNA released in December 2016.

They are also expected to spend $299 billion annually on digital advertising globally by 2021, a figure equivalent to 50 percent of their marketing budgets.

But while Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has previously encouraged colleagues to "Move fast and break things" (the internal motto changed to "Move fast with stable infrastructure" in 2014), the past few months have seen digital media platforms and the brands that spend money advertising on them in the spotlight.

Last month, Procter & Gamble chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard seemed to heed Zuckerberg's toned-down motto by suggesting P&G had been distracted by new digital marketing methods leading to poor ad placement or wasted money, and announced a five-point plan to clean up the media supply chain.

"I'll make a confession, which may sound familiar. I confess that P&G believed the myth that we could be a 'first mover' on all of the latest shiny objects, despite the lack of standards and measurements and verification," he told an audience of digital marketers at a conference on 29 January, according to a transcript of his speech seen by CNBC.

Rush to digital

For Jon Wilkins, executive chairman of agency Karmarama, many marketers have fallen into similar traps. "I can't help but think it has been a bit of a gold rush really, it's been a race [to say] 'I'm going to create competitive advantage and accountability in this new environment and I'm going to get there first without really thinking of the consequences.'

"[But] there are problems all the way along the food chain, if you like. Ultimately everything starts with the client because it's their money," he told CNBC.com by phone.

A report in the Times last week suggested that some of the world's largest brands are "unwittingly funding Islamic extremists, white supremacists and pornographers by advertising on their websites," because programmatic technology used by brands and media agencies can automatically buy and place ads next to such content on YouTube and other websites.

10 Free Marketing Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About

If you’re an entrepreneur, bootstrapping a business, then you understand the importance of every dollar.

While executing your core competency is a crucial factor to your business’ success, another important step is effectively marketing your business. Fortunately, there are hundreds of free digital marketing tools that can greatly impact your business. Below are a few of the best, free online marketing tools for entrepreneurs.

1. Use Due to track time spent on marketing projects for budgeting, invoicing, and payments.

Due is a free tool for marketers that offers a time-tracking app to assess how much time is spent on each marketing project. This helps your organization budget time appropriately and increase productivity. Along with the time tracking tool’s capability to help you calculate billing time, it also offers an invoicing and payments platform, which is an ideal way for freelance marketing talent to bill clients for their work.

2. Use Buffer for social media management.

Buffer is a social media management tool that will help you streamline your social posting efforts. We already know how powerful social media is for your marketing initiatives, but leveraging a tool like Buffer will help you increase your followers; engage your audience; and build your brand.

The benefit of Buffer is its ability to let you connect multiple accounts to one dashboard; schedule posts; create drip campaigns; and analyze the success of your posts. Buffer’s free plan is perfect for new businesses looking to grow their social presence, but to unleash the full power of the software, you might want to consider one of their upgraded plans.

3. Or use Hootsuite for social media management.

I’d be remiss to put Buffer on this list and not include Hootsuite. While Buffer is a great tool for scheduling posts, Hootsuite really taps into the central social management platform.

Its free plan allows you to sync three social media profiles, which is a great place to start for most entrepreneurs. The benefit of Hootsuite is its ability to let you quickly respond and post across all your social profiles in one easy-to-use dashboard.

4. Build a logo with Spaces’ free logo maker.

Branding is one of the most critical steps when marketing your business, and the logo is arguably the most important part of your branding. Fortunately, with tools like Spaces’ free logo maker, you no longer have to waste resources on hiring a designer to interpret your vision of the perfect logo.

Using its library, filled with hundreds of icons, frames and font classes, you can create a stunning logo that expresses your brand identity without any design training and without spending any money.

5. Use Canva for easy designing.

Visual content is becoming an increasingly popular form of marketing collateral. From custom illustrations and infographics to fully-designed sales proposals, visual content is a fantastic way for new businesses to gain credibility and build a professional appearance.

There are several free graphic design tools on the market, but one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use is Canva. Its free library of fonts, illustrations, templates and images give you a pool of graphics that you can easily drag-and-drop. From flyers and brochures to social media images and infographics, you can create it all for free in Canva.

7 Powerful Ways to Convert Website Traffic Into Leads

More traffic to a website does not always mean more revenue, unless the revenue model is purely based on display advertising. Display advertising model brings the lowest revenue per visitor compared to all the other revenue models and there are some studies that suggest that only 27% of the internet visitors actually end up looking at a display ad.

One of the best ways to monetize internet web traffic is to convert them into leads and then promote a product or service to them via email marketing or a follow up phone call. This is also called Inbound marketing. Outbound marketing or interruption advertising is no longer effective because people are getting better at tuning out of interruption.

The best way to attract traffic to a website is via content marketing. Content marketing is best done through blogging, social media and email marketing. However in this post we will not be covering how to attract traffic but rather we will talk about how to convert those traffic into leads.

All the tips below are based on my personal experience working on blogs which run on the WordPress platform. If your blog or content channel is not based on WordPress, you will still find these tips useful.

1. Landing Pages

Landing pages are one of the most effective ways to convert a visitor into a lead. While the purpose of many content pages on websites is to provide information; landing pages are designed for collecting contact information. Very effective landing pages combined with targeted traffic can give a conversion ratio of as high as 50-60% and in some rare cases even more than that.

Putting up several landing pages inside your blog or main content website increases the chances of more people coming to those landing pages via search engines, referral and direct traffic and hence it increases the chances of lead collection. You can also have different banners in your blog which link to one of your own landing pages. Another effective method of bringing traffic to such landing pages is via YouTube content marketing which will be explained in detail in another article.

Different landing pages are attractive to different people or groups and hence one should never rely on only one landing page. And its often a good idea to send traffic to the landing page via a blog and then measure which landing page performs better. HubSpot.com, a leader in Inbound marketing software and methodology recommends that a business should have as much as 40-50 landing pages with different offers.

You can design a landing page on your own or you can use some plugins and themes that are available in the market which makes the creation of landing pages very easy. Optimize Press is one such WordPress theme which can help you create landing pages easily.

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2. Notification Bars

Notification bars are the full wide banners on the top of the websites. Internet users have been “trained” to pay attention to the notification bars because the browsers usually display warning messages like a missing plugin or a blocked popup in the notification bar. Such bars stay on the top of everything and many such bars can be configured to stick to the top even when people scroll down the website. It is a very good attention grabber.

One can put an email form in the notification bar itself or there can be a link to one of the landing pages from the notification bar. The following image from ProBlogger.net shows an email optin form on the notification bar.

HelloBar.com is a good solution for notification bars. They have different plans based on how many clicks you will receive and they also offer split testing options where you can track the performance of different words and call-to-action links. However HelloBar.com is a bit pricey and if you want a free solution you can go for the WordPress plugin called Notification Bar. The options in it are limited and works only for WordPress. If you search around, there are many free and paid alternatives to put up a notification bar in your website.