Drive Sales With Digital Marketing

A Complete Blueprint on How to Use Digital Marketing Resources to Grow Your Business and Outsell the Competition

Peter Dickinson, Charleh Dickinson

• Editorial: PublishDrive
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781739885809
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Marketing

Digital marketing is an essential component for any modern business. If you are an SME looking for a way to get ahead and stand out from the competition, this book is your ticket.

As an agency that delivers digital marketing for our clients, we understand that it's something that is constantly evolving. To be successful, you must be able to capture each stage of your customer journey and identify an approach that will allow you to gain traction in your market and take you from strength to strength as your business grows.

This book includes background on why digital marketing is so important and a step-by-step guide on how to develop the right strategy and manage the key elements such as websites, social media, and email.

Chapter 1

Understanding Why Digital Marketing Is Important

Welcome to the complete guide on how to get started with digital marketing. This guide looks at what digital marketing is, why you need it, and gives you some ideas on what you need to implement to grow sales in your business.

This book will cover the groundwork you’ll need to complete in preparation for creating and launching a successful digital marketing strategy and provide an overall summary of exactly what digital marketing is and why you need it.

With the information you’ll take away from this book, you should be left feeling confident that you have a good knowledge of why digital marketing is essential for your business’s success. You will also come away with a succinct outline of your audience and what kind of marketing activities will be useful for communicating with them as part of your overall strategy.

Most people already have some idea of what kind of activities digital marketing involves, so this guide aims to build on that base-level knowledge and equip you with the vital information that many SMEs tend to overlook.

Digital marketing is ubiquitous, but it’s also something that’s constantly changing and evolving as new technologies develop and consumer behaviours adapt.

Because of this, you’ll find that there’s a lot of misinformation out there on how it should be used, which means there are many businesses that, too late, find out their resources have been wasted on techniques that are unsustainable in the long run or simply don’t work.

With the information supplied in this book, you’ll be able to identify the difference between good and bad marketing techniques, as well as what kind of groundwork you’ll need to put in before diving in to creating your strategy for your marketing, and wider business, development.

Ultimately, you’ll come away with an understanding of what it takes to compete in a digital world.

This means that you’ll be ready to hit the ground running and begin digital marketing while saving the time, money, and the headache of trying to figure out what’s gone wrong when you’re further down the line.

So, without further ado, let’s get started on everything you’ll need to know about digital marketing to build success within your business.

1.1 Why Do You Need to Embrace Digital Marketing?

Welcome to the first chapter. In this section, we’ll look at why digital marketing is so important and what’s changed over time to make other methods of marketing less impactful.

1.2 Why Digital Marketing?

For digitally-native generations, the answer to this question is pretty simple: we live in an increasingly digital world, where there’s very little that you can’t do online.

In marketing, it’s important to get your message across in the places where you know people are spending their time. Places which, as time goes on, are becoming increasingly digital.

Over a couple of decades ago, marketing messages would have been delivered primarily through TV, radio, and billboard advertising, but these techniques weren’t always the most cost-effective, leaving businesses with lower budgets to rely on word-of-mouth and communication tools like brochures to reach their customer base.

Nowadays, the prevalence of social media and other digital channels has created an opportunity for more businesses to engage in effective techniques, making impactful marketing more accessible than ever before. And, luckily for SMEs, the best marketing methods no longer need to be the most expensive, either.

So, let’s look at exactly where your audience might be spending their time online.

At least a quarter of the planet is on Facebook. The largest demographic is 25–34-year-olds, and most members exclusively use mobile devices to access the platform. It’s a great opportunity for B2C eCommerce to advertise using techniques like Pay-Per-Click, otherwise known as PPC.

There are over one billion people with an Instagram account. 25–34-year-olds represent the largest advertising demographic on the platform, but this is followed closely by 18–24-year-olds. As a visual platform, it’s perfect for B2C branding campaigns, eCommerce, and methods such as influencer outreach.

LinkedIn has around 740 million members. It’s the home of decision-makers, with the largest age demographic sitting at 46–55-year-olds, but millennials also make up around a quarter of the platform. As a professional platform, it’s a great choice of focus for B2B selling.

Twitter has around 330 million monthly active users. The largest demographic is 30–49-year-olds and is therefore a great platform to help with customer relationship management and PR.

The average person also spends almost 18 hours a week on a variety of social media platforms. With people spending so much of their time online, it should come as no surprise that the majority of marketers already use social media as a core part of their marketing strategy.

As social media users across various platforms can be segmented by aspects such as age, you should already have a pretty good idea of which platform you should be prioritising.

1.3 Changes Since Lockdown

As you’ll be aware of, the Coronavirus pandemic has become a pivotal point of change across many aspects of life.

Any form of successful marketing needs to reflect human behaviour and changing consumer habits, and so it, too, has had to quickly adapt to stay relevant in the face of such vast change.

Many of these adaptations are based around technology and have also fundamentally altered the way businesses are run.

For example, we’re now familiar with video call software like Zoom, but this was actually created in 2011; it took nine years and a pandemic for it to explode onto the scene.

For the tech-enthusiasts out there, a frustration prior to the pandemic was businesses being slow to adopt such technology, but the lockdown shifted all this, and now people are far more in-tune with technology and better understand how simple changes can make lives easier.

But how does this impact marketing? For one, it’s given us the ability to adapt faster.

Professionals’ n...