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Essential Digital Marketing Techniques for Entrepreneurs

  • Liaqat Ali Hamiya

    • Before exploring some very helpful digital marketing techniques, let’s first try to understand the core concept of digital marketing:

    The prevailing business dynamic is quickly becoming digital, and we are facing some inevitable changes in traditional marketing techniques. That is the reason that two out of three marketers have moved at least 30% of their budget gets from traditional marketing to digital marketing in the last 3 years. The complete data was published in Scott Anderson Cooper’s Book “Inbound Marketing for Dummies”.

    Digital marketing is a technique that we use to promote our product or services using electronic forms or mediums. Digital marketing became extremely important because of the speedy growth of information technology. Traditional marketing was mainly focused on one-way communication with the customers, such as, Billboards, Printed flyers, newspaper ads etc.

    Many marketers think that traditional marketing techniques will soon disappear.

    The new and updated marketing methods are much more convenient, faster and efficient than traditional ones. That is the reason markers recommend that small businesses and enterprises should invest in digital marketing, rather than wasting their time and money in traditional marketing, newly adopting dying methods.

    An article published by “Kate Maddox’ at adage.com on January 27, 2015, showed the changing company intentions re. digital marketing intentions. A full 80% said they were increasing their budgets.

    “The companies are increasing their digital-marketing budgets, 40% said they would increase them between 5% and 10%; 32% said they would increase them between 10% and 15%; and 9% plan to increase them between 0% and 5%.”

    By now, we can more easily ascertain digital marketing trends.

    Here are some quintessential digital marketing techniques that every entrepreneur can adopt.

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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    Search Engine Optimization is divided into two parts, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

    On-Page SEO

    This is the process of ensuring that the search engines understand what your web page is all about. Before starting off-page SEO, your website must be fully optimized and SEO friendly, so the search engines can easily crawl, and index all pages.  Here are the common on-page seo techniques, marketers use.

    After the completion of above mentioned steps, we can move to the Off-page SEO.

    Off-page SEO

    This digital marketing technique focuses on growing visibility in organic search results. It’s the process of getting free organic traffic using link building tactics, such as, blog posting, review writings, guest post writing, forum posting, directories and other link baiting techniques. By targeting long tail keywords, we can improve the SERP and generate website traffic from the organic searches.  Some marketers use paid link building ideas to get maximum back links in short time period. But the consequences of such activities might be harmful and and can have serious consequences, such as ranking penalties etc. There is no shortcut in off-page SEO. It’s a time-intensive process and you cannot fool the google algorithm.

    Email Marketing

    Email marketing often gets a bad rep because of spam and fraudulent email campaigns by spammers. If we look at the bright side, emails happen to be the most significant and effective marketing strategy for many entrepreneurs to communicate personally to the customers. It helps them to keep updating their customers about offers and updates, and send them other useful notifications. Smart entrepreneurs use email marketing to build new business and turn first time customers into repeat customers. Of course, it’s important to only send emails to those who sign up to your list.

    I would like to share a stat for the best time to send your emails. This content was published on the HubSpot.

     

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    Paid Advertising

    Paid advertising using various channel, such as, pay per click ads (PPC), social media, display ads and YouTube video ads, can give you instant website traffic, leads and sales. Specifically targeting paid campaigns on social media can also help entrepreneurs to build better brand image and enhance the trust level of the brand. Consumers are smarter and they know what to buy and how to buy – especially when making online purchases. Customers do complete research about your product or services through different reliable sources, such as, customer reviews, social media presence and other reliable business reviews sources.

    HubSpot said the following about Paid advertising:

     “Pay-Per-Click (PPC).  64.6% of people click on Google ads when they are looking to buy an item online. (2016) The average conversion rate in AdWords across all industries is 2.7% on the search network and 0.89% on the display network. (2016)”

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    The most essential part of the paid marketing campaign is the budget. You can control how much you are willing to invest on a particular channel, and can set daily or weekly advertising budgets. Poorly planned paid marketing campaigns will be unproductive.

    Content Marketing

    Content marketing is the most influential part of digital marketing.  The content should be clear, memorable, informative and useful – all elements of high quality content. There are various forms of content marketing techniques, including blog posts, guest blogging, product reviews, infographics, video content, case studies, press releases and tutorials.

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    Content marketing is a long term strategy. Consistency in sharing useful content attracts new customers, and helps you to build a strong brand image and trust amongst your targeted audience.

    Social Media Marketing

    Source: StartBloggingOnline.com

    Social media marketing (SMM) is the most rapidly growing and evolving platform. When marketers develop their digital marketing plan, they must focus heavily on the social media marketing section.

    We can figure out the potential of social media platform from the following research statement.

    “American adults used at least one of the social media platform, in 2005, just 5%. By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans, and today 69% of the public uses some type of social media.”

    Source

    Beyond the most commonly used social media channels –  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, G+ YouTube and Pinterest, you might consider some of the following.

    Well managed social media campaigns increase brand recognition, improve customer loyalty and increase inbound traffic. And it’s considerably more cost effective than other traditional marketing techniques. According to the Jayson DeMers , a contributor at Forbes magazine:

    “92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was essential for their business, with 80% indicating their efforts increased traffic to their websites. And according to Social Media Examiner, 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media”

    Other Effective Techniques

    Digital marketing is a vast area to explore. You can also use the following techniques to generate traffic and sales.

    Conclusion

    Whether you are in product or services industry, digital marketing has made it easier to reach and communicate with customers than ever before.  An efficient digital marketing plan is not enough to attain all of your goals. But the execution of the plan is an essential part of the whole process. Superb execution of your plan should be cost effective and positively impact on ROI.

    Your valuable opinion about this article may help the other readers. So please comment below.

     

    Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_weedezign‘ / 123RF Stock Photo

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    Liaqat Ali Hamiya

    Liaqat Ali Hamiya is the co-founder of Genesis, a holistic digital marketing and branding agency in Karachi, Pakistan. He has started his digital marketing career in 2011. He served dozens of business around the globe with a focus on digital marketing, ecommerce, branding, b2b and business service clients. He is also associated with leading logo designing company, LogoGuts