8 Digital Marketing Techniques for your business to conquer marketing challenges!
Being an entrepreneur is the most exciting part of your career. There are challenges you face every day while growing your business and dealing with customers.
Different personalities deal differently with the challenges they face in their path. As an entrepreneur, you need to list down all the challenges and segment them broadly such as, functional, operational, financial, technical, marketing & so on.
Being a digital marketing expert, we would like to present you the most common marketing challenges faced by many entrepreneurs and small businesses:
- Failure to Identify Target Clients & their needs: The biggest challenge for any business is identifying the target group, their needs, requirements and pain points.
- Lack of creative marketing methods: Marketing is a dynamic process. Business owners need to find creative ways to reach customers. Understand what makes you different and why your target audience would want to do business with you.
- Low Traffic and Client Leads: To generate quality leads and nurture and convert them into sales is what every business targets. Marketing efforts should bring in enough quality leads to convert them eventually.
- Not effective social media presence: You cannot ignore the importance of social media. Social Media also allows you to engage with your customers and understand their views, requirements and expectations.
- Ambiguous Branding Practices: Another factor that hinders marketing campaigns is unfavourable company image. Everything depends on business reputation. Build your business image by creating favourable marketing campaigns.
- Finding appropriate marketing channels: You have a marketing plan, a strategy, but you don’t know where to use it. There are so many channels that you are confused between them. All these questions can be answered by only one thing, Research.
- Scarcity of funds: The most common issue with most small businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs. Finance always has been a problem and is many times considered the most influential marketing challenge.
- Time constraints to execute campaigns: While running any business, as an owner, you have to plan, execute and manage multiple tasks simultaneously. It might become stressful for a business owner to focus on each department and it’s a hard choice between focusing on sales and focusing on marketing.
- Post-campaign analysis: Post-analysis of the campaign provides insights on the mediums that worked or what didn’t work. The budget spends to generate revenue and cost of new customer acquisition, the kind of communication accepted by the audience and which strategy made the impact.
- Incorrect ROI Determination: The ROI enables you to assess the impact of measurable promotion techniques. Failure to provide and evaluate ROI is the biggest challenge in marketing. Incorrect ROI can hamper business budget allocation.
Since we have discussed the critical marketing challenges faced by the entrepreneurs, let’s now discuss the solutions or ways to overcome these challenges through Fundamental Digital Marketing techniques.
Digital Marketing suits small business or start-up to create a better impact than traditional marketing. Now we will explain “What is Digital Marketing?” and which are those “8 Fundamental Digital Marketing Techniques” that every entrepreneur should implement in the business to maximise their returns.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is also known as “Online Marketing”.
It is a component of marketing that uses the internet and other forms of digital communication channels to market brands/businesses. It leverages digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.
“8 Fundamental Digital Marketing Techniques for Entrepreneurs”
As we mentioned above, many strategies can be implemented in digital marketing. However, we will discuss the primary and essential techniques that can be adapted by any entrepreneur and small business to make their venture profitable.
- Create a Responsive Website: All your digital marketing strategies, communication, tools, everything revolves around your business website. All your business details including information on products and services all are communicated through a website and customers have an access to your website before interacting with you.
- Domain Name: The website domain name should contain your business name. It should be short and easy to remember and should not have any grammatical or spelling errors. Try to avoid special characters or irrational words. Keep it as simple as possible.
- Hosting: You need to choose the hosting provider who can provide you with better service options. Please check out all the configurations before choosing the best plan.
- Website design/layout: Your website content should be engaging and customers should go through the entire site. The navigation on the side should be simple and your customers should get the information they are looking for. The design should be adaptable to all kind of digital platforms, desktop/laptop, mobile, tablets etc.
- SEO compatible: Create your content for people to read and at the same time it should be optimized for search engines. Your content should be in sync with what products or services you offer to your customers. This way you can provide relevant content to your customers and for the search engines as well.
- Product Information: You should provide detailed product information backed by images to educate your customers. You can share in-depth specifications, technical details, reviews, testimonials, brochures, videos and all relevant content about your products & services.
- Contact Details: You can also share your business address, contact details, e-mail so that customers can get in touch with you if they are interested in your products. Contact details are very essential that need to be mentioned on your website.
- Paid Advertising / Search Engine Marketing: Probably the most important tool to any business to make an impact for the customers searching content related to your products & services. Paid advertising works according to various marketing objectives and budgets and can be customised with the best suitable strategy for your business.
- Ads on Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.): More than 95% of Customers search for their requirements on Google across the globe. If customers are searching for something that you offer it is a great idea to be on the same page of the search engine displaying your business info.
- Lead Generation: Leads generated through paid ads are the most authentic and qualitative. The probability of converting these leads into sales is quite high. Ads also help you to reach to maximum audience and create brand awareness.
- Search Network campaigns: These ads are in the “Text form”, these ads can show on Google Search results pages when someone searches for a product or service that’s similar to yours.
- Display Network campaigns: These are in the Image form and these ads appear on websites or apps that your customers visit.
- Video campaigns: 6 or 15-second videos, these ads show right before or during YouTube content or also on the video pages of the search engine pages.
- Google My Business Account: Google provides a platform to register your business on its network. You can set up a virtual office or shop or plant on Google. You can also set your physical address (of your office/shop/plant/unit) on Google Maps so customers can find you in the nearby locality.
- An account on Google: You simply need an account on Google with a Gmail id and you can register your business on: business.google.com. You are then all sent to surf in the internet world.
- Share Business Info: There is a facility to create a website with the Google page as well but there are limitations to making such web pages. Also, the domain name of your website will contain the name “Google” in it. Hence it doesn’t look professional. You can also add office/business hours if you have a physical unit and manufacturing products.
- Share Product Details: You can share details about your products along with the images. You can also share the content about your products & services. All these details will be published by Google and your customers can also have look at it.
- Access Google Business Features: When you create an account on Google you can also access their Google Ads and Insights portal. Where you can create an advertising campaign and also analyse the campaign performance.
- Presence on Google Map: You can pin your business location on Google Maps to let your customers find your physical location. Google Maps allows people to quickly contact your business, encourages people to visit your website, displays your business with images, and more importantly, Google maps offer customer credibility.
- Mange reviews about your business: Often customers give reviews to various businesses about their overall experience. You can see all the reviews your business is receiving on Google. You get the details of the customers reviewing and you can have one-on-one communication with the respective customers and have feedback about their experience.
- Social Media Presence: Social Media today has become more influential than any other marketing channel. You need to have your presence on Social Media, for that you need to evaluate the most suitable and relevant social media network for your products & services.
- An Account on Famous Social Networking Sites: All you need to do is simply create an account preferably on Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Instagram, etc. The account creation on these sites is free. Ideally, you should use the same e-mail ID to create an account across all these sites as it is easier to manage multiple accounts with the common mail id.
- Similar content across all Social Media sites: Once your account is created, you can now start sharing the content across your accounts. You need to ensure that similar content is shared across all the channels as it creates a synchronised communication with your customers, helps you to create a good brand recall for your business.
- DO NOT Connect with your TG, Engage with them: It is advisable not to just connect with them but you need to engage them with your content. You can share videos about your products, run a poll, ask for their opinions, educate your customers with the product utilities. This also helps to build trust around your business.
- Search Engine Optimization for Organic results: Customers, who look out for the solutions on the search engines, always consider top results on the First Page. However, getting a prominent position on the first page is not easy. It requires a lot of efforts and persistence in content management to achieve this feat. When search engines crawl your website, it indexes the content on your website.
- Process of optimizing a website to get organic (un-paid) traffic from the search engine results page: To gain the top position on the search results is called optimization of the search engines. It is an Organic way to improve the rankings. To facilitate this you need to post relevant content on your website and keep updating it regularly.
- Research Keywords: The search queries submitted by the customers on the search engines are called keywords. You need to do in-depth research on the probable keywords used by customers while they search. You need to try to incorporate these keywords in your content to make it more relevant and applicable for search engines.
- Start building links to your website: It’s a good practice to refer/share your website content on various other digital platforms by sharing links to your web pages. This to & fro linking will not only create traffic on your website but also increases the credibility of the content
- Understand Your Competition: You should also have a watch on the keywords used by your competitors’ activities. There are tools available to track your competition keywords activities.
- E-Mail Marketing: Connecting with your customers through e-mails is a good way of two-way communication. You can share product updates, new launches, event invites, newsletters, product literature through e-mails. Customers can subscribe to your e-mails so you know who all are interested in knowing about your business. You can focus your marketing campaigns around this set of your target audience.
- A good way of Lead Nurturing: Sharing content about your business will enrich the knowledge of your customers about your products & services. Your regular e-mail activities would keep your brand on top of their mind and increase their conversion possibilities.
- Try to build your database with the mail ids: E-mail Marketing needs a database of e-mail ids, which is more than enough to run an e-mail marketing campaign. Hence while you collate the customer database make sure a valid e-mail id is available.
- Use software to send and review e-mail campaign: It’s always preferable to use dedicated software to maintain a database, run e-mail campaigns. You can easily do segmentation of the database as per your campaign objective. It also helps you to analyse the performance of the campaign. There are free versions of the software available but it comes with some limitations, you may consider buying a paid version as per your requirements.
- Challenge to reach out to INBOX of your TG: You need to be creative while designing an e-mail, especially the subject line of the e-mail should be attractive enough to influence customers to open the e-mail. Your subject line of the e-mail is more important than the content of your mail.
- Try to think out of the box: Thinking out of the box always provides an edge to you over the competitors. You can take the liberty of doing experiments with your audience through an E-mail campaign. It helps to analyse what’s working and what’s not with the audience.
- Use Call-to-Action Buttons: Every action needs a reaction similarly every campaign needs an action from the customers. E-Mail marketing helps to create that opportunities for your customers to react to your e-mails. Using call-to-action buttons facilitates your customers to go on a page where you want to lead them to educate further with more information.
- SMS Marketing: In the world of WhatsApp, Telegram and other messaging apps SMS have already lost its popularity. However, when it comes to Digital Marketing you can never find the cheapest medium than SMS which can reach across the masses in the shortest time. The ideal time to execute between 12:00 to 15:00 (weekdays/weekend) for SMS campaign.
- A good reminder medium: It’s a very good tool to send offers, coupons, reminders, notifications through SMS. If you have any events, launches, you can share the dates and reminders to the customers through SMS.
- Ideal for your existing/loyal customers: You can also send various customized deals for your existing & loyal customers to boost your sales. If you need to send wishes/greetings to your customers on special occasions or festivals then SMS is a good way to share.
- Use Call-to-Action Buttons: You can share call-to-action link/buttons in SMS like E-mail marketing. Let customer send feedback through these links.
- Use software to send and review SMS campaign: Like e-mails, there are several tools/software available to maintain the customer database, send SMS campaigns and review your campaigns. You can do segmentation of the database as per your campaign objective like e-mail software. It also helps you to analyse the performance of the campaign.
- Content Marketing: Relevant content helps you to explain your products and services in a detailed way, this applies to any kind of product and service business. It also creates trust around such brands which helps their customers to make their decisions easier. Creating relevant content, sharing it effectively and ensure that it reaches your target audience is very important.
- Tell stories and create your tribe: Content can be shared in any form, a write-up, newsletter, video, infographics, brochures and many more. Your content can help you build up your tribe. You can lead, nurture and influence your tribe with the relevant content.
- Know when and where to post: You have content, you have mediums to share your content, and you have your audience to consume the content. But you need to determine the correct time, medium to make your content more effective.
- Quality over quantity: You do not need to share your content every day. Quality is always important in quantity. Never share your content for sake of sharing, always share your content with quality material so your audience can take interest in consuming it.
- Experiment & Mix up content: There is no typical format or guideline on how to release your content. You can mix it up, shuffle it, experiment with it. Experimentation always works in Digital Marketing and that’s the biggest advantage.
- Focus on people, not search engines: Always prioritise your content for your audience. Focus on their requirements and solutions you can offer them for their search query. If your content is relevant to your products & services the search engine will index it without any issues.
- Optimize your content for search engines (use keywords): Though you need to focus on content for your audience, you should also try to optimize the content with the relevant keywords to make it easier for search engines to index your content. Keywords also help you to give a proper structure to your content so you can present quality information to your audience.
Some of these techniques are free to use to some extent and some are paid. You need to manage and make use of them as per your business objective, budget and expected returns. It is very important to have a balance across your techniques to optimise the ROI of marketing spends.
To understand the technical aspect of digital marketing strategies you can also think of pursuing a formal course on Digital Marketing.
Digi-Pub India would like to offer our support for digital marketing strategies and also planning to launch a course on “The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing”.
To learn more about this, please CLICK HERE.
Digi-Pub India: All About Digital Marketing!
We help entrepreneurs & small businesses to achieve their business objectives by implementing effective digital marketing campaigns.
Digi-Pub India is committed to provide and recommend the best-suited marketing mix according to the requirements and budgets. Our services will help your campaigns to reach out to the maximum audiences and ensure you get maximum return on your marketing investments.
Our Services includes Responsive Website, Content Creation, Social Media Management Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, E-mail Marketing, SMS Marketing, Review & Analytics.
Contact Digi-Pub India for more details:
• +91 9820 11789