If you are a business owner you might want to hear me out. Have you noticed the flood of digital marketing activities when you scroll through your mobile phone? Almost every business, big or small, has started its journey in the digital ecosystem. In this article, I will try to give a comprehensive overview of what is digital marketing. Along with that I also share a 10-step procedure to create a digital marketing plan for your business.

What is Digital Marketing?

When a business communicates through digital technologies, spreading awareness about its products & services to a specific audience, that can be termed digital marketing. Marketing traditionally resulted in sales. That is true even in digital marketing. Yet, digital can be utilized for a wider array of activities than just “looking to grow sales”. The digital space can be used in multiple manners to help your business achieve any desired outcome.

Outcomes of a Digital Campaign

1. Increased Sales
2. Increased awareness

A strategy is selected depending on the desired outcome needed.

Examples of digital strategies

Although the following list is not an exhaustive list of digital strategies, it shall give a fair idea of what kind of digital strategies are normally used by businesses.

1. Search Engine Marketing (Search based text ads shown on search engines)
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Video Marketing
4. Digital PR
5. Email Marketing
6. Social Media Outreach
7. Display Advertising
8. Local Listing Management
9. Link Building
10. Schema Structure Implementation

The digital ecosystem is a fast-changing, ever-evolving space. As new platforms emerge, strategies for advertising & marketing on the platform come into existence. Thus, it is important to understand the customer journey in the digital context.

For example, I had written about the customer journey of a guest looking to book a hotel. Although a long read, it expands on the various touchpoints a business may have while a guest is looking to book a hotel.

Having a good understanding of the customer journey enables easy decision-making in choosing the right strategy. What would be the desired outcomes? Which key performance indices(KPIs) need to be tracked?

To achieve a better ROI for the efforts put into Digital Marketing, it is essential to understand what is a digital platform.

What is a digital platform?

A digital platform is essentially the space in which one can create & consume content. A few examples of digital platforms

1. Facebook
2. Gmail
3. YouTube
4. Whatsapp
5. Booking.com
6. Google Search Engine Ranking Pages
7. TripAdvisor
8. Instagram
9. Amazon Marketplace
10. Wikipedia

Note: I have intentionally mixed up social media platforms(Facebook, Instagram) with knowledge-sharing(Wikipedia) platforms along with travel(Booking.com, TripAdvisor) & email(Gmail, Outlook) platforms. The reason for doing this is primarily to drive home the point of what a digital platform is. Different digital platforms are created to cater to different needs. The only underlying commonality is that they are all platforms. Platforms that can be accessed through a digital device.

What are platforms made up of?

Any platform is made up of content. Content over here encompasses all types of media. Starting from text to audio to visual content. Content can also be virtual reality or augmented reality in nature. A good way to look at content? Anything that can be consumed by a user irrespective of the media type or platform.

Content on the platform can be generated by the users of the platform, which is user-generated content. At other times the content is uploaded by the platform itself, e.g. listing of hotels on booking.com.

Examples of content on various platforms

1. A text post on Facebook written by a friend
2. A Facebook page posting photographs/videos on their Facebook group.
3. A reviewer leaving a review on Tripadvisor
4. A YouTube video
5. An Instagram story
6. An email sent by a company to your inbox informing you about the latest offers
7. WhatsApp status by a friend or business

All of the above are examples of content. Essentially on all digital platforms whenever an individual or a business starts posting something they are creating content on the platform, for the platform. If the content is engaging & entertaining enough it may go viral among a set audience group. if the content is educational in nature, a particular audience set may find it valuable & pass it on to their peers.

What role does communication play in Digital Marketing?

Now that you have been able to understand the fine differences between platform & content let us dig a little deeper in the context of content. Any piece of content at its core wants to communicate a message. It can be a social message, a sales message, or something else. Yet every piece of content is trying to communicate a message to a desired audience.

A well-designed communication targeted to an audience set can make or break a campaign. The better designed the communication, the better it has a chance to resonate with the audience. As the audience resonates with the messaging they may end up interacting with the content. A user may interact with the content by liking, commenting, or sharing it with their peers.

As engagement on the content increases the platform identifies ‘that particular content’ as valuable. The content is keeping more users on the platform. That is what the platform wants. To have more active users on the platform. thus the content is circulated to a wider audience set that can resonate with the messaging. This in turn makes the content reach a wider user base thus grabbing more eyeballs.

What can be summarized from the above few paragraphs?
When you try to launch a campaign focus on the message that needs to be communicated. Focus on the way the message is being delivered. Give attention to the medium & platform through which the message is to be delivered. Digital is a wonderful place if you know how to communicate well.

Digital is the most transparent medium. [Cautionary Message]

The digital ecosystem is a wonderful place to be if businesses start being honest. The flip side of things is that businesses are hardly able to maintain transparency throughout their lifetime. That’s where digital platforms can start acting as a bane rather than a boon. I’ll put forward two recent examples one in the Indian context. The other one is from an international context.

1. Bournvita Fiasco [details coming soon]
2. Bud Light gets it wrong [details coming soon]

As can be seen, by the above 2 examples, digital platforms acted as fuel to the fire. You may think for small businesses this is not that appropriate. That would be wrong to think. Think of Google/TripAdvisor reviews for a hotel. When ratings fall drastically business is bound to get affected. Hope you are able to understand how critical a business needs to look at being transparent when operating in the digital ecosystem.

Public Perception in the Context of Digital Marketing

How many times have we seen complaints about app-cab services on various social media platforms? In my understanding, we’ve all seen quite a number of such complaints surfacing on our feed time & again. How does that affect the public perception of the service? If anything it isn’t portraying a positive perception towards the brand.

To give an example, Snapdeal one of the earliest e-commerce brands in India lost its market share because of such negative brand perceptions. Users started to think when they ordered something from Snapdeal, they may not even get their desired product. This perception was seeded in users’ minds as they saw many social media posts of products not being delivered by Snapdeal. To make matters worse, these social media posts spread rapidly thus aggravating the problem all the more.

As a business that is foraying into digital marketing, it is extremely crucial to perform active digital & social listening. Respond to negative comments about the brand & take action to resolve the problem faced by the customer. If not done there’s a high chance of the brand perception falling drastically among the target audience. That would eventually lead to a decrease in business & competitors taking advantage of the situation. Both happening at the same time.

Examples of 3 well executed digital marketing campaigns

[Coming Soon]

Tools Used in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a vast field. It is expanding ever so often with the onset of new platforms emerging every single year. This inevitably creates the breeding ground for tools that can help strategize, develop, execute & measure digital marketing efforts. Experts from the field use quite a number of tools. For a start, you can look at the following tools. They are free & pretty easy to use.

1. Google Keyword Planner
2. Google Search Console
3. Google Analytics
4. Google Trends
5. Ahrefs
6. Advertising platforms of individual social media channels
7. Canva

Safe to say the above tool set is just the starting point. As you grow & invest more time & effort the number of tools will eventually increase.

Digital Marketing isn’t a cheap way to market products & services

There’s a common misconception surrounding digital marketing. It is a cheap way of getting the word out about your products & services. If anything, digital is not a cheap way of getting in front of your target audience. To give an example the total tools needed to properly perform SEO along with content marketing is going to cost upwards of $500 per month. That’s just the cost of the tools. Using these tools requires expertise. The experts are rather expensive to hire.

With each passing year established platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram have increased their advertising costs which does not make digital a cheaper way to market your products & services. All of the above along with the cost of the effort to perform all the marketing activities in a systematic way requires a dedicated in-house or a specialized agency which too would add on to the marketing budgets. All in all, if there’s one misconception that digital marketers need to educate the business community this would be it. Digital marketing can deliver measurable results in alignment with business goals. But that does not come cheap.

Does that mean you don’t get the workforce to perform digital marketing efforts for your business at a lesser cost than the industry standard? Yes, you do get them. but remember, you get what you pay for. In an everchanging martech ecosystem, the last thing your business may need is an outdated digital marketing agency working on your business goals.

Digital Marketing is harder than traditional marketing

A lot of business owners & managers established their careers before the digital era. Naturally, for them, it is extremely difficult to wrap their head around the complex system of how digital marketing works. In the pre-internet era things were simpler they would argue. While the statement holds true, times have changed drastically.

Nowadays an average individual spends more than 2-5 hours on several digital devices. Even while driving, people are on their mobile devices because the car is driving itself. The average consumer has become much more aware of his/her purchase decisions. With the fear of becoming obsolete, businesses are having to take up digital transformation. If they don’t their competitors will gain significant ground by taking a digital-first approach. All of this coupled with the lack of a good workforce educated in digital marketing makes digital even harder than traditional marketing.

Is Digital Marketing measurable?

This is where digital trumps traditional marketing hands down. Measurement of user activities through digital devices is commonplace. Although this poses another set of challenges. Attribution. If a user books a hotel room, how does one attribute this sale? Is it because the user saw an advertisement on social media? Is it because the user got a recommendation from an acquaintance? Or is it because prices were the lowest on the hotel website? There are various attribution models which are prevalent. There’s hardly any gain in arguing which model works the best. With all the data at our disposal, careful analysis of it can indeed help in taking informed decisions.

Creating a digital marketing plan for your business

1. Research on which platforms your audience is spending the most amount of time on.
2. Understand their pain points.
3. List down the solutions you can provide to these pain points.
4. Get YOUR platform up & running following best practices. For most businesses, it would be an e-commerce store or a website. Some may also have mobile applications.
5. Set measurable business goals. Segregate the goals in terms of 2 brackets. Increased awareness or Increased Sales.
6. Depending upon the business outcome required set the budget for the digital marketing plan
7. Select the strategy that aligns with the desired objective.
8. Gather a competent team to deliver on the execution of strategy.
9. Start the campaign & execute the strategies
10. Analyze the results. Take actions depending upon the insights gained from analytics.

Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Partner for your business

Now comes the most critical question. How does one choose a digital marketing partner? A good way to look at this would be to go ahead & start with an industry-leading agency. Starting the digital journey with a completely in-house team is next to impossible. The in-house team may not even have the latest news happening around the industry. On top of that the additional fixed cost of keeping an in-house team may just eat into the marketing budget. Once your business has seen a decent amount of success with the digital marketing efforts then you can plan on building an in-house team.

Conclusion

Depending upon the size & scale of your business you have to decide how to start your digital journey. It is never easy to start something. In fact, starting is the most difficult thing to do. Yet, one has to start somewhere. If you have read until now there’s a high possibility that you are considering a start for your business’s digital marketing efforts. I started my professional career as a teacher educating students in the subject of computer science. If you’ve liked what you read I’d suggest get in touch with me. i won’t ask for a fee or service charge. I’d be glad to know if I could help you get started with your digital marketing efforts.

If you liked reading this article you may want to check out how I started my career as an entrepreneur & work as a digital marketing consultant for clients across the globe.