9 Tips To Promote Your Business Online – Digital Vidya

How To Use Digital Marketing To Promote Your Business

In this blog, we have listed 9 tips to promote your business online along with the Why, What, and How to use them.

Digital marketing is the process of using digital technologies to promote your business or advertise your business or products and services.

Technical SEO, SEM, content marketing, Emails, marketing automation, inbound marketing, mobile marketing, video marketing, affiliate marketing, PPC advertising, native advertising, influencer marketing efforts, etc are online marketing examples.

It is used to optimize or promote your business online or advertise your business, lead generation, website marketing, display advertising, the performance of sponsored content, etc.

Digital marketing can be used to promote a wide variety of products and services and is often used in conjunction with traditional or offline marketing methods, such as television, radio, print, and online advertising.

What is Digital Marketing?

It is defined as the type of marketing used to promote brands, products, and services via digital channels.

The main goal of digital marketing is to reach a large audience in a short amount of time. It can be used to reach customers through a variety of channels, including email, social media, search engines, and websites.

It is an important part of any business’s marketing strategy or business promotions online. By using it, businesses can reach a larger audience more quickly and easily than they could with traditional marketing methods.

It can be used to promote a wide variety of products and services and is often used in conjunction with traditional marketing methods, such as television, radio, print, and online advertising.

Brands, as well as professionals, can use it for business promotions online.

• To build brand awareness: Online marketing helps businesses to build brand awareness and create an online presence. By using it, digital marketers can optimize branding.
• To generate leads: Online marketing can be used to generate leads for a business. By using digital marketing techniques, businesses can reach a larger audience more quickly and easily than they could with traditional marketing methods.
• To increase sales: Internet marketing can be used to increase sales for business promotions online. By using digital marketing techniques, businesses can reach a larger audience more quickly and easily than they could with traditional marketing methods.

Why is digital marketing important to promote your business online?

Any business promotions online is required for its growth. Promotion involves communicating the existence of your business to a maximum number of people and also convincing them to buy your products and services.

Television, Radio and Newsprint advertisements, Hoardings, Fliers, Leaflets, and Direct Marketing are some of the traditional methods of business promotion online

In the new Millenium, the internet is the most powerful medium to advertise your online business as billions of people have access to it.

They are the potential audiences to receive communications regarding your products and services.

Internet Users as Percentage of Population – Graph

Have a look at the attached graph; this is data released by World Bank about internet usage.

You will find that internet usage has increased rapidly in China since 2006 and in India since 2009. It is clear that the internet is an effective medium to advertise and promote your products as more and more people are accessing it.

Also since the usage of smartphones has increased exponentially in the last few years, the internet becomes mobile and is a very handy tool for the consumer further increasing its usage.

Please see the attached graph. This will make us realize why is digital marketing important to businesses.  You will see that Digital Advertising is the fastest-growing media in India in 2016 and 17.

This trend will continue in the future and hence it will be imperative for business promotions online.

Any communication or transaction with your customers through the Internet or Digital Channels can be defined as Digital Marketing.

In this blog, we will see the various concepts and tools in Digital Marketing and how Digital Marketing helps businesses. We will also give the steps for implementing a Digital Marketing project.

Digital Marketing is a rapidly evolving and changing field with immense scope for innovation. There are no set principles of Digital Marketing like other branches of knowledge.

We give basic concepts and tools in the Digital Marketing pdf. After which you have to practically implement the same. Then Digital Marketing can be deployed by ‘doing’ and ‘trying’ the concepts and tools. So wishing you the best in your Digital Marketing journey.

How to promote your small business with Digital Marketing?

It works by using a variety of digital channels to reach a target audience.

Digital channels include email, social media, search engines, and websites. It uses a variety of digital channels to reach a target audience.

You may use one channel or a mix of several different channels to reach your target audience. The most important part of any digital marketing strategy is to create content that is targeted to your target audience.

Your content should be relevant, interesting, and useful to your target audience. It lets you use marketing to run a cost-effective marketing campaign as per the buyer’s journey.

All in all, a digital marketer can use content marketing, SEO, SEM, Google Ads, instant messaging, and other sorts of digital marketing tactics to meet, connect and convert target audiences.

Let us understand how you can use digital marketing for your business and  how to promote your small business using various digital techniques

9 easy tips for implementing a Digital Marketing project:

1. Build your website

Building a website is the first milestone in your organization’s digital marketing journey. The whole Digital Marketing project revolves around the website.

The website gives basic information about your company and its products and services and this is your first advertisement post in the digital world. The website can also collect leads from people interested in your product or services.

Hence with a website, you can potentially reach the millions of visitors who visit the internet. Internet users visiting your website become aware of your products and services and can contact you in case of any requirements. Thus you can increase your marketing reach.

2. Get a domain name

The first step in building a website is registering your domain name. If your business is well established, your brand name can be your domain name, if it is available.

If it’s a new business, you can create an innovative and catchy domain name for your website. ‘GoDaddy.com’ is a registrar for internet domain names where you can register your domain name for a fee. There are several other registrars which you can find out.

3. Host your website

Your website will require storage and servers to reside on and hosting your website means creating server space and an IP address for your website on the World Wide Web.

There are various hosting service providers such as HostGator.com or GoDaddy.com. One of the crucial factors in selecting a website hosting service is the page loading speed.

Page loading speed is crucial for the performance of the website. It also improves your SEO Rankings in Google Search resulting in improved search result ranking of your website, as we will see later in this blog. Obviously, a faster-loading web hosting service will cost more.

4. Create Content and design the website

Once your domain name is hosted, then you have to design your website and create content for it. A well written and relevant content will become popular on the internet.

So you have to create good content to adorn your website. Content is the single most important factor in the success of your website. To begin with, WordPress, which is the best open-source or free Content Management System in the World, can be used to create content for your website.

WordPress has built-in ‘plug-ins’ for almost all website functionalities.

Some of them are: Creating Posts, Creating Web Pages, Back up data, Managing Comments( approving, unapproving, spamming, answering or deleting), Titles, Subtitles, Bold letters, Fonts, Italics, Alignment, adding links, pictures, videos, etc., adding social share icons, Adding Meta descriptions, snippet views, adding tags, creating users and giving them permissions( read/ write), managing subscriptions, analytics, improving performance, creating a mobile version of the website, SEO, etc.

Some of the functions are built-in, whereas some plugins are free and some are paid.

WordPress also has several themes for different types and uses of websites and also customizations for those themes.

Thus, WordPress helps you create a website without knowing web design and development. Almost 20% of all internet is powered by WordPress. WordPress is also very user-friendly to use with simple drag-and-drop functionality.

With the rise in mobile usage for accessing the internet, it is necessary to have the website optimized for a mobile device- smartphone or tablet.

Since the display sizes of a desktop, smartphone, and tablet are different, we require to develop a mobile website. A website that optimizes itself for different devices and gives a good browsing experience is called a ‘Responsive Website’.

We now attach here a webpage of tours and travel company as an example of a good website.

See how well laid out is the website content. There are catchy headlines; there is a form to immediately capture visitor information, and there is an easy ‘Search’ Panel with contact information at the top. You can employ good Web Designers and Developers to develop your website as your web business grows.

Having created a website, we now delve deeper into Digital Marketing. Your website is the digital asset of your business promotion online, but it will be useful only if people visit it. So getting people to visit your site, ie increasing the traffic to your site is an important activity in Digital Marketing.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Most of the internet traffic on the internet is guided by ‘Search engines’. You all must be familiar with Google as a search engine.

The user types in words relevant to the topic he is searching for( called Keywords) and the search engine throws results of matching websites. Needless to say, your website should be Search Engine friendly, so that whenever the keywords are typed, your website should show up at the top of the list.

The techniques used to improve your search engine rankings are collectively called ‘ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)’.

See an example of Search Engine Results for the keywords “Tours and Travels Mumbai”

Since these search results are naturally obtained, they are called as “Organic Search Results.

6. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

If you want a guarantee that your website will be returned at the top of search results, you can pay the search engine for this service.

So whenever the keywords are typed, your search engine will always be returned to the top of search results. The search engine typically charges for the number of times your website is clicked after being displayed in the search results.

This is called the ‘Pay per click( PPC)’ model. Of course, when two or more parties are bidding for the first spot in the search results for the same keywords, the one which is paying more per click gets the first spot; the second highest gets the second spot, and so on.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an effective way of attracting traffic to your website. This is an important tool in Digital Marketing for business promotions online.

There are several SEM products available in the market. Google Adwords, a Google SEM product, is the most popular. Google Adwords allows advertising messages to be displayed; thus you can create a copy for your ads in Google Adwords. Refer to the following attachment.

You will see that all the advertisers have written headlines about their businesses. You can also create ad extensions, ie your communications for your different products. SEM is evolved a lot and has become very popular with big Corporations, and online shopping businesses such as Amazon, Flipkart, etc., and is a source of 80% of all revenues of Google.

See another example of the paid search results for the keywords “hotels in Mumbai”. It is clear that the website booking.com has paid the maximum bid per click; therefore it appears in the first position of Search Results.

See another example of the paid search results for the keywords “hotels in Mumbai”. It is clear that the website booking.com has paid the maximum bid per click; therefore it appears in the first position of Search Results.

A paid search result can be recognized by the presence of the small prefix ‘Ad’ before the website. Please note the natural or organic search results for these keywords would be totally different. If you are in a highly competitive business and require a high number of leads, SEM is recommended as it definitely increases the traffic on your website.

Google Adwords gives a host of analytical information about the effectiveness of the campaign, revenue generated through the campaign, financial information such as number of clicks, number of conversions, orders and revenues and hence ROI, etc.

7. Email Marketing

Email marketing forms an important part of the Digital Marketing strategy of a company. Email marketing relies on a database of email addresses to whom you can send your promotional literature.

There are several tools available that manage your email marketing campaigns. They provide a lot of analytical data such as the percentage of opened emails, bounce rates, automation of email campaigns, the effectiveness of an e-mail marketing campaign, and so on.

You can sign up for any of the email marketing services providers such as Zoho or Mailchimp. See an example of email marketing.

8. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing refers to marketing via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Since these media are very powerful with a lot of traffic, social media marketing is an effective way of Digital Marketing. 

Social Media Marketing performs best to drive traffic to your website. Social Media Marketing( SMM) gives a lot of analytics on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, conversion rates, etc.

Here we would like to add the interdependence of the various Digital Marketing Tools. eg Social Media Marketing and Email marketing go hand in hand.

The traffic derived from Social Media has details of the emails of the users. This data can be used to enrich your e-mail marketing campaigns which in turn would increase the conversion rate through social media.

Thus an important concept we learn here is all Digital Marketing tools are interdependent and we need to integrate these tools with each other to increase the overall effectiveness of your overall Digital Marketing campaign.

9. Web Analytics

Marketing analytics has a crucial role in Digital Marketing Efforts. Since digital channels can access the digital footprints of the users, they can give a complete trail of the user in the digital world and the behavior of the customer can be analyzed.

This is the basic difference between traditional marketing channels and digital marketing channels and hence the effectiveness of digital marketing grows many times over.

Web Analytics is available at the individual Digital Marketing tool level such as Google Adwords or any email marketing tool and it is also available as a separate tool that integrates all digital channels and gives a unified view of the Digital Marketing Channel’s effectiveness.

Google Analytics is a well-known Web analytics tool that comes in a free as well as a premium paid version.

Web Analytics gives a whole gamut of data regarding the people visiting your website, their geographic locations, their age group, gender, and even their interests. This demographic data is crucial in knowing about your target customers and their behavior.

You can also get advanced information such as the user visited which website prior to visiting yours, how long the user was on your website, which pages he visited, and so on.

With such detailed insights obtained from web analytics, you can decide your marketing and communication strategy for your target customer segments and make your marketing more effective.

See the kind of data a module of Google Analytics gives. It has the number of sessions per day, the number of users visiting the site, the number of page views, new vs returning visitors, etc. It is a very rich tool that can give you great insights into the usage of your website.

Advanced ways to market your business online:

1. Mobile Apps

Mobile apps refer to applications for specific functions which are very easy and fast to use. They are very convenient to the user as they can be used on the go. This is an emerging field and has a lot of potential in the future of mobile marketing.

2. Universal Analytics

Ever wondered why when you try to search on Google through your mobile phone, the mobile phone displays the search results you had searched from your laptop computer?

This is because of the technology called Universal Analytics. This technology has revolutionized Digital Marketing and integrated all Digital channels such as mobile, laptop, or standalone digital devices.

Thus the user can be tracked through all the digital media he uses. This has increased the effectiveness of Digital Marketing multifold times.

Advanced Analytics works on the concept of the id of the user. So every individual user is given a unique user id and all the devices he uses are tagged with that id. Thus with a single id, the user is tracked on different channels.

Advanced Analytics also can integrate offline channels and data sources such as ERP systems or any other offline excel based data sources with online digital channels. This has helped Data Analytics a lot.

3. E-commerce

E-commerce has payment gateways through which customers can make online payments for goods or services. Thus the complete cycle of order to cash can be completed very conveniently with the help of a few clicks. E-commerce also comes with a lot of web analytics which helps you convert prospects into customers.

Having an e-commerce channel promotes your business or advertises your business as customers have another channel to consume your goods or services.

Premium Google Analytics gives detailed e-commerce measures; so don’t be surprised when you get an instant e-mail when you go to the payment gateway and then change your mind. As more and more people use online channels to consume goods and services, e-commerce will grow in the coming years.

Digital Marketing Job Roles

The most common and in-demand digital marketing job roles are-

• Social media expert: A social media manager is responsible for creating and managing social media accounts for business promotion online. They will also create and manage content, monitor activity, and engage with customers.
• Content writer: A content writer creates content for a business’s website, blog, or social media accounts. They will research and write articles, create graphics, and manage the overall tone of the business’s online presence.
• SEO specialist: An SEO specialist is responsible for optimizing a business’s website and content for search engines. They will also work to improve the ranking of the business’s website in search results.
• PPC specialist: A PPC specialist is responsible for managing a business’s pay-per-click advertising campaigns. They will create and manage ads, track results, and optimize campaigns for maximum ROI.
• Digital Marketing Manager: A digital marketing manager is responsible for overseeing a business’s entire digital marketing strategy. They will develop and implement strategies, set budgets, and track results.
• Digital Marketing Analyst: A digital marketing analyst is responsible for tracking, analyzing, and reporting on data from a business’s digital marketing campaigns. They will use data to improve the effectiveness of future campaigns.
• Email marketing expert: An email marketing specialist is responsible for creating and managing email marketing campaigns for business promotion online. They will create and manage newsletters, promotional emails, and transactional emails.
• UX designer: A UX designer is responsible for designing and improving the user experience of a website or app. They will create wireframes, prototypes, and mockups to help improve the usability of a site or app.
• UI designer: A UI designer is responsible for designing the user interface of a website or app. They will create wireframes, prototypes, and mockups to help improve the look and feel of a site or app.
• Web developer: A web developer is responsible for building and maintaining websites. They will write code, create and manage content, and test and debug errors.
• Digital marketing consultant: A digital marketing consultant is an expert in the field of digital marketing. They will advise businesses on how to best use digital marketing channels to reach their target audiences.

Now that you understand the various job roles in digital marketing, let us take a look at the skills that are required for these jobs.

Digital Marketing Skills

1. ROI of a successful Digital Marketing Program

A digital marketing course will help you understand how to measure the ROI (return on investment) of a successful digital marketing program.

You will learn how to track, analyze, and report on data from a business’s digital marketing campaigns.

You will also learn how to use data to improve the effectiveness of future campaigns.

With this knowledge, you will be able to create digital marketing programs that are more effective and efficient.

2. Digital Marketing Tools

There are a variety of digital marketing tools that you can use to improve your digital marketing skills.

Some of the most popular digital marketing tools include Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and Moz.

These tools will help you track, analyze, and report on your digital marketing campaigns.

They will also help you optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI.

3. Digital Marketing Strategies marketing your business

There are a variety of digital marketing strategies that you can use to reach your target audience.

Some of the most popular digital marketing strategies include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and social media marketing.

Each digital marketing strategy has its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

You will need to carefully consider each strategy before you decide which one is right for your business.

4. Role of a Digital Marketing Agency to market your business

It is a company that specializes in creating and managing digital marketing campaigns.

The agency will work with you to develop a custom digital marketing strategy to promote your business.

They will also help you implement and track the results of your campaign.

If you are not sure how to create a successful digital marketing campaign, or if you do not have the time to manage it yourself, a digital marketing agency can be a valuable resource.

5. Digital Marketing Services to promote your business

A digital marketing agency can provide a variety of services to help you reach your target audience.

Some of the most popular digital marketing services include SEO, PPC, social media marketing, email marketing, and content marketing.

Each of these services has its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

6. Digital Marketing Trends Businesses should follow

There are a variety of digital marketing trends that you should be aware of.

Some of the most popular digital marketing trends include-

• Using Short, DIY videos
• Telling a real story.
• Focussing on Privacy, transparency, and trust-building.
• Opting for Personalization.
• Using Content segmentation.
• Trying Conversational marketing and quality interactions.
• Using Artificial intelligence in digital marketing.

These trends are constantly changing, so it is important to stay up-to-date on the latest trends.

You can use these trends to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.

7. Digital Marketing Plan to advertise business

A digital marketing plan is a roadmap that businesses use to achieve their digital marketing goals.

The plan outlines the steps that need to be taken to reach the desired goal.

It also includes a timeline for each step.

A digital marketing plan is an essential part of any successful digital marketing campaign.

If you do not have a plan, you will not be able to measure or track your progress.

without a plan, you will not be able to make necessary changes to improve your results.

8. Digital Marketing Budget

A digital marketing budget is the amount of money that you are willing to spend on your digital marketing campaigns.

Your budget should be based on your goals and objectives.

It should also be based on your target audience.

Your budget should be realistic and achievable.

If you are not sure how much money you should spend on your digital marketing campaigns, you can use a Digital Marketing Budget Calculator.

This calculator will help you determine how much money you should spend on each aspect of your campaign.

Digital Marketing Benefits

Some of the notable benefits of Digital marketing include-

• Reach a large audience with minimal effort.
• A cost-effective way to reach your target market.
• Build brand awareness and credibility.
• Generate leads and sales.
• Improve customer satisfaction.
• Engage with your customers on a personal level.

A Final Word

We have seen in this blog, the importance of Digital Marketing for business. Digital Marketing helps promote and grow your business.

Digital Marketing is an ever-expanding field of knowledge and can be mastered only by implementing it. So what are you waiting for? Learn the basics of Digital Marketing and start implementing it in your organization.

Enrolling in a complete digital marketing course will help you learn and implement digital marketing methods for your business growth.

Sources: World Bank, Kesari.in, Facebook, WordPress, Google Analytics, Livemint.com.

FAQs:

1. How to promote your business or advertise your business locally?

A few tips to promote your business or advertise your business online are as follows:

• Take advantage of local listings.
• Use social media and create engaging content
• Optimize your website’s SEO
• Get involved in an online community.
• Use high-quality visuals.
• Pay for advertising.

2. How can I promote my business for free?

Here are five free marketing strategies that you can get started with today.

• Strengthen your SEO.
• Take advantage of social media.
• Start email marketing.
• Build a business blog.
• Join online forums and communities.

3. How can I grow my company?

Secrets for Growing Your Business Quickly are:

• Hire the right people.
• Focus on established revenue sources.
• Reduce your risks.
• Be adaptable.
• Focus on your customer experience.