Digital marketing is a strategy for carrying out online marketing processes by utilizing various digital media, such as websites, social media, email, and so on. Therefore, digital marketing is a business strategy that is most often used by business people/business actors.
Unfortunately, there are still many business actors who do not understand well about the implementation or steps for implementing digital marketing. This is because there are many online digital marketing platforms that have different approaches.
But before discussing further, what is the importance of digital marketing for a business? To find out the answer, see the following article.!!
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
In addition to reaching more target consumers, digital marketing also has several advantages that make business people often apply this strategy in their business. These advantages include:
- The cost is relatively cheaper and can be arranged by yourself
- Fast branding with a wider consumer reach
- Easier application access
- focus more on advertising to potential consumers so that ads are more targeted
- The convenience that companies get in collecting consumer data
- Based on research, 70% of the world's people prefer online advertising to traditional advertising
- Save time with advanced and efficient features
- Easier and faster in conducting two-way communication
- Advertising concepts and techniques that can be adapted to your needs
- Easy to Analyze Markets & Competitors (Competitors)
- No need for a lot of human resources
- Significant Business Growth Potential
What are Digital Assets in Marketing?
Talking about digital marketing, a marketer must know and also understand what elements can be maximized by businesses and companies so that digital marketing can run optimally.
One important element in digital marketing is assets. For that, here are some important digital marketing assets that you must understand to optimize:
- Brand Identity
- Websites, Landing Pages, and Mobile Applications
- Media (Photo, Video, and Audio)
- Digital Content
- Social Media Accounts
- Online Footprint (Review/Feedback/Testimony)
- Data Analytics
Apart from that, another important thing that is quite important is your activeness in online forums. For that, try to make your business profile have a good rating and impression from customers. This can affect the branding that your business has in cyberspace..
What are the Basic Steps of Digital Marketing?
To start digital marketing, there are several steps that you must understand, including:
1. Define Buyer Personas
Before implementing a digital marketing strategy, you need to understand the charm of your targeted consumers. Buyer Persona is a profile that can represent the target market for the product you are selling.
By determining a buyer persona, you can measure the level of success of the marketing process being carried out and develop a more targeted digital marketing strategy. But in determining it, you have to do research to create a complete buyer persona profile.
2. Identification of Target Market Needs
After knowing the buyer persona, aka the target market for your business, then you need to identify their needs. Before offering the product you are selling to customers, make sure that the goods/services can be the solution to the needs desired by the customer.
You can do this by conducting research directly into the field, holding Focus Group Discussions (FGD), joining forums, and so on.
3. Set Goals (SMART)
At this stage, you are required to set goals that you want to achieve with the Specific (S), Measurable (M), Attainable (A), Relevant (R), Time-based (T) formulas. While there are many goals you might want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will drive your strategy forward rather than keep them stagnant.
4. Set a Budget Fund
Budget funds are the amount of money spent in a certain period to implement a program. With a budget, you can manage and spend the marketing budget effectively according to your needs. You can set a budget by applying the SMART method to measure incoming and outgoing budgets.
5. Arrange Marketing Plan
After knowing the buyer persona to the needs of the target market, the next step that must be taken is to develop a marketing plan or what is commonly known as a marketing plan.
Marketing plan is the activity of formulating efforts to be carried out in the field of marketing in the future, in order to achieve the expected goals and objectives in the field of marketing.
By compiling a marketing plan, you can carry out the marketing process in a more directed and efficient manner. This is because you know what to do and what not to do, and you can also know the process for achieving marketing goals.
6. Take advantage of Digital Marketing Media
In this step, you must determine the digital marketing channel that you will use. In this case, the digital marketing channels that you can use are very diverse, ranging from free to paid.
However, it should be noted that each digital marketing channel has a different strategy. Therefore, you need to understand the right strategy for each digital marketing channel.
As for digital marketing channels, namely Google My Business, WhatsApp Business, Website, Landing page, SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Blog, Email Marketing, Video Marketing, Social Media Marketing, PPC, Native Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, and other digital marketing channels.
7. Make the Content as Interesting as Possible
This is the essence of the digital marketing process, namely creating content to attract the attention of the audience to buy the products you are selling. In this case, interesting content is usually packaged in visuals and also copywriting that can make readers read your ad.
But to create good copywriting, you need special techniques to concoct words, especially to convey business interests. This is what is called copywriting.
Copywriting is a technique of persuading readers or audiences with a series of words to take some marketing action. With good copywriting, the target market can understand the benefits of your services and know why they should buy them.
8. Use Marketing Tools
Because there are so many digital marketing channels that you can use, of course this can make you dizzy in managing them. But don't worry, to overcome this, you can use marketing tools that suit your marketing needs.
By using marketing tools, you can create to-do lists to organize work lists, automated email applications, applications for analyzing data, to tools to help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. As a result, project management is easier and more practical.
9. Create Keyword Research
Digital marketing is all about reaching a targeted audience through personalized content where all content cannot be disseminated without effective keyword research.
Therefore, conducting keyword research is essential for optimizing your website and content for SEO and ensuring people can find your business through search engines. Apart from that, social media keyword research can also help to market your product or service across various social channels.
10. Do Evaluation
After you've done everything, it's time to measure the level of success by evaluating. Doing a digital marketing strategy without evaluating performance is useless. You can't measure and know how far your strategy is if you don't evaluate it? Therefore, you must evaluate by understanding digital marketing metrics as a measure of success.
What is the Work of a Digital Marketer?
By becoming a digital marketer, you must understand the main tasks that must be carried out, such as:
- Conduct information research and analyze market trends
- Analyze business position against competitors
- Make strategic planning campaigns and promotions
- Plan sales strategies for products, services or services
- Product management (Pricing, distribution, etc.)
- Information Management and Innovation in Business
- Perform budget management on Return of Investment (ROI)
- Building communication and relationship with customers
- Utilizing online & offline media for the marketing process
- Doing business branding process
What are the Main Challenges Faced in Digital Marketing?
The marketers in today's world are constantly inundated with new ideas, new platforms to promote their business, and new technologies to leverage. While these innovations are often beneficial to them, keeping up with changes quickly can overwhelm marketers.
Even though they can survive, businesses can no longer rely on traditional marketing tactics alone. Digital marketing has its own challenges, keeping up with technological developments that keep changing all the time.
Even carrying out the marketing process cannot be separated from the challenges that can be faced in carrying it out. For that, here are some challenges in running digital marketing.
- Time investment
- The negative side of branding
- Time for training
- Privacy regulations
Conclusion
Before you start a digital marketing campaign, make sure you know what to do. With the right strategy, you can excel in the competitive marketing arena. All you need to do is be tactical, avoid business competition, target the market, reach the market and make sure that everything you have done encourages them to buy the product the moment they land on your website.
Those are some explanations about digital marketing that can help you increase your sales turnover, profits, and also your business marketing process. By following the steps above, you can easily run digital marketing easily.