10 Steps to Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing. Digital media has created a low barrier to entry for you to solve problems through Technology and make money. In the past, television, radio, magazine, and newspaper were the mediums for advertising but that is fast changing.
The world is changing so fast that with your Smartphone, you can open bank account, transfer money via e-banking, buy and sell in e-commerce platforms on the internet.
Selling is now digital shrinking to the size of your mobile phone, and to grow your business with digital marketing has become the fad, as you can advertise your products and services cheaply using social media instead of the traditional media.
In this article, we shall examine steps to grow your business with digital Marketing by defining digital media and digital marketing, learn how digital marketing affects your business, look at digital marketing ideas you can use to grow your business, and how to start using them effectively.
10 Steps to Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing
At the end of this article, you would be able to use some digital marketing methods to expand your business, satisfy your customers, give your business more visibility, and help you make more sales.
What is Digital Media?
Digital media is selling products or services using electronic technology on the internet, radio, satellite and terrestrial television, digital billboards etc. The key word here is selling through electronic means.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is selling products or services mainly on the Internet through electronic technology, using rich media tools such as mobile devices, social media, websites, and blogs.
Electronic billboards that display advertisements using digital means, also qualify as digital marketing.
Why Do You Need Digital Marketing for Your business?
To carry out urgent steps to grow your business with digital marketing will be faster, if you know why you are using it to sell on the internet.
Below are some reasons.
- it enables you reach your existing customers to create that personal connection with them
- it reduces your cost of production and makes business more profitable
- as more people use the internet and their mobile phones daily, you have opportunity to attract customers locally and internationally.
- it helps you to develop your reputation as a brand customers can trust.
- people will buy from you after checking your image and accomplishments on the internet.
- sale is swift, for example, you can sell an e-book with just the initial cost of production.
- delivering sale could be at the touch of the mouse or send key of your phone
- tracking your marketing campaigns are not only cheap but easy to do unlike the traditional media advertisement
How Do You Begin Digital Marketing?
Implementing anything new is hard, but if you do it properly, you could become successful. Digital Marketing involve using video, email, blog, website, social networking sites, retargeting, sponsorship, branded apps etc to sell to your readers on the internet.
That is why we suggest that you follow these steps to grow your business with digital marketing.
1) Build a Website and Add Blog to it
Since you already have a business website, just add a blog to reach your prospects easily.
Whenever you publish articles or contents in your website, Really Simple Syndication (RSS will automatically send the same to readers in your email list who subscribe for it.
You can do the following to connect with more readers in your website and blog.
- make your website and blog user friendly to all mobile devices
- make its look and feel neat with beautiful themes and easy to navigate pages
- publish helpful content regularly
- add social media buttons for sharing your content
- ensure customers can reach you easily by email, on your website and the blog
- have a good call to action in your website and blog
- ask readers to buy from you
- make sure merchants who collect payments for you, do so immediately.
Read Also: Website Traffic ; 40 Simple Ways to Increase and maintain it
2) Target a Slice of the Market
It is safe to assume you have an email list. Next, begin a careful marketing campaign to give subscribers interesting and specific content to make them willing to buy, before you actually ask them to buy.
You could send good articles, emails, and free videos that solve a pressing problem with a hint of more excellent contents to come in the future at a small cost.
Do email marketing and track user activities, to find out which content made impact on them so that you know how to get the sales.
You could sponsor an advert or review of your product, targeting fresh visitors to get a lot more buyers for your products and services.
3) Position Yourself as an Expert
Win the respect of your readers by delivering quality content. Let your expertise show in the articles, videos, and podcasts you create in your website. Solve readers’ problems by anticipating their pains and creating contents that heal those wounds.
To expand your popularity, pick top websites in the segment of the market you write about and write for them. Guest post for quality websites and put links to your Website in those articles and you are bound to reap traffic from them.
4) Search Engine Optimization
Optimize your website and make it easy for users to find. Get professionals to design the website and make sure articles reflect the theme of the website, complies with search engine requirements, and proves your ability to solve visitors’ problems.
Always write your articles for human beings. If you satisfy readers, the engines too will be satisfied. Put at least eight keywords scattered inside the article. Start from the headline, the overview, and put in some of the subtitles and sprinkle others inside the article, and in your conclusion.
Put the keywords into the write-up smoothly so that it does not turn off your human readers.
5) Become Visible In Your Social Media Accounts
Let your social media accounts be active. For example, be consistent each week with your posts in Facebook.
Engage your readers. Get them to ask questions and write to you, and then reply to them. Make your posts easy to share with suitable buttons for each social media account (i.e. Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram).
6) Retargeting Display Adverts
Pay for retargeting advertisement. This will keep your brand in the eyes of visitors to your website who are yet to buy from you.
This is how retargeting works. For example, let us assume you visited an e-commerce site and clicked on a shoe advertisement, the next time you use the web, you will see a display of that shoe advertisement from the e-commerce site.
This technology targets your computer via cookies and not you as an individual. It will often find your activities on the web and offer free shipping and discounts on the product until you buy. That is another cool step to grow your business with digital marketing.
7) Adwords
Pay for Google Adwords and create advertisements to target a small slice of the market you are familiar with, and write about regularly. You can choose pay per click advert and pay only when a customer clicks on it.
8) Advertising Online
People who sell online advertise for three reasons, such as engagement of visitors, lead generation, and creation of brand awareness.
Since you wish to advertise to grow your business with digital marketing, it will be good you know the methods for costing adverts. They are as follows:
CPM – cost per thousand impressions. This advertisement is for getting mass reach for your products and services.
CPA – cost per acquisition. You agree with Publisher to pay certain amount on the number of sales you get through them.
CPC – cost per click. You agree to pay only when someone clicks on your advertisement.
Let me restate that one of the steps to grow your business with digital Marketing is by advertising online. You can advertise your product or services through Instagram, digital Newspapers, CNN website, Magazines, and Television on the web.
For example, you could use fifteen seconds video on Instagram to appeal to your customers to buy from you. An advantage of using video to advertise is that it is easy to measure its effects on the target audience.
Make YouTube videos that teach and entertain your followers, and imbed links that direct users to your website to gain new visitors who are willing to buy from you in future.
9) Social Media marketing
There are two ways you can advertise using social media. First is brand account presence in a social media site, i.e. having a page for your business for example in Facebook.
The second is by paid advertisement in the social media account, i.e. paying for advertisement in social media sites like Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook.
Tracking the success of your marketing campaign in social media marketing is easy. You can track the following: fans, followers, pins, likes, and click through rates, engagement rates, cost per impression, and cost per engagement.
Creating compelling advertisement through the social media network is easy and cheap to do, but it is a rewarding way to grow your business with digital marketing.
You could make a budget of less than US$10 and use it to target specific set of buyers.
For instance, in Facebook you can target youths within the range of twenty to twenty five years of age depending on what you are selling. You could also focus on people living in a certain part of the country, male or female or by career or business etc.
10) Develop Application That Solves Visitors Problem
Developing branded apps for consumers to download is quite popular. Examples of these applications include Banking, Medical, and Telephone providers’ app inside your phone. Those applications keep you in constant touch with the businesses that own them daily.
You too can develop an application that solves your visitors’ problem and serve the exact market you are familiar with at a very cheap price.
If developing the app is a problem, get freelancers in Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr.com to do the work for you with a budget of between US$5 to US$10.
Launch it and allow people to use the application free, and sell your product or services inside through background advertising.
Related: 6 Tips to grow your business using social media
Conclusion
You now have many steps to grow your business with digital marketing. It is up to you to decide how creative and high you can climb.
If your aim for growing your business is to make profit among other reasons, just make sure that your selling strategies create customers who are ready to buy from you despite your small advertising budget.