Digital Marketing for Businesses - The Basics 

Companies use marketing to promote their products and services, communicate their value proposition, and build their brand. As a concept, marketing has been around since about 100 years ago. Since then, as well as service delivery, marketing departments and sales networks have become more prevalent. 

Marketing is also about understanding the needs of the customer and adding value to these through advertising. Marketers can appeal to a specific need or customer value (e.g., ecology, product life cycle as a marketing tool). In this way, they can get customers to buy the product or service of the specific company. 

People-oriented H2H marketing aims to attract customers through real human interactions, while customer-oriented marketing is focused on individual needs rather than mass appeal.

Account-based marketing or ABM is a way of targeting a marketing message to a target company or customer who knowingly or unknowingly needs your company’s product or service.

Also included in marketing is in-house marketing, which targets your own employees. 

Influential marketing helps customers understand their needs rather than selling directly to them, and strategic marketing develops a company’s marketing in a holistic and creative manner.

Various marketing options

Marketing options are increasing every year, and it can be challenging to choose the right ones for your business. Traditional advertising, such as newspaper advertising, has been replaced by digital marketing or internet marketing, and there are countless different options to choose from. 

Modern marketing today is all about data and measurement and, of course, digital channels. It’s also worth studying why product-centric marketing alone may no longer be enough.

The key difference between traditional advertising and digital marketing is the very precise measurement capabilities of digital advertising. You can measure every person who sees your ad and their actions on your company’s website or social media pages. 

While many things have changed, one thing remains true: A good ad is still a good ad. Oh, and no one loves aggressive marketing.

You can measure the following things with digital marketing:

How many people:

• saw your ad?
• Saw your ad more than once
• Viewed your webinar.
• Looked at your company’s website
  • Contact page
  • Videos
  • Blogs
• Has visited your company website
• Contacted your company

As the above list suggests, you can measure the effectiveness of digital marketing with a high degree of accuracy. This allows for more effective investment in the most profitable channels. 

Therefore, you can track which of your marketing activities led to customers visiting your website and how many of these customers have contacted you. By eliminating ineffective channels from your portfolio, you can continue to invest in those that drive customers to your website and ultimately convert them into customers. Marketing research will tell you what your target audience likes and dislikes.

Did you know: Drip marketing helps you squeeze even more value out of your marketing campaigns with automation.

Marketing for small businesses

Often, marketing is thought to be expensive, and that small business owners can’t acquire customers through digital marketing. This is wrong. Anyone can start digital marketing with very little investment and advertising budget on social media or Google. 

You can start advertising with as little as a few hundred dollars and then increase your efforts in the light of the results. In this way, you can get a sense of digital marketing even if you aren’t going to invest much money or expect results right away. 

Whatever the case is, it is a good idea to design a marketing plan so that the measures to be taken are consistent from the start. Having a marketing calendar helps to plan marketing efforts efficiently and cost-effectively. 

Targeting the wrong demographic should also be avoided with careful research into target groups. It is also essential to define a unique selling proposition, or USP, for each target group, which will help to differentiate the campaign from competitors. 

Digital marketing training is becoming more valuable every year, and the better you understand digital marketing, the better results you will get from it. Choosing a good agency for digital marketing will significantly accelerate your results, and you will also learn more about digital marketing while working with them. You might also benefit from the digital marketing training the agency provides.

Read also: Apply marketing mix and enjoy new levels of success with your campaigns.

The digital marketing mix is evolving fast.

It’s no secret that digital marketing is booming, and probably everyone knows their customers are moving heavily to digital channels and even making buying decisions there at an accelerating rate. 

However, there will always be a need for salespeople and experts in sales. Yet, it is noticeable that customers are increasingly looking for information online and only contact salespeople and experts after exploring a range of options. 

At this moment, it is best to be in front of the customer’s probing eyes on digital platforms. You can easily track the different stages of the sales funnel through digital marketing. 

Remember, too, that your company’s website should be optimized and well-designed so that traffic directed to it is not wasted. A/B testing will help you find out what works and what doesn’t. Conversion optimization increases what works and reduces what doesn’t.

What is digital marketing? Read our in-depth text here.

The most common ways of marketing in digital marketing are:

• Social media
• Google advertising
• Google search engine optimization
• Banner/display advertising
• Email marketing
• YouTube advertising
• Blog marketing

You probably know what Google is, but do you know all the valuable services it can offer your business? The most common way for businesses to start digital marketing is with Google Ads or social media advertising. 

Google is an excellent way to find customers if your company’s service or product is already known to the general public. This way, customers already know how to search for service providers online, and you can advertise to all of them. 

If your service is new or customers are not actively searching for it online, social media is a great way to promote your services to your customers proactively. 

So you can use social media for advertising to all your potential customers, even if they are not looking for your services online. By using this marketing strategy, your company will gain exposure to your best target audience.

Read also: The Basics of B2B Digital Marketing. 

The digital marketing industry is growing rapidly.

“87.3% of US adults the internet regularly” - World Bank

Most of your customers are probably already online, and at some point in their buying journey, they’ll Google your services. By now, you should have done some social media marketing for your business to your target audience. Hopefully, this has led to your business being Googled. 

On the other hand, if the customers are not familiar with your business, how could they possibly know how to search for your business? And, how do you get new readers for your blog posts? This is something you can do with banner advertising and social media advertising. 

Differentiate yourself from your competitors and reach out to your customers before they even search for your industry online. Now is the perfect time to start marketing online because the competition in digital marketing is constantly growing. It is becoming harder to get results with digital marketing as the competition increases each year. 

For example, this can be seen in the price of Google advertising, and today you can get a potential customer to your business website for as little as one dollar in many cases. Still, it is worth remembering that a few years ago, this cost only a few cents. 

Getting the same customer to your company’s website will cost considerably more. Google is still profitable as long as you avoid Google marketing mistakes.

The art of B2B marketing

In recent years, B2B marketing has evolved rapidly. The modern B2B marketing industry, of course, relies heavily on data. On the B2B side, the buying paths and the interactions that lead to a transaction are often more complex and nuanced than the consumer side. 

It can take several months, or even a year for large stores, to complete a transaction.

Modern-day B2B marketing is supported by marketing automation, CRM systems and their integration with marketing automation tools, various reporting tools such as Power BI, and many more. 

One of the key terms in B2B marketing is inbound marketing. Initially coined by HubSpot’s founders, this term refers to a broad marketing strategy perspective.

Alongside inbound, Account-Based Marketing has been an approach of interest to B2B marketers. Where inbound focuses on acquiring and nurturing brand new leads, Account-Based Marketing focuses on growing key existing customers. 

In 2020, the Texas Privacy Protection Act (TPPA) came into force, the primary purpose of increasing transparency about the data collected and used by businesses and organizations. 

A big question was also how TPPA and B2B marketing fit together. There are many answers to this question, but there are also open questions in the air. The state government will clarify its position in the coming years with the so-called ePrivacy Regulation.

How to start marketing for your businesses?

A good marketing strategy starts with determining your marketing channel and budget. It is also worth defining the target group. You can simplify the process by creating customer segments and defining buyer personas (or customer personas). 

Marketing methods are also influenced by the type of business you run. Do you sell B2B services, products to consumers or perhaps have your own Amazon online store? Are you targeting customers from abroad?

We also recommend that you set up an analytics tool to track your website traffic. Analytics will also help you track which marketing channel is working best. Most marketing tools are free or low-cost. There are also premium tools such as HubSpot. Additionally, we have an article on Marketing Tips that details the characteristics of a great advertisement.

You can start digital marketing yourself or choose a partner to help you get results and grow quickly. Marketing is about continuous development, testing, and measuring channels. If you do not yet measure your marketing results every month, I recommend you contact an agency familiar with digital marketing and start measuring right away. 

Feel free to contact us if you want to see results online in the next few weeks.

Contact us