What is digital marketing? What can a digital marketer do for me? How can digital marketers and digital marketing help my business succeed in today’s digital world? In this article, Net Branding’s digital marketing consultant explains how marketing has changed in the online world and how digital marketers hold the key to online success for businesses.
The Internet, and the forms of digital media it enables, has become so pervasive in today’s world that consumers now have access to all the information they need, any time and any place they need it. Marketing has always been about connecting businesses with their audiences in the right place and at the right time. To enable that in today’s online world requires digital marketing.
Digital marketing is the umbrella term used to describe all the online marketing channels that digital marketers use, such as websites, email, social media and the various search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc), to enable businesses to connect with their existing and prospective customers.
What’s the main benefit of digital marketing?
In addition to using these channels to connect with their target audiences, digital marketers also monitor how those audiences respond. Unlike traditional or offline marketing efforts, digital marketing enables digital marketers to see accurate results in real time.
For example, if you put an advert in a magazine or mail out a flyer it’s extremely difficult to determine how many people actually went to the page in the magazine and paid attention to your advert or read your flyer when it arrived in their mailbox (or simply biffed it in the bin). In other words, there’s really no accurate way to know if your advert or flyer was responsible for any sales at all.
With digital marketing, however, the digital marketer can see things like the exact number of people who viewed your website, how many pages they visited, how often and how long they stayed, what device they were using at the time, where they came from, and so on. And they can see it all in real time. This information helps the digital marketer see what content and which channels are generating those all-important sales leads, enabling them to prioritise channels and tweak marketing efforts accordingly – and all in real time too.
5 ways digital marketers can drive marketing success
The days are long gone when the messages that people get about your products or services are the ones that you want them to hear. In today’s digital world people are not just exposed to what you say about your brand, they are also exposed to what the other customers, friends and relatives say about you. What’s more, until they build their trust in you as a business, they are far more likely to believe those sources of information about you, than the information you put out about yourself.
The key to building trust with today’s digital consumer lies in what you tell them and how you do it – and how you back up what you say by what you do.
So, given that most of your communication with today’s customers will take place via some or other digital channel, we can say that the success of your business in the digital world will depend a lot on how your digital marketer conducts your digital marketing efforts.
Here are 4 ways digital marketers can enable you to achieve success with your digital marketing efforts.
- Build Trust: As we’ve said, the key to the customer relationship in the digital age is trust. The way you communicate and what you communicate via the various digital channels you use will determine how successful you will be at building trust with your customers. Always ensure your messages about what you do, how you do it and what your customers can expect from you are consistent across all your digital channels.
- Listen to your customers: One way to build trust is to show that you care about your customer and their needs. Your relationship with your customers is no longer a one-way street with you calling the shots. In the digital age it’s all about developing a real or two-way conversation in which you listen to what your customers want from you and then respond to their specific requirements. For some great ideas on how to build two-way communication with your audience, see our previous article about Facebook pages and groups.
- Be easily reachable: The best way to be able to listen to customers and build their trust is to always be easily reachable. The harder customers find it to reach you, the less they will trust you. Of course, different customers have different preferences when it comes to the ways in which they want to be able to reach you. Some want to call or email while others (a growing number) want to use their preferred social media platform to talk to you. Fortunately, in the digital world enabling multiple channels for two-way communication with customers is relatively easy and very cost-effective.
- Provide high-quality content: Useful, informative, high-quality content that consumers want to consume is what will make them come back for more. In other words, we’re talking about content that is not necessary geared to selling but rather to adding value to solving a problem in the lives of your customers. Providing such content will move your target audience to see you as an authority in your field – and keep them coming back to you for more of the same. This is how to build a relationship and develop the trust that will eventually lead to consumers converting to your product or service.
Need some digital marketing support?
As you can imagine, there’s a huge spectrum of digital assets and tactics that fall under the digital marketing umbrella. Assets such as your website, email, online PR, your social media channels, blogs and more, and tactics such as SEO or search engine optimisation, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising and much more.
Fortunately, a digital marketer has the skills and know-how to use the full suite of digital channels to provide a holistic customer experience, from the time they first make contact with you online to developing a relationship of trust and, finally, the act of conversion.
If you don’t have an in-house digital marketer in your business, it’s easy and very cost-effective to contract a digital marketing consultant at a digital marketing company to provide your business with the necessary expertise. The digital marketing consultants at Auckland digital marketing company Net Branding have been successfully providing businesses throughout New Zealand with end-to-end digital marketing support for a number of years. Our many satisfied clients can attest to how we’ve helped them achieve the success they desired from their digital marketing efforts.
Get in touch with us today – we’re just a phone call or click away.
