The shift towards digital mediums has been imperative to businesses for quite some time. In the year 2020, this shift accelerated at an exponential rate. Given the situation, everybody dipped their toes into the pool of digital platforms. The lockdowns and quarantines increased a person’s average time on online platforms. This was an opening for businesses to best use their online presence to keep their traction at par even in uncertain times.
However, to maintain a digital presence, you must have adequate and creative digital marketing strategies. Digital marketing is the key to sustaining an online presence. With many online options, it becomes more and more challenging to stay unique. All your competition is also within reach of your prospect. Hence, most business models these days heavily rely on digital marketing strategies. With access to a large variety, a potential customer can quickly stray away unless you ensure that you have all covered. From PPC to social media outreach, you will have to stay on the front foot to ensure that you stay alive in the competition.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is similar to traditional marketing, but the key difference is the medium through which you market your product. Everything is a way to sell your product digitally, from emails to potential customers to creating landing pages for a specific demographic. Any advertisement you push through the internet comes under digital marketing.
Kinds of Digital Marketing Strategies
Even though the ideas and the concepts behind the strategies are somewhat borrowed from marketing in physical mediums, these digital marketing strategies are unique. These strategies are used differently based on your research into the target audience and what you hope to achieve. But generally, most of these are utilized simultaneously by a business to ensure optimum results.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click is a type of advertisement strategy where a third party hosts your advertisements. This can be different social media platforms or search engines. They will screen the prospective clients for you and push your advertising to them based on their algorithms. This increases the amount of meaningful traffic you get on your landing page. However, every time a client is redirected to your page through the host, you will have to pay the host a certain amount that has been set beforehand.
You will have to pay this amount regardless of whether the prospect converted into a customer. The amount you have to pay varies based on different factors and metrics. However, the plus point is that you pay for the traffic you get on your page. If you have created a well-designed, adequately optimized landing page, it will mean that you will be generating revenue marginally due to this.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is another important digital marketing strategy crucial for businesses with a lot of competition. Search engine optimization is an organic method to get traction on your webpage. It ensures that your website shows up when users type anything relevant to your business in the search engine. However, it requires quite a lot of effort and constant updates. It is generally noted that people do not look at more than a few top search results (only a few people check the second page of Google). And so, getting a spot on the first page of Google (preferably the top 3) should be your goal.
Another alternative would be to pay the search engines to rank you above the others. However, your website will be marked as an advertisement, in that case, to distinguish it from those who have ranked organically. This creates a minor hassle for you since people are more inclined towards organic searches on search engines and are known to trust them more than what is labeled as an ad.
While organically ranking your webpage does not cost you much, it does require constant effort from your end. It may not start producing results immediately, but a good SEO rank can be a big plus point for your business in the long run. It can put your business in the spotlight and create traction towards
your business, which will, in turn, reduce the amount of effort needed to keep up your SEO rank.
Utilizing Social Media
While social media may seem trivial, it is a great way to gather an audience and create a brand for your product. Moreover, it does not cost you anything. However, it does require a commitment to online trends. Social media marketing opens up different avenues for you, from setting up stores to handling customer queries and engaging in customer polls to better understand your clientele. A social media marketing strategy is a complete package. Moreover, you can filter out the audience as well, and you can reach out to a larger audience much more conveniently.
How Much Revenue Should You Invest In Digital Marketing?
This is an important question when allocating a budget for your marketing strategies. How much should you invest in digital marketing, and how should you divide it among the different methods?
A general rule of thumb when investing your revenue into marketing strategies is to invest around 7-10%. However, this number may go up or down depending on what stage you are in, how much revenue you
are generating, and what you want out of your digital marketing
strategies.
Regarding the most effective strategies we discussed earlier, SEO and social media marketing may not cost you anything. They’re based on organically getting your product out there to the audience. However, Pay-Per-Click is one of the most crucial marketing strategies that require you to set aside a budget.
Given the traffic that can be generated with the help of PPC, it is recommended that you set aside at least 35% of your digital marketing budget for it. You can use the rest to create the content that your PPC strategy will lead to. The content is equally important and should not be compromised.
When investing in PPC, the return on investment is not reflected by the traffic generated but rather by the tips converted. If you do not have landing pages catering to the customer experience, your PPC investment will fail. You must work out a budget, keeping the investment against the returns in mind. However, it would be best to research the cost of getting a lead and your conversion rate.
Takeaway
PPC plays a very significant and unique role out of all the other marketing strategies. Even though it requires an investment to get things rolling, the return on investment can be increased if you use the right approach and do your research.
