What is Digital Marketing? | Bishal Rijal

Suddenly I changed my career to Digital Marketing while doing web development in my 5th semester of BCA.

Everyone around me was talking about digital marketing. Then, I learned that:

⭐ What is Digital Marketing?

⭐ 5 advantages of Digital Marketing.
⭐ How does digital marketing work or how is it done?
⭐ The 4 most common digital marketing problems and their best solutions.
⭐ 10 Major Challenges for Digital Marketing in 2023

What is Digital marketing?

It is an advanced and cost-effective way of marketing.



It is less costly than the old generation of advertising, such as television, newspapers, posters, radio, billboards, and hoarding boards.



Digital marketing uses the latest technologies such as computers, and mobile phones. Also, digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, and WhatsApp are used for promoting products and services.

In modern times, most purchases, whether they are products or services are made online.

Businesses around the world evolve with time. Digital marketing is not just a trending marketing tool, it’s the best marketing tool of all time.
5 advantages of Digital Marketing.

There have been many marketing tools but nothing like digital marketing.

Targeting particular audiences according to their interests, and behavior on a global scale at low costs would be impossible for traditional marketing.

Advantages of Digital Marketing in 2023

Here I have mentioned 5 advantages of digital marketing.

⭐ Global Reach

The creation of an international marketing campaign is challenging, expensive, and labor-intensive in traditional marketing.

But in the case of digital marketing, it’s very affordable compared to traditional marketing, it’s easy and doesn’t take as long as traditional marketing.

You can get immense reach at a low price in digital marketing and reach the audience of foreign countries globally.

⭐ Local Reach

Digital marketing can make your business visible to local audiences.

If your business relies on nearby customers like restaurants, garages, and so on.

Digital marketing can bring customers to your doorsteps and ads can be targeted locally which is more efficient than distributing flyers.

⭐ Lower Cost

One of the best advantages of digital marketing. It is a blessing for startups and small businesses that can now compete with huge brands and companies.

Highly targeted strategies like social media, content creation, and SEO.

No cost at all.

⭐ Easy to learn

Even though there are many aspects to digital marketing.

It is really easy to start digital marketing for startups.

It gets more difficult as you increase your scale, your campaign, and your goals but you grow accordingly.

However, it’s just finding the right strategy for you that works.

⭐ Multiple strategies

There are different digital marketing strategies depending on the nature of the business.

For example, a B2B agency interested in gaining international leads is very different from B2C selling clothes at the local level.

While some can benefit from SEO and Content marketing. Some have to use social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising. It’s just a matter of experimenting and seeing what fits best.

How is Digital Marketing done?

Some of the most well-known strategies of Digital marketing are:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

• Website Marketing

• Content Marketing 

• Social Media Marketing (SMM)

• Email Marketing

• Affiliate Marketing

Digital marketing uses various strategies to reach the main goal of marketing.

The goal of marketing can be to increase sales, brand building, lead generation, and so on.

To make it more clear, think of digital marketing as a company and strategies as employees who work at different departments to reach the company goal or main objective. 

So let’s dive deeper into strategies of digital marketing:

Search engine optimization (SEO)

What do we do when you are curious about a product or service or anything?

We generally go to google and search for the thing and check it.

It’s where SEO comes into play optimizing your website and making your website search engine friendly. 

So that you rank above other websites and don’t lose potential leads. 

If you don’t want to pay and to rank above other then SEO is the thing to do. Though it is time-consuming and takes more effort it’s best for the long run.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

When you search for anything in Google.

You can see that at the top of the page, some websites have sponsored writing that’s due to PPC.

PPC comes into play when you need your website to be at the top.

Inside PPC to be at the top of the search page.

There are many things such as ranking of the page, content, and bidding- how much you are willing to pay to google per click of the customer to your website. 

Website Marketing 

Websites are the best asset of a business because Facebook page ads can be blocked and restricted. But the company’s website is always there. 

Even before buying a product or a service a customer spends a significant time on your website. 

So the website of a business should be user-friendly.

It should be easy to find the information about the product customers are searching for.

You should make the website mobile as well as desktop friendly.

Content marketing

Content is king.

There is an 80/20 saying in digital marketing as 80 percent is content and 20 percent are others.

Content is the asset of a company that attracts customers and makes them loyal in the long run. 

In Digital Marketing without content marketing, you won’t be able to make your customers interested, build a brand, and make consumers loyal.

Basically, content marketing is promoting your business in some form of content.

Like a post, videos, reels, blogs, ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, etc, and convincing your customers to buy your product.

Social media marketing (SMM)

5 billion social media users were listed in January 2023.

So not using social media marketing for a company is like having a product and hiding it in a closet.

It’s so hard to believe how user-friendly and precise social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram have made targeting audiences.

According to their age, gender, place, exact area, and even behavior, your taste, your interest is known and can be targeted to run ads on social media.

It’s not like throwing your dart in the dark. You can precisely target your audience to generate more leads and sales.

Email Marketing 

An average person checks their mail 15 times or more in a day. 

Email marketing can be used to make customers more loyal and who like your product and services or content and subscribe to the newsletter.

Businesses send their available coupons, discounts, new products and services available, and content they may be interested in and keep them updated about the company.

Affiliate Marketing

There is usually a brand ambassador who promotes your product or services for commission. Companies reach out to influencers and successful individuals preferably within the same niche to promote the company's product or service.

 

To the influencer’s audience and pay them according to the clicks on the link or promo code used in their website or purchase of their product.

So, every strategy has a vast scope and is very deep. We just touched the surface of each strategy.

Came to know that Digital Marketing is unavoidable.

All businesses whether they want it or not should be involved in it and finally, all these strategies are applied by a business to reach a key goal or main objective.

4 Common Digital Marketing Problems and their Best Solution

Entering a digital marketing career. I came to know about the problems of digital marketing.

Everyone experiences these problems at least once in their career in digital marketing.

Let’s get started,

1. Making the most of a small(er) Budget

One of the biggest digital marketing concerns. Small Budget.

But you want to stand out.

From bigger competitors without a huge budget.

Google search algorithm.

Slightly biased towards big brands.

You feel like larger competitors have unfair advantages.

The following solutions are to level the playing field.

Segment Your Audience

Small budget. No problem.

Major part is stretching every dollar.

In Digital marketing.

You can get maximum marketing ROI by segmenting your audience.

Breaking up your audience in segments.

Can help you market more effectively to everyone you reach.

Segment Categories.

Depends on your business type.

Common ways to segment your audience.

By demographics, lifestyle, and behavior.

Invest in Local

Again.

Local market works or not. Depends on your business.

Enhance your Google My Business page.

With useful features.

Like Q&A, chat or post.

Make sure.

You have listed or claimed your business on other business directories.

Including local city-specific websites.

Level up your game at Local Level.

Using Local social presence.

Using location tagging in posts.

Posting about your local community.

These Efforts help you.

Improve your rank in mobile search and improve your local digital marketing metrics.

Get Social-Specific

If you’re struggling with a smaller marketing budget.

You might need to pick your battles.

Social media channels.

You might not be able to compete with them on all channels.

No cause for consideration.

Pick your best-performing channels and dominate them.

Excellent way of avoiding stress. And managing half dozen or more social media profile at once

Use paid Advertising on Social Media

Engaging with Audience. Building a solid online presence.

Social media can do it without costing a cent.

You want to make the best out of your digital marketing budget.

Spend a portion in social media advertising.

Choosing the most profitable social media channels. And using strategic native advertising. 

You can transform another social media page into a top lead generator.

Connect with influencers

Develop relationships with local and industry influencers.

Advocacy and referrals are one of the best way to spread positive word of mouth.

Click But No Conversions

Healthy number of clicks but less conversion rate.

Common business problems faced by businesses.

It’s very frustrating to spend money on ads and get many clicks, but no sales.

Let’s get straight to solutions:

Audience Issues

You are getting a significant number of clicks but a poor conversion rate.

First cause can be the audience itself.

You may be doing digital marketing in the poor performing channel targeting the wrong audience.

Users visit your website, but have no intention of making a purchase.

Your website design may not be right for the audience that is being driven to your website. They might be an audience not in position to make a purchase.

Often for B2B, decision makers will have their secretaries or workers browsing the site and report them back to them. Due to the lack of Authority, they would not convert sales despite the website's behaviors.

You may be using the wrong channel. For example your audience is mostly teenagers, Facebook and Instagram might be better social media channels. LinkedIn would not.

Ineffective Landing Page

Another cause can be your landing pages. An ineffective landing page can turn away even highly-interested potential customers.

Imagine clicking an ad for a half price swimming ticket then taken to a page that lists deals for all kinds of adventure. You have to search for half price swimming tickets inside the website.

Many customers do not bother with the second step. They will leave. You are wasting one of your clicks.

Landing page design is a huge topic for itself. A good landing page should be simple and helpful with user friendly design.

Landing page should be extremely fast. Customers have very little patience when it comes to website loading. If a landing page doesn’t load in a few short seconds, they leave.

Mixed Messaging

Effective digital marketing campaigns match landing pages to the offer, messages, style of original point of content.

Like in swimming tickets, if the landing page doesn’t match the content they clicked on then chances are they won’t convert.

Tough Ranking Competition

SEO can be very difficult. According to your location and industry you could have thousands of competitors. Fighting for Google front page. 

What’s worse?

There are hundreds of moving parts of SEO. Trying to stand out against tough competition can be overwhelming. 

Thankfully there are few proven ways to compete when it comes to page ranking.

Add Your Heading Text Don’t SEO the Same Way

Be different. Sometimes the best way to stand out from others is by being different.

Stop using short keywords. Be specific in key words. 

For example a travel agency should not use keywords like “trip”, “adventure”, “fun” but more budget related keywords for specific activities like “Affordable trip to Everest base camp” or “Thailand deals”.

These longtail keywords offer higher conversion rate and less competition for first page spots.

Don’t Rank in the Same Place

Budget or resource limitations makes ranking impossible sometimes.

Instead of trying to rank on the first page of SEO, try the first page of YouTube.

YouTube has 1 billion visitors and 6 billion hours of content watched per month.

If video marketing can show your product or service well then focus on YouTube.

You will also rank on the video part of google search.

Focus on Customer Experience

I can’t even define how important it is for your website to have excellent customer experience.

Customer Experience (All technical functions that allow smooth online experience).

As well all copy, content, style, and business practices that feed into your total website experience.

Google search Algorithm shows a relevant source for any query.

If your website prioritizes customer experience. You will rank higher.

Social Media isn’t Flourishing

Social media is said to be quick, easy and free engagement with your audience.

But in practice, it can be a difficult medium to get right. 

Your social media page is not growing or generating any leads, sales. You should think from the consumer's mind.

Solutions can be

Focus on Customer Experience

Frequency of your post. It should depend on your business and channel.

You post once a month means you will be forgotten quickly. For High Engagement. One post per day on Facebook and LinkedIn is best.

This doesn’t mean that more posts are better. Consumers don’t like being spammed by post.

More than 5 posts a week. Declines ROI on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Twitter and snapchat posting frequently can be better. But it should be useful and valuable content.

Offer Something

All social media posts should offer something of real value to viewers.

Offer can be simple statistics or funny GIFs.It should be something that is interesting to customers.

Good Engagement Reason. Every post should have a reason for engaging the shopper.

Actually Be Social

Communication is the key. You may have heard that it also applies here.

Best performing social media campaigns involve communicating with customers on that platform. 

Social Action can be responding to customer reviews, engaging in LinkedIn discussion, replying to comments and so on.

Connecting with consumers can increase in success. But interaction should be done appropriately in company style.

Connect With Happy Customers

Building good reviews and word of mouth can be challenging. Social media can help businesses with this.

Recruit satisfied customers to follow or subscribe to your business on social media. Share It.

10 Major Challenges for Digital Marketing in 2023

2020. Nothing to say about that.

Challenging and chaotic year for business owners. Businesses were shut down either temporarily or permanently.

A large number of businesses regroup and move their business online.

More competition in SEO, content marketing, and social media for both new and existing digital marketers.

Challenges for marketers to expect in 2023?

Learning About Your Customers

Targeting Audience. As the number of businesses increases, targeting specific audiences is more needed.

SEO is getting more competitive day by day. So you can’t waste your money and time on content or keywords that are too broad or poorly targeted.

Understanding your typical customers and visualizing them. Buyer persona is one of the best tools for targeting the right audience. 

Hubspot is a blessing to businesses. It has useful tools that simplify creating buyer personas.

Learn more about your customers. Polling and asking them questions on your blog and social media page will help you.

Generating Qualified Leads

Businesses develop on leads. More competition can be expected in 2023. Many service-based businesses attempt to gain more targeted leads. 

Paid ads such as Facebook ads and google ads will be more costly.

Lead generation will get more competitive. It will become necessary to give solid value to prospects before closing a sale.

Managing Cash Flow

Businesses may suffer cash flow problems. For example, if the 2022 holiday becomes profitable, customers might spend less on the upcoming month.

You must be extra careful about cash flow. Cutting unnecessary expenses can help. Online business saves you money on renting office or retail space.

You should do creative financing like invoice factoring for regular, steady customers.

Creating Engaging Content

Content is the king. Content marketing will always be crucial for digital marketers.

Customers always seek fresh content. Content that gives them information, educates them, or provides them solutions.

Short video content will be the most popular content in 2023. Like reels, stories, TikTok videos and so on which give them the most value in a short time.

Audiences love interactive content which allows people to express their opinions. 

Complying With Privacy and Data-Sharing Regulation

General data protection Regulation (GDPR) isn't going away. 

We can expect more legislation in future.

The website can attract visitors from any country.

You need to comply with laws covering a population in target audience.

You need to ensure your website is transparent about its cookies, data sharing, and privacy policies.

GDPR limits how long you can hold onto visitors' data.

So be careful while storing data.

Making Website Accessible

 Accessibility is a fast growing issue.

Your website should load fast. As visitors lose interest if it's slow.

Your website should be accessible on both desktop and phone.

Most websites are designed based on desktops only. 

But almost 80% of visitors use phones.

Strategizing Mobile First

People shop through smartphones now more than ever.

So you should make your website mobile friendly.

Test all features on multiple devices and make sure customers can easily check out and pay through mobile.

Establishing Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Customers are using multiple devices.

And Multiple platforms.

Focusing on one platform is not enough.

You should make sure your followers find you wherever they go.

This does not mean you should maintain a presence everywhere.

The Key is to link your different platforms.