How Digital Marketing Can Make Your Business Excel Online

Publicizing products and services using various techniques is the main purpose of any marketing department. Although many methods are employed by marketers in Nigeria, one of the most prominent technique nowadays is digital marketing.

Although perceived by many as online marketing, digital marketing includes advertisements through other electronic devices as well. Digital marketing has been in use since a century, when the original Morse code was used to send out signals about a show. However we will only be stressing upon online marketing in this article.

It is an undeniable fact that the usage of the World Wide Web has drastically increased in the recent past. This increase has brought significant changes to the way the world function, including marketing.

Let’s look at some digital marketing techniques, and how they can help your business to excel online in Nigeria. All of these methods inevitably play a vital role in increasing brand awareness and increasing sales.

How Digital Marketing Can Make Your Business Excel Online

1. Social Media platforms

The rise of the internet has brought along the trend of social media. Websites like Facebook, Twitter etc. have millions of users registered. Such a huge number means a gold mine of prospective customers. Advertise the right product/service at the right time and you just might convince them to make a purchase. In digital marketing, this process is called Social Media Marketing (SMM).

All of these platforms offer advertisements, with Facebook’s branded ads coming out on top. These ads are great for raising brand/product awareness and achieving new leads in a timely fashion, if well managed. Combining all the social media platforms together in a strategical manner can surely help to generate business leads. Check out this article on how to generate new business leads with Social Media.

Here are some stats on why Facebook is the first choice for ads on social media platforms:

• Facebook has over 1 billion users
• With a constantly increasing user base (a study by emarketer.com has shown that by 2017 every person out of 4 will have a Facebook account).

2. Email marketing

This is one of the most employed methods for reaching both existing and prospective clients in digital marketing. Billions of people, ranging from a child to grownups have an email address. There’s no cost involved with sending standard emails, therefore making it a cost-effective technique. But it’s not all that easy to run a successful email marketing campaign if you have no expertise.

Build up your email list from the get-go, consisting of your old and loyal customers, as well as prospective customers. Furthermore, according to marketmetrics.com, existing customers are more likely to make a purchase than new ones!

Here are few tips on utilizing email marketing to its utmost potential:

• Avoid spamming. Do not send too many emails in a short time frame, as that would agitate the customer and force them to unsubscribe from the mailing list.
• Make the email short and appealing. Don’t beat around the bust too much, try to go straight to the point, include rich images, and add catchy headlines.
• Add a hyperlink to your website in each mail to ensure the customer is encouraged to visit and check out your new products and services.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Nowadays, we see a high demand for SEO experts, which is due to the increasing importance of optimizing websites for search engines.  A good SEO specialist can be vital for ranking your website high for targeted keywords.

An analysis of all the traffic sources for e-commerce stores at kissmetrics.com reveals that almost 30.5% of total traffic comes from organic searches which were made on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. This shows that search engines play a huge role in the number of visitors your website gets. Hiring an SEO expert will ensure your website follows search engine best practices, the right keywords are at the right places, and without overdoing it. This is very important, as Google and other top search engines are constantly working to ensure that searchers get relevant results to their searches.

4. Affiliate marketing

Hiring an efficient affiliate marketer can be influential towards achieving higher revenues. A lot of people have huge social followers and connections online, which can be used to promote your services and products. Employing individuals as affiliates to advertise or endorse your product may persuade many prospective customers to make a purchase, which could be a very fruitful marketing channel. Imagine this scenario, Mr A is a blogger, and his blog receives thousands of visitors each month. If you were to ask him to advertise your product, priced at ₦25,000 on his website, and whenever a customer makes a purchase after clicking on your link from his website, you then give him 5% of the sale revenue. This is a win-win situation, as you have nothing to lose! In fact, no sale means no commission to be paid to an affiliate, yet in such case, you would have achieved some publicity.

In other words, affiliates allow you to reach a large audience that you might not have been able to reach, and without spending so much money.

5. PPC Advertising

A Pay Per Click campaign is one of the quickest ways to increase traffic. It is also known as a paid search advertising, with the most common platform being Google Adwords.

PPC advertising works on a per click basis, whereby you only pay a certain amount for each click made on an ad campaign. As per a study conducted by statista.com, a Google Adwords campaign can give returns on investment (ROI) of up to 372%. You really need to be very good at this in order to reap the returns of a PPC campaign.

Here are few tips on running an effective Google Adwords campaign:

• Have a clear objective and a measurable goal, so you can easily establish if your campaign is yielding the desired results or not. In other words, aim for a campaign that increases your sales rather than brand awareness, as brand awareness could be very hard to measure.
• Keep your target audience in mind. Preferably, implement the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, and action) principle i.e. make your ad unique and catchy, thus getting the attention of consumers. Then convince your customer through the text, that buying from you would effectively satisfy their need or want.
• Make use of conversion tracker i.e. be sure to see how many customers actually make a purchase after clicking on your ad, so you can easily tell if the campaign is fulfilling its purpose or not.

Adopting any of these digital marketing techniques can make a difference between a struggling business and an excelling business. Truth be told, there are a lot of people online who are waiting for the right product or services to be brought to their doorstep. This can only happen when you learn the tricks on how to market your brand to mobile and online users effectively. Without the right digital marketing strategy being put in place, a business will struggle to excel.

It’s always good to seek an expert opinion when it comes to planning a digital marketing strategy as you can’t go wrong. These digital marketing strategists save you a lot of trial and error, and from wasting time, money and resources, as they could easily tell what digital channels to employ and what digital channel mix, in order to achieve the desired result. This approach is highly profitable in the long run.