Digital Marketing Mastery

Digital marketing is important to any business organization regardless of its size. It presents endless opportunities for business to increase its revenues.

Furthermore, it’s an avenue for domestic businesses to participate on an international stage, have a strong brand identity, build online presence and customer relationship management (CRM).

In fact, digital marketing has become imperative to businesses because of its conveniences, cost effectiveness, wider audience, real time data insights, real time customer engagement and so on.

However, without the right marketing strategies, organization may miss out these opportunities for competitors.

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As more people are surfing the internet, looking for effective way of accessing information and products online, organization should invest in digital marketing strategies to leverage the internet.

Also digital marketing enables freelancers such as copywriters, affiliate marketers, social media mangers, SEO experts and so on to monetize their skills.

Post Content

1. Introduction to digital marketing
2. Five ways businesses can have online presence
3. Objectives of digital marketing
4. Forms of digital marketing marketing
5. Career opportunities in digital marketing
   

Introduction to digital marketing

Digital marketing is the marketing activities which involve promotion of a business brand, product or service using web technologies.

Web technology is also known as digital marketing tools which include: website, mobile apps, social media , sms, mails, SEM, SEO, content marketing, Copywriting and so on.

In order to increase company’s online presence and make more revenues, organization has to use those tools effectively.

ALSO READ; startup guide to run a successful advertising agency in Nigeria

These tools enable businesses to generate leads, drive traffic, analyze the performance of the business, communicate and engage with customers, maintain customer relationship.

In addition, business can gather and analyze customer information in a real time base on their behaviors, usage, interest, demographics.

However, The use of digital marketing tools depends on the organization marketing objectives.

Five Ways businesses can build online presence

For a business to leverage digital marketing strategies, it need a strong online presence.

it’s the responsibility of digital marketing specialist employed by the Company to bring this into reality.

Chaffey and Ellis Chadwick (2015) Identity five main types of online presence. However, these online presence serve different purpose depending on the company’s marketing objectives.

1. Transactional ecommerce site

Online manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, travel and financial service providers make their products available for online purchase.

Also their products, information and description are listed on ecommerce sites like jumia, spotify for customers to access.

2. Service oriented relationship building or lead generation web site.

Businesses stimulate demand for their products by providing sufficient information about their products and company through website, emails and so on.
They collect their customers’ information in order to serve them well.

3. Brand building site

The essence of this is to increase brand quality by providing customer support via live chat, opening of tickets as well as content marketing integration with social media outpost.

4. Portal or media site

The main purpose of this type of intermediaries is to provide information and content through blog posts, SEM, SEO, directories, news, sponsored post and so on.

These third party publishers generate revenue for the company through affiliate marketing, per per click, per per view, advertising, display ads etc.

5. Social network or community site

This site enables community interaction among consumers and a business to customers. Like messages, tagging, posting, commenting and replying to comments on social media like Facebook, Instagram, linkdn.

Objectives of digital marketing for businesses

1. lead generation

It helps businesses to collect potential customers information through email subscription in order to maintain regular contact with them as well persuading to make purchase.

2. Website traffic

It enables website to gain organic and inorganic traffic through SEO, SEM, paid advertising, social media and email promotion.

3. brand identity and awareness

Brand are easily recognizable, reach wider audience and building trust.

4. managing customer relationship and retention ship

By engaging with customers regularly, providing useful information and customer support help to build their loyalty

5. optimization

It enables real time data tracking, data insights, performance metrics for further improvement and inform decision making.

6. increase company’s sales and revenues

It enables businesses to generate more sales and revenues through promotion, adverts, lead conversion, optimization and strong online presence.

Forms of digital marketing

They are many forms of digital marketing for businesses and individuals to utilize.

however, the form of digital marketing chosen should align with company’s marketing objectives.

As an individual who intend to become knowledgeable about digital marketing, it’s important you conduct research beyond this blogpost in order to become more knowledgeable.

Nevertheless, this post highlights eleven (11) forms of digital marketing

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is a marketing tool that enables website and or blog post to rank higher on search engine result page (SERP).

When you search internet, the top non sponsored blog posts or website that appeared between the first few pages of SERP is a good example of SEO marketing.

The goal is for your business to be found on the internet, if you use SEO tool appropriately, when prospects search for a specific query relating to your business, then your business or website appears at the top or near the top after sponsored posts on SERP.

However, SEO contains key elements that help your brand to rank higher on the internet. Some of those elements include ; key phrase, SEO title, slug, meta description, links, readability, tags

2. Social media marketing

This involves using social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, x, TikTok, linkln etc to communicate you brand to and engage with your target audience.

Social media is a marketing platform that enables businesses and influences to have real-time engagement with your target audience as well as getting feedback through direct messages, comments, sharing, likes, tags and so on.

The choice of social media should depend on your marketing objectives. For instance, if your business is about to business to consume model, Facebook, Instagram ideal because majority of the users are consumers but if your business is about business to business, linkdn is ideal because it contains professional and potential job seekers and employers.

You can build your brand identity on social media and also perform many marketing activities like driving traffic to your website or landing page, creating sales funnel, generate leads, creating campaigns, running ads, creating events and so on.

To build a strong brand identity and influence on social media require time and high level of professionalism. You need to create business page, upload cover and profile photos, link up your mobile number, website, email, business address, category and business description.

Furthermore, you have to create quality content, post regularly, create reels, engage with your audience, run consistent ads, join groups relating to your business and relate with your industry players.

3. Email marketing

Email marketing is a digital marketing platform that enables businesses to update, inform and transact business with their subscribers. It’s a good tool for lead generation and conversion

This is how email marketing works;

• When prospects signed up or subscribed to your email list
• You can be sending automated newsletters, motivational or call to action contents to your subscribers in order for them to start transacting business with you.
• When they transact business with you, you can send them receipt and offer support via emails.
• Those products or services that need repeating purchase, you can keep sending your customers email for reminder
• You can also send them mail to alert your customers about available discount, coupons, promotions and other benefits. They are many more you can do with email.

For you to utilize effective email marketing, you have to integrate with other third party digital marketing automation like convertful and mail chimp.

This automation will enable you to collect leads, gain subscribers, create subscribers segment list, schedule and send mail across different subscribers list.

In order for your email to convert, you have to create appealing landing page or website.

Create detailed and convincing content that will push your prospect to taking action. You can hire copywriters to handle your content creation

4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is a sponsored ad that displays at the top of SERP. Sponsored posts usually appear on SERP above posts with good SEO scored.

The difference between SEM and SEO;

• SEM is been paid for to appear at the top while SEO is not pay for but requires techniques for your posts to rank higher.
• SEM drive inorganic traffic while SEO drives organic traffic.
• SEM last for the particular duration been paid for while SEO last as far as your competitors are unable to beat you.
• Also, SEM or sponsor post requires quality content and high SEO score to rank higher above competitors

5. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing model where an individual or business promote another business product for a commission basis.

If you become an affiliate marketer, you get paid anytime you are able to led someone into making a purchase or join a platform through your affiliate link.

If you are the business, you pay an affiliate anytime he or she creates sales for your products.

For the business that want affiliate marketers to spray your business, design a friendly website that enables third party promotions or join platform like impact.com.

For affiliate marketers that tend to become successful in affiliate marketing, join platforms that cater for the needs of your target audience. You can also join impact. Com in order to promote multiple products.

6. Influential marketing

Influential marketing has to do with business partnering with influencers such as celebrity, content creators, experts and so on with large number of followers.

If you are individuals who would like to get endorsement deal with reputable organizations, you need to spend time on building your followers across your social media platforms.

But if you are a business, looking for how to reach new audience or market, partnering with influencers is a very good strategy to achieve it.

Companies like to partner with loyal and reputable influencers in order to protect thier brand.

7. Content marketing and Copywriting

This has to do with creating quality and engaging content in order to attract and persuade your target audience in taking positive action.

Content could be inform of video, infographic, audio or text. They are distributed across the company’s marketing platforms for instance, social media, blogpost, ebooks, emails newsletters, sms and so on.

Without quality content, a company’s online presence could jeopardize which will in turn decrease business revenues

To write a converting mail, engaging social media posts, optimize blogpost, converting adverts solely lies in the hand of copywriters.

Copywriters are professional writers that write adverts and publicity copies for companies. These ad copies are distributed across the business social media, email, blog post etc in order to promote and sell the company’s products.

While Copywriting is an act of creating engaging advertising and publicity text for an organization hence, assist in achieving their sales objective.

It’s an integral aspect of a company’s content marketing strategy where convincing, persuasive, informative, thoughtful, call-to-action writeups are executed to increase company’s revenues.

ALSO READ; Copywriting and monetization tricks.

8. Paid advertising.

Paid advertising refers to publishing targeted advertising campaigns on platform like Google ads, monetag, to reach specific and wider audience.

A good example of paid advertising is display ads like popup ads, banner ads, push notification ads, embedded ads etc.

Anytime you are browsing the internet, those adverts that display across your mobile interface is known as paid advertising. They come in video, text, infographic format.

Another good example of paid advertising is sponsored ads like SEM that appear between the top of SERP or social media advertising.

As a business running those kind of adverts, there is what they call pay per click (PPC). This means that, you get charged anytime someone click your advert. While bloggers get paid anytime someone click the advert through their blog platform.

9. Blogging

You might wonder why popular businesses like mailchimp, wix, shopify, bluehost etc are into blogging.

Well, blogging is a great digital marketing strategy that enables your business to get noticed easily on the internet.

However, Nigerian businesses are yet to harness this opportunity except some few businesses like selar, iprint etc.

Firstly, if you keep publishing quality content, it helps your business to rank high on SERP. Secondly, it shows high level of professionism, expertise and industry know – how.

Blogging simply means publishing of informative articles on the internet. It’s a good digital marketing tool through which businesses pass information about their products, services, industry and so on.

Those published articles give the business high sense of expertise in their respective industry as well as building long-term trust.

ALSO READ; How to become a successful blogger in Nigeria

10. Website design or development

Website design or development is one of the pertinent factors in digital marketing. Both search engine optimization, search engine marketing all revolve around a website.

All other forms of digital marketing work better when your business has a website. You can link up the site with platform link social media, Google business profile, email and so on. Then your business will perform excellently if you can make good use of the tools

11. Google ad

Google ad is a Google advertising platform. Anytime a business advertise with Google, Google display the advert across Google ecosystem depending on the target audience.

Furthermore, Google ecosystem or ad networks refer to all the Google product lines such as Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Google map, Google apps etc.

Types of Google ads

There are several types of Google ad, this include;

• Good search campaigns; these are sponsored posts that app at the top of SERP

• Google shopping campaigns; these are campaigns that exist inside Google shopping ecosystem. It is usually relates to e-commerce sites and online stores. When the site places PPC advertising, and a user searches for a particular product on Google search, the advertised product display at the top of SERP.

• Google display campaigns; these are displayed adverts that appear when surfing the internet whether YouTube, websites, apps. They appear inform of push notifications, in page ads, Pop up ads, and so on.

• Google discover campaigns; These are ads that display across Google ad networks or ecosystem.

12. Google business registration

This is another digital marketing opportunity you should consider for your business. Google business registration is a free digital marketing tool.

Free here means, you don’t pay for it, you don’t spend time to optimize it or manage it, once your business is registered on Google, Google will show your business on search engine results page as well as directing customers to your business location.

Also all the information such as phone number, business description, business category, product listing, photos and others relating to your business will display publicly for customers.

Then, you can be updating it, check customer reviews and view business performance through your business profile.

However, you can also adverts your business via your profile but you must pay for the advert.

Also read; understanding e-commerce business in Nigeria .

Benefits of Google business registration

• your business will display on Google maps and local search result page making it easier for customers to find you.

• it help your business to rank higher on SERP page once they search keyword relating to your business.

• your business name, services, location, phone number, whatsapp are display for customer to see.

• it helps you to manage and review customer, building trust, and you can serve them better

• a complete and well structure business profile give great impression for customers.

• you gain valuable insights on how customers are interacting with your listing, monitor performance.
• It’s completely free

Career opportunities in digital marketing

Digital marketing is a professional skill that can give you a great fortune. It allows one to work at his or her conveniences as well as ability to serve international clients.

These are key careers in digital marketing you should consider for yourself.

1. Digital marketing manager

Digital marketing manager oversees all strategies and activities relating to digital marketing across a company’s digital platforms.

He or she coordinates subordinates like copywriters, SEO specialist, social media manger and so on.

2. SEO specialist

He or she is responsible for website optimization in order for a company’s website to gain top ranking at SERP.

He or she focus on website visibility as well as traffic maximization.

3. Content marketer and copywriters

They are responsible for drafting appealing and engaging contents as well distributing them across company’s blogpost, email, social media pages and so on.

4. Email specialist

He or she is responsible for lead generation and conversion. They maintain cordial relationship and regular contact with potential and actual customers.

5. Social media manager

Social media manger is responsible for scheduling posts, replies to customer comments and messages, boost followers, enhance engagement across company’s social media pages.

6. PPC specialist

PPC specialist creates and Manages social media and Google ads

7. Digital marketing analyst

Analyzing company’s online performance through Google or meta analytics as well as suggesting areas for improvement.

Also read; best web hosting companies in Nigeria .

Tips to become a successful digital marketer

To become a successful digital marketer, you must have to establish yourself before top clients will come looking for you.

* Get trained

Digital marketing is broad, you can choose any area of your interest and learn all the necessary skills relating to it. However, it is possible to learn all forms of digital marketing and still become expert.

* Run internship program

As a beginner, it’s very difficult to attract top clients, no company want to hire a liability. Before giving you a contract, they want to ensure that you are a professional so working for any domestic organization or friends will equip you with sufficient experience to win contracts

* Build portfolio

The first thing potential employers look out for before considering you for a job is your previous works. Build strong portfolio where you can display or direct them to your works. Linkln is a nice place to build a portfolio.

* Networking

Connect and build relationship with your industrial players. Write proposal to companies give detail explanation on how you can help them generate revenue online.

* Choose an industry

Choose one or few industries you have good knowledge of, this will enable you to write persuasive content. Besides you might not going to work for only one company so learning about multiple industries will be hectic.

Learning about one or few industries will give you sense of professionalism as you are going to perform tasks that are related repeatedly .

* Market yourself.

You are learning how to promote other’s people business so learn how to promote yourself won’t be a big deal.

Set up professional social media business pages, website, blogs, emails and others, use them to learn about the business as well as promoting yourself or your digital marketing business.

* Stay updated with the latest trends in digital marketing

Technology keeps changing over time, stay alert and know what is happening in digital marketing environment, this will enable you to remain on top.

Final words

There are vast opportunities for businesses to harness on the internet. Irrespective of how small or big your business is never be left out from online business presence.

The painful aspect of it is, if you are not interested in going digital maybe because of lack of sufficient knowledge, your competitors could definitely kick you out of business because they are there online.

your actual and potential customers are there online too so what is stopping you from investing in digital marketing.

Employ competent hands that would drive your business to paradise.

For those who are looking for a career in digital marketing, you made the right decision. This is one of the most sought after skills in this century.

Nevertheless, you must have to equip yourself with necessary skills and experience in order to standout. Business professional business profiles and portfolios is key to win contract.

That’s what your potential employers look out for before considering you for a job position in any digital marketing skill set. Use platforms link linkln, Facebook, Instagram, website to build your brand.