Supposing that you have started your own online business and become a digital entrepreneur, or have just given your brick-and-mortar shop an online façade, the next logical thing that you need to do is make sure that it starts making money.
It has to consistently pump out profits to break even and, eventually, bring in substantial profits that allow for expansion and a comfortable living free of financial worries.
Running a business in the online world is a completely different beast from working on your business in the street, however. You will need different tactics albeit following the same old principle of selling — make your target audience buy what you have to offer.
Sure enough, following through this principle is not as easy as it sounds.
This will mean navigating through the intricacies of making money on the Internet, as well as employing a good digital marketing strategy to get to your audience.
Digital marketing, as we all know, is basically marketing that uses the Internet and various digital technologies that are hooked to it.
This is an essential skill to learn if you are planning to become a digital entrepreneur, and there are three best digital marketing techniques that you should be well-acquainted with.
Social Media Marketing
These social networking sites came and went, but what remained with us to this day boast massive followings.
There are currently more or less 3 billion social media users worldwide; a number which, without a doubt, is an opportunity that no digital marketer should miss.
Social media marketing is, plain and simple, sharing content to social media in an effort to elicit a response from the audience that your business is looking to target.
It is a very effective way to gauge the popular opinion on your business and gain considerable exposure by indirectly utilizing the personal networks of your followers.
In other words, it is a way to connect with your audience in a way that is not possible with merely letting your business sit on a well-performing website.
On the technical side of things, social media marketing gets you some very important metrics that essentially lets you understand your audience.
Engagement statistics like reactions, shares, and comments tell you how your content fared with your audience, while awareness metrics like reach and impressions let you know just how well your content performed on its own.
The key to a successful social media marketing campaign is knowing what content to post and how to engage your audience with it.
This will involve learning more about your followers and your market as a whole through thorough research and data analytics.
Investing in social media advertising is also something that you should consider, especially since social media ads are efficiently delivered to the specific audience that you are looking to target.
Email Marketing
It is, in fact, still a primary medium of professional communication online and has never ceased to exist as a platform that many businesses and organizations use to send promotions directly to specific individuals.
Email marketing is pretty much as old as the email itself. It is, by its most basic definition, sending messages of a commercial or promotional nature via email.
It is one the most effective ways to promote anything on the Internet, owing to the fact that you are sending your promotion directly to a prospect that will likely be interested in what your business or organization offers.
The idea is to convert the recipient into what is essentially a buyer, and that would require two things: a well-written email and a high-quality list of prospects.
Writing an email that sells something can be quite tricky, and you will need to be as efficient as possible.
On average, office workers get a whopping 80 emails daily, and you will need a good subject line if you are to get your recipient’s attention; eye-catching phrases, a clear call-to-action, or a quick summary of your email should work in this regard.
The message, meanwhile, should be brief and straight-to-the-point, all while maintaining professionalism, sound grammar, and spelling, and a tone that convinces your prospect to buy into what you are selling.
Building a list, on the other hand, is what will suck in most of the effort that goes to an email marketing campaign.
While it might sound easier to just collect the names and email addresses of your prospects, a better list is always one composed of people who have willfully signed up to receive your promotions via email.
There are two primary ways to convince people to opt-in to your list. The first is an opt-in form strategically placed on your webpage and designed to grab your visitor’s attention.
The second is a lead magnet which is basically valuable content that you use to entice your reader into signing up to your list. These methods give you no less than a high-quality list and are more preferable than simply harvesting the Internet of email addresses or buying a paid list.
Search Engine Optimization
People use search engines to find what they are looking for online, and it is a fact that sites that show up on top of the search results get the most clicks.
Hence, it is important that you make sure that your business is immediately visible when search engine users look up what it offers.
This generates traffic and improves your brand’s exposure at the same time, and search engine optimization or SEO is your best friend in this regard.
SEO is basically optimizing your site in such a way that its visibility to a search engine is increased.
It is a great source of high-quality organic traffic — that is, visitors who found your business after actively searching for it online.
Naturally, these visitors are the ones who are most interested in what you have on offer and are the likeliest ones to make a purchase or avail of your services.
How does SEO work, you ask? Basically, you will be working with a search engine’s algorithm to get your site ranked high up in the search engine results page (SERP) of your targeted keywords.
Understanding SEO would mean knowing how the search engine works. Search engines like Google send out crawlers that gather all the information that they can find online.
These crawlers compile such information into indexes, which are then processed by the search engine’s algorithm such that the matching information is fetched to whoever searched for it.
Moving on, you have two options to optimize your site, these being black hat SEO and white hat SEO.
Black hat SEO is basically optimizing your site for the search engines without regard to human visitors, breaking and bending the search engine’s rules as you go.
This is not recommended as this results in spammy pages that will easily turn off human visitors and search engines tend to come up with updates that penalize exploits, making black hat tactics hurtful to your SEO in the long run.
White hat SEO, on the other hand, centres on well-written content containing relevant contextual links, capped with a unique and relevant title, illustrated with well-labelled images and comes with HTML code that complies with the search engine’s standards.
Any of these three fundamental digital marketing methods, when done right, can certainly give any business a boost in terms of sales and profit.
It is worth noting, though, that an effective digital marketing strategy should not solely rely on one technique but a combination thereof that fits the nature and the needs of the business and its offers being promoted.