Digital marketing is a necessity, not a choice, for businesses to create and maintain their digital presence.
In this article, digital marketing strategies are discussed in detail.
I will talk about many marketing strategies such as digital channels, advertising models, budget planning and customer lifetime value calculation, from basic steps such as determining business goals and creating a persona that you need to do before starting digital marketing.
As business owners who want to move their business to digital or improve their existing activities, and as a digital marketing specialist who is interested in digital marketing or at the beginning of his career, I think you will have an idea on many issues at the end of this article.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, just like in traditional marketing, is to carry out the activities of “delivering brands and products to potential customers and providing reasons for preference” through digital channels and tools.
In short, we can summarize marketing activities as the work of maintaining the digital assets we have. But this does not mean that we will only talk about ourselves, our products and services.
All marketing activities start from creating awareness about the product and brand in potential customers and ensure that they come to the sales stage. At this stage, it pushes the ideal customer profile to different actions and actions and prepares them to buy.
The main goal of common types of digital marketing such as social media, website, online ads and email marketing is to enable businesses to reach potential buyers and activate their existing customers in line with various goals.
To do digital marketing , you need many digital marketing assets . But having a digital presence (for example, having an Instagram account) doesn't mean you're marketing.
This is possible when many different entities and departments work in harmony with each other for the same purpose.
For example; The website you are reading this article and the Google Analytics that collects the visitor data in the background will remain as digital assets, even if I do not write any other articles… But unless I write anything other than this blog post or serve this article through various channels, that is, unless I provide continuity, they will not make any sense.
Digital Marketing Assets
Digital channels, tools, media types and channels… These are all digital marketing assets.
So, in a world where products are copied so easily and competition is more brutal than ever, how and with what strategies can you prevent this?
If all your competitors are active in the same channels as you, advertising with similar budgets, what asset can differentiate you and make you permanent?
Your brand . The most valuable asset of a business is the brand. If we briefly define the brand I am talking about here; It is the first feelings and impressions that people feel when they hear it. This is possible by creating and sharing value for people as well as products and services.
A brand is the only non-copyable asset that belongs to your business. Your competitors may make similar language, similar products and developments, but your brand will always belong to you.
Apart from that, in addition to known business assets, even a small startup has many digital assets; For example, we can list the following:
- Web site
- Brand assets (logo, colors, slogan)
- Social media accounts
- Map and business registration (like Google & Yandex)
- Visual media such as videos, photographs : Company, product or service photos, demos, advertising content, etc.)
- Text/visual content (blog posts, PDFs, infographics, etc.)
- Online platform and products (utilities, chatbots or Google Analytics)
- Comments & ratings
I'm sure there are many platforms or channels that can be added or removed from this list, specific to your market and service area.
What distinguishes the smart marketer or business owner from the others is about using these assets, which are found in everyone and everywhere, differently from everyone else and making this difference feel (brand 😉).
Designing and delivering new opportunities, different approaches, value and experience will always take you one step further. Being adaptive and agile in digital marketing is more essential than traditional marketing.
Before the date of May 2021, when I wrote this article, while most of us did not have an application called Clubhouse in our lives, it became a medium where even many YouTubers produced content, and it was being discussed whether it would be the social media channel of the future. Now it has faded.
Update: Looking back on March 1, 2023, Clubhose did not make a big impact as expected Clubhouse because its competitors have launched similar products. While we were talking about Clubhouse, TikTok started to challenge Google and Facebook. 🤷🏻♂️
So, is TikTok a useful channel for your business, should you be there? The short answer is ; You have to be wherever your customers are. And in order to answer this question correctly, you need to prepare your marketing strategy .
B2B and B2C Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing is an important and right choice for any business. The digital world has made it easier for us to access not only information but also products and services. This way, you no longer have to go to locations to earn money from John's grocery shopping in London, download your app to JunYan in Hong Kong, or sell your handmade products in a marketplace.
If you know who you are targeting , you can reach whoever you want, wherever you want.
I would like to remind you that not every medium can give the same results for every business. While some businesses fit right into some channels and become a part of it organically, they can be very synthetic in some channels. Even if you are not in every place where potential buyers are. Even if you know who you want to reach, sometimes the dynamics of the platform itself can put you out of the game.
What do you think; Is it more effective to be present in too many channels/media, albeit sporadically, or to be present effectively in a limited number of channels? You can share your thoughts as a comment, we can discuss this issue.
Now let's look at the meaning and detail of B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing strategies.
B2C Marketing
The main goal of B2C businesses is to show, remind and activate their products to us, the end users.
It includes all processes in the awareness raising category, which is at the top of the marketing funnel (about the product and the brand).
B2C marketing generally focuses on creating emotional bonds with consumers through advertising, promotion and branding. It includes creating compelling visual content, leveraging social media platforms, and developing engaging messages that directly address the desires, aspirations and problems of the target audience.
B2B Marketing
B2B (Business to Business) marketing is the strategies and marketing activities that businesses use to sell their products or services to other businesses.
B2B marketing requires targeting the right decision makers and understanding the needs and challenges (problems) of the business where purchasing occurs at the business level.
In B2B, the purchasing journey of users can be much longer and more complex than in B2C.
Digital Marketing Strategies
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Social Media Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising
The list of tools and platforms in the inventory of digital marketing strategies is constantly growing and growing. While the rules and methods of accounting or tailoring 10 years ago are still valid, it is not possible to advance in digital marketing with your knowledge of 2-3 years ago. In some cases, the information you knew was correct until yesterday may have been sacrificed to the search engine algorithm Gods in an update.
As a smart marketer or business owner, you need to follow the industry and stay up-to-date for the right digital marketing strategy and methods.
For more details on this topic, you can read my article on digital marketing strategies .
Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads
Pay per Click advertising is an online advertising term named after the payment method, meaning that we will be charged for a user's click on the ad.
For example, the “paid search ad” model for the search engine in Google Adwords, which we will explain below, is a type of pay-per-click advertising . On Facebook and Instagram, there is a pay-per-click advertising model that works with the same pricing logic and is frequently used in our country. We'll come to that shortly.
You may hear this term more as Pay-Per-Click or PPC (pi-pi-si) for short, as it is a frequently used expression in digital marketing jargon. Otherwise, no one is talking about anyone's penis.
Search Engine Ads
They are advertisements displayed in text format on the search results page (SERP) of search engines such as Google, Yandex, Yahoo, Bing. Search engine ads are one of the most efficient types of online ads used to target potential customers who are actively searching for your products and services.
You can access your word-specific costs by clicking “ Keywords ” from the left menu.
First you create a campaign and it can contain multiple ad groups . Here, you create ad groups according to different targeting types (such as placement, age group), product type or ad type (such as retargeting, display, search). You can also prepare different ads under each group.
Facebook and Instagram Ads
Compared to many other channels, they are the channels where you can target better since their users are logged in (login) and there are many behavioral, demographic and even psychographic data held by Facebook themselves.
If you have placed the Facebook Pixel code on your website, you can see your visitors again on Facebook and Instagram with retargeting ads after they leave your site.
Or, you can reach people who have taken a certain action (purchasing, creating a membership, leaving a product in the basket, etc.) or people similar to them, with the ability to create a similar target audience, and you can get maximum efficiency from your digital marketing ads.
On the other hand, if you are a lead generation business structure that collects forms/applications/requests, Facebook's own lead form ads allow you to do this more easily and cheaply.
You can access the information about how much you pay for each click with the advertising campaign you made in the Ad Manager (Business Manager), which is Facebook's online advertising tool, from the "Price Per Result" column within the campaign. What type of result (click, impression, or form, etc.) is associated with your campaign goal. In my article about Facebook and Instagram campaigns, I discussed this issue in more detail.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The importance and benefits of CPC ads are obvious, but what about SEO? Let me explain this with a well-known joke among SEO experts:
If you do not want to spend money to appear on the search engine results pages, you can make your website or blog organically listed on the first page and in the top ranks with some adjustments in the search engine optimization framework.
In this model, you don't pay for each click, but getting on the first page or in the top positions organically is a laborious and lengthy process compared to the Pay-Per-Click model.
There are many elements to rank high with SEO; These are basically divided into three main topics as Technical SEO , On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO .
All of these optimizations are for your website or related page to be accessible and understandable by both humans and Google's robots (also known as spiders).
I recommend that you read the article where I covered the basic HTM tags (heading tag, title tag and meta tag) to be successful in SEO .
For example, my goal in this and other blog posts is to reach organically relevant people like you. If you have reached this part of the article, we can deduce that it is "understandable" and "meaningful" for you and users like you. If you reached this article as a result of a search engine query, we can say that the article meets the technical requirements and Google bots agree with you. (Hello to those coming from social media👋🏼)
So how is this possible? It is possible with the subject, that is, the content, which we will cover in our next title .
Content Marketing
Although content marketing is a type of online marketing , it is a digital marketing term that includes many different types of communication. This marketing method enables potential buyers from the stage of accessing new buyers to our conversion funnel by using all types of content (blog, video, e-book, etc.) and channels (website, Youtube, social media channels, etc.) in all processes from brand awareness to sales. are strategic digital marketing activities that take them to the next steps and ultimately to the sales stage .
I would like to underline the word strategic because digital marketing efforts that do not serve a purpose, just for the people to see in the bazaar, and worst of all, by copying, will not make sense because they will not receive a response from the customers.
All digital marketing activities that serve your final strategy turn into an output at the end of the day, if we call this output "content", we see that content marketing is actually a very comprehensive and important type of online marketing.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization is the art and science of improving the online user experience . These optimizations; The landing page design includes various elements for testing different content types and variations, and increasing the user experience on the page.
Although conversion optimization is partially covered by on-page SEO, if we consider that this page is the last level of all our marketing activities, the page where the sales transaction takes place, a minor mistake here will waste our effort in all other stages.
While conversion rate optimization can be applied at different stages in the marketing funnel, businesses often hire CRO for the landing page where the conversion occurred to increase their current conversion rate.
This rate may vary for each sector and product.
Social Media Marketing
Just like SEO, social media marketing is a free and organic reach digital marketing method offered to market your products and services. You can use the advertising models of these platforms for fast results in a short time, but it will take a long time to get organic results, but the cost is much lower.
I won't go into too much detail on this subject as it needs to be dealt with in depth. This is the subject of a blog post on its own.
Email Marketing
Since email marketing is the oldest type of online marketing, it is still standing and strongly enabling businesses to reach their customers despite the frequent "dead" news about it.
Many digital marketers use e-mail marketing to feature special offers, promotions, announcements, content, educate the customer on the basis of discourse and product.
With the developing technology, email marketing has also taken a different dimension. Email marketing is now an indispensable part of the digital customer journey and perhaps e-commerce companies benefit the most from this aspect.
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