Hope you are a business owner and you are working towards achieving your goals for this year. If you have given a thought about implementing digital marketing for your business you are on the right track, but meanwhile many business owners including you must be struggling a lot in deciding on how to start with the digital marketing for their business.

Before you start with the activities remember that,

Digital marketing is all about doing the same activities what a great salesperson/business development professional does, but everything happens online when it’s digital marketing, starting from the traction to busoness, traffic, lead stage to the sale and this includes,

1. Building traction for your business/website on the internet

• Making people come across about your product/service or content

2. Getting target audiences to the website

• Audiences whoever are looking for it or in need of it has to be made accessible to our business, here its website and it means we should be getting them to the website.

3.Educating them

• Sometimes users must be exploring and they might not necessarily in want of it, but when they understand about it they would show interest in purchasing it.
• G: A person is passing through a market street and he finds something interesting and shows interest in purchasing it. Here he didn’t enter the market street to purchase something but then ended up purchasing some product.

4. Serving the content/info they are looking for

• Users who are in need and most of the times it a want and in such case they prefer understanding the object serving purpose/features/Worth to product/brand value and more about it before making the decision, this is very much similar to a salesperson escorting a customer who gets into the shop addresses their all queries and conveys about the brand/product value and now customer has clear understanding and would take a call.

5. Building the trust

• The trust cannot be built by you telling about yourself and the same applies in digital marketing as well and in fact, in digital marketing, it is badly needed due to the virtual interaction with customers.

6. Guiding them to take the action

• Now the customer has acquired knowledge about the product, understood the worth of product/service, trust your brand/company and now its time for you helping them on how to make them own it. Many online businesses don’t have this flow and they most of the times try guiding them to the sale even before the first 4 stages and this is the biggest blunder that many do.

7. Lead/sale

• If the users are being comforted with all the details and ease of access and payments salespeople don’t have to separately deal with the lead and sale stages, this supposed to be closed by stage 6 (on the website itself).

But remember all these cannot happen only on your website, many times your business is considered to be as authentic/great when many others are speaking about it. Without the buzz around your business, you would not see great conversions despite you building traction to your products/services through various digital marketing implementations.

Now, the biggest question is what should one do to make all the above mentioned (1-6 points) to happen? How to make it happen online?

To make everything happen online let’s understand what does It mean to be online for a business.

Case 1: Serving the want (Pull Marketing)

You have to available on search engines when users are looking for providers of the product/service.

The current era is very advanced and if users need something they know the go to places on the internet and they get it.

For E.g: “X” person needs a pair of shoes and he would consider visiting any popular online seller such as Amazon and in case if he doesn’t know from where to get he prefers asking search engines and search engines help users by serving the websites which can fulfill the need of the user.

99.9% of the internet users when they are in need of something they use search engines like Google to find the provider who can serve their need.

How to make the website available to users when they want it?

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is all about making the website user-friendly and search engine friendly so that search engines give importance to your website and place your website on top of search results

If you are doing it by yourself considering doing the following:

• Consider publishing relevant and lots of content regularly

You should be writing lots of content about your product/service addressing your user’s concerns

• Make sure website loads quick

Keep your website load times as low as possible and that’s the key to SEO success. Make sure your website load time shouldn’t be beyond 2.5s

• The website should have a good crawl frequency and crawl rate

With smaller load times and small page sizes, there will be enough room for crawl frequency and crawl rate when the following are met,

• Regular content update to the website
• Good internal links (Links from one webpage to the other webpage)
• Page size should be as small as possible

2. Google AdWords/Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEO wouldn’t reap the benefits immediately and if you have to start serving the users from the day you can consider being part of their bidding auction and when you bid higher than any other player your ad will be shown on the top. To do this sign up for Google AdWords and you should be able to do it by yourself if you are running campaigns on a small budget with the help of Google support team.

If you want to see a better return on Investment, consider seeking the help of SEM expert.

Looking For Experts Help?

If you want to see a better return on Investment, consider seeking the help of SEM expert.

Case 2: Creating the need (Push Marketing)

You should be actively reaching out to the people whom do you think can show interest in your product/service.

Creating the need, in this case, the user is not in want of the product/service who typically must be busy doing something on the internet and this has become a huge market opportunity for business owners.

Business owners try understanding the user based on their demographics such as age, gender, their lifestyle, their location, their interests and lot more and based on the same they prefer serving the content in such a way where they make it feel that is needed for them and hence the user would show interest in it and purchase or opt for it.

E.G I have a person information regarding the age and his interest and based on the I made an assumption that he would be interested in taking up a mock test and this works out very well as per the assumptions he takes the test and my objective is fulfilled.

There are hundreds of platforms such as social media, news sites and more, where people prefer spending their time and this platform are being used to

Proactively reaching out to the audience (Push Marketing)?

Display Marketing

Display marketing is usually managed through an ad network and there are few tens of ad networks and the easiest one you can consider using is Google ad network, this can be managed through the Google AdWords tool.

Social Media Marketing

In social media marketing, you will be deciding on to whom you have to push promotions of your products so that they would interest in it. All social media platforms have their own ad managers tool and it’s all easy to start with and if you think you are not the right person to handle all of it you can seek the help of social media expert.

YouTube ad’s can be gain handled from the Google Adwords tool and if you are not comfortable we suggest to seek the help of an expert.

E-mail Marketing

You can do this only to your email contacts or you by owning a database of emails. For bulk operations, there are tools available both free and paid and in case if you want to send emails to few lakhs there are companies who can help you on this, they own the database and software.

The other supporting activities include

Online Reputation management

A user prefers understanding the credibility of business before he takes the final call of purchase/opting for it and in case if they are not convinced with the business rating/reviews they drop off from purchasing the product.

Online reputation management ensures the business profiles to have good rating and reviews.

Affiliate marketing

Building backlinks

Here are some amazing tips for you from Kandra to start implementing digital marketing for your business.

1. First, understand the top platforms which are been in use by your users
2. Where do they spend most of their time on the internet?
3. How do they research about the products/services online?

In answer to the above three questions, we understand,

1. The top platforms are the one where lots of people spend their time on.
2. Users spend most of their time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, News sites, and many more
3. They use search engines(Google), review portals (Trustpilot, mouthshut, glassdoor, Google listing and many more), and directories

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.