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Dalton Ndou
DIGITAL marketing, online marketing and Internet marketing are one and the same. Digital marketing is an internet marketing strategy that involves the use of search engine optimisation, content creation, mobile marketing and social media management.
Digital marketing strategies may vary based on the business model, the targeted market and the preferred online channels of communication.
My goal is to demystify and hopefully, simplify digital marketing for you.I’ll be sharing some valuable digital marketing tips for the Zimbabwean business community through a series of articles and I invite you to engage.
Imagine the following scenario: your business has put up a billboard or placed an advert in the paper or distributed fliers all over the city. All of these are scatter-shot methods of marketing because their targeting is not precise and their success can not be measured.
The best you can hope for is that potential customers will take a second from reading your competitor’s newsletter in their email via their mobile devices or pray that they will glance up to see the expensive billboard that gobbled up most of your company’s marketing budget.
You realise that your scatter-shot marketing technique is ill-suited to grab the attention of your targeted audience.
Perhaps you have placed the fate of your business or venture in the hands individuals distributing fliers but you have no way of establishing whether your fliers will be read or how potential customers will respond to the intrusion of having a distribution agent in their face. You also have don’t know whether or not your fliers will end up in a bin.
All the above are proven methods of marketing, however limited by continual replacement by digital methods and inability to accurately measure ROI. Even with their inefficiencies these methods are far from obsolete, particularly when used in unison with Digital Marketing methods.
The 21st century brought the advent of people’s time-spend shifting more to online, so any company that wishes to grow its market presence and sales will do well to go where the people are – online.
Here are a few misconceptions about Digital Marketing.
Digital marketing isn’t effective
There are many business owners that think digital marketing isn’t necessary. They couldn’t be more wrong. Digital marketing is now the norm.
Most consumers spend more time online during and after working hours, Digital Marketing presents all-day access to existing and potential clients.
A good online presence will familiarise your business to consumers, which creates a relationship that leads to loyalty to your brand.
My business can’t afford digital marketing
This is one of the most common misconceptions I have come across. For the most part, digital marketing is a skill that the relevant staff (marketers) can be trained in and practice in-house for no extra dime, except, the amount spent on training. So the cost of training as a once-off expense will be the main expense a business is likely to incur.
Anyone can do a digital marketer’s job
Please don’t just hire someone who doesn’t have the relevant training to do your digital marketing. A web designer or developer is not a digital marketer. Your website will get penalized or blacklisted by Google if they use Black-hat (unscrupulous) methods of digital marketing.
Seeing the fruits of a digital marketer’s work takes time, mainly because Search Engine Optimization is a marathon and not a sprint. Hence it is better to enrolyour staff for a digital marketing course and have your digital marketing done in-house. This is better than waiting 4 to 6 months to then ascertain whether the outsourced digital marketer knows what they are doing or not.
Blogs aren’t important
Constant activity and content on your website is very important. Putting helpful articles on your site increases your credibility to search engines and consumers. You don’t even have to call it a blog; you can label the section as tips or news depending on the tone of your website.
Digital marketing = Social media
Digital marketing is more than updating a Facebook page and interacting on Twitter. Social media is only a piece of the puzzle, which when used in unison with content creation, SEO and mobile marketing becomes Digital Marketing.
It is also important to note that it is not entirely true that anyone who has a Facebook page can manage a company’s social media, this is because a Digital Marketer understands that people socialise online in the same way they do in their real lives.
Hence to achieve any success in any campaign one has to know their target and how to reach it as opposed to just posting or sharing on their timeline.
I will instantly rank first on Google once I start SEO
If someone is promising you this – run! The goal of digital marketing is NEVER to rank first on Google. Depending on your industry you may never rank first.
It is however good to be on the first page of research results for your key words. But what matters is an increase in traffic to your site, sales, and interaction with users.
Many companies are hesitant because of one or two of the above misconceptions, but in reality digital marketing really is mostly an improvement on traditional marketing.
With the growth and adoption of the internet, many traditional marketing tactics have been supplemented or even replaced by digital platforms and tactics. Some of the most obvious ones are;
·Physical office or store is now supplemented with a website
·Direct postal mail has mostly been replaced by email newsletters
·Traditional advertising is supplemented with online advertising
·Instead of doing surveys, polls and surveys, marketers can now use their website analytics data
·Traditional PR is supplemented by web PR
·Traditional word of mouth is now supplemented by viral marketing using mostly YouTube, Facebook and Twitter
All these points show that digital marketing really is ‘efficient traditional marketing’. Hence any and every company looking to do better and grow will be wise to be efficient in their marketing and supplement their marketing efforts using digital marketing.
Dalton Ndou is a qualified Digital Marketing expert and trainer affiliated with NUST’s Centre for Continuing Education (CCE). Feedback or questions are welcome via whatsapp on 0778640871.
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