Digital Marketing for Business after a Pandemic

Just three months before the pandemic, my neighbor opened a bakery. Guess what? The bakery shuts down completely because of the lockdown. He becomes disappointed and looks very disturbed. 

After a few days, when the bakery re-opens, the business was not easy like earlier and again underwent loss.

What happened next is very interesting. He started preparing homemade cakes and posting them on Instagram and Facebook profiles. Slowly he was getting orders on his dm. 

Then he starts boosting his posts by spending some amount on Facebook and Instagram using the boost post feature. Later he was getting more orders day by day and, now that is his full-time business. Their homemade cakes become so popular in the town and, the bakery turned out to be the Cake Palace now. 

The small digital marketing method has changed his business to a new big one. Here the small business owner makes use of his social media accounts to increase the revenue that sets his name in town for homemade cakes. 

That’s an example of the effectiveness of digital marketing for small businesses in 2022 after a pandemic. According to statistics, in India, 65% of people reported an increase in their daily internet use, as well as 40% more data consumption between 2020 and 21 after the pandemic.

When people start spending more time online, this is a great opportunity for many businesses to grow digitally and scale up their revenue. Every owner can make use of digital marketing for business development.

Here, in this article, I’m discussing the importance of digital marketing for business and its various types that give an overview of different digital marketing methods.

What is marketing?

Marketing is the process of selling products or promoting businesses and services. It includes advertisements, selling, and delivering products to businesses or consumers.

There are two types of marketing

• Traditional marketing or offline marketing
• Digital marketing or online marketing

Traditional marketing refers to the usage of offline methods for marketing communication to reach the audience viz. television, magazine, newspaper, radio, etc.

Digital marketing refers to the usage of the internet or online methods for marketing communication to reach the audience viz. website, blog, social media, emails, etc.

These are the key differences between traditional marketing v/s digital marketing or offline marketing v/s online marketing

Factors	Traditional Marketing	Digital Marketing
Cost-effective	Low	High
Results measurement	Difficult	Easy (Analytics tools)
Personal branding	Slow and not efficient	Fast and very efficient
Consumer interaction	Less	High
Marketing analysis	More time	Less time
Interruptions	Cannot skip interruptive ads	Can easily skip interruptive ads
Communication	One way communication	Two-way communication

Digital marketing for business owners

When people are searching everything online and finding results for all of their queries on search engines, it is much necessary of having an online presence for every business and startup. 

Today people’s mindset is that if they found a website, online reviews, social media profiles, or a blog of a particular company/startup or business, it is considered to be a genuine one otherwise people won’t believe the authenticity of the product or service. So implementing digital marketing for businesses is one of the most crucial parts that no one can neglect these days.

And also the business owner who keep engaging both new and existing customers about their new launches in real-time and the one that responds to customer queries immediately gains more traction and develops trust among users which increases sales that helps the business grow. That is the reason digital marketing for business growth is very important. But the businesses that aren’t online can’t able to achieve this.

How to do digital marketing for business?

There are various digital marketing methods to carry out for businesses depending upon the type and nature of the particular business. Every business owner or digital marketer must be very clear about the product’s or service’s sales process, customer interactions, and much more which helps to choose the right combination of digital marketing methods. Using digital marketing for business promotion is an influential factor these days for any business to grow and scale up its revenue.

Here I’m briefing a few important methods of digital marketing for business owners that everyone can make use of for their businesses to grow online. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of bringing organic traffic to a website or web page to rank higher on search engines. To make it a bit simpler, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making the content of the website rank higher on search engines like Google when someone searches on the browsers.

SEO is one of the best free techniques to get quality traffic from search engines to the website or webpage. SEO is not a result of short-term effort but is a long-term ongoing process that requires skills and a lot of patience, dedication, and hard work. SEO is not a one-time process but a continuous practice.

SEO types:

There are various types of SEO that every digital marketer must be aware of.

White hat SEO-

In this method, optimization is completely done positively without voiding any rules of the search engine and its policies. It always encourages genuine content which is of high quality that can easily understand by the search engine and the user. It also includes some technical things like optimizing codes and making sure that every page is visible on search engines. It is always recommended to have web traffic with white hat SEO methods to stay on top of google rankings for the longer term.

Black hat SEO-

In this method, optimization is done negatively. It is going behind the quick shortcuts to rank on search results like using automated tools for link building, buying backlinks, autogenerated content, keyword stuffing, and many more. This method always tries to manipulate the search engine algorithms to rank on top of search results. It is considered an unethical way of getting traffic.

Grey hat SEO-

This is the method that is neither white hat nor black hot. This method does not cross the white hat limits to treat it as a black hat but it is not a white hat either. 

On-page SEO-

On-page SEO refers to the optimization of the content in the website itself which is making sure the content is of high quality and must be capable of answering people’s search queries. It can also be the technical SEO as the modification happens in the website itself like taking care of titles, meta descriptions, URL structures, sitemaps, internal links, keyword density, images, alt tags, and many more.

Off-page SEO-

Off-page SEO refers to the optimization that happens outside the website. The key factor of off-page SEO is inbound links or backlinks. The number of backlinks from authoritative sites helps to determine the quality of your content which boosts your site rankings.

SEO techniques:

SEO also includes another wider range of powerful practices which are categorized as SEO techniques.

Keyword research-

Keyword research is the very first and fundamental step of SEO. It is researching keywords that people type on search engines as their queries. It might be words, phrases, or even sentences.

Content SEO-

Content is the king of all search results. Creating high-quality genuine content that answers people’s queries helps to rank top on the search engine results page.

Technical SEO-

Technical SEO includes optimizing the site code and doing on-page SEO which helps the site crawlers to index the web pages very easily and mobile-friendly.

Inbound links-

Inbound links are nothing but backlinks. This majorly includes an off-page SEO. Getting high-quality backlinks naturally from the most popular sites (high authority domains) that share similar interests increases the chances of ranking higher on the search engine results page.

Image and Video SEO-

Using the images and videos in the websites or webpages not only holds the reader’s attention but also the best practice from an SEO perspective also. Optimizing those images and videos for the search engines helps to rank higher on search engine result pages. 

Local SEO-

Local SEO is one of the best techniques to rank on search engines if you run a business locally such as restaurants, parlors, stores, clinics, etc. Google My Business is the best free method to get started with the local SEO. 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC refers to paid ads. PPC is a model of digital marketing in which advertisers place an ad on different platforms and pay only when the user clicks on it. Search engines and mobile applications are the platforms for PPC. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the popular form of PPC. 

When a user searches for something in search engines, an auction takes place among ads to display on the ad space. The display of an ad depends on different factors like website authority and relevancy and the bid amount for that particular search term. It usually depends on the ad rank. 

Ad rank is calculated by multiplying the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bid and quality score. CPC bid is the amount that the advertiser is willing to pay and the quality score is something calculated on the website authority and relevancy and landing page quality. After the calculation, whoever ranks top will appear in ad space. Google Ads holds the most popular PPC advertising system in the world when compared to Microsoft.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM refers to the use of social media platforms to connect with the audience for various activities like branding, advertisements, traffic, and sales. SMM involves publishing good content for the followers that makes them kept engaging always. Most businesses create content on social media profiles to generate quality traffic to their websites that increase sales. SMM is the most employed technique of digital marketing for business.

Social media sites allow marketers to place ads across their platforms for the marketing purpose of the company’s products and services. 

According to Buffer, there are five key elements of SMM.

Strategy-

It involves determining marketing goals, choosing the social profiles, allocation of budget, and the type of content creation.

Planning and Publishing-

Plan the content as per the strategies built and published in the form of videos or images or long scripted texts or short videos, etc.

Listening and Engagement-

Looking up for the users what they are talking about your brand, and posts and checking out the post’s engagement through likes, comments, etc. There are many advanced methods and various specialized tools to monitor social media engagement.

Analytics-

Along the way, analyzing how social media marketing is performing is a crucial task for every marketer. Many social media websites provide in-built tools for analytics and also there is a wide range of third-party tools to choose from.

Advertising-

If you have a sufficient budget to advertise on social media, it is recommended to go for it. Social media is a very powerful medium these days that help to build a brand and get quality traffic and sales. 

Content marketing

Content marketing is nothing but creating genuine, valuable, relevant, and consistent content and distributing it. Content creation can be in any way- newsletters, blogs, vlogs, social media posts, podcasts, etc. A marketer can opt for both paid and organic content marketing like SEM (paid) and SEO (organic). 

There are many benefits of content marketing. A business can attract more and more leads through the content itself. Proper content marketing results in increased sales and it is very cost-saving and cost-effective.

Email Marketing

Email marketing refers to the process of sending emails to a list of contacts who have agreed to receive emails from you. This is the most powerful technique of marketing. Email marketing ranked as the most effective approach to marketing by overtaking SEO, SMM, and affiliate marketing.

Email marketing is the most effective way because it always sits on the mailing list unless the user opens and deletes or archives it. This is one of the cheapest channels of marketing. 

Emails are sent to the audience to keep them updated about the products or services that help maintain a good relationship and also to get traffic to your site, blog, social media, or wherever you want your audience to reach. You can also use the emails for conversations with new and existing customers. 

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is promoting other’s products and earning a commission for each sale. If you are a company and have a product or service, ask the right person or influencer in your niche to promote it and give them a handful of commissions for each sale. This would help to increase brand awareness as well as sales.

Marketing Analytics:

Marketing analytics gathers the data from the marketing channels and segregates it into one place. Marketing analytics enables marketers to measure the performance of marketing efforts. There is a wide range of marketing analytics tools available in the market. 

Mobile Marketing

In this method, marketing is focused to reach the audience on mobiles and tablets. Through mobile marketing, you can reach the audience through text messages, emails, social media, websites, and mobile applications.

Above are a few methods of digital marketing for businesses in easy steps that can be easily considered by any company or individual who is intended to get the benefits of digital marketing.

Benefits of digital marketing for business

There are so many benefits of digital marketing for small businesses. Here I’m listing a few notable perks out of it. 

Right audience–

Through digital marketing, businesses can easily reach the right audience who are looking for their products or services through various digital channels.

Low cost–

Promotions through digital marketing are very low cost when compared to traditional methods.

High return on investment–

Digital marketing always offers a high ROI because here businesses are targetting only the audience who are checking out their products or services.

Easy to measure–

The marketing campaign efforts are very easy to measure in digital marketing as there are plenty of tools available to analyze the performance of the ad campaigns.

Ad flexibility–

There is more flexibility in digital marketing ads so that whenever the business wants to stop or pause or modify ads, they can easily do that.

Brand awareness– 

It is quite easier to create brand awareness in a shorter period when compared to traditional methods.

Engagement–

Digital ads are always very engaging when compared to traditional ads. 

Faster communication– 

Every business owner can easily communicate with their customers directly through digital marketing. 

Still, there are many more benefits of digital marketing for business. 

Conclusion

Digital marketing is not just spending huge money on ads. It is way more than that. It needs a lot of effort and dedicated time to create genuine content that answers most of the user search queries. 

Implementing digital marketing for business is very necessary these days as the usage of the internet increased among people and also most people know how to get the answers for their queries on search engines. Businesses like eCommerce, real estate, restaurant-hotels, or professionals like doctors, and artists can easily implement digital marketing techniques to increase revenue and also help them to grow online.