Marketing In The Digital Realm!
So you have a business – with online and offline representation – what next? Well, have you honed in on marketing in the digital realm? Do you have a marketing team that focuses on your digital presence? Well, it is time you should, if you are not there yet! Your business depends on it.
In this contributed article, you can see why marketing in the digital realm is a very necessary concept for your business needs. Let’s take a closer look at how we can accomplish this!
Marketing In The Digital Realm: Why You Should Stay On Top Of The Virtual World
Let’s talk about marketing in the digital realm!
Putting the word out about yourself might be the single most important thing you can do as either an entrepreneur or as a company. People often seem to forget that no matter what stage you may be at as a corporation, if you don’t actively try to interact with your audience and reach out to them, then you will either not reach out to a large target market, or you are at risk of falling off entirely.
Even companies as large as Apple or Microsoft will plummet noticeably if they stop all their advertising campaigns. Sure they won’t die overnight, but they will eventually start losing relevancy and slowly shift over into that uncanny valley of obscurity.
As a company or a business owner, that is most probably the last thing you would ever want to happen to your company, so in order to prevent this, you should take some time to plan some future-proofing. It might be hard to get started because there is definitely a lot to consider and a lot of paths you could take to go about doing this.
To make it a bit easier, let’s go through a few methods in which you could spread the word, and hopefully consistently stay in the spotlight.
What It’s All About
Trying to advertise yourself and grow is nothing new, companies have been doing it for generations, but over the years the methods change more and more, but the principle remains the same. Of course, on principle alone, you want to target the broadest audience possible, so picking methods which reach the largest amount of people would be preferred, sadly, that is not always very plausible.
Much like anything that’s higher quality or more effective, it usually costs much more, making it not very accessible for smaller businesses and startups. Of course, this all depends on your budget, and if you have enough money which you could allocate towards advertising while still being able to pay the rent for your new office and pay your employees, you’re probably fine. If you feel like you have enough to comfortable rent out an ad space on a bus or a billboard, then go right ahead, but if you do not, then it’s time to think of some other ways in which you could get around this.
Digital Marketing
It’s no secret that all the companies that are dominating the market are fully embracing the virtual world and using it to extend their reach into all sorts of different and global audiences. If you have not yet adapted to this strategy in order to not get outclassed and left behind, then it’s about time you picked up the pace. There are several ways in which you could gain a bit of an online presence, and some of them can even be started for free.
Social Media
Social media is quite noticeably at the forefront of most online communication nowadays, no matter whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even Myspace (yes, it still exists). If you wish to reach out to a broader audience of various age ranges and places all over the world without spending insane amounts of money on advertising campaigns with huge billboards and prints on blimps, then social media is the way to go.
Of course, just because it’s free does not mean it’s easy. You still have to spend the time to actually develop your social media accounts and make sure that the content posted on them is at least somewhat engaging. While the main purpose of it existing is to essentially advertise your company or your company’s product.
If you come off as too pushy with your advertisements then nobody will willingly follow you. People want short, quick, snappy, humorous and relevant information on their social media, whether it’s their twitter timeline or Facebook wall, nobody wants to know that your sponges are 2% off.
They want to know what exciting new products you have coming up, they want to know when the next sale is, they want to see various casual posts from your account talking about recent events and maybe even a few jokes here and there if you feel confident enough in your social media team.
To sum up, yes it’s free in the way that you are not paying a different company to do it, but like anything in this world, it is not free of any kind of charge. You still have to either spend time on it yourself, or the person who you hire to deal with it internally. This is a mall price to pay when you choose marketing in the digital realm!
Creating A Website
Despite the popular belief of most people, the internet serves more purpose than just scrolling down Facebook and checking out Wikipedia sometimes. There are a plethora of other ways in which you could utilize the internet to have the best chance at exposure to a broader audience, and without the proper know-how, you most probably won’t be able to do it yourself.
What’s easier?
Teaching yourself a programming language which will help you to build your own website from scratch, as well as learning to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create appropriate assets which will make the website actually somewhat appealing?
Or just hiring one or two people who already have years of experience in the field who will be able to do it much more efficiently, and with much better results? Just a heads up, learning JavaScript, CSS, HTML and the Adobe suite proficiently enough to create your website in a timely manner is going to take a lot more time and money than you might imagine.
The choice is usually clear on this matter, but some people think it’s cheaper to somehow do it themselves than to get a company like Innovative Resource Group LCC to do it for them. Understandable why people think so? Yes. Are they right in any way, shape, or form? No, not at all.
Your company needs both you and your employees to focus on whatever they are already doing, so your best option is to either hire new full-time staff who could work on the website related projects on the sidelines.
Of course, once a website is up that’s not just it, you have to keep maintaining it, updating it with new content, optimizing it for new hardware and software as well as different platforms such as tablets and mobile phones, among other things. Yes, it is a lot of work, and yet, some people still wonder why graphic designers and people who make websites get paid as well as they do.
Search Engine Optimization And Search Engine Marketing
If there ever was one website which most people would classify as the homepage of the internet, it would most probably be a search engine, and no, it probably wouldn’t be AskJeeves.com anymore either. Google is currently the great internet overlord, seemingly having a monopoly over searching, maps, video hosting, and some would even say email.
Yes, alternatives do indeed exist, but compared to their Google counterparts they do rather poorly.
Due to all of this, it’s no surprise that Google gets an absolutely insane amount of traffic on a daily basis, usually ending up with around 3.5 billion searches per day, and 1.2 trillion searches per year. Yes, those are absolutely astronomical figures, but with numbers like this backing you up it’s hard to go wrong advertising on Google. This is a prime example of marketing in the digital realm!
This is where the difference between SEO and SEM comes in. While search engine optimization focuses on using various techniques such as the right keywords to help your website show higher up in Google searches, search engine marketing puts you right at the top of the page, for a price.
Yes, one seems like a sure-fire deal, instantly taking you to the top of the ladder whenever certain keywords come up, but the truth is that we live in an age where a large number of people just ignore anything that might be an advert. This is why SEO usually gets a better reputation overall, as it organically allows your website to get more popular, and climb up the ranks.
The general public is more likely to click on something which doesn’t say “Ad” in a small box right next to the URL which you are about to click, for the very same reasons why most ignore people handing out leaflets on the street. It generally seems somewhat intrusive, and even a bit obnoxious.
That does not mean that your paid searches will not be effective, they most definitely will be, as there are a lot of relatively technically illiterate people who probably are not even aware that what they are clicking is a sponsored link.
Is this something you should base your main strategy on?
No, not at all, but if you feel like you need a bit of a boost in the exposure department, then this is one of the better opportunities you could ask for.
My Final Thoughts On Marketing In The Digital Realm
Being a business owner -online or offline – it behooves you to start focusing on marketing in the digital realm! It is no secret that this is the way of the 21st century! The sooner you start capitalizing on the digital way of doing things for your business, the quicker I am sure that you will be able to garner the digital aspect of your profit margin!
All the best.
Images courtesy of Pixabay and Pexels.
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