Digital Marketing Guide For Business Owners

Hi all, This is Jins George. In this blog, I will help you understand stand digital marketing better. And you are showing you some of the most important things you need to know about digital marketing. Right now, digital marketing has been made to seem way more complicated than it is. If you want to get the best results possible from your digital marketing, you will need to know and understand the strategies I will share with you in this blog. So, my promise to you is this: if you read this entire blog, you will better understand digital marketing. So let’s get to it.

Differences Between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing

The first thing I need to share with you is the differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing. Brace yourself for this one because it’s pretty profound. It’s not profound at all, which makes it so attractive. You see, digital marketing is just marketing done through digital channels; that’s it. Here is the sample digital marketing we have done on our Twitter and Facebook for your reference.

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Email marketing, website optimization, or anything that occurs online or through digital media. So, when we’re talking about digital marketing, we’re talking about marketing through channels like SEO or search engine optimization, effective search engine marketing, Content marketing, social media, Google pay-per-click ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or anything like that. You can contrast this with traditional marketing using traditional media, such as TV, the radio, newspapers, magazines, brochures, billboards, and basically anything not digital.

Now, here’s the deal. Traditional marketing and traditional advertising and everything that goes into it, well, it still works. Still, there are some significant advantages to using digital marketing and all the digital channels we now have available. First of all, digital marketing gives you a much larger audience size. You can reach anybody that’s online, and there are billions and billions of people online. Next is audience targeting because not only are you able to reach these billions of people, but you want to reach only some of them because they will not be the perfect fit for your business. Instead, you can be laser-focused and selective on only the ideal and perfect people you want to target.

Digital marketing also tends to be significantly more cost-effective than running an ad in the Malayala Manorama News Paper, in the Asianet News Channel, or in an advertisement on the ground grass surface of a cricket stadium. Again, these are designed to appeal to mass markets and reach everyone, which probably differs from your goal. Instead, you want to be laser-focused and selective with your marketing and reach only those most likely to buy from your business again. Digital marketing also allows you to get immediate feedback, which is one of my favourite benefits of the channels. 

Advantages of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

After all, if you think about running a magazine ad, where you’ve got to think of the copy and the creative and what you’re going to say, and then you’ve got to get it all written up and sent to the magazine, it’s got to get published and then distributed. You could look at weeks, at best, months, and many months before figuring out if this worked. In Digital Marketing, on the other hand, you can write an ad and have it online in a matter of minutes: immediate feedback, immediate correction, and immediate results. Plus, Digital Marketing is much easier to measure and track because everything’s digital, so we’ve got a Digital trail allowing us to estimate costs, results, and everything in real time. So we can make adjustments and tweaks, and optimisations on the marketing campaign.

Again, contrast that with waiting three months for your magazine to come out and figure out whether things worked. And you can’t measure clicks on a magazine, so the best you can do is to have them fill out a form on the magazine or visit a digital channel, which ties us back into digital marketing anyway. Going with digital marketing has some serious advantages to choosing digital channels. But again, that’s not to say that traditional marketing doesn’t still work. It does. 

The point here is to look at either traditional or digital marketing. Then take a few steps back to the strategies and the fundamentals and the principles, the consumer psychology, the buyer behaviour, why people do what they do, and then focus on mastering and learning that. Then you can apply that to digital, traditional, or any other channels that come out in the future.

Importance of Strategies in Digital Marketing

The next thing that’ll help you become a business leader who knows digital marketing better. Besides, to understand the differences between strategy and tactics and when to use them. Strategy is all the big picture stuff, and this is where you want to focus your efforts first and foremost because this is the foundation on all of your future marketing efforts and tactics and tools and software and things like that will be built on. Get this part wrong; nothing else matters because nothing else will work.

The Core Four Principles of Digital Marketing

Now, there are many different strategies, approaches, and ways to look at your digital marketing. Still, no matter how you look at it, it always comes back to four primary and solid principles that have stood the test of time and will be as relevant today as they are a hundred years from now. I call these things the Core Four, which comprises the centre of my hub and speaks marketing model. The Core Four include Model, Market, Message, and Media. So let’s unpack those now.

The Model

The model is your business, your offer, your package, your servicing, the pricing that goes with it, and how you deliver whatever it is to the market. It’s essential here to design your model design your business around what is the most enjoyable and profitable, and in demand by the market. The worst thing you can do is build a business you absolutely hate.

The Market

The market is the people you will serve; you want to say something other than everyone or anyone with money. You want to be focused, laser-focused on precisely who will get the best results from your product or service and also consider the market you will enjoy most serving. In marketing, we call this an ideal customer or client avatar. It’s made up of demographic details like age, gender, income, and occupation. Geographic information like what city or state or district, or country they live in, and psychographic details like their values, attitudes, and lifestyles.

The Message

In the message, you will clarify and connect with your ideal target market by speaking directly to them about their pains and their problems and frustrations and how your business is uniquely positioned to help solve that for them. Telling stories about previous customers and previous client results is an incredibly effective way to do this, as are getting testimonials directly from them and running case studies proving that you know what you’re talking about and have done what you say you’re going to do. The point here is that to craft genuinely effective messages, well, you’ve got to understand who your market is. That made sense. 

The Strategy 

The fourth core is strategy, the high-level stuff that goes into making the right decisions. Tactics, on the other hand, are how you will execute everything I’ve just talked about. The tactics are the details and the actionable steps, or executable things, that you will put into practice.

So, the strategy being the business model you’re using, the market that you’re going to go after, the messages you’re going to use, and the media choices that you’re going to deploy your marketing on, and then the tactics being things like what frequency are you going to post, and what kind of content are you going to post, and what schedule or level of consistency, or how many memes are you going to throw in? A tactical question would be: what’s the best time to post on social media? Which social media platform should we be on? That’s the difference.

Difference Between Organic and Paid Digital Marketing

Let’s start with organic. Organic content and organic digital marketing are essentially anything that you create for free. So, anytime you post on Facebook, an Instagram story, a Google My Business Post, a YouTube video, or anything like that, you’re not paying money to have it promoted; you’re creating organic content.

This doesn’t mean it’s free content because the odds are reasonable. You put time and energy, and probably a decent amount of money, behind the content you’re creating. However, it’s still classified as organic content by not paying to promote it. So, if organic marketing is putting out content and not paying to have it promoted, well then, paid marketing is the opposite of that – putting out content and then paying the networks to promote it and distribute it to even more people.

With paid media or paid marketing, you’re running advertising to whatever message or content you’re putting out there. Now, the big players in the space are the kingpins like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads, and Google ads – essentially the significant networks with ads added to the back of their names.

Organic content shows up in the news feeds of people that follow you. In contrast, paid marketing and paid media appear in the news feeds, on the phones, and on the devices of the people you choose through targeting. Now, of course, like all marketing strategies, both have pros and cons. Organic is essentially free in nature, but it will be more limited in reach because the way the algorithms work favours paid media because they like to make money.

Paid media, on the other hand, has the obvious downside of costing money. It allows you to reach many people very quickly. So, the choice between organic and paid comes down to time versus money and the rate at which you want to experience results.

Direct Response vs Brand Awareness Marketing

Direct Response Marketing and Brand Awareness Marketing are two popular marketing strategies. The key differences between Direct Response and Brand Awareness Marketing are their goals and metrics, and Direct Response Marketing aims to generate immediate responses. On the other hand, Brand Awareness Marketing aims to increase brand recognition and familiarity. Besides, it is not measurable, and the results are not trackable in the short term.

Direct Response Marketing

Direct Response Marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to persuade customers to take immediate action. It can be in the form of a phone call, email, or online form. Moreover, the primary goal of Direct Response Marketing is to generate a response from the target audience, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Besides, Companies can track and analyze their results, making adjusting and improving their campaigns easier. Direct Response Marketing is often associated with short-term goals, such as generating immediate sales or leads.

Brand Awareness Marketing

Brand Awareness Marketing is a strategy that aims to increase brand recognition and familiarity among the target audience. The primary goal of Brand Awareness Marketing is not to generate immediate sales but to create a positive perception of the brand. Besides, Brand Awareness Marketing is often associated with long-term goals, such as increasing brand loyalty and recognition. It is a less measurable strategy compared to Direct Response Marketing. However, it is essential for building a strong brand reputation.

Importance of Intent in Search vs Discovery Marketing

Another incredibly important thing you need to know about digital marketing is the difference between search and discovery marketing. When it comes to search versus discovery marketing, the biggest and most important keyword, if you will, is intent. Basically, what’s the intent, or why is someone using a specific platform when they log on in the morning, at noon, or at night?

Let’s start with search, and here we’re talking about platforms like Google and YouTube, basically any other search engine. When someone logs on to Google, for example, they have intent. They’re there to find an answer, solution, or product. They’re there to do something, buy something, learn something or take action. This is where you, as a business owner, want to show up in front of them and answer their question or give them the solution to whatever they’re looking for. Some strategies here are using SEO or search engine optimisation, as well as Google Ads, which is pay-per-click advertising.

Discovery marketing, on the other hand, encompasses brands like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to a certain extent. Essentially, users on these platforms may have intended, but they’re probably more casually browsing. After all, nobody really shows up in the morning and logs onto Facebook or Instagram with a credit card in hand, looking to buy something.

This is why if you’re doing search marketing, you can afford to be direct. They’re looking for something; you have the answer, so you can give it to them. With discovery marketing, on the other hand, you’ve got to be a little more creative and a little more entertaining. You’ve got to get their attention and then keep it and allow them to become interested in what it is that you’re selling or promoting.

Now, search and discovery marketing are incredibly important in building an overall successful, sustainable business. But just like with direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing, you want to ensure that you’re using the right tool for the right job at the right time and place.

Products vs Services in Digital Marketing

Next, I’ve got something very important to share with you, which rarely gets talked about when it comes to marketing advice, and that is the difference between marketing products and services. Here’s the deal: most of the marketing information out there revolves around product marketing, whether we’re talking about textbooks, courses, or even training.

A product is something tangible that you can hold, that you can see, that you can touch and that you can taste. A service, on the other hand, is intangible. You can’t hold it, can’t touch it, can’t see it, can’t taste it. Plus, with services, you often need to pay in advance, which requires a whole new level of trust.

Now, when it comes to marketing products, you have the opportunity and the advantage of explaining, showing, and demonstrating how a product works and what it looks like. You want to show it in action, show the features, show the benefits that the features will deliver, and show the story behind it. This is why you’ll be very disappointed if you’re marketing a service-based business and try to market it like a product-based business.

Everything like that. Here’s an example. I’m trying to promote and sell this pen. Well, the fact that this pen has a lid is a feature. The fact that it will prevent me from getting ink all over myself that’s a benefit. But you can take it further, and you should. For example, this pen lid also has a clip, meaning I can attach it to my papers, notebook, or even my clothes if I’m trying to sport that nerdy look. Another feature of the pen lid is that the lid has holes in the top. You may be surprised to hear that pen lids have holes in the top to prevent suffocation in case they accidentally or purposely get swallowed. After all, chewing on pen lids is an age-old, albeit highly unsanitary, practice. Sometimes you get hungry.

Services, on the other hand, well, they don’t have that advantage. When you’re promoting and marketing services, you want to sell the end, essentially the end state, the benefits, the outcome, or the results that someone will experience after working with you. In fact, when it comes to marketing services, I’d say it’s all about the end state and the benefits, outcomes, and results someone will experience. The key here is to highlight their current pain, dissatisfaction, or discomfort and then, of course, paint the picture of how they’ll be so much better after working with you.

B2B and B2C Digital Marketing

The next thing you need to be aware of if you want to become a true expert in digital marketing is to understand the differences between B2B and B2C marketing. B2B stands for business to business, where your main customers, your main clients, aren’t regular everyday people but rather other businesses. B2C, on the other hand, means you’re a business that sells to consumers, regular everyday people, and not businesses. B2B, business to business. B2C, business to consumer. And just like everything I’ve shared with you so far, there are some significant differences in how you want to market your business, market your service, market your product, market whatever, depending on whether you’re selling to companies or people. And this is why the next thing you will want to do is check out the blog I’m going to write about B2B vs B2C marketing. So, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you get noticed once it is released. 

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