What is Digital Marketing

At DigiCon Academy we use the word Digital Marketing a lot, whether it is about getting people to sign up for a course or sharing tips and advice on the subject.  We took a step back and asked ourselves if people actually know what digital marketing is by definition and what it entails. In this blog post, we explain this term that people may have been delirious about or perhaps don’t understand it fully.

Simply put, Digital Marketing is a general term to refer to all your online efforts to promote your brand. You use a variety of digital tactics and media to reach your customers where they spend most of their time online. 

Technology is developing fast and Internet usage is rapidly increasing. According to research carried out by WE ARE SOCIAL (hyperlink to source), the number of Internet users worldwide has passed the 4 billion mark. In Africa, the number of internet users has gone up by 20% to 435 million. As of January 2020, the number of Ugandans online is at 19 million (45.3% of the country’s population).

Over 75% of Internet users access the Internet on mobile devices, as such, there is a sizeable audience that is notpaying as much attention to TV or the radio as they did a few years ago.So, if you want to connect with this particular audience, you need to deliver the right message, at the right time in the right place and that place is the Internet more or less 24/7.

The best Digital Marketers have a full grasp of the different digital tactics and channels, they know how to use them to achieve their overall online and business goals. 

Here is a quick breakdown of some of the most commonly used tactics and channels 

Website

Your website is your business’ home on the Internet. It has information about your business and about what you do. It also houses your blog, useful and interactive content, and is an important piece that helps build your brand credibility.

Social Media Marketing

This is when your brand uses your different Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to mention but a few, to market by pushing out content that is relevant to your audiences in an effort to create brand awareness, generate leads and drive traffic to your brand’s website. 

Email Marketing 

As the name suggests, Email Marketing involves using, well, Emails to promote your products and services. You send Emails to an Email list of people who have subscribed to get newsletters from your business.

Search Engine Optimization (S.E.0)

S.E.O comprises of actions taken to boost the ranking of your website in Google search engine organic (free) results. Simply put, you put out content on your website structured it in a way that Google search engine can easily find it and giving it a high ranking in its search results, meaning your website will appear a head of others in the search results.

So, why do you need Digital Marketing?

There are a number of reasons why you should get on this Digital Marketing “thing”, but here are the big ones:-

First, measuring effectiveness and ROI: with Digital Marketing you can see real-time results of your marketing efforts, you can track how many people are going to your website, monitor how your content is performing, how many people have seen it, how many people like it and how many are sharing, and best of all, you can track how your advertising performance online and if it is not working, you can just stop or pause it from running and re-strategize so as to ensure you get maximum ROI. All this isn’t possible if you are running an ad in say a newspaper or on a billboard.

Secondly, it’s more affordable and accurately targeted than traditional media. On Digital, you can run an ad for as low as $5 and you will reach a significant number of people and target your ads directly to the people you want to reach with your message. Unlike traditional advertising where you run a radio or billboard ad with a significant budget and you don’t have any guarantee that your target audience will receive your message.

Does every business need Digital Marketing? The answer is still yes. Whatever line of work you’re in, it requires an aspect of digital marketing whether you’re selling something or not. However, not all digital strategies are the same. A Business to Business (B2B) company will have different online goals from a Business to Customer (B2C) Company. A B2B company might focus on lead generation with the focus of reaching a salesperson, so this marketing strategy focus on converting a salesperson while a B2C company is looking to attract people to their website and convert them into customers without necessarily talking to them. 

Now that you have an idea of what Digital Marketing is, what next? Do you want to learn the basics of Digital Marketing? Maybe you have been trying but haven’t been reaching some of your online audience, no doubt some areas of your strategy could use some improvement. We got you covered.

Sign up for our three day Digital Marketing training workshop in Partnership with SHONA Organization where you can learn how to craft and execute a brilliant Digital Marketing strategy. 

For more details about this workshop click here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shona_digitalmarketing-workshop-activity-6702193190717399040-DGa5/