What is Digital Marketing and how to succeed ?

Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of digital technologies to attract, engage and convert customers online.

For a business to succeed in today’s Digital world, it is really important to have a strong digital footprint on the internet. With today’s sophisticated digital lifestyle, consumers are probably on Facebook, checking out Twitter, browsing their email inboxes and searching for products and services on a search engine.

Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing as it leverages all the electronic devices like PCs, Tablets, Smartphones, digital signage or billboards, smart TVs to provide an experience in real time, that influences a desired audience to buy your product / read your articles / engage with your content.

Marketers shall use these Omni-channels, which can track the customer’s journey and give them the ability to engage with the consumer online.

Various components of Digital Marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – make your brand appear at the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – with pay per click & Google AdWords allow your website to emerge on paid listing of different search engines.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) – advertising on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube. Get maximum number of Likes and Tweets on twitter. 
• Mobile Optimization and Responsive Websites - When you take a look around a room, nearly everyone is on their Smartphone. The numbers of people browsing on mobile passed desktop users a long time ago.
• Video Marketing - best way to engage with millennials. Facebook live streaming, Periscope, Snapchat, and YouTube are on the rise now, more than ever.
• Web analytics – collection and analyze web usage data
• Content Marketing - eBooks, White Papers and Infographics
• Email Marketing – sending emails to customers directly

Here are some challenges for Digital Marketers:

• Explosion of digital channels - Consumers use variety digital channels and devices to interact with brands in different ways and for different purposes.
• Exploding data volumes - Consumers leave behind a huge digital footprint in these channels. It’s extremely difficult to get a handle on all that data, and find the right data that can help you make the right decisions.
• Increasing competition - Digital channels are relatively cheap, compared with traditional media, making them within reach of practically every business of every size. As a result, everyone is trying to capture consumers’ attention.

How do you succeed in Digital Marketing:

• Avoid overwhelming “in your face” marketing
• Respond to dynamic customer interactions.
• Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster
• Close loop the feedback into future digital campaigns for Cross/Up-Sell

People want brands they can trust, companies that know them as people, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers tailored to their needs and preferences.

Digital is now the first touch point for the consumer and a channel where the consumer has greater control over what they see and when they see it.