The Five W&H's of Digital Marketing

When we talk about Digital Marketing, the first thing that comes to mind are endless feeds and online advertisements that jumps up when surfing sites such as YouTube and social media Apps. Well, you are not wrong. However, that is not an overarching view of the intrinsic things that are associated with the term. In general, Digital Marketing is about creating an effective “online presence” for your company. If used correctly, it will exponentially increase your customer base. This blog will allow you to learn what digital marketing truly encompasses and the omnipotency of this magnificent tool of the era.

While the term “digital marketing” to many new-comers into the world of online entrepreneur may sound “style over substance”, if one believes in statistics, there is no way for an online company, or even offline ones, to grow and expand without utilising some forms of digital marketing techniques. Famous entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Jack Ma from Alibaba are great examples of experts in the field. Over the years, trends in effective online marketing have been explored and frameworks are formed to ease your way into this simple yet multipurpose tool. If this is the first place you looked when starting on the topic, you are in great luck. This blog will be breaking essential information you need to understand about digital marketing into simple and clear crystal-blocks of Whats and Hows.

Let’s begin.

WHAT

To get you started quickly, digital marketing in layman’s term is simply using digital devices and the internet as a channel to find and connect with your target costumers quickly and efficiently, in this way, you will gain a comparative advantage (given the huge network effects of social media and online platforms) in your sector of business, in turn exponentially increases revenue. It can be further divided into “inbound” and “outbound”, differentiated by “attracting targeted customers to your business” and “Pushing information out to the wide public”.

WHO

People who may be interested in digital marketing includes either an existing company trying to expand influence and increase revenue or start-up companies wishing to establish a brand name quickly. Given the potential of digital marketing doubling and tripling annual revenues for both online and offline businesses, its application is omnipotent. The targeted audience of digital marketing are people who are frequent users of the internet, from daily net surfing and social media feeds scanning and visitors to video sharing websites, consumer coverage is overarching. We will further break down the different sectors of consumer coverage based on devices and locations in later blogs.

WHY

So why should a company employ digital marketing which is more experimental compared to traditional marketing? Two simple reasons, first being digital marketing has greater user coverage given the strong network effects of social media and other interconnected platforms, ensuring a low input leads to an exponential output, secondly, digital marketing is an addition to that of traditional marketing, with similar frameworks, inferring there are no collisions of interest but complementary in utilizing both. No business would reject a robust marketing opportunity to publicize their brand name and expand their influence, given the endless possibilities made available by the nature of the internet and the associated components, such as emails, websites, social media, and shared videos.

WHEN

When would a company need to digitally market their business? All the time if one wants to generate a higher profit, or just purely increase influence for nonprofit organizations. The best time to do it is when the company is still in the start-up phase, to allow for trial and error and find the suitable channels to digitally market its brand, gaining an early comparative advantage in the business’ niche market. Advantages for larger offline companies who are new to the digital sector are high available inputs (greater possible yields), however, this requires professionals to manage their marketing strategy to avoid large negative revenue or inefficient borrowings that may land the company in danger.

WHERE

Though majorly dependent over the techniques employed Digital Marketings generally takes place at the following sites:

1. Search Engines (Eg. Google, Baidu, Yahoo)

2. Social Media (Eg. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)

3. Video-Sharing Sites (Eg. YouTube, Bili Bili, TickToc)

4. Other Specialize or Integrated Platforms. (Eg. 58, TripAdvisor, Sydney Today)

5. Paid advertisement banners on influential webpages and apps, Etc.

HOW (The Methods)

List of famous examples of Digital Marketing Techniques constitutes::

-Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

-Content Marketing

-Social Media Marketing

-Pay Per Click (PPC)

-Local Search Marketing

-Influencer Marketing

-Email Marketing

-Marketing Automation

-Inbound Marketing

-Online PR

We will be educating these techniques in greater detail based on their popularity and feasibility in our continuous blogs, later on, a themed series- “Your Online Business Today”.

HOW (The Measurements)

Measuring the success of your marketing techniques or campaigns made up of multiple techniques is crucial. This is especially true when you are digitally marketing your business using different techniques and channels. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) technique, similar to that of business revenue, can be used for each channel and marketing tool employed. For example, visitor count to the business’ main website from a Google Search can be monitored as “Organic Traffic”. This can be achieved for free using Google analytics. Many other measures and models such as Attribution Modeling are available to digital marketers, which we will go into greater detail in the “Your Online Business Today” Series.