Digital transformations can be challenging as well as transitional for businesses.

Considering that digital transformation failures can range from 66% to 84%, businesses have to be prepared to face challenges and overcome them effectively. Digital transformation of your business is not a decision that you take overnight. More importantly, you should not do it just because your competitors are doing it. There are successful case studies of companies that have driven value through digital transformation such as Uber, Airbnb, and Yelp, but not all businesses achieve the same success.

Even before you set out to digitally transform your business, you should ask yourself: what is digital transformation, and do I need it? Once you have answers to these questions, you can proceed to ask more pertinent questions that can potentially affect the outcome of the digital transformation, such as follows:

1.  Why is the transformation required for my business?

As is true for any major project that your business embarks on, it is important to set the end goals that you want to achieve through digital transformation. Setting goals is a great way to narrow down your primary priorities and how a digital transformation can play a role in achieving those priorities. digital transformations can affect all aspects of your business making it even more important to analyze if you are ready. Ask yourself what problems will you be able to solve through the digital transformation.

As a business owner, you should also assess why digital transformation seems to be the next step for your business. Are you looking to reduce costs? Or transform processes? Make workforce more efficient? If you are unable to find any reason, it is probably not the right time to go ahead with it.

2.  How is it going to affect my processes and overall business?

What business owners often forget is that digital transformation is just as much of a business transformation as any other major business decision that you take. A comprehensive digital transformation can affect all your stakeholders including employees, as well as customers. Thus, it is important to list down the different kinds of impacts that digital transformations can have on your business – especially on your daily processes and operations.

Value creation is an important part of any digital transformation and as a business owner, you need to assess the value that will be generated through the digital transformation efforts that you are embarking on.

Digital transformations will inevitably affect all aspects of your business, which is why it is important for your to see if the changes brought on by the digital transformation will be worth it in the end.

3.  What can I do to empower the digital transformation?

Digital transformation is a largely technological process and undoubtedly requires IT expertise. But even as the owner of a non-IT business, you have a major role to play in the digital transformation of your business. Such transformations require an adept leader who can guide and motivate the digital transformation process and drive it to fruition. Business leaders can enable the teams that are driving the transformation to do better, and also keep a check on the budget and the timelines.

Digital transformation can be a challenging processing spanning months or in some cases, even years. The onus of being patient and channeling motivation across the workforce falls on the fierce leader that heads the organization. Your experience and acumen as a business leader can be a great asset to the success of the digital transformation of your business.

4.  Do I need additional tools or partners to accomplish this?

The sign of a true leader is not his ability to accomplish everything on his own. It lies in his ability to acknowledge and ask wherever they think they lack the expertise. As mentioned before, digital transformation is a largely IT-driven process and can involve several crucial and important decisions that require technological expertise. If you are the owner of a non-IT business and want to implement a digital transformation, it is a good idea to leverage digital transformation tools and partners.

You can hire a project manager who has vast experience in implementing digital transformations, have an IT team that monitors and moderates the technological decisions within the digital transformation, or purchase tools that can make it easier for you to implement digital transformation in your organization.

5.  How are my teams going to collaborate and communicate?

Collaboration and communication are two processes that boost your business processes in every possible way. One of the major ways to accomplish this is through the implementation of processes and tools that can bolster communication and collaboration among your employees. Communication between teams can be vital in driving inter-departmental collaboration.

Furthermore, team collaboration could be a great way to drive your digital transformation and make sure that it is effective. Employees can help each other overcome challenges that can arise as a result of the transformation.

6.  What are the main challenges that I should expect from transformation?

The challenges associated with digital transformation can affect all levels and departments of an organization. Digital transformation can also affect the customers of an organization making it even more important for organizations to assess possible challenges in advance. It is also important for organizations to consider the resources and processes that would be required to successfully mitigate challenges that arise from a company-wide digital transformation.

You should ask yourself questions such as – do we have enough resources to face the challenges? Do we have enough capacity to handle any possible negative impacts of the transformation? Seeking answers to these questions can ensure that organizations are able to cope with some of the major issues that arise from digital transformations.

Digitally transform your business

Digital transformations can make or break your business. If implemented properly, digital transformation can help you reduce costs and improve your organizational processes. However, if done incorrectly, it can result in losses for your business, as well as lower productivity among your team members. Asking yourself the aforementioned key questions can be crucial in setting goals and expectations for the transformation, and can thus provide you with metrics with which you can measure the success of your digital transformation.

With a brick-and-mortar store, your business can reach a locality or a town or a city to the maximum. The marketing strategies therein too have a limited reach. But, if you wish to go global; digital presence and digital marketing are your best options.

Opening up the online world has made it easier to become an entrepreneur. As the digital world offers an opportunity to businesses to flourish without the requirement of any physical store, leasing, maintenance staff, sales staff, etc. the overall business development costs have lowered significantly. Moreover, the technology-based on-demand business setups require websites or mobile apps with low development and app maintenance costs for their functioning; which makes them an easier option for occupation, especially for business-minded individuals. But, to stay viable in this ever-expanding space, businesses need to find ways and digital marketing strategies that help them to stay afloat and in viewers’ focus.

Importance of Digital Marketing

We live in a digital world where businesses mushroom and evolve by communicating and connecting with a world audience daily through posts, blogs, articles, content, etc. Digital marketing is a broad term that includes all this and more.

Digital Marketing is the advertising of businesses, brands goods, products, services, etc. through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps.

According to global reports, the content marketing revenue worldwide reached 42.15 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. With an year-on-year growth of 14.4 percent, the growth of the marketing budget for companies is ample proof that businesses have been vying for ways to reach their target audiences.

Let us understand the reasons for this growth in greater detail:

1.  Customizable costs:

With television and radio advertising, businesses are required to shell out a bomb. Also, they tend to reach only a small section of society that views or listens to those channels. There is no such limit with digital marketing. A business can spend as much or as little as they may want, on a per day or even a per hour basis. Famous digital media platforms like Google, Facebook, etc. in fact provide businesses with their dashboard to control their ad-spends.

2.  A much larger Audience

More than half the world owns a smartphone and spends more than 4 hours a day on its apps(apart from the work requirements). Digital Marketing helps businesses to reach this audience. It thus makes the online world the perfect platform for marketers to showcase their products and services to the targeted audience, and multiply viewership and sales.

3.  Customer Connect

Digital Marketing is the most effective way for businesses to connect with their viewers. Social media posts, blogs, articles, etc. provide an open option for customers to respond and comment; they open up a communication channel for customers and businesses to communicate and understand each other.

4.  Varied Options

As digital media includes text in the form of content, blogs, articles, press releases, etc. as well as images, infographics, and videos; it provides marketers a plethora of choices to marketers to develop and evolve their brand names as per their target audience and overall costs involved.

5.  Evolved Customer Understanding

With the development of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine Learning solutions, businesses can easily track user’s online movements, collect data about the same and utilize it to analyze their expectations and requirements. Thus, digital marketing ensures that businesses know their intended viewers and customers well.

6.  Higher Customer Engagement

Digital Marketing includes several types of content including infographics, images, and videos that tend to inculcate a higher degree of interactive content for the users.  It is far easier to incorporate all these content types into digital marketing than any other type of publicity campaign.

7.  Better handling of Competition

As a business leader, you need to understand that though you may or may not want to spend on digital marketing; your competitors will. As the scope of digital marketing grows on a global scale, it is necessary to leverage the same for your business to stay viable amongst the growing competition.

8.  Window to the world

Digital marketing with its various social media handles and writeups; enables businesses to put across their vision and mission to their viewers. Also, it helps to put forth your mindset and make things clear to your audience, when you get stuck in an unavoidable or difficult situation.

9.  Better market research

With digital marketing tools and strategies like surveys, etc.; businesses can get a clearer vision of the industry they tend to step into.

Final Words

Digital Marketing has the prowess of opening up Pandora’s box of opportunities for any business. With its ease and effectiveness of reaching a global audience and the varied options of marketing like Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing, App Store Optimization, Big Data Personalization, In-store Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Live Video Streaming, Site Optimization, etc. that it provides; the strategy is unavoidable for all business fabrics.

Content:

• What is digital marketing?
• Digital marketing tactics and examples
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Content marketing
  • Social Media Marketing (SMM)
  • Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
  • Native advertising
  • Marketing automation
  • Email marketing
  • Online-PR
  • Inbound marketing
• What does a digital marketer do?
• What business will digital marketing be good for?
  • B2B digital marketing
  • B2C digital marketing
• What are the benefits of digital marketing?
  • Website traffic analysis
  • Effective content and lead generation
  • Attribution Modeling
• Types of digital content you should create
• How does mobile marketing fit into a digital marketing strategy?
• Conclusion

Knowing how accessible the Internet is now, would you believe me if I said that the number of people joining the World Wide Web is growing daily? In fact, in the last three years alone, the number of “regular” users among the adult audience has increased by 5%.

The Internet has significantly changed and continues to change the way people live and how they make decisions. Shopping methods are no exception. Life smoothly flows online. This means that offline marketing is already less effective. Marketing today is taking on a different form with the use of digital technology.

Marketing has always been to meet with the target audience at the right time and in the right place. Therefore, today you need to meet her where she lives – on the Internet. Therefore, if you are not yet using digital marketing tools in your business, now are the time to rethink your approach to promoting your business and adopt the tools that help you do business online.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a set of marketing activities using various digital tactics, tools, and communication channels to communicate with the target audience. Potential customers spend most of their time – online.

Some several tactics and tools are relevant to the concept of digital marketing. This is the company’s website itself and digital marketing channels – online promotion and customer acquisition channels: SEO, online advertising, and email marketing, sales funnel, content marketing, and teaser advertising, SMM, etc.

A business that uses different digital marketing course in Lahore and channels can interact with the target audience much more efficiently and promptly, thereby continually increasing the number of new customers and audience loyalty.

Digital Marketing Tactics and Examples

The best digital marketers have a clear understanding of how each digital marketing campaign supports the company’s overall goals as part of brand promotion. And depending on their marketing strategy goals, marketers can scale up their campaigns with both paid and free channels.

For example, a content marketer might write a series of blog posts to generate leads based on a new eBook recently released by a company. A social media marketer (SMM manager) will promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on company profiles.

The email marketer will compose emails detailing the company and send them to those who downloaded that e-book. I’ll talk about all the specializations of digital marketers a little later. Here’s a quick rundown of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels that each uses.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization of your site (aka SEO optimization) will help it occupy higher search results. This increases the volume of organic (free) traffic.

SEO tools:

• Web sites;
• blogs;
• Infographics.

Content Marketing

This term implies creating and promoting content to increase brand awareness, traffic growth, and communication with the target audience, generate leads, and attract new customers. Content marketing is considered one of the most effective yet underrated tools for promoting an online business.

Channels for implementing your content marketing strategy:

• blog posts;
• e-books and articles;
• podcasts;
• vlogs;
• lead magnets ;
• infographics;
• Online brochures and catalogs.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

This type of marketing aims to promote your brand and your content on social media. It can be used to increase your brand awareness, increase traffic, and generate leads.

Channels used by social media marketing (SMM):

• Facebook;
• Twitter;
• LinkedIn;
• Instagram;
• Snapchat;
• Pinterest.

Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC is an excellent method of driving traffic to your website. Its essence is that you pay a commission to the site owner or service provider for each click on your ad. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords. It allows you to place banner and search ads (contextual advertising). Payment is made using the same system – per click.

Paid advertising channels:

• contextual and search advertising in Google AdWords
• paid ads on Facebook;
• Twitter advertising tweets;
• LinkedIn advertising messages.

Native Advertising

The essence of natural advertising is reflected in its name – it fits perfectly into the context of the platform it is hosted on. Native ads do not contrast with the site content and look like “native” content. An excellent example of native advertising is BuzzFeed. There is also a widespread belief that advertising on social networks (Facebook or Instagram) is also native.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation involves the use of special software that automates your basic marketing operations. You can save time and labor by automating recurring tasks:

• mailing lists;
• posting schedule on social networks;
• updating the contact list;
• professional development of leads;
• lead scoring ;
• Control over the results of the advertising campaign and reporting.

Email marketing

Companies are using email marketing as a way to communicate with their audience. Email is often used to promote content, communicate about discounts and events, and direct people to a company website.

What Types of Messages Can You Send?

• subscription to news portals;
• regular mailing of letters to site visitors who have already downloaded something;
• welcome letters to new customers;
• holiday promotions for members of the loyalty program;
• Tips or a similar series of letters to strengthen customer contact.

Despite this tool’s relatively long age, email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for promoting a business and increasing sales.

Online-PR

Online PR provides extensive audience reach through digital publications, blogs, and other content sites. It is very similar to traditional PR but in the online space.

To make your PR strategy more effective, digital marketers use:

• PR outreach;
• online reviews of goods and services;
• Comments and reviews on websites or blogs.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing brings together all of the above marketing tactics. It aims to attract, engage and satisfy customers through content.

Unlike the old method of attracting customers, when companies tried to reach out to potential customers and tell about their products, inbound marketing involves an integrated approach to grab the target audience’s attention by creating and distributing useful content online. Thus, marketing turns out to be inbound because thanks to content in different formats and on other platforms, people find your company themselves and want to become your customers themselves.

1. The process goes something like this:
2. The person has a problem that he wants to solve.
3. He begins his search for a solution by searching for relevant information on Google.
4. He uses Google to find useful articles, research, tips on your blog.
5. In interacting with your content, a person understands that your company is an expert in their field and provides a product that could help him solve the problem and help him achieve his goal.
6. The person decides to become your client and places an order.

In this way, you can attract hundreds and thousands of customers every day because, unlike offline marketing, digital inbound marketing is not limited by location or time of day. Inbound marketing is based on a high-quality content strategy, which directly creates the basis for attracting the target audience’s attention in this way.

This is all made possible by the correct use of digital technology.

What Does a Digital Marketer Do?

Digital marketers are responsible for building brand awareness and generating leads across all of the digital channels a company owns (both paid and free).

These channels include:

• social networks;
• the company’s website;
• search engine ranking (SEO);
• email marketing;
• display (banner) advertising;
• Company blog.

The digital marketer tracks Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each of the listed channels. This allows you to adequately assess the performance of the company for each of the marketing tactics. In modern companies, digital marketing can be done by a variety of people. One professional (a kind of universal digital marketing courseand specialist in Lahore who knows all areas) can simultaneously master several digital marketing tactics in small ones. The larger ones have several specialists, each of whom deals with one or two digital brand channels.

What Business Will Digital Marketing Be Good For?

Digital marketing works for companies at different development stages: for a startup or an established company. Also, these tools are applicable for businesses in any area. Regardless of what your company is selling (products or services), digital marketing helps shape a customer profile, which determines the needs of your target audience and allows you to create valuable online content. But that doesn’t mean that all companies should implement their digital marketing strategy in the same way.

B2B Digital Marketing

If your company is a B2B business (business to business), all your digital marketing efforts will generate leads online. And, ultimately, to establish is direct contact with a potential buyer. Therefore, the role of your marketing strategy is to generate high-quality leads for your sales force. This is what you will do with your website and existing digital channels. In addition to your website, it’s also wise to use a business-oriented channel like LinkedIn because that’s where your target audience resides.

B2C Digital Marketing

If your company operates on the B2C (business to consumer) principle, your digital marketing strategy will be different. All your efforts should be aimed at attracting people to your site and so that they subsequently become your customers, bypassing direct contact with the seller. However, don’t forget to consider the price point of your product. It largely determines the digital marketing strategy.

B2C marketing doesn’t require you to throw all your energy into traditional lead generation. A more logical tactic is to create an accelerated customer journey. This means optimizing the process itself as much as possible from when the client enters the site until he makes a purchase. For B2C companies, channels such as email marketing, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest prove to be more valuable than LinkedIn’s business-focused platforms.

What are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?

The main advantage is the ability to build communication with the target audience where they spend more time. Today it is online. The Internet is replacing television. Suppose 30 years ago, and a TV was the primary source of information and a channel for interacting with the world. In that case, today, users like to communicate online – through applications, websites, and social networks.

Plus, unlike most offline marketing activities, digital marketing allows marketers to see concrete, measurable results in real-time. If you have placed an advertisement in a newspaper at least once, you understand how difficult it is to track the actual number of people interested in your advertising. And there is no reliable way to know if the ad generated a sale. With digital marketing, you can realistically estimate the ROI (return on investment) for literally every marketing area.

Website Traffic Analysis

Digital analytics software allows you to see the exact number of people who have viewed your site’s homepage in real-time. Among other analytics data, you can also see how many pages they visited, what device they used, and where they came from (from which resource).

This data will help you prioritize correctly. You will understand which marketing channels you should spend more money on and which ones should spend less. This will optimize your budget and processes to improve the effectiveness of your brand promotion.

Effective Content and Lead Generation

Imagine you’ve created a brochure about your product and mailed it to people you consider potential customers. So this brochure is also a form of content, but offline. The only problem is that you never know how many people opened your brochure and how many immediately threw it into the bin.

Now imagine that you have posted this brochure on your website and sent it out by email. And you can see how many people viewed it, how many people followed the link, and how many people were interested in your offer. Besides, you can know how many people have done this or that action and who these people are. You can track the gender, age, location, and interests of these people. All of this data will improve your understanding of your target audience and enhance other marketing campaigns.

Types of Digital Content You Should Create

The type of content you create directly depends on your audience’s needs at different stages of the customer journey. Therefore, start by creating a client portrait to define your audience’s goals and objectives and how your company can help your audience reach them. Your online content should help people achieve these very goals and solve their problems.

Now you need to consider what stage of the customer journey people will be ready to perceive your content in the best way. This is called content mapping. With mapping, your goal is to get the content right. He must consider the following factors: Characteristics of the person to whom it is intended (and here the portrait of the client will be very useful to you); how close the person is to make a purchase.

In terms of the format of your content, there are many different channels you can use. I’ll show you some of them so you can apply them every step of the way. Here are some options that I recommend using at each stage of the customer journey:

How Does Mobile Marketing Fit into a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Mobile marketing is one of the critical components of digital marketing. Smartphones account for 69% of all time spent consuming digital content. These are global statistics. This means that it is vital for you to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. People who interact with your company online via mobile devices should have the same positive experience as they would when using the desktop version.

There are many ways to optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users. Whichever digital marketing strategy you implement, you must consider how it will look on mobile devices. Only by achieving high-quality display on both desktop and mobile will your digital technology be able to deliver the results you expect.

Conclusion:

Outdoor advertising and digital television are losing ground faster every day. The Internet provides endless opportunities for the growth and development of any business. And even one that seemed 100% offline. Detailed analytics and the ability to reach a broad audience without borders speak of digital marketing’s absolute advantage.

And this is increasingly being proven in practice by companies from different industries. Therefore, if you are not yet using these tools in your business, you should revise your approaches and start right now. There are many advertising and marketing agencies that you can turn to for help. They are ready to share their experience and help you implement your marketing strategy. These agencies provide different services and help you avoid mistakes that you can make due to a lack of knowledge.

But this does not mean that all aspects of digital marketing cannot be mastered on your own. It only takes time and desire. Understanding the basics of digital marketing and knowing what digital marketing is, aka digital marketing, or just digital, and knowing how the leading digital marketing channels work, you can develop a strategy that will help you effectively promote your business on the Internet.

Digital marketing has taken the world by the storm and every business is utilizing digital marketing to put their business on a world map. Also, as digital marketing enlarges the digital footprint of the organization, the business feels digital marketing is inevitably, a part of the business.

Recently, there have been many upcoming trends in digital marketing that are changing the way you endorse your brand digitally. Each day, new trends are being introduced in digital marketing which offer various options to market your business digitally.

In this blog, we are going to discuss the digital marketing trends you should not ignore in 2021. Let us take a look at those:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP):

2021 woke up to the dominance of Artificial Intelligence or AI. With the way it is growing, it is sure to enter the core of businesses around the world. Also, it would replace simple jobs in the future with some already replaced.

AI analyzes the customer’s search behaviour and uses the data from social media platforms and blogs. This enables the businesses to understand the way customers look for the products and services they need. There are dedicated offshore developers available for hire who can understand your requirements and help you integrate AI and NLP in your business. 

Chatbots are the best example of the implementation of AI. We will discuss chatbots further in this article.

2. Programmatic Advertising:

Programmatic advertising uses AI for automation ad purchase, which lets you target a specific section of your target audience. For instance, real time bidding is a great example of programmatic advertising.

Since this type of automated service is efficient and fast, it significantly increases the customer conversion and cuts down on the customer acquisition costs.

When someone clicks on the webpage, the publisher of the webpage or the website places the ad impression for the bidding. The auction is held in the ad marketplace among the advertisers in the competition. In this auction, the advertiser who bids the most for the concerned ad impression, wins the auction.

The advertisement gets delivered to the customer. As the customer clicks the advertisement, the advertiser converts it into a sale and starts earning the profit.

3. Chatbots:

As we already discussed the importance and increasing use of AI, let us take a look at chatbots. Chatbots are a form of implementation of AI. An individual can have a conversation with the chatbot in a real-time environment.

These chatbots are generally used in websites when a customer wants to talk or inquire about a specific product or service. Since the chatbots are available 24/7, the customers prefer chatbots instead of talking to a human during work hours.

Initially, chatbots were used only in the tech industry. But, recently, there have been websites that employ chats in the mental healthcare industry. The individuals who are suffering from depression or anxiety, can also chat with these chatbots.

The chatbots are not considered as a replacement for a mental healthcare practitioner. But, chatbots can gather basic information about the patient and offer answers based on the concept of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The CBT works on the concept of replacing the negative thoughts experienced by an individual into positive ones.

Chatbots provide basic set of services listed as below:

• Basic form of communication
• Product or service recommendations
• Content generation and creation
• Personalized email
• E-Commerce transactions

4. Conversational Marketing:

As the concepts behind the chatbots are clarified, we know that the marketing strategies should be conversational. Brands are behaving this way because the consumer wants it in the same way – conversational. The consumer wants an answer immediately as soon as he posts his question.

With conversational marketing, a one-to-one connection is facilitated in a real time environment between the marketer and the customer. This form of marketing strategy is available for use through various channels. With this, the brands are enabled to reach the customers on their terms – using various devices, platforms and time zones that suit the customers the best.

The basic goal of conversational marketing aims to enhance the user experience using a feedback-based model. Such a model is said to offer high engagement and increased loyalty.

5. Personalization:

Personalized marketing strategy is one of the most important digital marketing trends of 2021. Personalized marketing includes personalized content, products, services, emails and more.

Various brands offer personalized content to their customers who have purchased their products or services before. Also, this makes the customer think that the brand is working hard to meet their requirements. This makes the customer bound to the brand and buy their products or services.

Conclusion:

Digital marketing trends have evolved over the last few years and have dramatically changed the way businesses market their services and brands. Also, with changing trends, it makes the businesses easier to reach their target audience and offer their products that suit their requirements.

Many people in the marketing industry consider SEO (search engine optimization) and digital marketing to be similar. Yet, they have two unique definitions and are different. There are various ways in which SEO and digital marketing perform likewise and today they work in tandem. An SEO agency is outsourced to optimize a website so that its place in search engine results is increased. They will practice a wide category of techniques and SEO best practices to achieve higher rankings in the SERPs. SEO is a subset of digital marketing and many would define an SEO specialist as one who combines digital marketing and SEO best techniques to reach their aims.

SEO Manager and a Digital Marketing expert

It has already been stated that there are several connections in these two places and many circumstances they share some of the same abilities. An SEO expert has the expertise, experience, and knowledge to optimize a website to grow traffic and earnings. A digital marketing specialist may work with an SEO specialist in a marketing campaign to improve a company’s whole exposure using digitally based media. SEO is a tool that is in the digital marketer’s toolkit. The plans shared by SEO experts and digital marketing specialists include various marketing best practices such as email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and more recently mobile marketing. However, the digital marketing specialist will have a few other options at their control such as advertisements, SMS, Television, or radio sources. Since the two overlap pretty drastically, it can be hard to separate the two. Still, the SEO specialist is concerned about improving visits to a website and the digital marketing expert is concerned with expanding a company’s overall online appearance and visibility to customers.

Upcoming Trends in Digital Marketing

Trends are favoring nearer including digital marketing techniques with SEO tactics. The trends show that 2 are mixing frequently. In history, it was thought that SEO was acceptable for business promotion but as social media extended, and mobile phone and tablet use collapsed on the view it takes more than just SEO tactics to reach the customer market. To build an efficient online appearance and achieve your potential buyers before any other opponents, you will have to include digital marketing with SEO techniques. SEO is not wasted, and it will not disappear anywhere anytime quickly. The variety in the climate of today’s industry is that you are going to have to go past SEO and include many digital marketing strategies. SEO is all about generating high-quality websites that are organized for the user.

Connecting Digital Marketing and SEO

There is no doubt that the SEO world is in a situation of constant change. Search engines are continually upgrading their techniques of ranking websites and the SEO specialist is forced to keep up with the trends. One of the more recent changes in SEO tactics is the establishment of digital marketing. The new term that appears from this development is SMI (Search Marketing Integration). As search engines proceed to broaden their gaze and complete the specifics and methods they use to look at a site and measure an agency’s sentiment, content-quality, and overall relevance, it is obvious that search is growingly flapping with other marketing approaches. This is likely to completely transform an organization’s plan for approaching sales, PR, marketing, branding, and everything else for that matter. Success will need a mixture of SEO best methods and marketing strategies.

New Business Service Measurement

There have been numerous portions that moved over the last few years for both SEO and digital marketing which have obscured the line that separated the two. Even though they are still two solo entities with singular aims, they are growing more integrated into a single, appealing strategy. The most influential question now is how the combination of these two powerful and multi-faceted tools can be applied together for the advantage of a business or company. Since no two firms are equal, it can be a hard plan. Success comes from contracting a single campaign constructed from plans from both digital marketing and SEO best methods.

Conclusion

SEO and Digital Marketing are not totally the same. While similar, they are not the same. SEO specialists have a goal to optimizing a website to get higher rankings in search engine results (SERP) and thereby improve free organic traffic. Digital marketing specialists focus on improving whole online appearance and visibility for customers using their corporate budgets, using numerous digital tools plus paid promotion to reach their marketing goals. So now you know the distinction between SEO vs Digital Marketing.

Are you confused about whether to use display ads or native ads to promote your e-commerce website?

You have come to the right place.

Online advertising can be especially beneficial for creating brand awareness. And with the number of mobile users increasing day by day, if you optimize your ads for mobile, your advertising efforts will be more effective.

Statistics have it that by appearing in mobile search ads results, a company’s brand awareness can be increased by 46%.

In this article, we will be discussing native ads and display ads, their pros and cons, and when to use them. It will give you a clearer understanding of the two ads and help you decide which one to use to promote your e-commerce website.

What are Display Ads?

Display ads, also known as banner ads are ads that attract and compel the audience of a website, social media platform, or other digital mediums to click-through to a landing page and take a specific action.

Display ads can be text-based, images, or even videos. Most display ads are charged on a cost per click (CPC) basis. It means, every time the user clicks on your ad, you’ll have to pay a certain amount based on how you have made your bid.

What’s more, display ads come in all sizes.

Here’s a display ad from Adobe:

Note that display ads are more effective on the desktop.

What are Native Ads?

Native ads are like paid content that appears in a media and match the look, feels and function of its format. You will find native ads mostly in social media feeds, or on a website page as recommended content.

“Unlike display ads, native ads don’t look like ads. Instead, they blend into the editorial flow of the page. Hence, native ads are non-disruptive,” explains Devesh Sharma of Design Bombs.

No wonder consumers look at native ads more frequently than display ads.

Take this native ad, for instance:

Naturally, the look and feel of Native ads make them more effective on mobile.

Pros of display ads

• It is visually appealing – Since display ads are graphic content, you can design and style them. You can use graphics, audio, video, etc., to stand out and attract their attention.
• It can create brand awareness – Its visual element can benefit your business by facilitating brand awareness. Very often, display ads are branded and styled with an offer. Thus, users can gather your brand’s information by merely seeing your display ad. They don’t even have to click on the ad to get the ad’s overall look and feel.
• It makes targeting and retargeting possible – You can target people most relevant to your business by creating specific parameters for your ads. You can also use it for retargeting by putting your ad in front of customers who have visited your site before. 
• It provides data – With the data provided by display ads, you can measure your marketing activities right away.
• Diversity – Display ads come in varied shapes and sizes and can be presented in different formats. You can pick a style and format depending on your goals.
• Measurable – You can measure clicks, impressions, and conversions using Google Ads and Analytics. 
• Reach – You can access countless sites from your Google Ads account.

Cons of display ads

• Lower click-through rate.
• Lower conversions.
• People usually avoid or block display ads.

Pros of native ads

• You can create branded content – As per a study, 2 in 3 GenZ, Millennials and GenX customers trust custom or branded content more than traditional ads. 
• It can engage the customers – Since the content is created by understanding the audience, they can engage with it more. Plus, when you know how, when, where, and why the content should be placed, it can create an emotional connection with the readers.
• It receives higher click-through rates – As per a study, the CTR of native ads is 8.8 times higher.
• It is less disruptive – As they are included within the content, they are less disruptive.

Cons of native ads

• It is challenging to measure metrics, such as ROI and effectiveness.
• It is costly and time-consuming.
• It has the potential to be too discrete.

When to use display ads and native ads?

As you can see, both display ads and native ads have their own advantages and disadvantages. To use them should depend on your business goals.

Use display ads for:

• Creating brand awareness.
• Targeting and retargeting campaigns.
• Attracting users to click-through to a landing page and take a specific action.

Use native ads for:

• Increasing click-through rates.
• Creating brand awareness.
• Engaging the audience.
• Providing information about your business or services to users.
• Driving traffic to your site.

Split test your ads

You can also conduct A/B testing/split testing to see which version of your ad is performing better. Here are some key features you can test and optimize to increase your click-through rates.

• Headline: Check the length, tone of voice, and play around with color, font size, contrast, etc.
• Image: Consider the background image color, number of images used, and whether you are using products or people.
• Call to Action: Test the color of the button, language, contrast, style of the button, etc.
• Copy: Are you using long-form or short-form? Does it resonate with the audience?
• Landing pages forms: Test the form length, design, and the number of fields.

Wrapping-Up

Many e-commerce businesses use marketing ads to create brand awareness, drive traffic to their website, engage users, target customers, and also for retargeting.

Launching your business on mobile-optimized platforms like Shopify Plus will make your marketing efforts easier. It can easily enable you to reach your audience and promote your products from the platform. Plus, it has high-volume traffic capacity.

Since you now know when to use display ads and native ads, you can choose the right type of ad for your business, depending on your business goals.

Display ads are mainly used for branding and targeting and retargeting customers. Native ads, on the other hand, can be used for shelling out information about your business, increasing click-through rates, and also driving users to your site.

What comes to your mind when you hear digital marketing? Search engines? Social media? Mobile apps? Email? Or websites? These are the high-level digital channels out there via which marketers endorse their brands, goods, and services.

If you take a look at the stats, in 2019, mobile devices, excluding tablets, created about half of all website traffic worldwide.

It is also said that 63.57% of the companies are actively investing their time in SEO.

There are more than 80 million small businesses that use Facebook’s free business tools. And most of the content that marketers create is for different social media channels and company websites.

It is well understood that a company needs to take the digital marketing path to remain in the competition and to succeed in this day and age.

But since a lot of questions are still asked about digital marketing – this article will answer who, why, and how of digital marketing.

Who is a digital marketer?

A digital marketer is someone who implements marketing strategies using an electronic device or the internet. Digital marketers use digital channels, including search engines, email, social media, and other websites to connect with existing and prospective customers.

Who can use digital marketing?

Any business, big or small, should adopt some aspects of digital marketing in order to stay competitive. In fact, so many businesses out there are using digital marketing.

The worldwide digital marketing spend was estimated to be $290–310 billion in 2019, and it is anticipated to reach around $330–340 billion in 2020.

Since there are so many options out there, you can experiment with different marketing strategies on a budget and implement those that best suit your business.

For instance, a business-to-business (B2B) needs to attract and convert quality leads through your business site and digital channels. Thus, B2B digital marketing will mainly focus on online lead generation for the salespeople. Business-focused social channels such as LinkedIn are best suited for B2Bs.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, on the other hand, will need to attract people via their digital marketing efforts to their website and convert them into customers without having to speak to a salesperson.

Thus, their focus will be on making the customer’s journey as fast and great as possible, from the moment a buyer lands on their site to the moment that they buy a product or service. B2C companies have to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

Social channels like Instagram and Pinterest are more suitable for B2C companies.

Why should you implement digital marketing?

If your business doesn’t have an online presence in this digital world, it will be hard for you to compete and grow your business. 

Here are some crucial reasons why you should implement digital marketing:

• Global reach: If you have a website, you will be able to find new markets and trade internationally without having to invest much.
• Lower cost: Digital marketing will incur lower costs than traditional marketing, provided you have proper planning and have a well-targeted campaign to reach the right audience.
• Track and measure results: By using web analytics and other online metric tools, businesses can analyze their marketing efforts. Having detailed information about how customers engage with your site or responding to your ads will help you breach any loopholes in your strategies.
• Personalization: People feel frustrated when they receive irrelevant emails or read irrelevant website content. They engage better with personalized content. 91% of customers say they are more likely to buy from brands that deliver offers and recommendations relevant to them. Linking your customer database to your site can help you to offer targeted offers.
• Improved conversion rates: Since digital marketing can be seamless and instantaneous, unlike traditional marketing, you will see enhanced conversion rates.

How to create a digital marketing strategy?

From personas to selecting the right tools, there are several things that can determine your digital marketing strategy’s success. Here’s the initial work you need to do to ensure your digital marketing strategy is successful:

• Create customer personas: Buyer personas can be created by surveying and contacting your pre-defined target group. Online tools such as MakeMyPersona can help you with it.
• Define your goals: Without defined goals, your digital marketing strategy won’t work. Also, make sure that those goals are suitable and measurable.
• Focus on blogging: Creating high-quality content is crucial for any digital marketing strategy. And blogging is an excellent way to create high-quality content. It will help you bring more traffic to your website, reinforce social media presence, give a competitive edge, and rank you high on search engines. Outsource your work to an SEO agency for the best results.
• Automate marketing: The leading marketing automation platforms can take your digital marketing strategy to the next level. They will make it easier to automate activities such as email marketing, content marketing, lead generation, and so on. 
• Focus on building a mobile-optimized site: With the number of mobile phone users increasing daily, there is no reason why you should not be building a mobile-optimized site. Focus on page speed, site design, and various other SEO practices to offer the best experience to your site visitors. Also, ensure to review your mobile responsive design and email templates. You have to implement only the latest methods and deliver only relevant and latest data.
• Make yourself easily accessible to customers: If you connect the right way with your audience, your business will automatically grow. To ensure that your customers are not making an effort to communicate with you, avoid asking for irrelevant data on your landing pages and making call-to-actions clearly visible on the website.

Wrapping-Up

Digital marketing is something your business cannot avoid in this digital era. Thus, you need to be aware of the latest trends and strategies of digital marketing and how to implement them.

You can always refer to this article to eliminate any doubt about who, why, and how of digital marketing. Also, make sure that you are incorporating some digital marketing strategies so that you can gain a competitive edge and grow your business.