Why Is Digital Marketing So Important For Business Survival Right Now?

The Covid-19 outbreak has impacted countries across the globe, effectively grinding them to a halt. This outbreak has impacted all businesses, disrupting manufacturing industries and logistics on an unprecedented level. With the threat of a potential economic recession looming, businesses are prioritising investments in automation and IT operations to support remote work environments. With working from home becoming the new norm for the global workforce, now would be the time for businesses to maintain and diversify their digital marketing strategies to continue creating revenues and remain afloat. 

A dynamic digital marketing strategy with a keen focus on different key performance indicators across all digital channels and platforms is vital for businesses to survive and gain an advantage over competitors, especially in times like now. In the midst of global lockdown, people are spending more time on the internet than ever. With the population going digital and brick & mortar stores being shut down temporarily, consumers are turning to online services to meet their pre-requisite. This transition in the consumer behaviour can be capitalised by businesses through a re-evaluation of their digital marketing efforts. Let’s discuss the what, how and why of digital marketing to understand how important it is for business survival in this day and age.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing envelopes all marketing efforts that utilise the internet and digital technologies such as search engines, websites, mobile apps and social media for the purpose of brand awareness and reaching the target audience.

What are the benefits?

• Digital marketing allows you access to a global marketplace. 
• It is far more affordable than traditional advertising.
• It gives you the ability to interact and respond to your customers directly.
• It gives you the ability to analyse your customer behaviour and build better brand awareness and loyalty.
• Digital marketing provides real-time trackability of your marketing campaign efforts.
• Digital marketing helps with faster lead generation and conversion compared to traditional advertising.

What strategies should you follow?

There are different strategies that businesses can adopt to reach their target audience. The right cluster of marketing strategies can enhance and amplify the overall marketing efforts of the company.

SEO
Search Engine Optimization helps with the growth of your online visibility through organic or non-paid traffic. By optimising your website through SEO you can get better ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Better ranking on search engines translates to greater web traffic and greater conversion rate.

SEM
Search Engine Marketing refers to paid advertisements that appear on SERPs. Pay per click (PPC) is an example of SEM wherein search platforms like Google AdWords charge you a fee to display your ad on SERP for some specific keywords.  SEM assures you greater visibility and directs you to a more motivated customer, hence resulting in higher conversion rate.

Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to advertising through different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. This strategy gives immense exposure as well as the opportunity to interact and engage with the customer on an individual level. Social media marketing can help businesses to gain valuable insight into their target audience and help run more effective and high relevant ads.

Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to the practice of creating and sharing highly relevant and quality content on different platforms to attract and retain customers, ultimately to drive up sales. Content marketing is not about explicitly advertising the product or service but to create target specific content that generates interest or resolves a consumer issue. This strategy is vital for driving brand awareness and building a loyal customer base

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing refers to the process of hiring an affiliate who represents the brand for a revenue-sharing pay structure. Affiliates are paid for the conversions they help generate through their product/service promotion. Affiliate marketing gives you greater accessibility and relatability to your target audience while building brand recognition and eventually conversion. 

Email Marketing
Email marketing helps you to update your email subscribers with valuable, relevant and personalised content about your business. Email marketing has proven to be essential for winning a loyal customer base that’s interested in your product. Segmented and personalised emails can truly generate greater traffic and sales.

Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing refers to advertising on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. With smartphones becoming such a ubiquitous part of our lives, targeted mobile marketing can play a key role in the growth of your business. This includes SMS, MMS, app-based and push notifications. Text messages have a 94% open rate which makes it a great tool for marketing.

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is about leveraging all other marketing strategies to create viral content. Viral marketing can get you instant fame and brand awareness. The hype afforded by a viral marketing campaign can lead to greater visibility and sales for a short period of time.

What tools should you use?

Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing technology that helps businesses manage newsletters, mailing lists, automated email campaigns and much more. Mailchimp’s advanced analytics and user-friendly interface have made it a market leader in its realm. 80% of B2B and B2C companies choose Mailchimp over other alternatives. Mailchimp can help you design and send an infinite number of newsletters to your infinite subscribers, create and run automated campaigns, create landing pages and integrate with e-commerce stores. 

Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing software that provides access tools to help with all aspects of marketing such as blogging, social media, SEO, landing pages, emails, lead generation, automation, website management, CRM and more. Hubspot is an exceptional tool that can help amplify your inbound marketing efforts. Hubspot can not only help you create blogs, newsletters, landing pages and manage customer interaction but also analyse your marketing campaign success and track consumer behaviour. Its numerous access tools, which can be purchased individually, when combined can effectively unite the sales, marketing and support systems while optimising your marketing campaign.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that provides management and trackability of all social media channels. For companies with extensive social media presence, Hootsuite provides the ease of managing multiple social media channels all under one roof. Hootsuite allows you to draft posts for your social media in advance which enables you to pick the most optimal time to upload the post. Hootsuite makes it easy to manage customer service as it allows you to see customer questions in one single place without having to check multiple social media sites. Features such as team collaboration, social media monitoring & analytics and integrated app extensions make Hootsuite an all-inclusive social media marketing tool.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool by Google and it’s an essential tool for every digital enterprise. Google Analytics helps businesses to track and analyse all the traffic to their website. By adding Google Analytics lines of tracking code into your website’s code you can track and record every visitor to the website along with attributes such as age, gender, interests etc. It helps you to record user acquisition data(user data before they visit your website) and user behaviour data(user data when they visit your website) which quintessentially serve as a roadmap to improve the website’s user experience. It allows businesses to measure the results of individual campaigns in real-time.

Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO and SEM tool. Through the help of this tool, businesses can learn everything about their competitors. Ahrefs provide vital information such as your competitors’ web traffic, their rank for specific keywords or keyphrases on Google search, their number of inbound and outbound backlinks and much more. Unlike other SEO tools Ahrefs uses its own crawler like Googlebot, hence it is able to provide extensive details for backlink analysis. Its keyword research feature provides a list of best keywords for optimization and also lets you know which keywords your competitors are using for SEO. Features such as Content Explorer, Historical Backlink Analysis, URL Rating and Link Intersect can really help businesses to create detailed competitor analysis reports which can add greater value to their SEO strategy and give them a competitive edge. 

Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is an analytical tool that helps to track, analyse and optimise metrics of digital marketing strategies. It’s a behavioural analysis tool that can help you track and analyse your target audience behaviour in real-time. This is vital information to understand where your marketing tactics are falling short so that you can focus on revenue-making areas and gain more traction in attracting and retaining customers. Kissmetrics, unlike its competitors, is a paid tool. Its features help you to measure the effectiveness of all marketing strategies, conversion rate and user engagement.

Buzzsumo 
Buzzsumo is a content marketing tool that allows users to know what content is trending on social sites. Buzzsumo provides information on what topics are popular across multiple social media channels along with attributes such as platforms where these topics are being discussed and how much attention they are getting. Its analytical tools can give you valuable insights into your competitors and help you learn from their strengths and weaknesses, saving you valuable time and optimising your content marketing strategies. Buzzsumo has features that help its users set up keyword alerts so that they know who and where the content is being uploaded. This tool can help you understand your competition and target audience better which in turn can help create better and highly relevant content.

There are many more digital marketing tools that can help you consolidate your marketing efforts to achieve optimal results with minimal effort.

Why is digital marketing so important?

The world is going digital. So it is imperative that businesses go digital to remain relevant in a very competitive space. When your potential customer is online, you have to use digital means to reach them and that is what digital marketing provides- an effective means to connect with your online consumer. 

In these uncertain times where all businesses are suffering and many are closing their doors, digital marketing is helping businesses to continue communication with their customers. As countries continue to enforce strict social distancing, the only means of interaction now is online. By sending a consistent message across all digital platforms, businesses can help their customers feel like they are a part of the business community and that their health and well being is a priority. The message which is communicated should remain true to the brand’s profile while being sensitive to the current pandemic situation. Businesses which are swiftly realigning their digital strategies are able to stay afloat at this time. It’s necessary to leverage all your digital channels to update your target audience about your operations and the additional support and services that you might be offering during this time. As physical interactions are on the low, online interactions are on the rise. So placing your business strategically at multiple places online can give you that extra boost, visibility and revenue. Now would be the time to invest in your digital marketing channels such as SEO, social media, content and email marketing to ensure that you remain relevant and reconnect with your loyal customer base as well as attracting new ones. 

How can services like Alkye help your business?

Alkye Services specialise in building personalised digital strategies that help businesses to enhance their web presence and drive growth and revenue. Our services are designed to cater to the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in the competitive world of business. We combine our collective expertise in technology, marketing and organisational skills to help businesses grow digitally.

Digital Advertising
We offer a comprehensive digital advertising strategy for our clients that’s impactful, generates brand awareness and enhances user experience and customer engagement. We merge our best technical, creative and strategist team to bring you the best marketing campaign for your brand and target audience whether that be social media, affiliate, SEM or trade media advertising. We use advanced digital analytics to study, establish and implement a marketing strategy that would make you an industry benchmark.

Content Creation
Our team of curators create carefully researched and beautifully written content which is specifically tailored for your audience. We deliver quality work that is genuinely interesting and intuitive. We intend to create relevant and enticing blog, video & audio content that stimulate interest and encourage customer engagement all the while adding more value to your brand. 

Social Media Strategy
Our social media strategy is built to help you connect to your audience. We monitor and manage all your social media platforms to help you understand consumer behaviour and tap into potential markets. We create targeted content that’s directed to the right audience at the right time to achieve greater exposure and better response.

UI/UX Design
Our designers strive to create outstanding concepts for products and services with a focus on interactive and innovative user experience across all digital platforms including mobile apps, websites and emails. We believe in designing products and services that are highly ergonomic and are a true representation of the brand’s ethics.

SEO
Our specialists can help create more visibility for your brand online and put you on the forefront. A uniquely crafted SEO strategy will help strengthen brand awareness. We are motivated to make you an authoritative figure on SERPs and help you grow your business.

Neuromarketing
We can help you build a better business through extensive analysis of your target audience. Understanding customer behavioural patterns can positively impact your digital marketing efforts as it helps you to identify what strategies are working and what is not.

Branding & Product Design
It’s our passion to create visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing product designs that are not only beautiful but functional too. Through our designs, we help you tell a story that’s relevant, thought-provoking and inspiring.

Conversion Rate Optimisation
We use our expertise and a wide range of analytical tools to create a CRO campaign that would optimise the functionality of your digital platforms, elevate user experience and improve ROI.

Customer Research & Personas
We leverage our knowledge and data to create highly detailed customer personas that would lay the foundation for all other marketing efforts. With the help of our customer research and analysis, you would be able to create a more result-driven campaign.

In conclusion
To survive in a digital world, businesses have to adapt themselves. How we do marketing has changed with the invention of the internet. The reach, affordability and traceability of digital marketing should convince you to adopt a cluster of digital marketing strategies that would give you greater conversion rates and ROI in a shorter time frame. It is no longer logical to depend on just physical stores. Investing in building a digital presence ensures the sustainability of your business, especially in times like these.