Choosing the best way to market your business can be challenging and needs to be well researched. Given the variety of marketing channels that you can use to promote your business, you first need to know who you want to reach.
Know your target audience & market needs
Whether you are marketing locally or outside your country, you ought to have information about your potential customers. This information should include age, gender, location, interests, income level and, education. Once you have listed all of that information you will have a basic idea of your target audiences.
Also know the market needs: you have to become accustomed to the market needs. For example, what are the commodities popular at that period? What is the market orientation? What are the most followed channels? For example, Facebook advertisements might be the best marketing way in a specific field and a specific country, while in other markets, Twitter is the best and most popular social networking site.
Your knowledge of the means of communication in a specific area such as the most popular local newspaper or news website is one way to reach your potential customers.
Also worth mentioning – advertising laws differ from one country to another. Learn about marketing laws before you promote your products in any target country.
Setting your marketing budget
Important points that should be considered when setting your marketing budget include calculating the incurred expenses before making a sale (number of customers who can be served, extra marketing-associated costs); sizing the potential customers/ target market.
Marketing costs vary and include costs of creating online classified ads, costs of buying materials such as images for the site, licenses for the music and sound effects you want to use, hiring people or agencies to create, publish and monitor your advertisements, no matter if you depend on one marketing way or more. You have to take into consideration that all these expenses are going to add up and that you need to know what they are to avoid bearing extra costs and know how much returns you will generate from this business.
Traditional marketing (newspaper, TV, or radio advertisements) rarely allows you to measure impact and reach; online marketing on the other hand enables you to know how many people clicked on your advertisement and how many people purchased something on your website, which allows you to measure your ROI more clearly.
7 reasons make digital marketing the growth gateway for entrepreneurs and emerging companies
Digital marketing does not represent a single field as some may think; it is a broad world that includes many different fields, including Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), E-mail Marketing
Here are 7 most important reasons why you should develop a digital marketing plan for your own business:
1. Ease of setting marketing objectives
Unlike traditional marketing mechanisms in which it is difficult to define your goals accurately, digital marketing enables an entrepreneur to proceed according to the various marketing stages with specific realistic and viable goals within a certain period. You can imagine your ad being broadcast on a billboard in a square; can you estimate how many people saw the ad or how many people interacted with it? Imagine your ad appearing on a website or a social media platform in which a dashboard enables you to monitor and analyze your ad results and ensure that your marketing campaign goals have been accurately reached.
2. Flexibility to edit ad during the marketing campaign
If your ad has already appeared on a TV channel or a billboard and then you have discovered that there is an error that necessitates the ad to be edited or canceled, how much time, effort, and cost will be taken to correct the error in your ad? On the other hand, if your ad has appeared on a digital platform, then you need only a push of a button on your computer to stop the ad and edit it within a few minutes.
3. Reaching the precise target segment
All types of digital marketing platforms enable an entrepreneur to target his potential customers precisely according to several mechanisms including but not limited to: reaching the target segment according to its geographical location, interests, gender, nationality, marital status, activity, interaction on the content of social media platforms or the websites that they interact well with. You can also re-target your current customers again with different ads by inputting the data related to their mobile phone numbers, emails, and other mechanisms through which you can access the target segment precisely.
4. Achieving marketing goals at the lowest cost
Digital marketing platforms top the list of marketing platforms of the lowest cost in all marketing stages; they enable you to reach a potential customer or his interaction with the content or to complete a purchasing process or other results on the various platforms.
5. Helping build trust with potential customers
In traditional marketing platforms, you always talk about yourself, your service, or your product, always highlight your advantages and directly request your potential customers to go through the experience of buying from you. In contrast, digital marketing platforms focus on the customer in the first place; in this case, you focus on customers’ concerns and problems, provide solutions to them and start an effective conversation to build trust between you and them.
6. Creating a state of effective communication between a customer and marketing team
With all the traditional marketing platforms such as TV, radio, etc. you are the only speaker and display your product without any response or interaction from the other side; you do not know how much your target segment is interested in your ad and will not be able to receive any feedback from it. In contrast, digital marketing platforms enable you to effectively communicate with potential customers by allowing them to evaluate your product or send suggestions, comments, or complaints on social media platforms, e-mail, or other means of communication offered by digital marketing platforms.
7. Analyzing and measuring results accurately
On digital marketing platforms, you measure and analyze your results accurately during the marketing campaign. This enables you to pinpoint the pros and cons of your marketing plan and hence develop a more effective marketing plan in the following stages.
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