What is digital marketing? How does it impact your startup business?

 What is digital marketing?

It is the term used to describe the marketing services of integrated market used to attract, convert and even engage customers online. Digital marketing is basically the process of the promotion of material or anything with the help of one or more kind of electronic media. Nowadays you must be very good at digital marketing in online world to get more eyes on your merchandise.

For example, ways of advertising which might be used as the part of digital marketing strategy of any business must include promotional efforts made with the help of the social media, internet, online marketplace, electronic billboards and mobile phones, even also with the help of internet ads television and radio channels.

The role of digital platforms:

Its role in supporting multichannel marketing is very important sort or component part of digital marketing, oftenly overlook. Online channels also manage to support the buying process for small-scale to large-scale customer relationship.

How does it work?

Source:http://www.slideshare.net/liblog/cipraworkshop-future-communications-by-michael-slaby-edelman-digital 

Measuring The Effectiveness of Digital Marketing :

• The ultimate criteria to expand any type of business initiative should be its return on every investment or different financial metrics in common; the evaluation criteria for the digital marketing campaigns can be discussed in more briefly.
• All the criteria or metrics is classified according to their type and time of span. According the type, either we can evaluate these campaigns quantitatively or qualitatively. Quantitative metric includes “Sales Volume” and “Revenue Increase or Decrease”.
• On shifting the focus to the time of span, we may or may not need to measure some “Interim Metrics”, if the overall initiative was successful or not. As an example, most of social media metrics and indicators such as shares, likes and comments may be classified as interim metrics while the final increase/decrease in sales volume is clearly about from the final category.
• The correlation between these categories should exist for sure. Or else disappointing results will happen at the end in-spite of the illusion of success perceived early during the project.
• In contrast to traditional methods of marketing, Digital Marketing generates more revenue and is less time consuming.
• Digital Marketing provides exact data and figures whereas in traditional business, we work on Approximate data and figures, which are not exact.
• Due to changing trends and advancing technology, Internet has become a great medium for advertising. It provides marketing on one click.

Conclusion:

Digital marketing is all about utilizing every digital technology to achieve your marketing goals or objectives. There is no necessary need for the digital marketing to be separate from the marketing department all the time. The objectives of both are very similar. For now, it remains a very useful term because of the requirements of certain skills for utilization of the digital technology necessarily. As per our developing skills report, many of the marketers are now spending more than 50% of their precious time on the digital marketing activities or terms and two of the three top job roles in marketing are digital, so clearly digital skills are needed.

Growth hacking – your tool to success

Growth hacking has been around and the word has taken many business owners in its grip. Every new start-up is looking for growth hackers to make millions of money and ridiculously increase their sales figure. Those who are aware of the word, know what we are talking about but those who are new to this term, let me explain a bit about growth hacking.

Growth Hacking Overview:

Growth hacking is only a few years old, around 6 years old. The term was first coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis. Growth hacking is a way to increase the social reach of the brand or product. The word hack means a way which is different than the traditional way of doing things; the hacker uses innovative and creative ways to get the job done. Unlike the detailed marketing strategy, the focus of growth hacking and growth hacker is to focus on end result i.e. increasing sales and generate more and more brand awareness. Growth hackers, with their knowledge of product and distribution, find new and technologically advanced ways to promote the product and find new avenues of growth.

Growth hacking has 4 different phases:

• Product-market fit
• Growth is hacked
• Viral
• Retention and optimization

Why has growth hacking become a survival guide for startups?

Growth hacking is kind of marketing; the only difference is that it is only result oriented. Most of the startups initially lack funds and cannot afford to have a big marketing team to plan and strategize their growth. The upsurge of growth hacking has brought forth a modern and new approach that transmogrifies their business without spending much on marketing team and implementation of strategies.

The crux of the matter is that growth hacking is important for startups because:

• They are uncertain about the market response and a good growth hacking strategy works well for them.
• They need quick growth , although growing numbers is a dream of any business but the start-ups need to work fast and grow faster to make their name established in the market.
• They don’t have access to so many resources and brand equity.

There are various tools available which work as a survival guide for the startup, few of them include the following :

• Analytics
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Lead Generation
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing
• SEO
• Marketing Automation
• Landing Pages
• Social Media

Growth hacking and Digital marketing, what’s the difference?

Well, for most of the people the terms are chaotic or sometimes used interchangeably but there is borderline between growth hacking and digital marketing. Growth hacking deals scalable methods to increase sales and generate brand awareness. It includes everything that drives traffic to your website, retention of customers, word of mouth or anything that promotes your business and motivates the customers to come back to your website. It can be your email signature or a leaderboard in your website or anything that entices and engages the prospective customer.

On the other hand, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s about promoting brands through different ways and medium.

To sum it up, it can be said that growth marketing is a level up of digital marketing.

Marketing automation – The secret element that will make your startup thrive

Any new business has a lot of work on its to-do list, but as compared to the earlier times, the modern world and entrepreneurs are blessed with technologies and tools that have simplified the task. As the time is passing, we are witnessing new tools and techniques unfolding and showing a new way of doing business. Whether its ways of promotion, marketing, connecting and advertising, business in every form has a strong influence of technology. Marketing automation is one such tool which has simplified business and has helped in streamlining the process which helps in removing bottlenecks.

What is marketing automation?

It’s a software platform which helps in automating your marketing and sales engagements such that you are able to generate more leads and gain your customers’ loyalty. Overall it ensures making your business a success by removing bottlenecks.

Marketing automation can be a great help if merged with sales and marketing team, it allows the team to work together and helps in optimizing leads.

Here are the benefits of marketing automation:

• It helps in generation of more leads
• It helps in qualifying leads
• It helps in prioritizing the leads so that you can convert them
• It helps in managing all marketing emailers
• It helps in generation more leads

The benefits of the marketing automation can be reaped by entrepreneurs who have newly entered the business and those who are a well-established name in the market.

Related post: How can market automation support startups through festive season?

The sole objective of implementing marketing automation is that it helps in enhancing the performance of the sales and marketing team by streamlining their way of work and also prioritizing the leads which help enclosure and sales. Under marketing automation, you don’t have to micromanage the work; instead, everything runs on autopilot which gives you enough time to focus on your core area of work. It enables you to have a 360-degree view of how your prospects are communicating with the tool and how this tool is working on converting the prospects into clients.

Overview of how marketing automation helps in enhancing the business performance:

• Saves time – The newbies and the established class in the business face the problem of time crunch, most of you will agree with me that sending emails, prioritising leads etc. bag more share in your daily work life, with marketing automation, all these tasks can be deployed to an automated tool which works as your team member so that you can focus on your work.
• One stop shop- In order to use the best of technology, most of the companies end up using an array of marketing tools which only gets you webbed in using series of marketing tools, however, with marketing automation , you have a single tool to perform multiple tasks. It gives you a complete picture of your customers likes, interest to submit up, marketing automation helps you create, deploy, manage and measure your entire asset in one place.
• Identifying sales leads- Marketing automation if merged with the CRM tool can help in understanding how customers are interacting with your marketing campaign and marketing materials, it also helps in aligning the process of sales lead prioritizing and thus helping sales team focus more on hot leads for closure.

Conclusion

Technology has come as a boon for many businesses to survive and succeed, marketing automation is the revolution in work of business and is working wonders for those who are start-ups and need to focus solely on their increasing the productivity of their business.