The Power of Digital Marketing

By Ankur Jhunjhunwala

The entire world is going online. With this massive shift in human behaviour, a new platform has appeared for marketers to market their products – the internet. There are billions of internet users, each one a potential client for a company. Digital marketing helps companies reach these users online and showcase their products and brands.The entire world is going online. With this massive shift in human behaviour, a new platform has appeared for marketers to market their products – the internet. There are billions of internet users, each one a potential client for a company. Digital marketing helps companies reach these users online and showcase their products and brands. Digital marketing is the use of internet technologies to market your product and brand to your target customers. Digital marketing utilises various tools like websites, analytics, social media, mobile devices, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to better reach customers. The backbone of digital marketing is content marketing. Content marketing is creating content (articles, blogs, photos, videos, etc.) about your products which are consumed by your target audience. A lot of activities in digital marketing depend on using the content to market your products. Example: optimising the article you have created by adding keywords to improve SEO of your website, creating a video and promoting the video in social media, YouTube, etc. Digital marketing has huge advantages over traditional marketing. Traditional marketing has a lot of limitations which are compensated by digital marketing. Some of them are:

1. Traditionally only big companies could capitalise on expensive marketing tools to build brands but with digital marketing even small businesses can build brands and use marketing to reach out to customers.
2. Not only is digital marketing cost effective (you can easily reach more than 80,000 of your target audience by spending mere Rs 5000) but it also provides important data about the results of the ad that has been run. This is not possible with traditional marketing. For example: you cannot find out the number of people who interacted with your newspaper ad; whereas, this is possible with digital marketing.
3. Digital marketing allows much more flexibility, e.g. you can start or stop ads as per your convenience; it allows you to target certain age group, particular gender, editing ads to improve past results, etc.
4. In the present time, digital marketing is imperative to build trust. If a company is not available online, the company may not be considered authentic or trustworthy.
5. A good website, a good Facebook page helps you build your brand. The first point of contact for companies now-a-days is the website. Your website and Facebook page create the first impression. A sloppy website or Facebook page can greatly hamper your brand image.

Digital marketing allows even a small company to tap into the huge target audience. Even with a small budget or no budget, small companies can increase visibility. Internet rewards businesses that are creative. If your content is creative, you are awarded by your audience by comments, likes and most importantly by sharing. When your audience shares your content, it has a multiplier effect which is as good as running ad campaigns online. Sasto Deal in its starting years ran many contests that helped them create this multiplier effect. They gained a lot of visibility simply by coming out with creative and interesting games and challenges. An example of a startup in Nepal that has used digital marketing to build a brand name for itself is Happy Bean Bags Nepal. They make bean bags in Nepal and have a store in Kathmandu, and supply bean bags to homes, offices, etc. Happy Bean Bags has used digital marketing since the inception of their company. Sahil Agrawal, the co-founder of the company, says that initially they thought that establishing a brand and marketing their products was only possible with a hefty budget. But using digital marketing, they have successfully established their brand as a household name in a short time. Using various segmentation strategies, the company has received amazing visibility and good return on investment. With the increase in number of social media users and smart phones in Nepal, they have been able to broaden visibility and customer base with minimum expenditure. An important thing to learn from Happy Bean Bags is that keeping the page relevant and in the minds of customer requires regular new content. They regularly come up with creative posts, offers, engaging competitions which have given a top of the mind recall for this brand. Content upload not only helps in keeping your brand relevant but it also helps in SEO. Search engine optimisation is an important technique used to improve ranking for your webpage. So when someone searches for your product or similar products in a search engine, if SEO is done well, then your page will show up in the first page of the search result. SEO is not a one time job, it has to be continuously be done by uploading new and relevant content. Did you know that the first 18 characters of your Facebook post help in SEO by notifying a search engine about what the post is about? There are many other similar techniques that small companies can use to make a big impact without burning holes in their pocket. Growth hacks are creative techniques that digital marketers use to gain a much higher return by applying little yet innovative ideas. Some examples are: when Airbnb was founded, it listed all properties on craigslist.com as well. This gave them the huge advantage of tapping into craigslist.com’s user base. Apple used “sent from my iPhone” as a salutation for emails, this was a very innovative technique to build your brand. By changing the font size, or colour theme of a website, websites have found that the time users spend in their website increases. These creative techniques can easily help increase brand recall and user inflow by applying minimal effort. An important trend in Nepal is lack of reporting and evaluating results after each campaign. Digital Marketing allows you to keep track of the number of people who saw your ad, how many people clicked on the ads, how many people played the videos, etc. For certain types of businesses it is even possible to calculate the amount of business they received from that campaign. Using the results of one campaign to evaluate the result of another campaign is easily possible using digital marketing. Therefore, such simple strategies can be followed by companies to make their campaign more effective ensuring that each rupee they spend can yield them good results. Digital Marketing is a vast ocean which includes SEO, social media marketing including: Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc., Google display network, Google ad words, content marketing, native ads, etc. Businesses in Nepal mostly focus on marketing only on Facebook (there are a lot of businesses that sell only through Facebook). But there are a lot of other platforms that business can use to market their products increasing their effectiveness. Google is a very good alternative that businesses can embrace as it shows ads during the moment of truth – when people are searching for products! Google Display Network is another great platform. Google Display network consists of a huge database of websites (more than two million websites with a reach of more than 90% internet users worldwide) where your ads are shown based on the similarity of the ad and that of the website. Facebook also has created a similar network of websites and apps called Facebook Audience Network. Investing in different platform allows companies to reach different types of target audiences. It is also important for businesses to try other digital marketing platforms because of the decreasing reach of Facebook over time. As the competition increases, you tend to get a lower returns on the same investment since Facebook works on auction model. There are bidders who are willing to pay more to reach that same target audience. Businesses in Nepal will find that return on investment on Facebook will start decreasing in the future making it essential for them to try investing on different platforms. All in all, digital marketing is a great alternative for marketing products. Companies need to keep the following in mind when using digital marketing for their businesses:

1. Create interesting and relevant content.
2. Regular content (post update) not only keeps your brand relevant but also helps in SEO.
3. Exploring other tools for digital marketing (apart from Facebook)
4. Keeping track of results of your ad campaign and optimizing campaigns to yield better results.
5. Using analytics offered by Facebook, Google to see the change in user flow in your page and take actions to increase traffic.

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AnkurJhunjhunwala is the founder of Digital Marketing Nepal. He has developed a Nepal-focused full length course on Digital marketing and he is a faculty in colleges like KCM, KUSOM, etc. He can be reached at [email protected]