Very often we hear the of buzz of the digital ads, internet marketing, social media marketing, etc.  Today in this blog I thought of taking you into the world of digital marketing and how it can be a generate more revenues. In this blog I shall talk about digital marketing, its importance, the process, how it you can make it a part of your business and then I will touch upon types of ads, targeting, engagement and measurement.

WHAT is Digital Marketing?

Any marketing activity done over the Internet using various digital devices is called digital marketing. 

WHY Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is the most effective and widely used method of marketing in today’s world. The key reasons why it so popular among the marketers

• Its wide and effective reach.
• It’s cost effective as it’s measureable.
• Easy process to target your niche.
• Optimization based on the performance of your campaigns.
• Due to the tracking and monitoring, performance and retargeting is made easy in Digital Marketing.

Understanding the process of Digital Marketing.

• The first step and the most important step is to identifying your Customers, which will consist a detailed research in order to target the only the potential buyers.
• Once the target audience is figured out it’s time to work on the brand awareness, that’s working on the visibility of your products.
• Based on the brand awareness campaigns, we get in the targeted customers.
• Once the customers comes in, it’s important to Engage with the customers.
• After Engagement with the customers, they convert into Leads/Sales.
• The fifth step is measurement of the campaign, based on which optimization becomes easy.
• Retention.

 Before going forward i would like you to see the Video posted in this blog, in order to understand how digital marketing can change your business around.

From where do i start?

Assume I sell a particular cosmetic products which caters the need of a girls, from a store based out of Jayanagar, Bangalore. Let’s try to integrate Digital Marketing into my business.

• Identifying the potential customers, so as the cosmetic product I sell is to cater the need of a girl. Say the age of my audience is aged between 18 and 24 years. Now moving towards to geographical research of the potential audience, say my business is set up in Bangalore and I want only people in Bangalore to see my ads. One more targeting I want to aim for is device on which I want to place my ads, say I want to display my ads on mobile only or desktop only.

   To sum up my research, the gender I am targeting is females aged 18-24 years, based in Bangalore using mobiles (you can also target specific areas in a city and particular digital devices as well). Suppose you don’t have an online store then you are restricted to put up ads which are aimed to get footfalls in the store, and target only people in Bangalore so your number of potential customers are restricted. If u have an online store then your target can be a country, just imagine the number of specific customers you will have!

• Now the Visibility, Brand Awareness & Targeting. Increase visibility – It’s a good practice to have to an online store, as this helps to increase your horizons. So I will have a website, a page on various social media platforms like Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. These online properties are owned by you, hence we can call this a owned media it is to bring in traffic to your site by inbound or outbound marketing ways. You can say it’s like push and pull in offline marketing, however this is much more effective than offline world.  You can also go in for paid media, where you can advertise on various platforms by using various platform the best are one been Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Emails Campaigns, etc

   Google Ads – Google ads is an advertising program by Google, which lets advertisers target potential customers by showing ads on Google search engine result page based on the keywords. The other service of Google Ads, is the Display Ad Network where Google lets you advertise on the network of its partner websites, currently there are 2.5 million websites registered with Google to facilitate display advertisements. What makes Google Ads effective is you pay Google only when someone clicks on the ads, you don’t pay Google if people don’t click your ads, this concept is called Pay per click (PPC).

  Facebook Ads – It’s a service by Facebook that lets us advertise on Facebook which can be seen in your newsfeeds and right sidebar.

  LinkedIn ads – There are quite performance oriented as LinkedIn is for professionals. This service is effective when you wish to target professionals on the basis of work profile. However this service is expensive when compared with Google and Facebook ads.

   All these above mentioned services allows the users to target their audience as per their needs, in our case also, targeting is based on the gender, age, location, device and interests. So I would prefer to setup the online store and go for ads for my cosmetic product store.

• The next step is engaging with audience. Now always remember not all people coming on to your site have the intention of buying but your conversations with every single customer matters. Don’t be always about selling, try to give value to your customers, like giving tips, market updates, etc. It’s also very important be act responsibly when you reply to your customer queries, reviews, comments and feedbacks. A new customer tends to go through reviews, comments and feedbacks so your replies matter a great deal to the existing customers. These things do have an impact on your new and existing customers. Remember conversions are based on how you engage with your customers.

• Conversions in the form of Leads/Sales is the final objective of digital marketing. There are two types of conversions micro and macro i.e. when a customers does a small activity like visiting your site, downloading your freebies it is a micro activity. Macro on the other hand are bigger steps like buying a product or requesting a call back, filling forms, etc. When you go for ad campaigns, it’s very important to run relevant and specific ad campaigns so only the niche audience is targeted and interested people click on the ads. Based on the clicks on these ads, the price per click, is calculated. When people with irrelevant or no interest in your offering click on your ads it is a bigger harm done to you, how? Well when people click on your ad you have to pay the publisher, when they land on your site and don’t do any activity they increase your bounce rate of the site which affects your SEO.

• Measurement –  This helps you to measure and understand your traffic and its nature for you to run ads more effectively, you can use a number of analysing tools, most popular one being Google analytics which is followed by Adobe, IBM. When it comes to Ad Campaigns, lets assume I have a ₹100 budget for a day which I distribute ₹50 for Google Ads, ₹30 on Facebook ads, ₹20 on others that is emails, SMS, etc. If we make some sales at the end of the day, by using the analytic tool we can measure the effectiveness of advertising platform used. Suppose our analytics say that our Facebook ads are generating better conversions then Google then digital marketing lets optimise these campaigns by simply reducing Google budget from₹50 to say ₹30 and increase Facebook ads by ₹20 spending ₹50 on Facebook.

• Retention of customers  is also important to keep our sales ticking, when I say retention of customers it applies to new and existing customers. We can classify the retentions in 2 types Vertical & Horizontal. Say, when a customer’s wants to buy a facewash, but along with the facewash she also ends up buying a cream this is vertical retention. When a customer buys a face wash and returns to buy the same product again it is horizontal retention.

Conclusion

By taking the digital route, it’s easier and much more effective approach to grow your business as it increases your reach to a larger, specific audience at a cost effective price.

Read about how to setup an Ecommerce website for your company.

In this blog I have tried to compile the things that you need to go online in India.  Before we start  you need to know there are multiple online marketplace which lets you have a seller account example flipkart, snapdeal, and amazon where you can simply register and list your products on these sites and start selling, however these site will charge a certain percentage on sales. Here in this blog I will be talking about how to setup your own market place.

Domain name

Whenever we start some business we always ensure it to give it a name so that it is easy for the people to find it, similarly when we go online we have to book a domain name for your business. Example, www.amazon.in, this is a domain, amazon is the domain name and .in is the domain extension.

There are various domain extensions based on the industry, country, etc. for example industry specific, .biz – small business, .edu-educational institutes, .org – non-profits groups or trade associations, .info – resource website., .in – India, .uk – United Kingdom, .us – USA, .com is a universal extension.

For our website, I would suggest a .com or an .in extension and try to keep the domain name less than 3 words. You can buy the domains on BigRock and GoDaddy.

Web hosting space

You’ll need a space to host the data of your site on the web server, hence we need to buy host spacing. The best hosting space in the market is Hostgator, however there are many more service provider like godaddy, bigrock, etc. This hosting space is linked to your domain through the name servers in the domain console. The Name servers are provided by the service provider.

Based on your requirements i.e. you have a single or multiple domains choose a suitable plan. On hostgator, there are 2 popular plan

• Hatchling Plan – lets you host single domain and gives u unlimited hosting space. It costs around ₹ 375/-month for a year.
• Baby Plan  – lets you host multiple domain on the same hosting space and gives u unlimited hosting space. It costs around ₹ 455/-month for a year.

Here is a trick to save some money hunt for coupons on google you will get up to 30% off. On special occasions like Independence Day, republic day you do get 50% off but that’s on your luck!

For a people planning to build their sites on WordPress, I would advise buy a Linux hosting.

Content and conceptualizing your site

 Plan your content in detail, your content will be the key to earn customers, you need to clearly define whether you are selling or just displaying information of your business. Another important step is to Conceptualize, that is the look and feel of the website, the content on the homepage, the process of buying. Plan your site in detail, avoid a hooch pooch content on your homepage. Think like a customer!

Development of your site

Also remember there are 2 ways of doing things, one is you learn and do it yourself or get it outsourced. Getting your website built on WordPress is always a good option as development & updating the site is easy. Remember WordPress is just a platform to build and edit a site. The theme is the thing that makes it visible to the customers when they log on to your site. These themes are available for free and paid, free theme are restricted when it comes to customisation. Paid theme lets to customise the site to a greater extent.

U can buy themes on Theme Forest, usually most of the developers buy themes from this portal and simply integrate it on WordPress and charge you a bomb. If the developer develops the site using HTML coding then it is like building the site from scratch.

Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is a medium which enables u to do transactions online. You need to subscribe for these services which is a third party vendor and customers coming to your site will make payments to these sites and the payments are redirected to you into your subscribed bank account. Some of the payment gateway providers are – CCAvenue, PayU, PayPal, AirPay, CitrusPayments, etc.

I would advise you to a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. What is SSL certificate? A SSL certificate verifies the authenticity and identity of a website owner, it uses https protocol and displays a padlock in the browser to indicate that it is trusted. This is issued by authorities like VeriSign and Thwate. This is a method to keep the data safe, the server passes encrypted data to the web browser, which is reconstructed by the browser.This certificate is provided by your Hosting space service provider which is provided by subscription costs around ₹1,350 – ₹ 2,760 based on the warranty levels on Hostgator.

Ecommerce Platforms

If you don’t want to get into the hassle of booking a domain and development and all the above mentioned steps you can simply go to platforms like Shopify, zepo, etc. These platforms take care of all these hassles and you simply start listing your products n start selling! However these companies charge quite a bomb, but based on your product and sales you can decide.

I would recommendWooCommerce, it integrates seamlessly with WordPress, and also covers Payment Gateways and shipments.

Shipment

You can subscribe from a number of shipment providers like Fedex, DTDC, Bluedart, Gati to name a few. Usually these service provide offer a wide range of services for ecommerce and prices vary based on weight and distance of the shipment. You also need to keep in mind whether the service provider offer u to have Cash on Delivery option along with the delivery. In order to track shipments you can simply subscribe to Aftership, ShipRocket and Mypacco.

Taxation

 It’s not required to set up a company to do ecommerce, in India, but I would recommend you to register as a sole proprietor. However some payment gateways asks for Business ownership documentation, so it’s better to just register an LLP. I have been a partner in LLP and its very easy to setup. You can also consult a CA or a Lawyer for better details or check out  MyOnlineCA.

You can read about marketing your sites here.