Digital marketing, online marketing, internet advertising… whatever you call it, marketing your business online is a big issue these days. After all, Internet usage has more than doubled in the last decade and this change has dramatically affected the way people buy products and interact with businesses.
What is digital marketing?
Basically, digital marketing refers to all online marketing of assets. E-mail marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, and even blogs are all excellent examples of web marketing. They help to present your business to people and convince them to buy.
Here are some of the most common digital marketing assets and strategies that companies use to reach people online:
Your Website
Almost anything can be a digital marketing asset. It simply has to be a marketing tool that you use online. That said, many people don’t realise how many digital marketing assets they have at their disposal. Here are a few examples:
- Brand elements (logos, icons, acronyms, etc.)
- Video content (video ads, product demos, etc.)
- Images (computer graphics, product photos, company photos, etc.)
- Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, testimonials, etc.)
- Online products or tools (SaaS, calculators, interactive content, etc.)
- Comments
- Social media pages
As you can probably imagine, this list only scratches the surface. Most digital marketing assets will fall into one of these categories, but smart marketers are constantly coming up with new ways to reach customers online, so the list just keeps getting bigger and bigger!
What is the role of digital marketing for a company?
Despite all the fuzziness about digital marketing, you can expect it to deliver outstanding results for businesses, can’t you?
The truth is: it does.
As a strategy, digital marketing is known to be one of the most successful. Just look at the figures surveyed from companies across Africa:
- 82% of consumers look for a product online before buying;
Digital marketing expenditure in Africa will increase to about 332 billion CFA francs by 2021. - But what do consumers and businesses gain by moving their relationship to the Internet? Understand the type of results that businesses can achieve with digital marketing.
Measure with ease
- Having trouble keeping up with your company’s marketing efforts? With traditional marketing, it can be difficult to understand how many people are engaged with your promotional materials. But we can thank the Internet for changing that.
Every time you visit a website, click on a link or interact with a medium, you leave a breadcrumb trail of what you liked and what you weren’t interested in.
Online marketers can easily collect this data and use it to create more compelling ways to promote their brands.
Even tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is a much more accurate process this way.
Because of this, companies are more likely to learn from their mistakes and improve with digital marketing over time.
Increase the visibility of your company thanks to digital technology.
One of the greatest difficulties encountered by a company is certainly that of boosting its visibility and standing out in an ocean of competitors in order to get customers. Fortunately, there are various actions that can help overcome this problem.
Creating and optimizing qualitative content, engaging prospects, and building a digital strategy can help a company to stand out from the competition. It’s not enough to offer quality products or excellent services: consumers must first know about your brand. Digital will give you several tips that will help you to increase your visibility further, such as
Be active on the forums
Forums are an excellent way to build relationships, promote your company and above all increase your visibility. Indeed, they allow Internet users to ask questions, interact with members of a community while building an online reputation.
In line with your company’s digital strategy, you need to be active on forums related to your business, provide insightful answers and showcase your brand. With this active presence, you will meet more people and create the expected visibility.
Be active on social networks
Similarly, social networks are a high-visibility medium. Millions of people visit them every day, so it makes sense to integrate this element into your strategy. You can join groups and participate in discussions to find out about customer trends and needs.
Social networks have proven to be viable tools for business development: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, Linkedin and other platforms have unique aspects that will help market your product effectively.
However, you need to know when to publish, where to publish and what type of content to publish. You also need to know how many publications are needed in a week, for example. A good social media marketing strategy will help to increase your company’s online visibility in record time!
Web marketing may seem easy, but it’s not too easy, without a good marketing strategy your efforts are doomed to failure.
Digital marketing strategies in Cameroon
The list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the strategies that most companies use:
Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing in which you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising” (which we’ll come back to in a second). Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social network advertising” (again, we’ll come back to this shortly).
Search engine optimization
If you don’t want to pay to appear in SERPs, you can also use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to try to rank the pages or blog posts on your site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but ranking a page usually takes a lot of time and effort (for a more in-depth comparison of paid search and SEO, see this article).
Paid advertising on social networks
Paid advertising on social networks
Most social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat will allow you to place ads on their sites. Paid advertising on social networks is ideal for reaching audiences who may not be aware that your business, product or service exists.
Social Media Marketing
Like SEO, social network marketing is the free and organic way to use social network platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business. And, just like SEO, organic marketing of your business on social media takes much more time and effort, but in the long run it can provide much cheaper results.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the art and science of improving your online user experience. Most of the time, companies use CRO to get more conversions (leads, chats, calls, sales, etc.) from their existing website traffic.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another fairly broad term in digital marketing. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, computer graphics, e-books, videos, etc.) to build brand awareness or generate clicks, leads, or sales.
Native advertising
Have you ever gone to the bottom of an article and consulted a list of suggested articles? This is native advertising. Most native ads are content marketing because they use content to attract clicks (“you’ll never believe what happens next!”). Often, native advertising can be a bit hard to spot, as it is usually mixed with recommendations for unpaid content … but that’s kind of the problem.
Email advertising
E-mail marketing is the oldest form of online marketing and it is still going strong. Most digital marketers use e-mail marketing to announce special offers, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or company) to promote your products and services on their website.
As you can see from the list above, there are many ways to market your business online. That’s why many businesses hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team and marketing automation software to cover their marketing needs.
Does digital marketing work?
Digital marketing is a great option for any business. Good digital communication helps you At Global Business Consulting, we’ve used digital marketing to help all kinds of businesses grow, from mom-and-pop shops to world-renowned universities and beyond. That’s the beauty of online advertising. If you know who you want to target, you can use digital marketing to target anyone, anywhere.
However, that being said, certain types of businesses will benefit more from certain types of digital advertising. For a quick overview, let’s look at the strategies that tend to work best for B2C and B2B (business-to-business) companies:
B2C Companies
Generally speaking, B2C companies have much lower prices than their B2B counterparts. After all, it can be a bit difficult to sell a 10,000,000 FCFA car (believe me, they exist) to a worried mother. But a pair of children’s trousers for 15,000 FCFA? It’s a pretty simple sale.
The good news is that since B2C companies are not trying to sell incredibly expensive products or services, they don’t need large sales teams or complicated marketing funnels. All they have to do is present their products or services to the right audience with the right message and the rest takes care of itself.
As a result, the main objective of most B2C companies is to bring people into and through their marketing funnel. For example, if you can bring that worried mum to your children’s clothing website and offer her an interesting offer, chances are she will buy it today. You don’t need to build brand awareness or trust before you can close a sale.
With this in mind, B2C companies often see excellent results with higher funnel marketing channels such as social network marketing or paid social advertising. These channels do an excellent job of getting your company known to potential customers who might not otherwise know you exist.
Now, complementing with other digital marketing strategies such as paid search or SEO is always a good idea, but if you need to choose a channel to start with, paid social advertising or social media marketing are excellent options for B2C.
B2B companies
On the other hand, paid search is an excellent option for B2B companies. Most B2B companies have very specific niche audiences that can be difficult to target using social media. However, if you sell computers worth 100,000 FCFA and someone is looking for “computer salesman”, you want to be the first result they see. Yes, you may pay more for your click than with social network advertising, but with a price of 100,000 FCFA, it’s money well spent.
Furthermore, most B2B companies have a much longer and more complex sales cycle than B2C companies. If you are selling a 200,000,000 drill, most people probably won’t come to your site, call you and say “I want one”. As a result, longer-term strategies such as content marketing or email marketing are often necessary to close a deal.
Of course, the right mix of digital marketing tactics will vary from sector to sector and from company to company, but simply comparing B2C and B2B should help you understand how different strategies may be better for some companies. Not all strategies are appropriate for every business, but with a little trial and error, you should be able to identify the most cost-effective approach for your business.
Gaining new customers, increasing market share, increasing your turnover is having a digital presence, having a digital presence is having an erased web strategy that guarantees your prospects an excellent customer experience so call on our services For your support in the field, our digital marketing agency Global Business Consulting is there for you!
Global Business Consulting is a digital marketing agency in Cameroon
We offer complete digital marketing solutions tailored to your needs and budget; our services include :
- advice and support
- marketing and distribution
- digital marketing
- design and creation of websites
- video editing and photography
- online advertising ( Google Ads; Facebook Ads ; Linkedin Ads ; Instagram Ads etc )
- Events
- Real estate management
- Training and Placement
- Graphic Design and Printing ( Logos ; Flyers ; Business Cards ; Letterhead ; Banners ; Roll-Up etc )
To find out more about how Global Business Consulting can help you optimize your online visibility and improve your turnover through digital marketing; contact us via our email address at contact@globalbusinessconsulting.com or call us on +237 670 932 922.
At Global business consulting we make your business better than others !!!!
Please feel free to contact us
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EYENGA MBA ELISE SANDRA
Community Manager | Redactrice Web
EYENGA Mba Elise Sandra is Responsible for Community Management and Web Editing at Global Business Consulting. She holds a Master’s degree in Digital Marketing and provides content marketing advice and strategy to the agency and its clients.
Contact the author at sandra@globalbusinesconsulting.com
