It is clear that digital marketing is important. Any business knows that.
Almost any business have a website, most of them have a blog and some of them do online advertising but many of them are losing a lot of opportunities.
Which is the big difference between offline and online marketing?
The biggest is that digital marketing can and must be updated, managed and it must be interesting.
A lot of business owners think that developing and publishing a website means the end of a marketing action, actually it is the start.
Any activity in digital marketing needs continuous update and maintenance to be effective:
- Website: you receive a new brochure. At first glance it could be interesting and you are thinking to contact the company. Maybe you look at it 2-3 times to understand better. But after the 4th time you are not interested anymore. Why? Because the content is still the same and there is nothing interesting anymore. You cannot afford to do a new brochure every month, but you can update your Website (your digital brochure) to attract users and keep them interested.
- Advertising campaign: differently from a traditional media campaign which is usually prepared and launched and cannot be modified, in the digital space a campaign can be modified in any moment (and that is the main advantage). You can lower the cost per user or increase the leads rate or even change target if you see that something is going wrong. Most of the time companies set up a campaign (keywords and budget) and they forget about it
- SEO: this “magic” word is all about the performance of your website on search engine ranking. I don’t want to be tedious describing in details how a search engine works but a thing must be underlined: a search engine doesn’t catalog websites, it tries to understand them. A search engine evolves continuously because rankings are like a race: you are running and you are in the second position, silver medal coming! But if you continue to run at the same speed ignoring whatever happens around you, probably somebody will reach and surpass you, farewell silver medal! You need to monitor the others, you need to modify your run every day.
- Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on, are all social media networks. Let’s analyze what it means. First of all they are media. This is clear, they broadcast information. But they are networks which means they are able to connect different “persons”. Most important they are social. Also a TV network can be defined a media network (this is actually the proper name) but it is not social. Social means that the information is flowing in both directions. Without the social component, it becomes a traditional media. A business if present in social media networks, must act and react and must dialogue and participate. Otherwise it is only like a website and nobody cares about a website on a social media network
What I am telling so far is that “doing” digital marketing is easy: everyone can create a stunning website, set up an advertising campaign, and optimize content and SEO and open infinite social media accounts.
What is hard is to manage all this: it means time, dedication, knowledge. A lot of skills that most of the small businesses don’t have (and most of the marketers neither to be honest). And this is the reason most of them fail on digital marketing.