Digital Marketing strategies for small businesses

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As Digital Marketing continues to consolidate its dominance in today’s business world, businesses are increasingly incorporating data-driven digital marketing in their overall marketing campaign.

Although digital marketing had its footprints in the late 90s, it gained recognition in the early 20s, specifically with the introduction and growth of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

Advertisements play an important role in growing, especially in small businesses. A few years ago, companies advertised their products using traditional means such as newspapers, hoardings, etc. Still, nowadays, all the companies have expanded their business to include the digital means of advertisement.

Over the last few years, businesses have grown leaps and bounds by simply marketing their positives through digital platforms. Surely, this field as a profession has transformed several lives and has become a good source of income for the youth.

So, if you wish to pursue such a demanding profession and get into its insight, this guide belongs to you. Let’s understand how to start the Digital Marketing journey in this ever-evolving environment.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the profession that deals with the promotion of goods and services, more specifically the brands, to connect with interested consumers using the internet and other forms of digital communication.

Digital marketing helps introduce the brands to the consumers who are interested or have the potential to consume these brands. It includes emails or social media and text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.

Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Pay-per-click, Mobile Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, etc., are a few types of Digital Marketing.

Prerequisites to Learn a Digital Marketing

The prerequisite to start learning Digital Marketing is to be at least a graduate though there is no restriction placed on discipline/stream of study. Apart from the above prerequisite, the other requirements are to be good at technology and have good communication skills because it is the digital media you have to communicate to attract the consumers.

Skills to be Pursued to be a Digital Marketer

To become a successful Digital Marketer, you have to practice and master the skills such as:

You must be well equipped with the fundamentals of digital marketing.
You should also know about content marketing and paid marketing.
You should also be well versed in Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing.
Gaining an understanding of how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works and content optimization.
You should have a hands-on Data analysis as it will be a backbone of every single facet of business where data plays an important role.
Being a Digital Marketer, you should be able to understand the needs of the consumers and thereby provide the solutions which get along with the needs of the consumers. You can also take up Great Learning’s digital marketing online training to get well-versed with the requisite knowledge of Digital Marketing to be a good Digital Marketer.

How to Start with the Digital Marketing Course?

With the vastness of the digital industry, it can be tough for newcomers to navigate through their niche segment. Amongst the various streams of digital marketing, you should be very clear as to which areas of digital marketing matter the most to the respective business. To start with the digital marketing course, you need to understand and master the prerequisites mentioned above.

As mentioned above, you need to be well-versed with communication skills and be extremely tech-savvy. Having a graduation degree is another prerequisite that needs to be complied with.

Data analytics should be the other area where you need to be good, as data analysis is important at every stage of business to make better data-driven decisions for marketing campaigns.

Further, you will need to excel at design thinking and planning. The problems are to be approached from a user-centered perspective which essentially involves thinking in a human-centered way when solving large and complex problems.

Digital Marketing Certificate

As mentioned above, to become a digital marketer, you need to be a graduate. Additionally, it would be best to be good at communication and technology. Moreover, you can also pursue Digital marketing post-graduate courses from Great Learning which is an online platform. There are many such digital marketing certification courses that you can pursue online.

Current Scenario in India

A career in digital marketing has been on an upwards trend in the recent past because of the ever-increasing growth in small and medium e-commerce businesses and start-ups. This field is constantly evolving because of the introduction of different platforms. A digital marketing manager always analyses the trends and their impact on discoverability.

Digital Marketing is quickly taking over traditional marketing because of its affordability and analytics. The data-driven approach makes it easy for digital marketing managers to see which tactics produce the highest ROI and which strategies are most effective.

According to the report by Google, India could reach $100 billion in online e-commerce, which shows that there is an ever-increasing demand for digital marketing and, thus, for digital marketers.

The LinkedIn report for the year 2020-21 shows that 59% of the world’s population uses the Internet compared to less than 1% of the same population in 1995. This shows the rapid growth of Digital Marketing over the last two decades. It also shows that India is the largest user country in terms of total users.

The Dentsu-e4m report states that digital advertising will grow 20% by 2021 compared to 15.3% in 2020, which clearly states that there will be a tremendous demand for digital marketing managers in the future years to come.

These statistics show that there will be more opportunities for the digital marketer in the future, for which the digital marketer needs to be creative, innovative, and up-to-date.

Conclusion

Looking at the statistics provided by the well-known forums and by analyzing the demand for the digital means of communication, Digital Marketing is indeed one of the vast and emerging fields of business and need. Small businesses cannot find a better option than digital marketing to promote their goods and services and reach the masses and promote their brands.

Thus, we can conclude that digital marketing is essential for small businesses or start-ups. You can pursue a career in Digital Marketing through many institutes and online platforms which provide free beginner-friendly courses with certification.