There is no doubt Digital Marketing is the new face of marketing. Every brand, ranging from the big companies to small business is harnessing this new form of marketing in getting brand awareness, generating sales and maintaining customer’s relationship. By 2021, 75% of companies marketing budgets are projected to be spend on Digital Marketing.

This doesn’t come as a surprise as we have over 4 Billion internet users in the world. It is also estimated that 57% of online shoppers start their buyers’ journey with a search on search engines like Google.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is facilitated online and used paid or organic ads on social media(facebook, Instagram etc) or search engines (google, yahoo), as well as email marketing, influencer marketing, and video marketing to name a few.

Importance of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is now the easy and most cost effective way to advertise and sell your products. With digital marketing you can target ad to a specific group of people. Let’s take the example of a brand selling female dresses and shoes. You can target your ad to female only, at the age range of 18-45, at a particular or multiple location. And so on. Furthermore, with digital marketing you can measure exactly the amount of people that see your ads, the estimated revenue It generated and so on.

Digital Marketing For Effective Business Growth In Nigeria

However, to fully understand and integrate this type of marketing into your marketing strategy, you need to understand how it works. And this is what I’m going to be showing you in this post: The 5 D’s of Digital Marketing.

Dos and Don’t Of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing revolves around these 5Ds:

1- Digital devices

2- Digital platforms

3- Digital media

4- Digital data, and

5- Digital technology.

1- Digital devices

This focuses on combination of connected devices your target audience are using in interacting and engaging with your websites, mobile application, and social media pages. These devices may include smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, TVs, and gaming devices.

People now make use of their mobile devices more frequently and for longer periods of time than their desktop computers. Research shows that 67% of the global population owns a mobile phone in 2019. With 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile phones in the last 6 months.

With this in mind, you should try to target mobile users when crafting your digital marketing strategy.

2- Digital platforms

This is the digital marketing component that involves the analysis of the preferred platforms or services of the target audience. This where you comes directly in contact with your customers, and where new leads or potential customers can find you. Among digital platforms, most engagements occur using popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn.

Among digital platforms, social media is the largest as more than half of the world is now using social media too. It is estimated that 3.96 billion people are now on social media users with 950,000 new users each day.

This is not to overlook the importance of search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on. Search engines are where most customers buying journey start. People use search engines to know more about their problems and also look for a solution.

3- Digital media

This refers to paid, owned, and earned communications channels utilized to build engagement with the target market through several ways such as advertising e-mails, messaging, search engines, and social networks.

With digital media like Email, you can keep your customers’ abreast of your new products, new launch, sales and so on. You can also make use of social listening, which involves being vigilant on across social media and replying to posts where your brand name has been mentioned.

4- Digital data

This normally consists of audience profiles and engagement patterns with businesses. Collecting data about consumers gives us insight about what their interest is, where they look for information and how they make their buying decisions. These data are used for cross-selling,  improving user experience, increasing customers buying rate. The analysis is also used for driving and creating new products and use cases.

Data collection helps you to collect, store and analyze information about your current and prospective customers. With this database of information, your company can use them for re-targeting and  future marketing efforts. Ways you can collect data digitally include: website contacts form, POS, contests, surveys, event sign-ups, app installation and so on.

5- Digital technologies

These are electronic tools, systems, devices and resources that generate, store or process data. Well known examples include artificial intelligence, cloud computing, virtual reality, big data and Internet of Things. It focuses on building interactive experiences across a wide range of platforms.

Companies using digital  technologies offer a better user experience and also market themselves better. For instance, Artificial Intelligence helps company to gather more data and insights about their audience. It then uses these data and insights in offering predictive search, chatbots, recommendation engines and so on. This makes it beneficial to both the users and the companies.

Summary

The importance of digital marketing to small and large business can not be over stressed. It helps businesses with low marketing budget to compete with the big companies. However, to set up your company for success in digital marketing, you need to understand these 5 D’s of digital marketing. This will help you to know and incorporate the right platform, tools and technologies for a successful digital marketing campaign.