Around a decade ago I was still using traditional marketing techniques and Bharat spoke to me about how I was wasting my time and that the marketing landscape was very much changing. Bharat Bhise HNA is a marketing executive and a dear friend of mine was the person who helped me most when it came to marketing my business.
At that time I have to be honest, I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but I bowed to his wisdom and over the course of the next 3 years he showed me everything that there was to know about digital marketing.
I will forever be grateful for what Bharat showed me all those years ago because since then I have been able to apply what I learned to my own business with some very good results.
Within digital marketing businesses large and small have a wonderful opportunity to market their businesses to millions of people around the world, they can do so for free and they can pay for this marketing, and the scope is really limitless. Within digital marketing, there are a number of methods that you can approach to promote your business or products to the world, and these are the methods that have been most effective for me and my business.
Promotional Marketing
Promotional marketing really isn’t anything new and in truth, businesses have been using this strategy for decades. What is new however is the way in which we use promotional marketing and in the modern world, the internet does the hard work for us.
Promotional marketing is very simple, you offer a product with a heavy discount in the hope to promote how good your business is to a new client. Using the internet and coupon websites that have become very popular, we can harness that popularity to give people great offers that will showcase what our businesses can do.
SEO
To those of you who do not know what SEO is, it stands for search engine optimization and it is the process by which we can lift our websites up the rankings on the search engines when customers type in certain keywords.
Les says that you have an Italian restaurant in Seattle when people go to Google or another search engine looking for a local Italian restaurant and type in ‘pizza Seattle… pasta Seattle. Italian restaurant Seattle’ you are going to want your business to arrive on page one for all of those search terms. This is important because the customer never looks beyond page 1 or 2 of the search engine results, either you are at the top, or you don’t exist.
Email Marketing
There are many who say that email marketing doesn’t work anymore because the click-through rates have significantly decreased over the years. Whilst it is true that fewer people click on the content on the email, I dispute that this is an approach which you should ignore.
All goo digital marketing strategies should feature a number of methods rather than focusing on just one angle, and this is why I believe that email marketing can form a key part of an overall campaign. W can heavily tailor and target these emails so that they are very personal and so that they are sent to the people who are most likely to engage with them. Email marketing does work and whilst it may not be the be-all and end-all of digital marketing, it most certainly plays a key role.
Social Media 
When it comes to online marketing there is no better way to do it than to use social media, a truly magnificent option for any type of business to market and to engage with their customers.
The beauty of using social media is that you don’t have to spend any money if you don’t want to, and this makes it perfectly accessible for small businesses that don’t have a large amount of capital to invest. Social media platforms have billions of users worldwide and when it comes to marketing they are able to offer businesses the chance to target their ads to a very specific audience in order to get the most engagement.
For all its criticisms, social media for businesses is the ideal portal through which they can showcase who they are an what they do, they can engage directly with customers and they can grow their image as a brand through this medium too. If your business is not on social media then it is time to change that because this is just too big an opportunity to miss out on.
These methods of digital marketing are where I have found the greatest success but as I have already mentioned, every great strategy will incorporate a number of different methods.
