Essential Digital Marketing Guide for Profitable Online Businesses

If you want to have a profitable online business, you should learn to work with digital marketing.

That is why we have prepared this essential guide, where we will teach you what digital marketing and its areas of application is, so you know the steps you will have to take, for creating a successful digital business.

What is digital marketing or online marketing?

If you are a little lost, we are going to start at the beginning, giving you a definition of digital marketing, before we start talking about the main topic of this post:

Digital marketing or also called online marketing is a set of adapted and transformed marketing techniques for a new area of digital action through which we will try to reach predefined goals with the help of digital tools.

The essence is the same as with traditional marketing, but the strategy will have to be changed to include other resources.

Profitable online businesses need digital marketing strategies to succeed

Many people think that to create an online business, they only need an active page, or to create some profiles on social networks and spend some money in advertising.

Nothing is further from reality. The truth is that for creating a profitable online business, you will need a digital marketing strategy designed uniquely for your company, with all the goals you want to achieve defined in detail, with a clear plan focused on the niche Market that you want to work with.

The competition in the digital world is fierce and the success of your online business lies not only in a single factor but a set of elements and digital techniques that will have to be perfectly employed.

If you don’t have an excellent digital marketing plan, it will be challenging to get good results with your company on the internet.

The current reality is that users are increasingly connected to the internet, with wi-fi available in many places, improvements in the coverage of mobile operators, new really useful apps and many other factors that will force you to develop customizable and scalable digital marketing strategies.

Your customers are online 24 hours a day. and this is an opportunity that you shouldn’t miss if you want to turn your company into a profitable business.

Benefits of digital marketing for online businesses

By working with digital marketing, you will be able to take advantage of a series of opportunities which we will explain in this article:

What benefits can I get with digital marketing?

1. All companies can do digital marketing, be they large, medium or small. To do that, you will have to adjust your strategy to the needs and characteristics of each line of business.
2. Digital marketing is a crucial tool to strengthen your brand image, exposing your values, your products or services to your potential customers.
3. It also offers the possibility to reach new users through search engines and the use of web ranking techniques. Search engines are the primary source of information, and we all use it several times a day. That is an excellent  opportunity to promote your business to customers who are looking for the type of products or services that you are offering.
4. Digital marketing is easily measurable, and you can get relevant statistics that will show you whether the strategy is working or if you need to make changes to your business plan.
5. Digital advertising is not very expensive when compared to the traditional marketing that, in some cases, can have exorbitant costs, which makes this advertising something unattainable for companies with smaller budgets.
6. The ability to segment campaigns for each type of user makes this type of marketing more flexible, which will help reduce your investment in marketing.
7. The advantages of using social networks are many, and they help a lot in creating a community of users interested in a brand, faithful to the products or services that you are offering.

Undoubtedly, digital marketing is the key to the success of your Internet business and without working with marketing, you will not be able to find and attract new customers.

How to create an online business? The digital marketing plan

If you are thinking of starting an online business or if you already are working on a project, your digital marketing plan should include a series of information that will form the backbone of your business on the internet, the real guide for use during this process, which should consist of an analysis of various aspects and factors.

Aspects to be defined in the digital marketing plan

When you are creating your digital marketing plan, you should start by responding to several critical issues. Among the most important, we can list:

1. Definition of your company and its products: answer the central questions that describe the characteristics of your company and your services or products.
2. Who is your ideal buyer: You should know who might be interested in your products, why they would need them and what you can offer to these customers. Try to define your users including variables such as age, educational level, concerns, and social class.
3. Study your current situation on the internet and your competition: Review what you have done so far on your site or your social networks. Listen to what your followers say about you and if you have already created email marketing before or not if you have invested in advertising or the generation of digital content. If you have not done anything yet and you are starting to work with digital marketing; this guide will be useful for you.
4. The goals you want to achieve: you should set goals and don’t do things only because you think they could work, changing your strategy every day. It would be a waste of time and effort.
5. How you will do it: prepare your action plan with all the tools available on the internet, setting dates and goals that you will have to achieve. There are more and more tools to help you in working with digital marketing.
6. Review the results of what you are doing to know if you are on the right track. On the internet, it is easy to measure and get statistical data from many sources. Define your KPIs.
7. Available budgets: calculate how much you are willing to invest in internet marketing and if you can afford to pay for the costs of the marketing actions that you would like to implement.
8. Delegate tasks: It will be necessary to designate the people or companies that will be responsible for doing all the work because you can’t be an expert in all fields.

Digital marketing tools for your online business

Several tools can help you improve and develop your digital marketing strategy. These tools are critical to the proper management of your digital marketing campaigns.

The most important ones will be described below:

1. The site where you can showcase your company, its services and develop your corporate identity. This will be your central point and one of the most relevant sources of information for your customers. Along with your site, we recommend creating a blog, where you can offer personalized content to your readers.
2. Content Marketing whose central axis is based on the creation and distribution of valuable content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This new way of attracting customers is one of the pillars on which a new digital marketing strategy could be established.
3. Social networks as a point of interaction and connection with your users. Select the social networks you should work with. You don’t have to create profiles in all of them; you should work with the platforms with the most significant number of potentially interested users.
4. Search engine marketing is an integral part of your digital marketing. You should be in the first pages of the relevant search engines, as these pages will be the ones your users will see when they are searching for your keywords. You could do that through organic ranking with SEO strategies and paid campaigns, (SEM).
5. Online Advertising in different formats and locations. The secret is in the right choice of where to invest.
6. Email Marketing as one of the most influential tools to maintain permanent contact with your users. You can create a professional newsletter using an email marketing software such as Mailrelay.
7. Affiliate Marketing. You could offer products or services designed by other companies and make some money by recommending them to your visitors.

These are some of the things you should consider for developing a digital marketing strategy and creating a profitable online business.

Top mistakes to avoid in digital marketing

Often mistakes are made in digital marketing that can be easily corrected, but you should be aware, as these mistakes could severely damage your reputation.

This is why we advise you to control all your strategy on the internet and pay attention to the following mistakes you might be making. You should not:

1. Forget to revise and update your marketing strategy.
2. Think that creating a blog is a waste of time.
3. Publish new content without planning.
4. Change your approach without analyzing the results of the previous actions.
5. Not taking advantage of tools like email marketing.
6. Not having a professional in charge of the digital marketing department.
7. Not working to boost your online reputation.

Conclusions

Planning and knowledge will be your primary allies and your accurate guide to creating a digital marketing strategy.

If you want to create an online business that is profitable, you should dedicate time and effort in each of the points we mentioned in this article.

The world has no more boundaries when it comes to trade and business development. If your digital marketing strategy isn’t correctly outlined, you won’t be able to make money with your online business.