I see that many people in Zimbabwe are asking Google what is a digital marketing and what are its main benefits so I have decided to write about it to make it more understandable.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, according to the Digital Marketing Institute (DMI), is the use of new media or digital technology to achieve marketing goals.

Some of the most common assets are:

• Your website is the main asset
• Blog posts
• Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
• Online brochures
• Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)

So as you can see from the above list, Digital Marketing is not only about social media marketing as many marketers, entrepreneurs and CEOs think.

It also includes email marketing, content marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), affiliate marketing, and online public relations. Other methods such as SMS, MMS, and even Display Advertising are all part of the toolbox.

As many of you know, there are 4 P’s of the marketing mix namely the Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Assuming you already know your product and your price, digital marketing deals a lot with determining consumer behaviour in order to choose the right digital marketing channel (Your Place) and the right method of promotion which goes back to those above mentioned digital marketing assets.

Let’s say you want to market a cell phone application that’s similar to Snap Chat. Which digital platform would you use and why?

The first step in this scenario is to define your audience – the specific group of people most likely to use this application are teens between the ages of 13 to 18 and youth in their early 20s

The second step to consider is your Place – a lot of people would be quick to say Facebook and although they’re a lot more people on Facebook, the place that your teenage audience is most engaged these days is Instagram.

Digital marketing, like all forms of marketing, is about considering where your customer can be found and then marketing your product or service to them at the right time and at the right place, but all done online!

And now you could ask…

Why Digital Marketing?

Unlike most offline marketing methods, the main benefit and advantage of digital marketing are that it allows marketers to see accurate results of their campaigns. And not only are these results accurate, but they are also available in real-time!

3 Main Benefits

You already know what people are searching for!

How? Keywords

A keyword is a word or phrase that your audience uses to search for relevant topics on search engines.

If you are a flower shop, a relevant keyword could be “Buy Red Roses” [short keyword] or “Looking to buy roses from a flower shop” [long tail keyword]

So using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner in the Google Ads portal and Keywords Everywhere you can find out what keywords in your market your audience is searching for and the best part is you can even search by country and by language so you really literally know what your audience is searching for.

You can monitor the web for competition, news and trends that happen in your sector

Google Alerts allows you to stay in the know about things happening in and around your industry instead of just following digital marketing news that is global, you can get alerts for digital marketing news in Zimbabwe, digital marketing news in South Africa and any other place in the world. You can even get job alerts straight to your email.

You can keep track of who, what, when and how

Google Analytics (GA), offers a lot of benefits to you as a marketer as it allows you to gain insight into how users find and use your website.

You can track your business ROI (Return on Investment) as GA tells you if most of your leads and sales (if you are selling online) are coming from social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter or from email marketing or directly by people actually typing in your business website URL which means you have great brand awareness.

GA is truly a ”treasure trove” of information and should be at your fingertips as you are making your digital marketing decisions.

Hope you found this article useful and will check out some of the tools mentioned here. If you have a question you would like to know about within the sphere of digital marketing, write us a comment below.

If you are ready to start your digital marketing journey, register for an internationally certified Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing