With the emergence of the internet and growing technology, traditional marketing has taken a back seat and given way for a more advanced type of marketing, which is Digital Marketing.

Digital marketing refers to the use of digital technologies to market products and services, mainly on the Internet, which also includes the use of mobile phones, display advertising, and other digital media.

Technology is taking over the world, and the social media is having a significant impact on how we behave socially, act as consumers and carry out our day-to-day businesses. Having that in mind, it is safe to say that any business that is not taking advantage of the internet to market its products and services is losing out a great deal and will never measure up to its competitors who are already on the internet and social media.

Some businesses are still skeptical about embracing digital marketing and still stick to the traditional marketing methods probably due to the success they have recorded in the past using this method. In a matter of time, traditional marketing will phase out to a more modern way of marketing, digital marketing.

Here, I will show you the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing.

• Reduced Cost: Purchasing television, radio or billboard ads tends to be very expensive and can eat deep into your capital. Digital marketing, on the other hand, can be done according to your set budget and can save you lots of money with the pay-per-click, pay-per-lead and pay-per-acquisition You can also get a free listing on Google My Business for free, which can be just as effective as advertising on yellow pages which costs thousands of dollars.
• Demographic Targeting: Digital marketing allows you target a specific audience, interests, age, location, and behaviour, unlike traditional marketing which shows your adverts to the general public including those who are not interested in your products or services. Targeting your adverts to the right audience increases your chances of making a sale, and this is very attainable through digital marketing.
• Real-Time Campaign Monitoring: When you run an online campaign, you can monitor and measure how well your campaign is doing. You can see in real-time the traffic your campaign has generated and if it has converted to sales. There are free analytics tools available on the internet like Google Analytics which are specifically designed for monitoring, reporting and optimizing campaigns. This option is not available in traditional marketing. Definitely not!

Digital marketing enables you to see the number of traffic and sales conversion in real time. You do not have to wait for days or weeks before you start noticing positive results in your business.

• Strategy Refining & Fine-Tuning: Tracking and monitoring the success of your campaign gives you an insight of what works and what doesn’t work in your marketing strategy. These results can be used to refine your campaign strategy at any point in time until you perfect it. You are now able to stick to what works best thereafter. This is super awesome!
• Level Playing Field: Digital marketing gives small businesses the opportunity to compete against recognized brands without going bankrupt. These big brands can afford to pay millions for traditional marketing which a startup company might not be able to afford. With digital marketing, you do not need millions to run an online campaign. It is budget friendly and can be equally afforded by both small and large businesses.
• Brand Engagement: You can engage existing and prospective customers on your social media pages and blogs. This is a great way to generate leads and convert them into sales. A regularly updated website or social media page shows people how you offer the best value to your clients and gives you the chance to convince an undecided or interested buyer.
• Greater Return On Investment (ROI): You do not need to invest heavily on an advertisement campaign when using digital marketing. This saves you a lot of money, and once you have optimized the keyword search content on your website, you should see a long-term return on your investment and will be fairly low cost to maintain your ranking on search engines. With digital marketing, you can measure ROI, whereas with traditional marketing it will be more daunting to calculate ROI.

Finally, traditionally marketing may have worked for some till now, but since the advent of the internet, the game has changed. From broadcasting an advert to the entire audience on TV or Radio, without being able to monitor audience’s behaviour, sharing thousands of flyers to everyone on a busy street regardless of whether they can read or write, and to advertising on billboards without being able to ascertain if the advert was seen or not. I can carry on with these setbacks of traditional marketing, but with digital marketing comes hope and solutions. Hence, the reason for any serious business to adopt digital marketing because it works wonders; it is affordable measurable, flexible, predictable, prolific, and rewarding.

When used correctly, social media platforms can return more marketing value than simply brand building and networking with existing customers; you can also use sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to generate leads to convert into sales.

Furthermore – possibly the best aspect of generating leads via social media is that it is cost-effective and produces measurable results. Research has shown that social media marketing can increase your sales revenue by up to 24% when utilised for lead generation.

Here we take a look at the various ways you can turn your social media marketing campaigns into lead generating machines and ultimately, make more sales.

Starting with the basics, you have to consider lead generation as a way of gathering intelligence on your existing customers and potential ones. The areas you want to concentrate on are as follows:

• What kind of topics your target market has an interest in
• What service or products you provide that you can sell to them
• What their pain points are in terms of why they would buy your products or services and what problems they address
• How you can convert their interest into a sale

In the digital era, lead generation is all about content in its various forms: email opt-ins, video marketing, paid advertising campaigns, blogs and gated white papers, as per our previous article – How to use Content to Generate New Business Leads.

It is now easy to collect the data you need by drawing your target audience in with compelling and relevant content in all media formats and simply ‘gating’ it to encourage providing information to access the document or video. You can keep it simple and just request a name and current email address or you can perhaps ask product or service-related questions to get an idea of what they’re interested in. It’s always best to keep your online forms simple, without cluttering it up with too many questions.

The Role of Social Media Networks

So, how exactly do social media platforms come into play when it comes to lead generation?

Well, when you consider that 40% of people spend more time networking on social media than they do face-to-face, you can be pretty certain that your target market will be amongst them. All you have to do is pick the right social media channel for your business.

Facebook

Facebook has evolved considerably in terms of its advertising power. Changes made to its algorithm allow users to generate leads through paid ad campaigns which can be extremely budget-friendly compared with the more mainstream option of Google AdWords.

However, you don’t necessarily have to spend any money to generate leads on Facebook. You can run a contest to attract a lot of attention and shares while generating more email addresses for your CRM database. Give away your products or services to the winner of a simple raffle-type competition and you’ll get a wealth of responses. The only downside is that your leads won’t be qualified and that there’s a chance an element of them will only be after any freebies on offer!

It’s worth putting plenty of content on your Facebook page so that it’s more like a website. There should be more of a purpose behind your profile than just to build your brand and so it’s a good idea to put a call to action somewhere to encourage more than just ‘likes’ to your page.

Twitter

Twitter cards were introduced in 2013, making lead generation on Twitter a whole lot easier to achieve. Twitter Cards allow you to attach rich media like photos and videos that drive traffic directly to your website. When you Tweet a link to your website content, your card is attached making it easier for you to engage your audience and get them to see your website.

There are different Twitter Cards available from the basic Summary Card through to the Player Card, to which you can attach video, audio and media files. You can get plenty of help developing your lead generation campaigns from Twitter direct via their manual, Getting Started Guide. You can also use Twitter’s extremely useful analytics tools to find out in real-time just how your campaigns are running.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is considered the best social media platform for B2B advertising and because it specifically caters for networking professionals, it’s a natural fit for lead generation. You can now link your LinkedIn account with your Twitter account and post on both platforms simultaneously.

The best way to generate interest and ultimately traffic to your website using LinkedIn is by publishing interesting content using the network’s authoring tool. When you publish an article, blog piece or information about a special offer, always place a call to action at the bottom of your piece to encourage engagement.

Not only should your piece of content warrant sharing within LinkedIn, you can link to it from other networks like Twitter, as mentioned above and also by putting the link manually on Facebook too. In essence LinkedIn provides you with the opportunity to have your content hosted somewhere other than your website.

The other reason creating and publishing your own unique content on LinkedIn is so effective for lead generation is that the network regularly promotes pieces to its 400 million users, according to the fields they’re working in which can connect you directly with your prospects.

Instagram

Instagram is probably the least developed tool for lead generation among its social media counterparts. However, it’s still possible to generate leads when you keep it visual. Instagram is a sharing network for photos and videos principally and users can share and comment on the posts that catch their eye.

If you want to generate leads, you need to read and respond to any comments to garner further engagement. Instagram is also a great platform for short video clips which, if you’re entertaining and creative, it is relatively easy to generate interest that can go viral. Not only is Instagram great for brand building and really getting your name in front of your prospective client base, it’s really effective as a tool to engage your audience and turn them into clients.

The good news is that you don’t have to do this all by yourself, you can employ the services of a digital marketing agency like ours to help you manage your social media pages adequately, and at a very resonable fee.

If you need further assistance on bespoke digital marketing strategies or require help on implementing the tips provided here, do contact us and one of our experts will be in contact.

Do you want to be personally or professionally involved in the continuous growth of the online world? TopYouGo Digital Marketing Agency is organizing a FREE Digital Marketing Fundamentals Training which will equip you with the basic skills and knowledge required to succeed online through digital marketing.

What you will learn:
– Digital Marketing Terminologies
– Inbound Marketing Methodology
– Digital Channels
– Digital Marketing Tools, Analytics, and Reporting
– Certifications
– Career Opportunities

Here is your opportunity to learn from experienced digital marketers. Sign up now.

Date: Saturday, 21/01/2017
Time: 9:30am – 12:30pm
Venue: LCCI Conference & Exhibition Center, Plot 10 Nurudeen Olowopopo Street, Behind MKO Abiola Garden, Alausa. The center is the tall blue and white building facing Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

This is where digital marketing comes in. In order to benefit from this large market, you would need to hire digital marketing experts so they can use their vast experience in creating awareness for your business with the best digital marketing strategies.

The major goal of digital marketing is to boost your business online and engage your target audience. Now you may ask “How do I achieve this goal?” This shouldn’t be the problem. Your major focus should be on how to choose the best digital marketing agency for your business. These agencies would lift the burden off your shoulders so you can focus on the core services you offer.

These digital marketing agencies analyze your business and device a digital marketing strategy that would catch the attention of your target audience and seek prospects out of them.

One effective way to boost your business online is by building strong social media presence and sharing regular links to the company’s website and its new products, features and news.

A digital marketing expert knows how to create captivating contents and how to keep your customer base committed to you. It is not enough to have quality contents as these contents need to penetrate the digital world and attract more customers. A good digital marketing agency knows the right strategy to use in marketing your contents to your target audience, and how to generate new leads using contents.

Your social media pages also have to be engaging and not left to die off. When contracting a digital marketing agency, make sure they have the ability to engage existing and prospective customers. They should also build active interaction between people and the company through these social media pages. This will boost your business and help you understand your customers and what they look forward to from your company.

You can also use digital marketing to boost your return on investment (ROI), drive sales and further improve the revenue of your business. Instead of investing millions of naira on TV, radio and print adverts, investing in digital marketing helps you work within budget and save your company a whole lot of money. Running an email marketing campaign would also help your business reach more prospects which could translate to sales, awarenes and engagement.

The success of each campaign can be monitored and this would help you know what you are doing right and what you are wrong. You can take note of these observations and make changes where necessary so as to reach more people with future campaigns and improve sales.

In summary, digital marketing is one of the most effective ways to boost your business online and engage your target audience. As I mentioned earlier, the digital space is the largest market you can think of and there are so many things to benefit from digital marketing. So a business should hire the best digital marketing agencies so as to realize its goals with ease. Doing all of these without the help of digital marketing experts might lead to the loss of prospects that would have been so easy to gain in the first place. So make sure you choose only the best digital marketing agency that you can fully depend on for the growth and success of your business.