We can see Digital marketing progressing in Nepal from last 2-3 years. Previously, people did not know much about digital marketing, how to start and grow a YouTube channel, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, and such. Now, people have started to harness the power of the Internet and social media to grow businesses. As ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have started providing Internet with a faster speed at affordable prices, the revolution in the digital field has occurred. The table has turned in the favor of digital marketing in Nepal.

Digital marketing companies and individuals have been growing in Nepal and doing their best. As I remember, two years back, there were just a few of them. If you think all IT companies are digital marketing companies, then you are wrong. Companies who provide Website design and development, Java, jQuery, programming, PHP services do not fall into digital marketing. Let’s be clear what a digital marketing is about.

Digital marketing

Simply put, digital marketing is a marketing process that uses digital devices (electronic devices) and Internet access for a marketer to reach over potential customers. Businesses use online channels such as social media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email, websites to connect with customers, which are digital marketing approaches.

Why digital marketing?

With increasing Internet uses over time, the world is digitalizing rapidly than anyone has ever imagined. Internet will grow bigger than today. The numbers of people who go online are increasing every day. Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. are the giant companies and they are making fortune from digital marketing.

Currently over half of the world population has access to the Internet.

• The number of internet users in 2018 is 4.021 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year
• The number of social media users in 2018 is 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year
• The number of mobile phone users in 2018 is 5.135 billion, up 4 percent year-on-year

Source- https://wearesocial.com/us/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018

If you are a marketer, then your focus is always on your audience. It’s all about bringing your audience in right place at right time. Billions of people are online and the increasing number of every day shows that it’s now time to get your business onto the Internet or else you are losing your customers to your competitors whose business are already online.

Digital marketing tactics and strategies

There is not only a single way to do digital marketing because it depends on so many things. One particular technique can work for many marketers but not for you or it can work just for you but not for other people. This all depends on how you do it. Every digital marketing campaign needs a plan, research, team, strategy, and hard work so that you can finally sell your service or product. It also depends on how well can you plan your marketing strategy and work with it throughout the campaign. Consistency is the key to achieve the long-term goal in digital marketing.

For example, you are a marketer selling a book from your store. Now you want to sell it online so what can you do? You can either learn digital marketing or ask digital marketing agencies for their services. What can be done next?

What are the things you have to understand before selling your service?

• About your services or product that you are going to offer (Cook Books).
• Who are the audience (those who love to cook and try out new recipes)?
• How will your service benefit your audience (new recipes to learn for cooking enthusiasts)?
• Where is your audience lurking (FB, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Google, Forums)?

Find out the audience where are they lurking around on the Internet. Would it be Facebook Ad, Organic search traffic, Paid search, email marketing, social boosting or some other ways to reach your audience? Find the perfect way that can be profitable for you. You don’t have to go through all the marketing tactics, just filter out where can you convert your audience into customers and start the process.

Many people fail when they do not follow the above-mentioned simple things. It’s simple, easy and basic that’s why many people ignore it trying to act advance and smart.

Let’s get into some of the most common and widely used digital marketing tactics which highly converts.

Search Engine Optimization

It is the process of optimizing your websites to rank higher on search engine result pages to get organic traffic. This is the number one process of obtaining organic (free) traffic to your website or blog. When you apply SEO strategy on your website, your website will start ranking higher in search engine result on applied keywords. People will start finding your site on SERP’s first page and visit it more often. More traffic means more lead and more lead means more customer or clients.

SEO can be broken down into:

On page SEO

• Meta Title and description
• Heading tags
• Content and keywords
• Page speed
• Image optimization
• Internal Linking

Off Page SEO

• Link building
• Outreach
• Social media engagement
• Social bookmarking
• Forum submission
• Article submission
• Press release

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a process of promoting your business, products, services, and brand through social media to increase audience, traffic, brand awareness, leads, and sales for your business. There are different ways to promote your business using social media and every medium has their own terms and rules to follow.

Social media is now the biggest platform where people engage and spend more of their time every day. Currently, it is the best place for reaching thousand and millions of audience for marketing.

Facebook

• Facebook Advertisement
• Facebook post boosting
• Building Facebook page and groups in a niche

Instagram

• Create a personal profile or a business profile
• Increase followers
• Get followers on your niche
• Post amazing content continuously
• Upload your content in peak hours
• Instagram Advertisement

Twitter

• Create a good profile
• Increase followers
• Tweet during peak hours
• Twitter advertisement

LinkedIn

• Create a profile and complete it with correct details
• Engage in your niche
• LinkedIn Advertisement
• If you have a good reputation you rock

Pinterest

• Amazing platform to generate traffic
• Create a board on a niche
• Pin others pins
• Pin your photos to your board
• Increase followers
• Promote pins
• Pinterest pin advertisement

Google+

• Create a profile
• Engage and increase followers
• Google plus advertisement only works if you have 1k followers
• Google plus advertisement allows you to create engagement campaigns

Content Marketing 

Content marketing is the long-term marketing strategy that is done by providing quality, relevant content consistently to generate traffic, audience and to attract potential customers. Content marketing always focuses on the solution of the problems.

For example, KFC has a tagline, “It’s finger licking good”, which is always displayed in every video advertisement made by KFC. That video with their tagline is the content KFC delivers to the people informing the food they provide is so delicious that you lick your fingers leaving no any residue behind and it’s really a finger licking good, no doubt. This also shows that why continuous quality content marketing over time will create brand awareness.

Some of the good forms of content marketing strategy are

• Blogs
• Videos
• Infographics
• Social media posts
• EBooks
• Ad banners

Google Advertisement

Google is the largest search engine we have today, where more than billions of queries are searched every day. Google is not only about search, they have different services such as Gmail, Google drive, Google AdSense, Google AdWords and more.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is the Advertisement platform created by Google which allows publishers to advertise text, video, banner and more interactive media ad to publishers’ blog, website, channels and personal business platforms in the Google Network. An advertiser pays Google for their content to be shown as an advertisement to high traffic generating platforms like YouTube, Websites, and blogs.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is another Advertisement platform, where an advertiser pays Google for their content to show up in the search result pages. If visitors click on the Ad displayed then advertiser has to pay Google based on how much CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) they have set. It is PPC (Pay Per Click) based advertising program.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisement model is found in paid Facebook advertisement, promoted tweets, CPC based YouTube Ads.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a type of marketing where you earn a commission by promoting other people products or services to your audience through different channels like websites, social media, advertisement and more. All you need is to have an audience with you who can buy those products or services through you. You need channels like websites, YouTube or social profiles to post affiliate links of other people stuff and when someone goes through your affiliate links and buys, it earns you a commission based on how much percentage% deal you have with the vendor.

Email Marketing

One of the high conversion marketing strategies is considered Email marketing. It is an old strategy but still very effective. If you can find the right audience, make a good email list and target them with your amazing content then you can get a huge amount of conversion.

A lot of tactics has been changed, as people have gotten smarter. Sending a continuous email with no value provided would result in your email ending up in the receiver’s spam folder. Hence, you need to work carefully and professionally to avoid such results.

• Build trust with your audience
• Provide valuable and relevant content
• Don’t spam with lots of emails continuously
• Use strategy that converts

Mobile Marketing

Mobile phones have become the basic aspect of people nowadays. People use and have a mobile phone by their side all the time. It has become a part of people’s daily life. Checking mobile phones every minute for messages and notifications shows how much people are addicted to it.

Taking these advantages, marketers are targeting mobile users for marketing products and services. Google has also confirmed that mobile devices are the main factor where searches are being made. Mobile traffic has raised more than 50% at the present day.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is digital marketing?

When you apply a marketing strategy using digital technology to sell your products or services online, it is a digital marketing.

Why choose digital marketing?

If you are a marketer, it’s always important to find out where your customers are. Billions of people are using the Internet and are online most of the time. People are spending most of their time on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube Forums and more places. Your only option to reach to those crowds is through Digital marketing.

What are the benefits of Digital Marketing?

When it says digitalized, it means everything is recorded and saved within a digital system where people can access information faster and easier. When you apply Digital marketing, the best thing is you can track campaigns and results in real time. You can even check and compare the previous results with the current one. You can target people as per your wish and analyze the whole process in real time, can see how many people have seen your post or content, Impression generated, amount of clicks pressed, conversion and lead generated. You cannot track result when you apply Advertisement in Newspaper. You will never know how many people are reading the newspaper, even if they are reading what number of people are seeing your advertisement, what is the conversion ratio. You cannot make a good choice with no data that you cannot analyze. With digital marketing, you can track report, manage report, analyze data and retarget with a better strategy.

Things you can you do with digital marketing 

• Track your campaigns and results in real time.
• Analyze the whole process
• Retarget by improving the previous strategy
• Easier to measure ROI (Return on Investment)
• Calculate CTR (Click through Ratio) by calculating a number of clicks made in a total number of Impressions.
• Find and track your returning visitors/customers.
• Know details on your visitors.

What Is Inbound Marketing and Outbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the strategy focused on attracting audience or customers by providing quality content, value, the solution to the problems and building trust. Blogs, search engine, content marketing, and Opt Email marketing are some Inbound Marketing strategies.

Outbound Marketing is the method of getting sales by reaching to people by general media advertisement, initiating conversation or meeting in-Person. TV advertisement, face to face meeting, cold calling or emailing are some outbound marketing strategies.

Will Digital marketing benefit any business?

People frequently ask how will digital marketing benefit their business? Will it work?

Yes, Digital marketing will benefit every business if performed properly. Find out what your company or business is providing or selling, who are the potential costumers, where are these people, what they want, what are their problems and creating valuable content covering all of these things will help business to gain profit. If your Business is B2B or B2C you have to slightly apply different techniques depending on your services and audience nature and you will eventually do good.

B2B Digital marketing

B2B marketing refers to the techniques used by companies to sell their products and services to other businesses using digital marketing. If your company is business-to-business (B2B), you have to focus more on how to get leads and built a strong long-term relationship.

For example – I have a Digital marketing company and you have a Travel company. So, here you come to me asking for digital marketing services for your business and only after a clear understanding of my company, you will accept the services. This is B2B. The main part is how did you find out that I have a digital marketing company? Well, it’s because of digital marketing strategies that I have applied to my business module. It can be Search engine optimization, Social media marketing or Email Marketing.

B2C Digital marketing

Business-to-consumer marketing refers to the strategy used by companies to sell their products directly to the consumers using digital marketing. Here your business has to focus more on product quality, reviews, and pricing. You don’t have to personally meet all the customers and deal with them instead focus on how can you make them buy your products.

For example –You are selling football jerseys online and you have a website where people can order or buy it.  So, your business goal is to reach to people who are football fans, those who play football or watch football. You reach to them with different digital marketing channels like online Advertisements, Search engine optimization, social media, Facebook groups, Instagram, Pinterest and make engaging content to get a sell. You can direct your traffic to your site and make a sell or you can directly sell it from Facebook as well.

How fast can I see the result of digital marketing?

With different digital Marketing strategy, the result will vary. You can see a fast result with Paid Advertisement while SEO, content marketing, social media are long-term Marketing process, which generates high organic traffic in the long run. It normally takes 6 months of strong digital marketing strategy to start seeing the progress and years or two to generate constant traffic over time.

All of the results will depend on the efficiency of your digital marketing strategy.

What is a cost for digital marketing? Is it high?

There is no exact price for digital marketing, as it depends on what service you want for your business. SEO, social media, content creation for your website tends to cost lower compared to other. There are companies charging 250$-2k monthly for SEO. Social media and content creation are even more expensive than SEO. These are long-term digital marketing strategy, which will bring continuous organic traffic in the long term.

If you go with Paid Advertisement, for example – If you want a PPC campaign using Google AdWords, you will bid your price against your competitor for a specific keyword you want your business Ads to appear at top of the google search result. The amount of cost that is required depends on the competitiveness of keywords that you want to rank your business while it can be cheap and affordable or extremely expensive.

You can’t always get these Ads to run every time, which consumes a lot of money so building organic traffic will be the backup plan.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is taking the market all over the world and ignoring it is not going to help you but cost you and your business.

If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business

                                                                                                                                     – Bill Gates

 

Ignoring online marketing is like opening business but not telling anyone

-Anonymous

 

Brand that ignores social media… will die… it’s that simple

-Jeff Regovin

 

Today people are the most effective marketing channel of your brand

-Davide Scialpi