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Why Businesses Should Be on TikTok: From Platform to Search Engine
Nov 15, 2024 3:00:32 PM
As a student in Social Media Marketing, TikTok is a topic I'm passionate about, and I’d like to share why it’s so important for businesses to have a...
In today's digital age, digital marketing is a crucial part of every company's marketing strategy. But what is digital marketing, really?
Digital marketing may seem complex and challenging to initiate. However, with the help of this blog post and TeQflo, you can kickstart your marketing efforts today!
In this blog post, we will delve into what digital marketing is, explore various types of digital marketing that you need to be familiar with, and guide you on how to start your marketing strategy, set goals, define personas, and actually get started!
Are you ready to embark on your digital marketing journey? Let's go!
Content:
2. Different types of digital marketing
What is digital marketing, and why should you start doing it?
Digital marketing is a way to promote products or services through the use of digital channels, such as various social media platforms, search engines, or email, etc. There are many fun and rewarding ways to market yourself online!
You can use digital marketing to reach a broader audience, build strong relationships with your current and new customers, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate more leads. The list of things you can do is endless!
Why should you be present on social media/search engines and market yourself?
Because almost everyone in Sweden uses the internet, and 85 percent use social media every day, according to a survey from Svenskarna och Internet. The truth is, you need to be there to be visible and to survive as a business.
Another motivating reason is that digital marketing is effective. Digital marketing can be much more effective than traditional marketing, such as printed advertising or TV commercials. So, it's time to replace the "old" way of marketing your business and dive into the more modern marketing approach.
Different Types of Digital Marketing
As mentioned, there is a lot one can do when it comes to marketing. However, if you are entering the digital world, it can be beneficial to be familiar with some of the various ways to market yourself.
Here are some topics you might need to acquaint yourself with when entering the world of marketing:
- Content marketing
When you create various forms of material for, e.g., social media or your website, whether it's an image, text, video, etc., you are engaging in content creation = you are working with content marketing. The idea behind content marketing is to create valuable, relevant, and aesthetically appealing content that either touches, entertains, educates, or engages your followers/customers. - Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing method where the focus is on attracting your customers, listening to them, and letting them come to you, instead of chasing them and pushing advertising and the brand name in their faces. Inbound is about understanding your customers and providing them with relevant and valuable content they have requested. - Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Advertising (SEA)
Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing strategy employed when you want to rank higher in Google's search results. By ranking high in search results, more people can find your website, resulting in more traffic and customers. There are several ways to work on SEO, ranging from choosing relevant search phrases to having good content and technical optimization, etc.
Search Engine Marketing involves marketing through search engines (e.g., Google) through advertising or organic efforts. However, SEM encompasses more methods than just advertising.
Search Engine Advertising exclusively deals with paid advertising, unlike SEM. The purpose of SEA is also to appear high in search results.
To simplify it further: SEO + SEA = SEM. Easy Peasy, right? - Email marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing method where you use email to send targeted messages to your audience. The goal here is to build customer relationships, promote your services/products, and get closer to your customers in a way that may not be as easily achieved through other marketing channels.
Here at TeQflo, we use Hubspot to work with email marketing, among other things. If you want to start with email marketing, you can check out our CRM services, or talk directly with us if you are curious about Hubspot. - Advertising (Paid ads)
Paid ads are a marketing strategy where you pay for your ads to be visible on social media or search engines to reach a specific audience. There are countless ways to work with advertising and numerous platforms to advertise on!
There are many more words and ways to market yourself, which you will undoubtedly encounter as you venture into the world of marketing.
Where should you start?
There are countless ways to market your business, and it can feel somewhat overwhelming to think that you need to be everywhere to be visible. Trust me, I work in marketing and I feel EXACTLY the same way.
The trick is not to make too big of a deal out of it once you've started investing in your company's marketing, but start small! Begin with one social media platform, a blog post every other week, or an email per month. The most important thing is that you START!
After you've been doing it for a while, you can analyze your work, see what worked well or less well, what you can learn from it, and consider if you might want to spend more time establishing a stronger presence on social media?
This is what I would start with:
1. Build a strategy/personas/goals
Start by finding out who your target audience is, how to reach them, and what kind of content they want from you.
Here are some good questions to answer in order to target the right audience:
- What are your customers' "Pain Points"? In other words, what are their problems that you can solve?
- Some details about your customers' lives: where they live, their income, their occupation, their interests, and hobbies, etc.
- How do your customers find information? Do they search on Google or TikTok? Do they get purchase recommendations from friends, social media, or perhaps through newsletters?
- What prevents your potential customers from making the decision to buy from your company? Examine this carefully; it could range from your website making it more difficult for the customer to purchase to not providing relevant and interesting content on social media.
Write a detailed description of your customers (also known as personas), so you have a solid understanding of who your target audience is!
2. Choose a platform and determine how often you should be active there
Start with one platform. This makes for a good soft start! Set up a social media schedule – on which days and times will you post content? Consistency is key, so make sure to stick to the schedule. Perhaps you could begin by posting on TikTok and uploading 1-2 videos per week?
3. Set clear goals
You need to know the purpose behind your presence on this platform. Is the goal solely to increase sales? In that case, I recommend that you reconsider. It takes time to build a presence and trust on social media, and building a customer base that returns to you for purchases doesn't happen overnight.
My advice is to focus on building brand awareness on the platforms and ensuring that the brand is visible, but not aggressively pushing sales. That can come later, after you've built a strong presence and people are familiar with your brand and appreciate what you share.
Write down a couple of goals! Maybe you want to increase the number of followers? Get more likes? Or perhaps more clicks on the website?
4. Start! After that, analyze the results and start again!
You don't need to overthink this too much. It's better to start than to overthink it and never begin because it feels too big and overwhelming. Of course, a well-thought-out strategy is needed, and being consistent and active on the platforms is crucial to seeing a clear improvement in your marketing goals.
After following the steps above and initiating the project, stick to the schedule for a good while! You need to give this TIME! It takes time to build your presence on social media. After maintaining this for, let's say, 6-8 weeks, you can move on to the analysis phase.
Go through your statistics and compare them to how they looked before. Do you see any improvement? Consider expanding your online presence on another platform. If you don't see any improvement, revisit your strategy, rethink and redo, then try again!
You usually don't get it right on the first try, and there is NO shame in that!
As mentioned... marketing takes time.
Do you want to learn more about marketing?
Then you should:
1. Follow us on social media. We post updates on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook when we have a new blog post. You can also get valuable tips and learn something new from other posts we share on social media, so you lose nothing by following us!
2. If you want additional knowledge about marketing, maybe even a little help on how to start your marketing journey, don't hesitate to contact us!
3. Want to connect on LinkedIn? You can find me here! I'm here to support you and want to help you through this exciting new marketing journey! Let's do this! 🌟🌟
/ Sofia Johansson - Digital Growth Marketing Specialist 🥰
