JustGoom: September 2018

Why is digital marketing important for business?

Any business requires promotion for its growth. Promotion involves communicating the existence of your business to maximum number of people and also to convince them to buy your products and services.

Television, Radio and Newsprint advertisements, Hoardings, Fliers, Leaflets, Direct Marketing are some of the traditional methods of business promotion.

In the new millenium, the internet is the most powerful medium for business promotion as billions of people have access to it and they are the potential audiences to receive communications regarding your products and services.

Have a look at the attached graph; this is data released by World Bank about internet usage.

Build your website

Building a website is the first milestone in your organisation’s digital marketing journey. The whole Digital Marketing project revolves around the website. The website gives basic information about your company and its products and services and thus is your first advertisement post in the digital world. The website can also collect leads of people interested in your product or services. Hence with a website, you can potentially reach the millions of visitors who visit the internet. Internet users visiting your website become aware of your products and services and can contact you in case of any requirement. Thus you can increase your marketing reach.

Get a domain name

The first step in building a website is registering your domain name. If your business is well established, your brand name can be your domain name, if it is available. If its a new business, you can create an innovative and catchy domain name for your website. ‘GoDaddy.com’ is a registrar for internet domain names where you can register your domain name for a fee. There are several other registrars which you can yourself find out.

Host your website

Your website will require storage and servers to reside on and hosting your website means creating server space and an IP address for your website in the World Wide Web. There are various hosting services providers such as HostGator.com or GoDaddy.com. One of the crucial factors of selecting a website hosting service is the page loading speed. Page loading speed is crucial for the performance of the website. It also improves your SEO Rankings in Google Search resulting in improved search result ranking of your website, as we will see later in this blog. Obviously, a faster loading web hosting service will cost more.

Create Content and design the website

Once your domain name is hosted, then you have to design your website and create content for it. A well written and relevant content will become popular on the internet. So you have to create good content to adorn your website. Content is the single most important factor in the success of your website. To begin with, WordPress, which is the best open- source or free Content Management System in the World, can be used to create content for your website.

WordPress has built- in ‘plug- ins’ for almost all website functionalities. Some of them are: Creating Posts, Creating Web Pages, Back up of data, Managing Comments( approving, unapproving, spamming, answering or deleting), Titles, Sub titles, Bold letters, Fonts, Italics, Alignment, adding links, pictures, videos etc., adding social share icons, Adding Meta descriptions, snippet views, adding tags, creating users and giving them permissions( read/ write), managing subscriptions, analytics, improving performance, creating a mobile version of the website, SEO etc. Some of the functions are built- in, whereas some plugins are free and some paid.

WordPress also has several themes for different types and uses of websites and also customizations for those themes.

Thus, WordPress helps you create a website without knowing web designing and development. Almost 20% of all internet is powered by WordPress. WordPress is also very user-friendly to use with simple drag and drop functionality.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Most of the internet traffic on the internet is guided by ‘Search engines’. You all must be familiar with Google as a search engine. The user types in words relevant to the topic he is searching for( called as Keywords) and the search engine throws results of matching websites. Needless to say, your website should be Search Engine friendly, so that whenever the keywords are typed, your website should show up at the top of the list. The techniques used to improve your search engine rankings are collectively called ‘ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)‘.