3. Digital Marketing

It has become vital for any business to be present online whether through selling on a website, social media platform, email marketing, or any other tool that would enable penetrating the market and establishing a brand in the digital world. This guide will help you identify your target audience and explore some digital tools that you can use in marketing your products and services.

Step 1: Identify Target Market

A target market is the group of customers that your business wants to serve. The first step any business has to take is identifying who their target customers are. Try thinking of the characteristics of the customers that usually buy your products or similar products from the competitors. You can start identifying 4 main characteristics of your audience:

1. Demographics: social and economic characteristics of a group 
2. Behavior: their lifestyle and behavior patterns when interacting with similar products
3. Physiographic: the customer’s beliefs and ideas
4. Geographic: the region they live in

To better understand this concept, let’s apply it to the sports brand Winner Force. If we were to describe the target segment of this business, the following would be their targeting map:

These tools can help you gain insights into specific target groups: 

• Google Keyword Planner: a feature in the Google ads tool that helps explore and extract insights about the market. 
• Similar Web: a global cloud-based solution that offers business web analytics services. It provides data on the volume of web traffic from your customers and competitors and referral sources, including keyword and demographic analysis, and website information (bounce rate, site visits, time on page, among others).

Step 2: Online Channels

After identifying your target audience, it is time to work on your digital channel to help your audience find your products and buy them. Digital sales channels or e-commerce websites are simply online venues that you use to reach all the online shoppers out there.

1. Landing Pages

A landing page is a singular webpage that is created for one specific purpose as selling. A landing page is reached when clicked on a specific link in an email or message you sent to your customers or a social media ad you placed online. By clicking your link, the visitor shows interest in buying your product and when they reach the landing page it gets easier for them to make the purchase.

• Elements and Best Practices of Landing Pages

1. Main headline: it is the very first thing that people see and read; therefore, it is important to make it capture the viewers’ attention through a catchy phrase.
2. Supporting headline: This is added to further explain the main headline and add a persuasive message about the product.
3. Hero Shot: it is the best photograph or image of your offering, displayed in an attractive way for the audience to make it stand out. The hero shot could also be a video, displaying the offering.
4. Call To Action (CTA):  This is where you ask the customer to do something such as purchase your product, fill in a form, download your mobile app, etc.

The performance of the landing page is monitored through the following KPIs:

Best Landing Pages Tools

• Unbounce: it offers an easy interface and several templates to create landing pages instantly through drag and drop features.
• Instapage: an easy-to-use builder that offers 200+ customizable templates for a variety of uses as well as drag and drop functionalities. You can use it to create and publish landing pages instantly.

2. Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace is a digital marketplace where you can post items to sell to all other Facebook users in your area. It is a simple and effective tool for small businesses to sell their products and services.

Steps to sell on Facebook Marketplace:

1. Log into your FB account and choose Facebook Marketplace
2. Click Create New Listing, then click Item for sale.
3. Click Add Photos to upload a photo of your item from your computer
4. Enter info about your product as title, description, price, location, and category.
5. Make sure that you've entered the information that's required then click to publish your Marketplace listing
6. To follow up on any of your listings, open your marketplace click on it, and see if you got any messages from buyers. If you sold your product, you can mark it as sold from there.

7. WhatsApp Marketing

Direct marketing is direct communication with individual consumers, rather than using a third party as a social media platform. Direct marketing channels can include mail, email, social media, and texting campaigns. WhatsApp is one of the most dominant messaging and direct marketing applications globally. There are currently more than 2 billion WhatsApp users around the globe and rising. Hence, any business needs to use this channel to connect and promote its products to its customers.

1. Create your business contact list: Prepare a list of business contacts through lead generation tools e.g., landing page.
2. Create a group or a broadcast list for your customers: Make sure you add the most interested customers in a broadcast list or a group on your WhatsApp to send out and communicate any new offerings or discounts through messages.
3. Try to include your messages clear call to action and add visuals to make it easier for the message recipients to read your messages.

Create WhatsApp stories featuring your products to encourage your contacts to buy your offerings