The definition of e-marketing and its advantages

First, the definition of e-marketing and its advantages

E-marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technology, such as the internet, mobile phones, social networking sites, search engines, e-mail, and others.

E-marketing tools are in harmony with this digital technology; market research uses a tool such as Google Keyword Planner; analysis of your marketing efforts is done using a tool such as Facebook Insights; and your ads are also digital platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

E-marketing represents a completely new approach to understanding customer behavior, starting from measuring the number of uploads, likes, visits, views, comments, and interactions and ending with ratings, reviews, and questionnaires.

It is characterized by being easier, cheaper, faster, more effective, and more flexible than traditional marketing methods.

The easiest: it does not require any routine complications or interviews. Just create an account on the competent platform to start marketing.

It’s cheaper: the cost of renting a billboard on a road or advertising space in a well-known newspaper can cover the cost of an advertising campaign on social networking sites for 3 months ، there are also marketing ideas that you can implement with minimal cost.

Your ads start appearing to your audience moments after they are designed and published.

E-marketing gives you the advantage of personalization. When you narrow the scope of the appearance of your ads to target a specific category in terms of age, country, city, or interests related to your products, you spend your money only in the right place.

More flexible: the many measurement tools give you enough accurate information about your marketing efforts to determine which ones to continue with and which ones to stop.

In order to be able to practice e-marketing activities, the starting point should be to build a presence for your company on the internet. This can be done by creating a website with an attractive design, providing comprehensive information about the company, and adding a blog to it in which you share your experiences with your target audience, and also creating accounts on social networking sites through which you promote your products and communicate with your audience.

Second: e-marketing plan in 6 steps

Step one: choose the right audience.

When you think, ‘Who are you directing your products to?’ The typical answer will be for those who want and can afford to buy it.

But many do not do this. Some people may be excited about starting a business without pausing to think first, “Is someone going to buy my products?” And can I get to him?

In a study published by Harvard Business Review on the five stages of startup growth, the study explained that the first stages should relate to answering the question: Can I provide a customer base for my products? More on that here: Can I get to them?

So what’s the point of shopping for a great product for people who don’t care about it but don’t have the money to buy it? Therefore, it is very important that your e-marketing efforts are aimed at a category that wants and is able to buy your product. and to carry out a nomination process that excludes all other categories from the general public and targets only this category.

Step two: Know your customers well

Knowing your customers is not a simple or intuitive step, so that you can define your customers in just one line: age, country, type. But it is a complex step, and I am not exaggerating when I say that, in the end, it will make you know your customers more than they know themselves.

Let me explain to you how:

Look for five emotional stimuli in your customers’ minds that move their motivation to buy, namely pain, fear, hope, dream, and obstacle.Use brainstorming and imagine yourself in their place, or design a questionnaire using Google Forms. Google Forms and send it to them by e-mail. Record any information regarding the five catalysts in the market for your products.

Use Google to search for topics related to your market, and read reviews and audience ratings of products from the category you produce.

Treat with an open mind as you try to understand your customers. Do not put restrictions on your understanding. Whatever their postulates and things that interest them, you should take them into account in your electronic marketing plans.

Step three is to define your goal.

Financial expert Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich, a 2009 bestseller, says that focusing on one goal increases the likelihood that you will be able to achieve it.

Reducing goals may seem unpleasant for a beginning e-marketing enthusiast, but focusing on the bigger goal that you want to achieve when you use it helps you grow step by step. For example, do you want to collect a mailing list of 500 users or do you want to generate revenue of 10,000?

Step four: Calculate your expectations.

ROI is the abbreviation that refers to the return on investment, which is the essence of this step. Some e-marketing methods, such as search engine advertising, for example, require funding, so in this step you have to answer the following question: Will I recover my money spent on the marketing method that I will use or not?
The expected return on investment will tell you whether to proceed down this path or change it to another one.

The expected return on investment can be calculated in the following way:

The expected return on investment equals the expected revenue from e-marketing less the costs.

In the field of e-marketing, the 5:1 ratio is a good ratio, which may vary depending on the structure of your expenses and your field of work.

Step Five: Keep an eye on your competitors.

The importance of this step comes not only from the fact that it gives you the opportunity to outperform your competitors, but because it saves you a lot of trial and error at the beginning of using this type of marketing. As the saying goes, “you don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” but rather “start where others have ended”.

Monitor your competitors in order to learn from their mistakes, be motivated by their successes, and to discover areas that distinguish you from them. Use them in your e-marketing for your business.

Here’s the most guaranteed way to monitor them, which is to engage, act as if you are one of their customers, buy their products if possible, read other people’s reviews of them, browse their websites, subscribe to their newsletter, notice where and when you see their ads, and follow them on their social accounts.

And if you want more “permissive spying,” use a tool like Alexa Competitive Analysis to analyze traffic on your competitors’ sites and learn about their performance in search engines.

Step Six: draw a path to reach the goal

For example, your goal with an e-marketing plan is to get 100 subscribers to your newsletter per month.
But the current rate of subscribers is only 50 per month, so in order to achieve your goal, you need to double the current subscription rate.

You can achieve this in two ways:

The first: to design a catalog or a free book that asks to write the email address before downloading.
The second is to double the number of visits to your site using different options such as blogging or paid advertising.

Decide which two ways you will take to start implementing the goal

Third: e-marketing methods

You have finished developing your e-marketing plan after choosing your audience, knowing your customers, setting your goal, calculating your expectations, monitoring your competitors, and then charting the way to reach the goal. Now it’s time for implementation.

The available methods are varied. Start by using the easiest and most economical e-marketing methods and then include them in the use of the rest of the methods according to your budget and measurement of results, which is the continuous process that coincides with the implementation of your marketing plan and we will discuss it at the end of this guide.

The following are the most important methods of e-marketing:

Content marketing

Content is king. This phrase that did not come out of the blue is one of the postulates of e-marketing. Your successful marketing message is one that includes good and relevant content, and today, with the presence of many companies on the internet, it has become necessary that your e-marketing efforts be characterized by “content.”

Content marketing is the sharing of various forms of content that meet the needs of your audience and provide them with value in order to attract their interest. But what is the importance of attracting public interest in e-marketing?

Attracting public interest is critical because it drives traffic to your site from search engines, informs the audience about your products, and provides an opportunity to communicate with the audience, thereby building trust between you and them.

The content takes different forms; for example, a blog post, a video, an infographic, a book, or a catalog.
Start content marketing from day one and this will achieve your goal in the future and give you natural organic traffic from search engines.

As for the detailed steps of e-content marketing, here are the most important ones :

Create a blog for your company right away, present yourself as an entrepreneur in your specialty, write blogs in which you do not hesitate to share your experiences to gain loyal followers who later turn into your promoters, and use attention-grabbing headlines for your blogs.

Share blog content on your social media accounts, and add buttons to the blog that make it easier to share content on these sites.

Make a publication schedule and stick to it

Write a book or guide that meets one of the customer’s needs (such as the one you are reading).
Write on popular blogs with the same quality of readers that you are targeting, and point to your site inside the post to get a lot of traffic.

You should write about other companies and individuals in your field. They will most likely share content with their audience, so you gain faster penetration, and they may do the same with you ، use the infographic to give your content a wide spread on social networks.

Marketing on social media

Facebook is used daily by 1.5 billion people, and by simple calculation compared to the total world population, almost a fifth of the world’s population logs on to Facebook daily, which means that your current and future customers often have accounts on Facebook.

Social media marketing is the use of these sites to attract the attention of your audience to your website by creating attractive content that encourages them to share it.

There are many social networking sites that are witnessing constant growth, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, so do not put yourself under the pressure and fatigue of matchmaking between many of them and focus on the sites that interest you most and expand your e-marketing activity.

The following are the most important steps of e-marketing through social networking sites:

Create an account on the most useful communication sites for you and take care of choosing a cover photo. Put your URL in the photo post to represent a link leading to your site.

Use Facebook templates such as “business” or “shopping” to make it easier to post your own offers on your page and publish your products in the form of a store.

Post your posts on your social accounts, as linking a blog to networking sites generates non-stop traffic.
Communication sites have a social character, so when used for e-marketing purposes, they are not limited to publishing commercial content, and use a 3:1 ratio (1 commercial content, 3 useful or entertaining content) in determining the quality of the content of publications.

Avoid generality in the non-commercial content you provide and make it relevant to your company’s field (for example, if you use e-marketing to sell sports tools, do not share phrases that stimulate learning).

Find out when your followers are active using a service like Facebook Insights, and then schedule content posting using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer so that content continues to stream regularly at these times.

Interact with your followers by answering their questions, responding to their comments, and following up on their complaints.

If your budget allows, use social media ads, and be precise in targeting the category for which the ad appears to match your target audience.