Wikipedia defines digital marketing as the component of marketing that utilises internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Put simply, digital marketing is reaching out to people using these digital platforms to promote your brand and ultimately to sell your products or services.
But can you do this without a website?
In case, you are new to Digital Marketing, allow me to break it down for you. So you are using these digital channels to get users to see your brand and eventually to buy your products or services. Like in the old days, when we put up an ad in the local newspaper to get the readers to recognise our brand or to buy our products or services, so now we are using the digital channels instead to do the same thing. Previously, we would want the reader to come to our storefront or go to our distributor network to get our products, today we want the users to go to our landing page or online store to complete the sale. So the landing page is like the storefront of old.
So we are asking, can we do without a website? Can we use something else as a landing page?
I think you can do it with Social Media. Here I am putting social media marketing as part of Digital Marketing.
As an example, you can make use of the Facebook business page, which is free to use! You can even create a shop on the page to sell your products directly. And this is all free. But as your volume increases, you might want to consider a tool like shopify to create your shop and then link it to Facebook. This way you will have more reach and more tools to help you manage your orders, shipment and fulfilment.
So yes, you can definitely do it without a website, but then again, Facebook and shopify are actually websites, they are managed services or solutions whereas if you build your own website with an Ecommerce solution, it is more flexible. Facebook is free but you have to pay to use Shopify.
This is a short blog post to explore the possibilities and I think if you are just starting out and have a limited budget, doing up a Facebook page to promote your services or products, combined with posting engaging posts and stories frequently, you can be successful in promoting your brand. Facebook has a large user base and you can be very targeted in your reach too.
