Digitaholic

Introduction to Digital Network Marketing

Do you own a Retail store or an online webstore and wondering why the sales are not progressive? And why do you have the same old customer base even after introducing varieties of products to your store? The answer to your question is “Network”. 

However, whenever we talk about “network” aur brain automatically connects to the process of making connections and building relationships. Network marketing is that medium which helps manufacturers and sellers to expedite their sales through digital medium. Digital Network marketing is a person-to-person business model where you take your offline business to online mode and expand your current digital presence. 

Digital Network marketing stretches its spectrum from email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing to video marketing, content marketing and so on. This will build a stronger and productive base for your store, open to a huge variety of audience digitally.

What is digital network marketing, and it’s future?

We all have had that one person in our group who would tell us about this one product that they have started using and claim it to be the best of all. This is the most cliche yet the most common way of network marketing!

Network marketing is also popularly known as Multi level marketing (MLM), Pyramid marketing, Affiliate marketing, Referral marketing and so on. It is a person-to-person business model of sales. The blueprint of digital network marketing is urging people to create, buy and sell onto a further network to generate sales. In short, it is a person to person sling platform where sale is achieved by expanding the network through contacts and media.

The Digital Network Marketing Rules

1. Plan Ahead

Set your objectives

Decide what your purpose is! Once you have that, start working strategically to achieve it and maximise your ROI.

2. Establish your Connections

Keeping your objective in mind and the niche that you are working on, connect with your audience in a narrow approach but in all the targeted mediums. For instance, making a small video of your physical store and publishing it on social media platforms. 

Identify events and groups to take part in. 

Get in Radar of influencers 

3. Follow Up

Stay connected to your audience by regular posts and follow up messages.

Digital Marketing For Network Marketers

Network marketing is a kind of marketing where we need networking for business growth. The stages in which a network marketer works to achieve a target can be divided into following parts:

1. Join the program: After joining the program, fathom the niche and choose the right audience who will be targeted for your product.
2. Promote the Program: Understanding the psychology of your audience and to make them understand how this product can make things easier and more efficient. Where, on one hand the product promotion starts from your friends, neighbours, family and extended family, many network marketers use platforms like instagram, facebook, whatsapp and so on. However, if not done properly many network marketers fail to achieve their goal.
3. Convert leads to customer: During the product promotion many leads are collected. After the lead collection the next objective of the network marketer is to convert these leads to the prospective customers, mostly by personal meetings. After successfully completing these 3 steps they start generating income through Digital Network Marketing.

Problems Network Marketers Face

Problems faced by network marketers is losing existing customers. Many MLM organisations fail due to poor financial management and choosing to work with one of these will never get you on track. Always go for a revolutionary, progressive and steady company. Try to take concrete actions focused on your goals.

However, Time management is the key factor. Always keep in mind to on-board new customers without neglecting existing ones.This can be achieved by keeping a list of customers with their contact information and doing regular follow-ups about their concern and new demands if any.

MLM Industry

Multi Level marketing is a strategy used in selling products or services by a company or an organisation to maximise their ROI. MLM encourages its members to sell and promote its product to individuals and bring in new recruits. For the new recruits, a percentage is paid to the distributors, hence, becoming the distributor’s downline or his network and in turn, these “networks” are encouraged to generate more sales to earn money by providing incentives.

Basically, MLM is used by businesses that heavily rely on sales to generate their revenue. Meanwhile, The FTC or Federal Trade Commission makes sure that operations of MLM do not undergo illegal pyramid schemes.

Example of Companies that follow Multi level Marketing: 

1. Amway

It is one of the leading MLM businesses in the world selling Homecare, health and Beauty products in over 100 countries with over $8.9 Billion sales generated in 2021.

2. Herbalife Nutrition

A high-profile MLM company, manufacturing nutrition and weight-loss products. Although the company was accused of using pyramid scheme 

However, according to AARP (American association of Retired Persons) 60% are women participants, 50% participants drop out every year, Whereas, profit is turned by only 25% of the participants, 99.6% of participants seemed to have lost money in a study of scheme of 27 MLM businesses.

The Digital Network Marketing Revolution 

Digital Network marketing has drastically changed the mindset of the audience for traditional marketing as well as for advertising. Globally, the percentage of businesses spending their financial budget on digital Network marketing is more than 40%.

What actually is working in digital marketing?

Leading companies have changed the way of marketing in the digital world by capitalising on the following three forces.

1. Accessing enormous amounts of real-time data for their campaigns on different platforms.
2. Strategically working in omnichannel relationship and long term engagement with consumers (instead of one way interaction)
3. Deploying flexibility of ideas and concepts with consumer’s real-time feedback data collection.

Evolutionary stages of Digital Network Marketing

As companies are strengthening their Digital Network Marketing strategy, They typically follow four stages:

1. Building Basics

Most companies spend a portion of their advertising budget on social advertising, Display and search. They not only upgrade their company website but also fine-tune their email interactions and work on improving their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) activities.

2. Personalization and Targeting

In the next stage, this consumer data is used by marketers to target and tailor ads with more precision, maximising the ROI of digital elements and individual campaigns.

3. Evolving through Test and learn

Companies use this technique to transform their way of marketing, covering almost all the aspects of marketing through online and offline campaigns.

4. Maximising Direct consumer interaction value

            At this stage companies build a direct relation with their customers. Digital Natives like, Netflix, Amazon prime, spotify, Uber have excelled in consumer engagement through network marketing. Similar to this, businesses with loyalty programs have started using this customer based data to develop a lifetime relation with their consumers such as Airlines and hotels.

Social Media Marketing

The concept of lead generation, hiring, managing and marketing came from social media marketing. However, there are specific working strategies to gain ROI from social media marketing.

1. Increase your online presence

Increasing online presence by creating more valuable content to post over online platforms. For instance, making live videos on instagram or facebook, creating an online store for people to look over your products at ease of their home on instagram or whatsapp through the business tools provided by these applications. Making your audience more engaging by asking them their opinion on certain things that you are making or planning to do. Apart from this making your website, influencer marketing, blogging are among few that helps in increasing your presence on online platforms.

    2.Measure your marketing Effort

After you have successfully worked on your campaigns, it’s a great idea to always go and check on the analytics to see if your campaign is meeting the goal. Analytics also helps you analyse the platforms showcasing the most growth over the period.

 Creating content on social Media

 Platforms for growth of your Social Networking online:

A. Facebook

 Facebook with more than 1.1 billion users,  is the biggest platform that offers a variety of video, promotional and written content for its users. Despite its decreasing popularity among youngsters it still remains at top in the world for its social connectivity.

B. Twitter

Twitter has around 310 million users, out of which 71% users use this platform to know about latest news or using news references and sharing tips on network marketing. It widens the circle and groups through tweets as many people retweet or share the tweets posted by famous or known personalities.  Twitter also offers to feature tweets and to gain followers. It also uses an easy to use advertising program for social popularity.

C. LinkedIn

A business to business (B2B) oriented platform, used by around 255 million users. A recent addition to the advertising for lead generation was made whose prime focus is email marketing. Linkedin also bought slideshare company, a lead in powerpoint presentations. 

D. Pinterest

This is an image based social media platform with over 250 million users out of which 80% are women. It is a picture based visual social network. Here, people pin pictures that relate to services, products and much more to their pin boards. These pins can also be re-pinned to be shared into the social circle. According to a study, around 60% purchases have been made based on pictures on pinterest. 

E. Youtube

Youtube, owned by Google,  is the top most popular video sharing site in the world and ranks 3rd after Google and Facebook on internet popularity platforms. The basic mode used by Youtube for social marketing is video. This site provides you the platform to use video based content to attract an audience on a large scale. Youtube is one platform for businesses of almost every niche, most popular out of which are beauty, fashion and food.

F. Instagram 

Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 and owned by Meta platforms. It is a free site that uses photo and reel based sharing to generate attraction from the audience. However, instagram is most popular among small business owners to showcase and sell their products organically. It uses data to grow on social networking by followers and sharing reels with popular instagram users.

Email Marketing

So, the question is why email marketing? When social marketing through other and almost all mediums use pictures, videos, tweets and reels then what will an email do? This question is answered by top ranking companies that believe to have a holistic approach towards digital marketing. These companies suggest that social marketing is best when used together for best customer experience.

According to the data, where 17% of consumers prefer seeing promotional content on social media, 72% of consumers prefer to receive this content via email. The percentage of people buying products by using links in email is 4.24% whereas, the percentage of people buying something by clicking on links from social media sites is just 2.49%.

Email marketing strategy used in Digital Network Marketing

Email marketing requires strategy of its own, to achieve the goal:

1. Identifying targeted audience
2. Know pain-points of your audience
3. Focus on their needs, instead of imposing yours
4. Regular follow ups by Question, comments and concern 

What’s New in Network Marketing 2.0

Network marketing has upgraded itself in complement to digital marketing. With the digital revolution used by influencers today by sharing strengths of their domains, businesses and contacts more effectively, many influencers of the financial industry drive their marketing channel with evolving digital and social media mode. Therefore, synthesising new marketing terminology as Network marketing 2.0 another word for Digital Network Marketing.

Creating a comprehensive Digital Network Marketing strategy

Digital network marketing strategy has a defined set of actions that uses online channels to  lead towards your goal. Businesses use digital network marketing strategy to boost their revenue and seize their growth opportunities. The nature of marketing can be Earned, owned or paid. 

Digital network marketing basically involves selling or promotion of your products or services through online mediums such as websites, blogs, search engine optimization and social media accounts. 

Strategy of Digital Network Marketing

Digital network marketing can be achieved in following 4 concise steps:

1. Know who you are marketing to

By this we mean your targeting audience.The core of every business is its customers, business will not exist if there are no customers. Therefore it is of utmost importance to understand the audience through surveys, Interview and by conducting research.

2. Identifying Digital network marketing tools and your marketing goals

One of the most important aspects is setting your goal. Once your goal is set, you get a proper direction to work on achieving your expected goal. In the next step, identify tools keeping your goal in mind, this will tend you towards success. 

3. Reviewing existing assets and channels

            Reviewing already possessed channels to decide which one to use for your digital network  marketing strategy.

4. Planning and Auditing

            Planning and auditioning you earned, paid and owned media. This will help in determining how it can be used in your business for successful digital network marketing. 

Conclusion

Digital Network marketing is the new era of portraying your products, conducting customer based surveys, expanding your connectivity and making your business-customer relationship more efficient. On the contrary to shopping with brick and mortar stores, Digital network marketing proves to be more personalised to your customer base through emails, responding to messages and providing them with more tailored responses according to their needs. This involves knowing your customer and providing the search engine with top results in just a click of certain keywords. 

It also lets the businesses reduce their production cost and spend on research and development of their prospective products, and assign more workforce towards Digital Network marketing. Participating in online marketing also increases the social popularity of the product bringing it to the competitive advantages on the online marketing platform. However, When working with all the mediums together best of the goal oriented results can be obtained.