Yes, it is always a good idea to go for digital marketing as it will help to create an effective online presence. Our recommendation would be to follow the given steps below:
Step 1 - Website
Create a website which showcases your expertise, services or the treatments that you offer at your dental clinic.
Step 2 - Create a strong presence on Google and Social Media
For a dentist, digital marketing can be utilised to target people staying in specific locations/pincodes. This helps to generate relevant enquiries from local or even international areas, wherever your target audience is present.
Step 3 - Target as per interests, profession or events in life
Digital marketing can be utilised to target people based on their life events or professions as per your focused services or treatments which will help to generate quality leads. For example, if you are offering smile correction treatment then it is possible to target people who have recently got engaged or people who are in modelling or acting profession.

Onboard a digital marketing agency during the early stages of your business for the following reasons:

• To decide the platform/technology for the website.
• To do a competition analysis and keyword research which will help you to understand the behaviour of the target customers and devise the content marketing strategy accordingly.
• To increase the brand visibility and awareness during this crucial starting phase of the business by not only reaching out to newer audiences but also retargeting your website visitors or people who have engaged with your social media posts.
• To analyse the performance of the digital marketing activities and understand the conversion rate.

The topics for content creation can be:

• Trending hairstyles
• Tips for maintaining a hairstyle
• Review of an actor’s or model’s hairstyle
• Testimonials from customers
• Services and facilities available at the salon

Social media marketing can be used to target people based on various factors such as age, location, gender, interests, life events, etc. You can also optimise your "Google My Business" profile so that people searching locally for the kind of services that you offer are easily able to find you on Google.

Our recommendation for this type of website would be to go for:

• Search engine optimisation (SEO) - SEO will help you to understand what type of search terms people are searching for and what are the search volumes of these words during a year. This insight can then be used to built the content for the website and blogs thereby gaining relevant traffic organically.
• Community portals - Listening to the discussions happening on community portals on various topics related to this place and engaging in a meaningful conversation with the audience. You can also share the website links or blogs to help the audience gain more understanding of the topic.
• Social media marketing (SMM) - Posting on social media on a regular basis and engaging with the audience and influencers will help you to get the attraction for this type of website.

As per a recent study, it is observed that there are more than 700 million internet users in India. This shows you how big the opportunity is if your business has a strong digital presence. Some of the advantages are as follows:

• Targeting - You can reach out to your target audience based on their age, location, gender, hobbies, industry or designation. This kind of detailed targeting is not available with the traditional means of marketing.
• A/B Testing - Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing gives you an option to carry out A/B testing which means that you can experiment with different captions or creatives and see which combination works best for you.
• Flexible Budgets - You also get flexibility to define your budget on a daily, monthly or a campaign basis.
• Analytics for ROI - It provides you with the necessary insights such as which page of your website is more popular with your website visitors, which platform has generated more traffic, how much time people have spent on which page, which city/location have people visited your website from etc. All this helps you to improvise your future campaigns.
• Real-time feedback - Having a strong digital presence will help you to get real-time feedback from your customers and respond faster to their concerns.
• Showcase testimonials - You can showcase the positive feedback from your existing customers to your prospective customers so that they get a glimpse of what it means to do business with your company.

Step 1 - Identify which social media platform would be more relevant for your business. The relevancy of a platform depends on the product/service that you are offering and your target audience. Our recommendation is to experiment on 2-3 platforms for the initial few months and understand which social media platform is giving you better engagement and ROI.
Step 2 - Create your company page, start posting and build your fan following organically.
Step 3 - Start with paid campaigns wherein you can reach out to a larger audience base by targeting them based on demographics. The objective of your campaigns can be brand awareness or website visits or lead generation.
Step 4 - Re-target users who have interacted with your social media posts.

The negative reviews can fall in into three categories:

• Spammy or offensive reviews - In this case, you can flag the review as inappropriate and Google will take necessary actions against it.
• Fake reviews - In this case, you can reply to that review and ask for more details about the business or the order and mention clearly that you would like to take necessary action on the response. If there is no response in a few days then you can flag it as inappropriate.
• Review due to bad customer experience - In this case, reply to them with an apology and ask them what you can do to rectify the situation. If you are able to provide a proper resolution then chances are that they would delete the negative reviews.

If all of this fails, please continue with the good work so that you can get more and more positive reviews and with time the impact of these negative reviews will go down.

Instead of using the personal profile for promoting her business, our recommendation is to start a company page on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Check out our Day 6 answer above to understand how such pages can be promoted. Following are the advantages of having a company page:

• Larger audience base - Personal profile is limited to friends or connections whereas in a company page you can reach out to your followers and a much larger base of audience.
• Customer reviews can be showcased - If you have a company page, your customers can also come and write reviews about your business and these reviews can be showcased on your page.
• Automated and personalised replies to messages - Company page has an option to send personalised and automated messages to your audience when they send you a message on the page.
• Flexible page management - A company page can also be managed by multiple users.
• Product catalogue - There is also an option to showcase your products on a company page.

• Changes in consumer behaviour - After the lockdown, there was an increase in the consumption of digital media since people were spending more time on YouTube and social media platforms. The search volumes for essential goods and services also increased during this period.
• Reduction in ad rates since sectors such luxury, travel and entertainment reduced their ad spend.
• New features for the new normal - Some of the publishing platforms introduced features which would help the businesses and the customers alike.

What changed for digital marketing agencies? As digital marketers, on one hand we had businesses who were reducing the ad spend or completely stopping the digital marketing activities because their industry was badly affected by COVID-19. On the other hand we had businesses who had never tried digital marketing earlier but realized that this is what they need to survive in the market.

How did businesses change and respond? Businesses who had strong online presence during the pre-COVID era reaped the benefits by getting leads organically even during the lockdown when they were forced to hold their marketing activities.

Businesses who traditionally had physical presence but quickly adapted digital marketing, got results too.

Certain businesses did realise the importance of digital marketing but their traditional ways of working restricted the transition. We have spoken about this in detail in our blog on digital transformation (link at the bottom of this page).

• Providing budget-friendly solutions to the customers.
• Providing the same level of experience through various digital channels.
• Responding to the customers on time via mobile app, chat bots, website, etc. while working with limited staff availability.

The answer to this question would depend completely on how you as a business normally converse or deal with your customers. Is it transactional or relational?

• On social media, we try to maintain a connection with our audience by sharing valuable content and most importantly we want our target audience to remember us and not our competitors.
• In the real world we wish our friends and family during festivals because they hold a special place. Likewise for every business, their customers are the reason why they exist. Hence, wishing the customers during festivals is a way of showing their care.
• It is possible that your followers may not engage or comment on your festival post but they will definitely see it in their feed the way they see all your other posts.
• If it is possible, you can also connect the festival greetings with your core products or services.

Following are the benefits if your employees have a good social media presence:

• Visibility - If your team is active on social media and are talking about topics that are relevant in your industry, their visibility to prospective customers increases.
• Engagement - Most of your employees will be connected with your customers on social networking sites like LinkedIn. If your employee engages with your post then it reaches out to their connections which can be your target customers.
• Feedback - Employees who are active on social media can provide you with valuable feedback on what kind of content your customers find interesting. This will help you to improvise on your content marketing strategy.

Please ensure the following points:

• Your website should be responsive.
• Google analytics should be installed on the website which will provide you with the necessary insights.
• Research for the terms searched on Google by your target audience and optimise the content on your website for these topics and phrases.
• Share your blogs on social media using relevant hashtags. You can also mention the links of the blog page on your profile.
• You can also make use of search engine marketing or paid advertisements to drive more traffic to your blogs.

I won't just talk about the mistakes. I would also let you know the lesson which we learnt from those mistakes.

This was during the early days of Idecution. A prospective client called us to revamp their website. Their current WordPress website was slow. It took 20 mins for a page to load. We created a new website and everyone was happy. Suddenly one day, we received a message from Google search console that the website was hacked. We rechecked our files. There was no malware. So, we re-uploaded the files and submitted the request to Google to re-crawl the website. We got the same message saying that our website has a virus. We then discovered that it was the old WordPress website which was lying on the hosting server and these files were corrupt. We immediately removed those files and this time when we submitted the request Google accepted that there is no threat now.

Lesson learnt - Don't leave any old website files or any unused plugins on the server. If you are not using them then it is best to remove these from your website or server.

The next is about Google Ads. We decided to promote Idecution's blog pages and set up a campaign for this in Google Ads. After a few hours I started receiving random calls. Someone asked for old coins, one person called thinking it's a gambling site and so on. I knew something was wrong with the ads. We paused the campaign and upon checking discovered that there were no negative keywords. And since our target city was one of the keywords it resulted in our ads being shown up for every random search with the city name.

Lesson learnt - It is important not only to discuss and update the keywords that you are targeting but also the negative keywords, which means words or phrases you don't want your website to appear for.

When we started our journey and created pages on social media we had followers in double digits. Not happy with the number of followers we started paid campaigns to increase the followers. We kept the target audience criteria too broad so that we can get more followers which we did. But the next time we posted, the engagement on our posts was zero.

Lesson learnt - There is no point in having an irrelevant audience as your followers. It’s better to have less but more relevant followers.

• Inputs from the customer facing team is important - A digital marketing agency would require necessary inputs like the target audience, the competitors or the type of questions that the customers usually ask.
• If the employees understand how the digital marketing works, it will be easier to define the objective and understand the ROI from the campaigns.
• If not all, at least the employee who is going to act as a bridge between the digital marketing agency and your team should have a basic understanding of digital marketing.

If you handle digital marketing locally, then you can focus your content marketing strategy on those products or services which are more relevant for the Indian markets. This will help you to reach prospective customers. Here are some benefits:

• Reduced friction in customer interaction
• Faster response to local trends or events
• Boost in offline marketing activities

All of this is possible without any compromise on brand guidelines.

Please note that each of these activities are very essential for your business and the right mix would vary depending on the nature of the business and the target audience. Also, the tools you should use for your business is something that a digital marketing agency would recommend. As a business, you should be clear about the following points:

• Brief of the company
• Your USPs
• Products/services that you want to focus on
• Brand positioning
• Current marketing activities
• Objectives of digital marketing activities

Most people have this misconception that digital marketing is useful only for e-commerce websites or products which can be promoted on social media. But the fact is that digital marketing is useful for every business. Here are some scenarios which will help you to understand this better:

• Let's consider a typical B2B situation wherein your sales person meets the client. The client mentions the problem that they are facing, for which your company has a solution and the sales person explains the solution to the client. After the meeting, the sales person shares a blog or a case study which is mentioned on the website related to the solution. Now this particular case study or the blog that we spoke about is part of SEO or content marketing strategy.
• Another example is wherein your client is connected to your sales person on social media platforms. Now, when your company posts about this particular solution, the client sees this post on their feed and reads about this solution. This post that the client just saw is part of social media marketing.
• Now let's consider a scenario where your clients search about this particular problem on Google and find the solution that your company is offering in the form of a blog which is mentioned on your website. This particular information which the client came across is part of SEO or Google Ads strategy.

Success or failure of digital marketing activities depends on various factors.

• Target audience - Define your target audience precisely and while defining your target audience consider all the factors such as age, location, their behaviour and their interest. If you think of reaching out to more people to gain more visibility, then remember that your budget will get exhausted quickly when your ads reach irrelevant people.
• Keywords - While setting up your Google Ads campaign, opt for keywords where the search intention is clear. The right mix of keywords is very important for you to get results from Google Ads.
• Message in Ads - Make sure that the message your post conveys is able to communicate clearly the solution of the problem that your target audience is looking for.
• Objective of the campaign - While setting up the campaign, make sure that the objective of the campaign is very clear.
• Landing page experience - Make sure that the message in your ads is in sync with the information available on the landing page.
• Budget - To get significant results from the campaign, make sure that the budget of the campaign is optimum and is not exhausted too early.

Following are three important factors that you should consider if you are planning to handle the digital marketing activities in-house:

• Expertise - Digital marketing is not only about post content on social media. You need to plan a strategy based on the content which will resonant with your target audience.
• Consistency - Being consistent is the key to understand which digital marketing activity is working for your business and what needs to be changed.
• Time - We all know the age old saying that ‘Time Is Money’. If your reason for handling digital marketing activities in-house is to save money then be ready to invest your time and efforts to strategise, create the content, publish the content, monitor the performance and analyse the performance of these activities.

The feedback for the digital marketing activities can be from two sets of customers:

• Customer feedback - The first set of feedback can be in the form of comments on social media posts or blogs on the website or it can be a verbal feedback when you interact with the prospective customer.
• Conclusions from analytics data - The second set of feedback is something that has to be understood based on the analytics.

When customer feedback is in sync with the analytics data then it becomes easier to incorporate the feedback in the next post or campaign. However, if customer feedback is not in sync with analytics data then there is no need to make changes immediately. This is because when we compare both the sets of feedback, the second one has a larger sample size than the first set.

The best part of digital marketing is that the reach is not limited to the physical location of your business.

• Search behaviour - For search engines, our first step would be to identify which search engines are used more in the country where you wish to target. The second step would be to do a keyword research.
• Location targeting on social media and search engines - Both search engine and social media provide the option to target the audience based on the postal codes or name of the location.
• Relevant content for target audience - The content of the social media post and landing page should be relevant to the target audience.

Regarding the commercials, if you are in B2C, then creating an e-commerce website with the options to make the payment online is a good approach. For B2B, if it is a "off the shelf" product or service then again an e-commerce solution will work. If the product or service needs consultation and customisation, then the sales process will mostly happen in the traditional way.