Digital marketing is the future of marketing and will gradually gain more ground in the online and offline World.
Buying behavior has drastically changed over the past decade, and now more consumers are starting their buyer’s journey online, virtually showing the effectiveness of how digital marketing works. This shift in the way that consumers make purchasing decisions and buy products and services has made digital marketing a must for any business that’s trying to compete in the modern marketplace, regardless of size or industry. Digital marketing is the use of the internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach consumers. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a broad term that encapsulates all marketing channels and methods you can use to promote products or services on the Internet but also on electronic devices such as TVs, mobile phones and electronic billboards.
The primary difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing is that digital marketing campaigns are executed exclusively through digital channels and this gives marketers more control, tools, and data to analyze the effectiveness of a campaign. Digital marketing is a way to promote brands and products online and through other digital channels. Most businesses have a specific audience they are trying to reach, and digital marketing aims to help businesses reach these target consumers through the internet and other digital avenues.
There are a number of different digital technologies that marketers and companies use to get their marketing message to their target audience. In addition to its website, a company might also use PPC and display ads, email marketing, mobile technology like smartphones, social media, and other mediums to attract and engage their target consumers. Digital marketing is vital for modern businesses because the internet plays a significant role in how today’s consumer makes purchasing decisions. The internet also impacts how consumers actually purchase their products and services. This makes it imperative for businesses to not only be present online but to boost visibility as much as possible.
The days of browsing at a physical store location and asking sales associates for more information about products are gone. Now, consumers use the internet to get the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision, even if they still visit the physical store location to make their final purchase. That’s where digital marketing comes in. It helps your business reach these consumers wherever they are in their digital buyer’s journey.
The difference between Digital Marketing and Social Media & Internet Marketing.
The difference between digital marketing and social media is that social media is just one of the available channels of digital marketing. Many people believe that by engaging in social media they are doing digital marketing but this is not 100% true, as there are many more components that make up a digital marketing campaign. Whereas digital marketing can take place over the telephone, on a subway platform, in a video game or via a smartphone app.
Internet (a.k.a. online) marketing also differs from digital marketing. Internet marketing is advertising that is solely on the Internet, whereas digital marketing can take place over the telephone, on a subway platform, in a video game or via a smartphone app.
How Digital Marketing Works?
It’s important for business owners to understand how digital marketing works so that people can make smarter decisions about their digital marketing campaigns. The key to understanding how it all works is getting to know each part of digital marketing and recognizing how can help you reach your marketing goals. We’ll go through each digital marketing tactic below. Digital marketing has a number of channels and these can be separated into online marketing channels and offline marketing channels. The chief difference between the two is that online marketing channels are based solely on the Internet while offline marketing channels have to do with digital devices which are not necessarily connected to the Internet.
Online marketing Channels:
Website Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Inbound Marketing
Mobile Marketing
Video Marketing
Offline marketing channels:
TV Marketing
SMS Marketing
Radio Marketing
Billboard Marketing
Website Marketing.
A website is the focal point of all digital marketing campaigns. By itself is a very powerful channel but it’s also the medium to execute most of the other online marketing campaigns. Your website should represent your brand, product, and services in the best possible way. It should be fast, mobile-friendly and easy to use. Once you have a website your next step is to come up with a digital marketing strategy and promote your website and content with the purpose of getting more traffic and customers. A website should represent a brand, product, and services in a clear and memorable way. It should be fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to use.
Your website is sometimes your brand’s only chance to make a good first impression with consumers in your target market. For this reason, you should pay attention to the layout of your site as well as the colors and graphics that you use in your site design. However, the appearance of your site is not the only thing that matters. Since your website is the center of many of your digital marketing campaigns, it’s important that it is designed and optimized for conversions. This involves creating a site optimized for mobile devices to improve the mobile user’s site experience.
Did you know that 70% of the time spent online (in the US) was done using a mobile phone? Desktop usage is only less than 50% of the whole user online activity. And mind you, US is not the biggest user in mobile which means other countries spend more time online using their smartphones. That is exactly why it is important for a business owner like you to optimize your digital content, most especially your website for mobile usage.
Search Engine Optimization.
Search engine optimization also plays a big role in how digital marketing works. If you want to reach and convert consumers in the digital age, you’ll need to start with the search engines. 71% of consumers start their buyer’s journey on search engines like Google. If you are not taking the right steps to improve your site’s SEO then you may be missing out on a powerful opportunity to reach a significant amount of leads.
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your site’s content so that it appeals to the search engines. Search engine optimization not only brings more traffic to your website, but it also helps ensure that the leads you are bringing in are of a higher quality. By emphasizing certain keywords and topics within your content, you can work to reach those online who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. Now that you know how important search engine optimization is to all of your digital marketing efforts, you may be wondering how you can optimize your site and content for best results.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
PPC advertising enables you to reach internet users on a number of digital platforms through paid ads. You can set up PPC campaigns on Google, Bing, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook and show your ads to people searching for terms related to your products or services. PPC campaigns can segment users based on their demographic characteristics (age, gender etc) or even their particular interests or location. The most popular PPC platforms are Google Ads and Facebook.
Though the goal of your digital marketing strategy may be to bring in as much organic traffic as possible, your business should not ignore the value of pay-per-click (PPC) ads. PPC ads are a type of advertising that involves paying the ad publisher every time a new lead clicks on your ad. Google Ads is one of the most popular and effective types of PPC ads. Google Ads helps your business appear on the first page of the search engine results. That’s where PPC ads come in handy.
PPC ads can help you see results more quickly by putting your site at the top of the search engine results page for relevant search terms. By appearing on the first page of the SERP, your business gains new visibility and searchers are more likely to find and click on your site.
PPC ads not only generate more traffic to your site, but they can help you ensure that the leads you are getting are qualified. Those who are clicking on your PPC ads are consumers who are searching for the topics that are most relevant to your products or services. This means that they are more likely to be interested in your brand and the products or services that you provide.
Content Marketing.
Content marketing is another important tactic that plays a significant role in how digital marketing works. The goal of content marketing is to reach potential customers through the use of content. Content is usually published on a website and then promoted through social media, email marketing, SEO, or even PPC campaigns. The tools of content marketing include blogs, ebooks, online courses, infographics, podcasts, and webinars.
No matter which tactics you use as part of your digital marketing strategy, you will need to create content to support these tactics. This can be something as short and simple as a thank you email to someone who has subscribed to your email list. Here are just a few types of content marketing that you might create to support your digital marketing campaign goals: Website pages, Blog posts, Social media posts, E-books, White papers, Case Studies, Testimonials, Videos, Images, Infographics, Podcasts, Ad Content and etc.
The key to creating great content assets that help support your digital marketing campaigns is strategically choosing topics that appeal most to your audience. If you haven’t already, make sure that you do some target audience research and even create customer personas to ensure that you know your customers well and can identify what types of content will attract and engage them at each step in the buyer’s journey.
Email Marketing.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Many people confuse email marketing with spam email messages we all receive per day, but that’s not what email marketing is all about. Email marketing is the medium to get in touch with your potential customers or the people interested in your brand. Many digital marketers use all other digital marketing channels to add leads to their email lists and then, through email marketing, they create customer acquisition funnels to turn those leads into customers. Here are just a few examples of the types of email marketing content you might develop to support your digital marketing campaigns:
Send a welcome email when new users subscribe to your marketing email list letting them know what they can expect to see from your brand emails.
Deliver promotional content about upcoming sales and discounts straight to the consumer’s inbox.
Develop a newsletter that goes out to subscribers periodically to deliver the latest content and company updates from your business.
Suggest additional products or content assets that your leads and customers may be interested based on their browsing and buying behavior.
It’s important to note that email marketing is mainly used not for generating new leads, but rather nurturing leads once they have shown interest.
Marketing emails can also be used as part of your customer retention campaigns. In fact, according to eMarketer, 80% of retail professionals report that email marketing is one of the best tactics for driving customer retention. Let’s say that you want to hold a social media contest as a way to generate new leads and foster some excitement for a new product that your business is launching soon. Email marketing can be used to support this social media campaign. By letting your subscribers know that the contest is happening, you can work to get more people entered into the contest. In addition, each email that you send to leads and customers can include links to your social media pages as a way to drive more traffic to the platform and your contest.
Social Media Marketing.
The primary goal of a social media marketing campaign is brand awareness and establishing social trust but as you go deeper into social media marketing, you can use it to get leads or even as a direct sales. Most brands today are using social media marketing to support their digital marketing campaigns and drive more traffic to their website. Social media marketing involves promoting your content and engaging with your target consumers on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. This tactic is used in digital marketing to help businesses increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and improve customer contact.
One of the biggest appeals of social media marketing is that it allows businesses to reach a wider audience online. Social media not only works as its own tactic, but it can also support all of your other digital marketing efforts. For instance, if your brand develops a new product that speaks to your target audience’s pain points, you can use social media to promote this product and drive traffic to the landing page for the download. You can then re-purpose of the product for future social media posts as a way to generate further interest in the content piece.
Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing, and the internet has brought new life to this old standby. With affiliate marketing, you promote other people’s products, and you get a commission every time you make a sale or introduce a lead. Many well-known companies like Amazon have affiliate programs that pay out millions of dollars per month to websites that sell their products.
When designing your digital marketing strategy, you should include affiliate marketing as a way to get people involved in your brand and sell your products for a commission. In other words, when you have a product or service to promote online, you should consider setting up an affiliate program where people can sign up and find resources and material they can use to promote your products on the Internet.
They will get a commission as a reward but the benefits for you as a provider are much more. Your affiliates can only not drive more sales but can become the best representatives of your brand and positively influence other people to buy or connect with your company.
Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing is another fancy term that refers to how you can use various digital marketing channels to reach new customers mainly through the process of content creation and how to ‘push’ them through a funnel until they convert. The chief elements of inbound marketing are: content, attention, engagement, trust, and satisfaction. All these elements have a single goal: to help businesses connect with their potential customers and establish a channel of by bi-directional communication with them that will lead to more sales. All digital marketing channels have similar sales funnels. In general, a digital sales funnel has 3 main goals: to get people to learn your brand, to get them to engage with your brand (either through your website or app), and to get them to convert.
Mobile Marketing.
Mobile marketing refers to the process of reaching customers in the different mobile app stores such as Google Play, Apple app store or Amazon marketplace. These app stores have thousands of apps and millions of users per day. With mobile marketing, you can promote your apps either through paid advertising or through other methods (cross-app promotions etc.), so that they can be seen and installed by more users. Mobile marketing is not the same as having a mobile-friendly version of your website. Making your website mobile friendly is a must and necessary otherwise your website won’t show up for Google searches performed on mobile. Mobile marketing is about creating an app and uploading that app to Google Play or other app stores for users to download.
Video Marketing.
YouTube has become the second most popular search engine and a lot of users are turning to YouTube before they make a buying decision, to learn something or just to relax. There are several video marketing platforms, including Facebook Videos, Instagram, Vimeo to use to run a video marketing campaign. Companies find the most success with video by integrating it with SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing campaigns. The best way to take advantage of video is to integrate them into your SEO, content marketing and social media marketing campaigns. Running standalone video campaigns can be costly and does not always create a positive return on investment, but when the video is used as part of your other campaigns, the ROI is justified.
TV Marketing.
TV marketing is not dead, on the contrary, is a marketing channel that will experience a boost in the coming years. Currently, TV advertising is not 100% targeted. Marketers can only make assumptions based on the statistics they have from a limited amount of people. The adoption of Web TV will change this dramatically. Marketers will be able to target audiences based on a number of factors and make informed decisions as to what content to produce.
SMS Marketing.
SMS marketing is still an option to get in touch with potential customers, although not among the most powerful. There are better alternatives these days like push messages on the web and mobile and also on Facebook messenger. Nevertheless, SMS marketing can be used to get more visits to your local community store.
Radio Marketing.
Radio marketing is another tool you can utilize but not so effective as other methods. The chief issue with radio marketing is that you don’t know exactly the return on your investment. When you pay for a radio ad, you can only assume on the number of people that heard the ad, based on the number of listeners the particular radio station has. Radio marketing is still good for local businesses though and small communities that are not so affected by social media.
Billboard Marketing.
Billboard marketing is considered to be part of digital marketing. Electronic billboards are available in a number of public places (think Times Square billboards or Super Bowl commercials) and it’s another more traditional channel in your digital marketing arsenal.
Digital marketing is all about marketing on the internet and other electronic devices. It’s not a single process but it consists of a number of sub-components which you can use depending on what you want to achieve. Not all methods work for all businesses, that’s why it’s important to come up with a digital marketing strategy that will detail how you will utilize each process. It is important to know the differences between the different marketing theories so that you can select the most appropriate tools to use in your campaigns. Digital marketing is the future of marketing and will gradually gain more ground in the online and offline World.
