Brief Details about Digital Marketing

Any marketing that uses electronic devices and can be used by marketing experts to send promotional messages and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing usually refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet or other device. This can take many forms, including online video, display advertising, search engine marketing, paid social advertising and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to "traditional marketing" such as magazine ads, billboards and direct mail. Oddly enough, television is usually combined with traditional marketing.

Did you know that over 3 quarters of Americans are online on a daily basis? Not only that, but 43% are on the move more than once a day and 26% are online "almost constantly".

These figures are even higher among mobile Internet users. 89% of Americans are online at least daily, and 31% are online almost constantly. As a marketer, it is important to leverage the digital world with an online advertising presence, by building a brand, delivering a great customer experience that brings in more potential customers and more with a digital strategy.

A digital marketing strategy allows you to leverage various digital channels – such as social media, pay-per-click, search engine optimization and email marketing – to connect with existing customers and individuals interested in your products or services. . As a result, you can build a brand, deliver a great customer experience, bring in potential customers, and more.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, is the promotion of brands using the Internet and other forms of digital communication to connect with potential customers. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messaging as a marketing channel.

Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it is digital marketing.

Inbound marketing versus digital marketing

Digital marketing and inbound marketing are easily confused, and for good reason. Digital marketing uses many tools like inbound marketing- email and online content, to name a few. Both exist to capture the attention of prospects and convert them into customers through the buyer's journey. But the 2 approaches have different perspectives about the relationship between the tool and the target.

Digital marketing considers how individual devices or digital channels can convert prospects. A brand's digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all its efforts on one platform. For example, a company may create content primarily for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns while ignoring other digital marketing avenues.

On the other hand, inbound marketing is a holistic concept. It first considers the target, then looks at the tools available to determine who will effectively reach the target customers, and then at what stage of the sales funnel should be. As an example, let's say you want to boost website traffic to generate more prospects and leads. You can focus on search engine optimization when developing your content marketing strategy, which results in more optimized content, including blogs, landing pages and more.

The most important thing to remember about digital marketing and inbound marketing is that as a marketing professional, you don't have to choose between the 2. In fact, they work best together. Inbound marketing gives digital marketing efforts the structure and purpose for effective digital marketing, ensuring that each digital marketing channel works toward a goal.

Why is digital marketing important?

Any type of marketing can help your business flourish. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important due to how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone.

There are many ways to use a digital marketing strategy to communicate with your target audience, from social media to text messages. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.

B2B versus B2C digital marketing

Digital marketing strategies work for B2B (business to business) as well as B2C (business to consumer) companies, but best practices differ significantly between the 2. Here's a look at how digital marketing is used in B2B and B2C marketing strategies.

B2B clients have a longer decision-making process, and thus a longer sales funnel. Relationship building strategies work better for these customers, while B2C customers respond better to short-term offers and messages.

B2B transactions are usually based on the logic and evidence that skilled B2B digital marketers exist. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally based, with a focus on making the customer feel good about the purchase.

B2B decisions require the input of more than 1 person. The marketing materials that best drive these decisions are shareable and downloadable. On the other hand, B2C customers favor a face-to-face connection with a brand.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. A B2C company with a high-ticket product like a car or computer can provide more informative and serious content. As a result, your digital marketing strategy always needs to be tailored to your own customer base, whether you are B2B or B2C.

Take a look at your current audience to create a well-informed and targeted online marketing campaign. Doing so ensures that your marketing efforts are effective and that you can capture the attention of potential customers.

Types of digital marketing

There is as much expertise within digital marketing as there are ways to interact using digital media. Here are some prime examples of digital marketing strategy.

Search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool, not a form of marketing in itself. Balance defines it as "the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines".

The "art and science" part of SEO is the most important. SEO is a science because it requires you to research and weigh the various contributing factors to get the highest possible ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).

Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines include:

• Content quality
• user engagement level
• mobile-friendliness
• Number and quality of inbound links

In addition to the above elements, you need to optimize technical SEO, which is all the back-end components of your site. This includes URL structure, loading times, and broken links. Improving your technical SEO can help search engines navigate and crawl your site better.

The strategic use of these factors makes search engine optimization a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.

Ultimately, the goal is to rank on the first page of a search engine's results page. This ensures that people searching for a specific query related to your brand can easily find your products or services. While there are many search engines, digital marketers often focus on Google because it is a global leader in the search engine market.

In SEO, there is no quantitative rubric or consistent rule for ranking high on search engines. Google and other search engines change their algorithm almost constantly, so it is impossible to make accurate predictions. You can closely monitor your page's performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Content marketing

As mentioned, the quality of your content is a key component of an optimized page. As a result, SEO is a major factor in content marketing, a strategy based on the delivery of relevant and valuable content to a target audience.

As with any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that eventually convert into customers. But it does so in a very different way than traditional advertising. Rather than enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service, it provides value for free in the form of written material, such as:

• blog posts
• e books
• news
• video or audio transcript
• white papers
• article information

Content marketing matters, and there are tons of statistics to prove it:

• 84% of consumers expect companies to provide entertaining and useful content experiences
• 62% of companies with at least 5,000 employees produce content daily
• 92% of marketers believe their company values ​​content as an important asset

As effective as content marketing is, it can be difficult. Content marketing writers must be able to rank high in search engine results, as well as engage the people who will read the content, share it, and further interact with the brand. When content is relevant, it can establish strong relationships throughout the pipeline.

To create highly relevant and engaging content, it is important to identify your audience. Who are you ultimately trying to reach with your content marketing efforts? Once you have a better understanding of your audience, you can determine what type of content you will create. You can use many formats of content in your content marketing, including videos, blog posts, printable worksheets, and more.

Whatever content you create, it's a good idea to follow content marketing best practices. This means creating content that is grammatically correct, free of errors, easy to understand, relevant and interesting. Your content should funnel readers to the next step in the pipeline, whether it's a free consultation with a sales rep or a signup page.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing means increasing traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in online discussions. You can use social media marketing to highlight your brand, products, services, culture, etc. With billions of people spending their time on social media platforms, it can be worthwhile to focus on social media marketing.

The most popular digital platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Ultimately, which social media platform you use for your business depends on your goals and audience. For example, if you want to find new leads for your fintech startup, it is a good idea to target your audience on LinkedIn because industry professionals are active on the platform. On the other hand, running social media ads on Instagram may be better for your brand if you run B2C focused on young consumers.

Since social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way to gain attention. It is the most popular content medium for B2C digital marketers at 96%, and is making a mark in the B2B space as well. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of B2B content marketers increased their use of social media this year.

Social media marketing provides built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely useful to help you understand how well you are reaching your audience. You get to decide which types of interactions matter most to you, whether it means the number of shares, comments, or total clicks on your website.

Direct buying may not even be the goal of your social media marketing strategy. Many brands use social media marketing to initiate a dialogue with the audience, not to encourage them to spend the money right away. This is especially common in brands that target an older audience or offer products and services that are not suitable for impulsive shopping. It all depends on your company's social media marketing goals.

To build an effective social media marketing strategy, it is important to follow best practices. Here are some of the most important social media marketing best practices:

• Craft high quality and attractive materials
• Respond to comments and questions in a professional manner
• Create a social media posting schedule
• post at the right time
• Hire Social Media Managers to Support Your Marketing Efforts
• Know your audience and which social media channels they are most active on

Pay-per-click marketing

Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing in which you pay a fee every time you click on your digital ads. So, instead of paying a set amount to run targeted ads consistently on online channels, you only pay for the ads that people interact with. How and when people see your ad is a little more complicated.

One of the most common types of PPC is search engine advertising, and since Google is the most popular search engine, many businesses use Google ads for this purpose. When a position is available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engine essentially fills that space with an instant auction. An algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on a number of factors, including:

• advertising quality
• keyword relevance
• landing page quality
• bid amount

Whenever a person searches for a specific query, PPC ads are placed at the top of the search engine results pages based on the above factors.

Each PPC campaign consists of 1 or more targeted actions that the audience has to complete after clicking on an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is a newsletter signup or a call to your home office.

Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them through your chosen digital marketing channels to see how your campaign is performing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows someone to earn money by promoting another person's business. You can either be a promoter or a business that works with a promoter, but the process is the same in both cases.

It works using a revenue sharing model. If you're an affiliate, you get a commission every time someone buys an item you're promoting. If you're a merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.

Some affiliate marketers choose to review only 1 company's products, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple traders.

Whether you want to be an ally or find one, the first step is to build a relationship with the other party. You can use digital channels designed to connect affiliates to retailers, or you can start or join a single-retail program.

If you are a retailer and you choose to work with affiliates directly, there are several things you can do to make your event attractive to potential promoters. You have to provide those associates with the tools they need to be successful. This includes incentives for great results as well as marketing tools and pre-made content.

Native advertising

Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with the content around it so that it's less blatantly obvious as an advertisement.

Native advertising was created in response to today's consumer craze for ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.

Before a native ad offers any promotional information or entertainment to get around this bias, the "advertising" aspect is underestimated.

It's important to always clearly label your native ads. Use words like "promoted" or "sponsored." If those indicators are hidden, readers can spend a significant amount of time engaging with the content before even realizing it is advertising.

When your consumers know exactly what they are getting, they will feel better about your content and your brand. Native ads are less obtrusive than traditional ads, but they are not meant to be deceptive.

Influencer marketing

Like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing relies on working with an influencer—a person with a large following, such as a celebrity, industry expert, or content creator—in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your products or services to their followers on multiple social media channels.

Influencer marketing works well for B2B and B2C companies that want to reach new audiences. However, partnering with reputable influencers is important because they are essentially representing your brand. The wrong influencer can erode consumer trust with your business.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, while improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on building the strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of the cumbersome and time-consuming processes.

While marketing automation may seem like a luxury tool your business can do without, it can significantly improve the engagement between you and your audience.

according to statistics:

• 90% of US consumers find personalization either "very" or "somewhat" attractive
• 81% of consumers would like to understand brands better
• 77% of companies believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60% struggle with it

Marketing automation lets companies maintain the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:

• Collect and analyze consumer information
• design targeted marketing campaigns
• Send and post digital marketing messages to the right audience at the right time

Many marketing automation tools use the potential engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach forward. This level of real-time optimization means you can effectively create a personalized marketing strategy for each customer without investing any extra time.

marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience via behavior-based automations, transactional emails, date-based automations, and more.

Email marketing

The concept of email marketing is simple - you send a promotional message and hope your prospect will click on it. However, the execution is much more complicated. First, you need to make sure that your emails are as desired. This means that there is an opt-in list that does the following:

• Personalizes content in both body and subject line
• clearly states what type of emails the customer will receive
• An email signature that provides an explicit unsubscribe option
• Integrates both transactional and promotional emails

You want your customers to see your campaign as an important service, not just a promotional tool.

Email marketing is a proven, effective technique in itself: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.

It can be even better if you incorporate other digital marketing techniques like marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so they can more effectively meet your customers' needs.

If you are considering email marketing, here are some tips that can help you design the best email marketing campaign:

• Segment your audience to send relevant campaigns to the right people
• Make sure emails look good on mobile devices
• Create a campaign schedule
• run A/B tests

mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to connect with your target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be through SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts and more.

It is important to ensure that all content is optimized for mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans own a smartphone, so your marketing efforts can go a long way when you create content for computer and mobile screens.

The benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers many other benefits that can boost your marketing efforts. These are some of the benefits of digital marketing.

A broad geographic reach

When you post an ad online, people can see it wherever they are (provided you don't limit your ad geographically). This makes it easy to increase the market reach of your business and connect with a larger audience across various digital channels.

Cost efficiency

Digital marketing not only reaches a wider audience than traditional marketing, but it also costs less. Overhead costs can be high for newspaper ads, television spots and other traditional marketing opportunities. They also give you less control over whether your target audience will see those messages in the first place.

With digital marketing, you can only create 1 content piece that attracts visitors to your blog as long as it is active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to target customer lists on a schedule, and it's easy to change that schedule or content if you need to do so.

When you combine all this, digital marketing gives you more flexibility and customer interaction with your advertising spend.

Quantifiable results

To know whether your marketing strategy works, you need to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately generates. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?

The traditional option is always to ask each customer, "How did you find us?"

Unfortunately, this does not work in all industries. Many companies are unable to interact face-to-face with their customers, and surveys do not always yield complete results.

With digital marketing, monitoring results is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of conversions you want to achieve, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.

Easier personalization

Digital marketing allows you to collect customer data in a way that offline marketing cannot. Data collected digitally is more accurate and specific.

Imagine that you provide financial services and want to send special offers to Internet users who have viewed your products. You know you'll get better results if you target the offer to the person's interest, so you decide to create 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have looked at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.

How do you collect all that data without automatic tracking? How many phone records do you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn't read the brochure you've sent?

With digital marketing, all this information is already at your fingertips.

More connection with customers

Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.

Think about your social media strategy. It's great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it's even better when they comment on it or share it. This means more discussion about your product or service, as well as increased visibility each time someone joins the conversation.

Interactivity benefits your customers, too. As they become active participants in your brand story, their level of engagement increases. This sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.

Easy and convenient conversions

Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after seeing your ad or content. With traditional ads, the most immediate result you can expect is a phone call immediately after someone sees your ad. But how often does someone have time to reach a company when they're doing the dishes, driving on the highway, or updating records at work?

With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move on with the sales funnel immediately. They may not make a purchase right away, but they will engage with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.

How to create a digital marketing strategy

For many small businesses and beginning digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.

Set SMART goals

Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely (SMART) goals is critical to any marketing strategy. While there are many goals you want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will propel your strategy forward, rather than on them.

Identify your audience

Before starting any marketing campaign, it is best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want your campaign to reach based on similar characteristics, such as age, gender, demographics, or buying behavior. Having a good understanding of your target audience can help you determine which digital marketing channels to use and incorporate the information into your campaigns.

Create a budget

A budget ensures that you are effectively spending your money towards your goals instead of spending more on digital marketing channels that may not provide the desired results. Consider your SMART goals and the digital channel you plan to use to create the budget.

Select your digital marketing channels

From content marketing to PPC campaigns and more, there are many digital marketing channels that you can use to your advantage. Which digital marketing channels you use most often depends on your goals, audience and budget.

Refine your marketing efforts

Be sure to analyze your campaign data to see what was done well and identify areas for improvement after the campaign is over. This allows you to create even better campaigns in the future. With the help of digital technologies and software, you can get this data in an easy to see dashboard. Mailchimp's Digital Marketing Analytics reports will help you keep track of all your marketing campaigns in one centralized place.

Digital marketing creates growth

Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business's overall marketing strategy. There has never been a way to stay in constant touch with your customers like this before, and nothing offers the level of personalization that digital data provides. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you will be able to realize the growth potential of your company.