Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for promoting and selling products or services using online marketing strategies.

Here are some of the essential areas of any digital marketing strategy:

• Content Marketing

• Email Marketing

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Social Media Marketing

• Pay-Per-Click (Paid Ads)

• Affiliate Marketing

These digital marketing elements help you reach your customers wherever they are, engage with them, and encourage them to purchase something from you. You create brand awareness, generate leads, convert new buyers, build trust, and increase sales.

Types of Digital Marketing

Essentially, digital marketing encompasses six different modes, including:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Social Media Marketing

• Content Marketing

• Pay-Per-Click

• Email Marketing

• Affiliate Marketing

• SMS Messaging

• Video Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website for search engines.

The main goal of SEO is to help a website rank higher in search results and get organic traffic from search engines.

SEO has a number of sub-processes. The main ones are:

• Technical SEO

• On-Page SEO

• Off-Page SEO

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has to do with reaching people on the various social networks either through content marketing campaigns (postings), paid ads, or both.

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 channel.

Take for example Facebook. Facebook sales funnel consists of 4 major steps.

The top of the funnel is awareness. This is the stage where you can use Facebook ads to introduce your brand to Facebook users. Your goal at this stage is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible and gain new followers.

The second step is discovery. During this stage, you can start engaging with your audience by answering their questions on Messenger or email, and by providing value through your blog posts and FB postings.

The third step is consideration. At this stage, your goal is to get people (that showed an interest in your brand) and pass them through the middle of the funnel and get them to visit your website, engage with your page, install your app, and send you a message, etc.

The fourth step is conversion. This is the final step where you try to convince people that enter your funnel to convert. A conversion can be anything that has value for your business like the sale of a product or service or a visit to your store.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about the content. The digital world is a huge collection of content in different forms like text, images, audio, and video.

The goal of a content marketing campaign 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 difference between having a blog versus running a content marketing campaign is that the latter has specific goals as to what content to publish and when to publish it, who to target, and how to monitor the effectiveness of your content campaigns.

The main tools of content marketing are:

• Blogs

• eBooks

• Online Courses

• Infographics

• Podcasts

• Webinars

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising gives you the ability to reach internet users on a number of networks 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.

Every time a user clicks on your ads, you pay a fee to the provider (and thus the term pay per click).

The most popular PPC platforms are Google Ads and Facebook.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Many people confuse email marketing with spam email messages, but that’s not what email marketing is all about. This type of marketing allows companies to get in touch with potential customers and anyone interested in their brands.

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.

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, influencers promote other people’s products and get a commission every time a sale is made or a lead is introduced. Many well-known companies like Amazon have affiliate programs that pay out millions of dollars per month to websites that sell their products.

SMS Messaging

Companies and nonprofit organizations also use SMS or text messages to send information about their latest promotions or give opportunities to willing customers. Political candidates running for office also use SMS message campaigns to spread positive information about their own platforms. As technology has advanced, many text-to-give campaigns also allow customers to directly pay or give via a simple text message.

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.

Video Marketing

YouTube is one of the most popular search engines in the world. A lot of users are turning to YouTube before making a buying decision, to learn something, read a review, or just to relax.

There are several video marketing platforms, including Facebook Videos, Instagram, and even TikTok to use to run a video marketing campaign. Companies find the most success with video by integrating it with SEO, content marketing, and broader social media marketing campaigns.

Video marketing is something relatively new but recently it has become so popular that you simply cannot ignore it.

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.

YouTube is just one of the mediums you can execute Video marketing. There are so many other platforms like Facebook Videos, Instagram, and Vimeo to use to run a video marketing campaign.

The best way to take advantage of videos 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.

How does digital marketing work?

There are a number of ways to approach a digital marketing campaign. As a digital marketer, you have in your toolbox a wide range of tactics, strategies, and channels that can be employed to connect with your audience. Generally speaking, digital marketing campaigns involve several common steps:

1. Define your marketing goals

Digital marketing is a wide-ranging field. So it’s important to establish your goals before starting a digital marketing campaign. For example, do you want to build brand awareness? Acquire new customers? Focus on retention and customer loyalty? Outlining goals helps you tailor your strategy and budget to maximize your impact.

2. Identify your target audience

Whose attention are you trying to get? The more details that you can find out about your target audience (age, location, income, etc.) the easier it will be to determine how to connect with them.

3. Identify the right marketing channels and marketing tactics

Now that you know who you want to reach, you need to decide how (and for how much) you want to reach them. Suppose you’re a B2C digital marketer trying to connect with younger customers. In that case, you might allocate more of your budget to social media advertising on specific platforms rather than put the majority of your efforts (and money) into blog publishing.

4. Develop and optimize content and messaging for each channel

Analyze your data and try to find out as much as you can about your audience. For example, if you know that your customers prefer browsing on their phone versus a laptop, the content they receive will need to be optimized for mobile viewing. But that may not be enough. Customers interact with brands across a variety of channels in a nonlinear fashion. So you need to make sure that every piece of content has a consistent brand voice and messaging. Consistency prevents confusion about what your brand is and the value you provide.

5. Campaign measurement across key metrics

Measure across key metrics and iterate based on those results. If you don’t measure your performance based on the key metrics you defined earlier, how will you know whether the campaign is doing well or continuously improving? Measuring results over time ensures that you’re connecting with customers, driving loyalty, and building brand advocacy.

Benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing tactics enable direct communication between companies and their customers, as those customers travel along their unique buying journeys. Digital marketing helps innovative marketers deliver the right content and offers at the right time, on the channels where customers spend most of their time. With the use of digital marketing KPIs, marketers can understand what strategies worked and how well they worked, helping to drive continuous improvement, boosting customer engagement, and improving marketing ROI.

Done well, digital marketing benefits both customers and companies. By appropriately personalizing content and offers to each individual, customers feel that your brand understands their needs and can provide them with a valuable service or product. This ultimately deepens their trust, turning them into loyal brand advocates. There are many advantages of digital marketing for companies as well. These include:

• Increased reach. Most people start their buying journeys online, across a variety of different digital channels.

• Precise targeting. Marketers can reach more qualified buyers by leveraging SEO and social media strategies. This, in turn, boosts conversions, revenue, and brand advocacy.

• Agility. It’s typically easier to amend digital marketing tactics if your goals change.

• Measurability. Digital marketing provides a greater degree of attribution so that marketers know which tactics truly drive growth.

Future of digital marketing

It all started with mobile, which has impacted digital marketing in a huge way. Consumer behavior has changed with the times. Customers now expect more from their brands, and micromoments count. What is a micromoment? It involves a consumer interacting with a brand at the touch of a button and in real time. The challenge for digital marketers now lies in intersecting people at micromoments with relevant marketing messaging that adds to their lives rather than disrupting them.

Customers now expect a unique, connected, and seamless experience across all channels and instant gratification. You only have a micromoment to capture their attention and hold it with a strong message and a delightful, engaging experience. If you don’t, they will move on to the next offer. This has made the old methods of marketing obsolete.

Modern marketers must adopt a mobile-first approach with their global audiences. You must keep in in mind that customers:

• Desire to all be treated uniquely.

• Are in charge. They decide when, where, and how they’ll interact with your brand. They want a frictionless experience and to be able to start a conversation on any channel, which can carry seamlessly onto another channel if they choose.

• Wish to be served in the least amount of time possible but with the most convenience.

• The walls between B2C and B2B are breaking down. The delightful experiences people have had with B2C are making them expect more of the same from B2B, but really, you are always marketing to people, regardless of whether it is B2B or B2C. You could say that it is now B2ME.

This might be the future, but the future is now. It is happening right in front of everyone’s eyes. You cannot afford to be left behind. In fact, you best get ahead of the curve.

KEY LEARNINGS

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 that 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.

A digital marketing manager is a person responsible to monitor all digital marketing activities.

He needs to have a broad knowledge of how the internet works so that can decide which marketing activities are more suitable for a given project.

Other typical members of a digital marketing team are the content manager, SEO manager, social media manager, email marketing manager, and PPC manager.