Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.
The reality is, people spend twice as much time online as they used to 10 years ago. And while we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.
What Exactly is Digital Marketing?
From your website itself to your online branding assets - digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond - there’s a huge spectrum of tactics and assets that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. And the best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each asset or tactic supports their overarching goals.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most common assets and tactics:
Assets
Your website
Blog posts
Ebooks and whitepapers
Infographics
Interactive tools
Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
Online brochures and lookbooks
Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)
Tactics
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The process of optimizing your website to ‘rank’ higher in search engine results pages, therefore increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic that your website receives.
Content Marketing
The creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, or customers.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to the ‘full-funnel’ approach to attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers using online content.
Social Media Marketing
The practice of promoting your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
A method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords.
Affiliate Marketing
A type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website.
Native Advertising
Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be ‘native’ -- for example, Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.
Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people towards the business’ website.
Online PR
Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space.
What’s the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing?
On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what’s the difference?
The term ‘digital marketing’ doesn’t differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.
Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space - regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.
On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.
Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.
Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses? B2B and B2C?
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that’s not to say that all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.
For B2B
If your company is B2B, your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.
Beyond your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.
For B2C
If your company is B2C, depending on the price point of your products, it’s likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.
For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).
For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.
What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Marketing?
Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are some examples:
Website Traffic
With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software like sahanigroup. You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.
This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.
With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes -- that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it.
Attribution Modeling
An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business. We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's’ journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.
Awareness Stage
Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.
Consideration Stage
Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it.
Research reports. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they’re often picked-up by the media or industry press.
Webinars. As they’re a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.
Decision Stage
Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.
Testimonials. If case studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.
How Long Will It Take to See Results?
With digital marketing, it can often feel like you’re able to see results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it’s easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends entirely on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months.
If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker -- but it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.
Do I Need a Big Budget for Digital Marketing?
As with anything, it really depends on what elements of digital marketing you’re looking to add to your strategy.
Presuming you already have a website, if you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation then the good news is you don’t need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to outsource the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time.
With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.
For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you’ll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.
Where Does Mobile Marketing Come Into the Equation?
Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, mobile usage as a whole accounts for 60% of time spent consuming digital media, while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up the remaining 40%. This means that it’s essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.
Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social media images, it’s important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be cut-off.
There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you’ll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you’re hoping for.
I’m Ready to Try Digital Marketing. Now What?
If you’re already doing digital marketing, it’s likely that you’re at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.
Yeah businesses leverage digital platforms for generating new leads or in order to get new visitors to their blogs and websites. These platforms include Google search, Google Adwords Management, social media and email marketing etc. To get success, you should always do proper market research and only then pick a platform to market your business.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this blog, There are marketing companies in virginia who provide you best digital marketing and seo service at reasonable price.
ReplyDeleteHiring a team of experts to manage the more technical aspects of your marketing strategy allows you to focus on other areas of your business that you enjoy and do best. disseminatedigital.co.uk
ReplyDeleteThe digital marketing agency should have the proper task to do and every people should try to maintain the things more properly. That's why you should hire a reputable and reliable agency like digitrio.com.sg.
ReplyDeleteDigital Marketing is a platform to reach to your audience online. This helps you in exploring the maximum audience. You just need to know your audience and your digital marketing platforms.
ReplyDeleteFor more information visit Minneapolis Digital Marketing
Thanks for sharing those tips. One of the nice things about seo services is that you don’t need to search for SEO providers in your area but you can find them online.
ReplyDeleteExcellent explanation on digital marketing. Digital marketing is expected to be one of the fastest-growing careers by 2022, and it can truly assist new-age businesses advertise themselves. Coming from a Digital Marketing organization, I find these types of videos to be quite beneficial to students. i think create animation videos and published different social platforms for promotion of your business i have resource VIDEO ANIMATION COMPANY IN CALIFORNIA they are create your video for your business niche related
ReplyDeleteStunning blog! As a digital marketer myself in product video production company portland, this one was really well explained! I'm looking forward to more such videos in the future! This is a very good explanation of SEO's principle. Well done.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the informative article, keep updating more content. By the way, I'm an employee at Connect Driving School UK and if you're looking for manual and automatic driving instructors, you can reach out to me.
ReplyDeleteI would spread the word in my company where we create louis vuitton onthego bag bags. Thanks for sharing this information.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your work. I work at Louis Vuitton, a big brand known for its LOUIS VUITTON ONTHEGO MM, it's an louis vuitton onthego bag for women and men.
ReplyDeleteYour blog is full of importance about digital marketing. Through digital marketing we grow our business easily. Just like Silicon Graphics AE, who offer best online Digital Marketing Services.
ReplyDeleteJust loved the article and the way it is written. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteReference: https://proweb365.com/digital-marketing/
In the realm of digital marketing, achieving a spiritual life alignment
ReplyDeletemeans harmonizing online strategies to resonate with customers. It's about crafting messages that speak authentically, nurturing connections that transcend mere transactions, and guiding brands towards meaningful engagement with their audience.
In the evolving landscape of digital marketing, understanding consumer behavior is key. With people increasingly spending time online, businesses must adapt their strategies to meet customers where they are. Incorporating visuals from the best online feet pictures platforms can enhance engagement and resonate with modern audiences.
ReplyDeleteIn the dynamic landscape of digital marketing, gifts of the holy spirit right judgementbusinesses must adapt to where their audience spends most of their time: online. Embracing digital channels like social media and search engines ensures effective connection with customers, aligning with evolving consumer behavior.
ReplyDeleteIn the dynamic landscape of digital marketing,Dr. John Mathai's Holy Spirit book businesses must adapt to where their audience spends most of their time: online. Embracing digital channels like social media and search engines ensures effective connection with customers, aligning with evolving consumer behavior.
ReplyDeleteIn today's digital age, connecting with audiences means meeting them where they spend most of their time: online. Businesses can leverage this shift by offering I need 40 word comment while using my keyword naturally which is "spiritual life alignment" according to the topic.
ReplyDeleteonline classes in Tigrigna, tapping into the growing trend of digital engagement for effective marketing strategies.
In today's digital age, reaching your audience effectively requires leveraging various online channels. Integrating biofeedback technology near Arlington into your digital marketing strategy can enhance engagement and connect with customers where they spend most of their time: the internet.
ReplyDelete