Digital marketing usually refers to online marketing campaigns that appear on computers, mobile phones, tablets, or other devices. 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 advertising, billboards, and direct mail. Surprisingly, television is usually equated with traditional marketing.
Did you know that nine out of ten US adults are online every day? Not only that, 41% are online ” almost constantly.”As a marketer, it is important to take advantage of the digital world with an online advertising presence, by building a brand, delivering an exceptional customer experience that also brings more and more potential customers, with a digital strategy.
A digital marketing strategy allows you to leverage a variety of 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 great customer experiences, bring in potential customers, and more.
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What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of a brand to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messaging as marketing channels.
In essence, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it is digital marketing.
Inbound marketing versus digital marketing
Digital marketing and inbound marketing are easy to confuse, and for good reason. Digital marketing uses many of the same tools as inbound marketing-email and online content, to name a few. Both are there to grab the attention of prospects through the buyer’s journey and turn them into customers. But both approaches take a different view of the relationship between tools and goals.
Digital marketing considers how individual tools or digital channels can transform prospects. A brand’s digital marketing strategy can use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on one platform. For example, a company might primarily create content for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns while ignoring other digital marketing avenues.
Inbound marketing is a holistic concept. It considers the goals first, then looks at the tools available to determine which ones will reach the target customer effectively, and then at which stage of the sales funnel that should happen. For example, let’s say you want to increase website traffic to generate more leads and leads. You can focus on Search Engine Optimization when developing your content marketing strategy, producing 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 two. In fact, they work best together. Inbound marketing provides a structure and purpose for effective digital marketing for digital marketing efforts, ensuring that each digital marketing channel works towards a goal.
Why digital marketing is important?
Any type of marketing can help your business grow. However, digital marketing is becoming increasingly important due to the easily accessible digital channels. In fact, there are 5.45 billion internet users worldwide as of July 2024.
From social media to text messaging, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics to communicate with your target audience. 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 both B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) companies, but best practices differ significantly between the two. Here’s a closer look at how digital marketing is used in B2B and B2C marketing strategies:
B2B clients tend to have a longer decision-making process, and thus a longer sales funnel. Relationship building strategies work better for these clients, whereas B2C customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages.
B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, presented by skilled B2B digital marketers. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally based, focusing on making the customer feel good about the purchase.
B2B decisions tend to require input from more than 1 person. The marketing materials that drive these decisions the most tend to be shareable and downloadable. B2C customers, on the other hand, love a one-on-one connection with a brand.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. B2C companies with expensive products, such as cars or computers, may offer more informative and serious content. As a result, your digital marketing strategy should always be geared towards your own customer base, whether you’RE B2B or B2C.
Look at your current audience to create a well-informed and targeted online marketing campaign. Doing so ensures your marketing efforts are effective and you can grab the attention of potential customers.
Types of digital marketing
There are as many specializations in digital marketing as there are ways to interact using digital media. Here are some key examples of these types of digital marketing tactics.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing itself. It is often called “art and science.”
The” science ” part of SEO is the most important. SEO is a science because it requires you to research and consider various factors that contribute to achieving the highest possible ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines include:
Quality and uniqueness of content
Optimization of key elements for targeted keywords (URLs, title tags, H1, subtitles)
User engagement rate (time on page, bounce rate)
Number and quality of backlinks
Internal links
In addition to the above elements, you need to prioritize technical SEO, which is all the back-end components of your site. These include mobile friendliness and loading times. Improving your technical SEO can help search engines better navigate and crawl your site.
The strategic use of these factors makes search engine optimization a science, but the uncertainty involved makes it an “art” that often requires experienced SEO professionals.
Ultimately, the goal is to rank on or near the top of the first page of search engine results pages or in Google’S AI overview. This ensures that those searching for specific queries related to your brand can easily find your product or service. While there are many search engines, digital marketers often focus on Google because it is the global leader in the search engine market.
Google and other search engines change their algorithms almost constantly, so SEO is a never-ending advancement. And your competitors are most likely also investing in SEO. What you can do is carefully monitor the performance of your page and make adjustments as needed.
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 distribution of relevant and valuable content to the target audience.
As in any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract prospects who eventually turn into customers. But it is very different from traditional advertising. Instead of luring prospects with the potential value of a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material, such as:
Blog posts
E-book
Newsletter
Video or audio transcripts
Whitepaper
Infographic
Content marketing is important, and there are plenty of Statistics to prove it:
84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and useful content experiences
62% of companies with at least 5,000 employees produce content every day
92% of marketers believe their companies value content as an important asset
As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need to be able to rank high in search engine results while also engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand. If the content is relevant, it can build strong relationships throughout the flow.
To create effective content that is highly relevant and engaging, it is important to identify your audience. Who do you ultimately want to reach with your content marketing efforts? Once you understand your audience better, you can determine the type of content you will create. You can use many content formats in your content marketing, including videos, blog posts, printable worksheets, and more.
No matter what content you create, it’s best to follow content marketing best practices. This means creating content that is grammatically correct, error-free, easy to understand, relevant, and engaging. Your content should also funnel readers to the next stage in the flow, be it a free consultation with a sales representative or a sign-up page.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in online discussions. You can use social media marketing to highlight your brand, products, services, culture, and more. With billions of people spending their time engaging on social media platforms, focusing on social media marketing can be beneficial.
Instagram Facebook, X, and LinkedIn are the most popular digital platforms for social media marketing, 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 prospects for your FinTech startup, targeting your audience on LinkedIn is a good idea 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’re running a B2C focused on younger consumers.
Since social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way to get attention. Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are very useful in helping you understand how well you are reaching your audience. You can decide which type of interaction means the most to you, whether that means the number of shares, comments, or total clicks to your website.
Direct purchases may not even be the goal of your social media marketing strategy. Many brands use social media marketing to start a dialogue with an audience rather than encouraging them to spend money right away. This is especially common with brands that target an older audience or offer products and services that are not suitable for impulse buying. It all depends on your company’s social media marketing goals.
To create an effective social media marketing strategy, it is very important to follow the best practices. Here are some of the most important social media marketing best practices:
Create high-quality and engaging content
Reply to comments and questions professionally
Create a social media posting schedule
Post at the right time
Hire a social media manager to support your marketing efforts
Know your audience and which social media channels are most active to them
To learn more about how Mailtools can help your social media strategy, check out our comparison of free social media management tools with others.
Pay per click marketing
Pay per click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing where you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your digital ad. So instead of paying a set amount to continue running targeted ads on online marketing channels, you only pay for ads that individuals 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 spot becomes available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engines fill that spot with what is essentially an instant auction. The algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on a number of factors, including:
Ad quality
Keyword relevance
Landing page quality
Number of offers
PPC ads are then placed at the top of the search engine results page based on the above factors every time someone searches for a particular query.
Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers must complete after clicking the ad. This action is known as conversion, and it can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so are newsletter signups or calls made to your home office.
Whatever you choose as your target conversion, you can track it through your preferred digital marketing channel to see how your campaign is performing.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing tactic that allows one person to make money by promoting someone else’s business. You can be a promoter or a business that works with promoters, but the process is the same in both cases.
It works using a revenue sharing model. If you’re an affiliate, you earn a commission every time someone buys an item you’re promoting. If you are the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.
Some affiliate marketers choose to review products from only 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with many merchants.
Whether you want to become an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make connections with other parties. You can use digital channels designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single retailer program.
If you are a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program attractive to potential promoters. You must provide those affiliates with the tools they need to succeed. That includes incentives for outstanding results as well as marketing tools and ready-made materials.
Native ads
Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. The goal is to blend in with the surrounding content so that it’s not as flashy as an ad.
Native advertising was created as a reaction to today’s consumer cynicism towards advertising. Knowing that ad creators pay to run them, many consumers will conclude that the ads are biased and consequently ignore them.
Native advertising overcomes this bias by offering information or entertainment before it becomes any promotion, downplaying the “advertising”aspect.
It’s important to always label your native ads clearly. Use words like “promoted” or ” sponsored.”If the indicator is hidden, readers will probably spend a lot of time engaging with the content before they realize it’s an ad.
When your consumers know exactly what they’re getting, they’ll feel better about your content and brand. Native ads are meant to be less obtrusive than traditional ads, but they’re not meant to be deceptive.
Influencer marketing
Like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing relies on working with influencers-individuals with a large following, such as celebrities, industry experts, or content creators-in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your product or service to their followers on multiple social media channels.
Influencer marketing works well for B2B and B2C companies looking to reach new audiences. However, it is important to partner with reputable influencers as they essentially represent your brand. The wrong Influencer can undermine consumer confidence in your business.
Marketing automation
Marketing Automation uses software to support digital marketing campaigns, increasing the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on creating a strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of a complicated and time-consuming process.
While marketing automation may seem like a fancy tool that your business can’t afford, it can significantly increase engagement between you and your audience.
According to statistics:
90% of US consumers find personalization “very ” or “somewhat” attractive
81% of consumers want the brands they use to understand them better
Marketing automation allows companies to keep up with personalization expectations. This allows the brand to:
Collecting and analyzing consumer information
Designing targeted marketing campaigns
Send and post digital marketing messages at the right time to the right audience
Many marketing automation tools use lead engagement (or lack thereof) with specific messages to determine when and how to reach next. This level of real-time customization means you can effectively create an individual marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.
Mailtools marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience through behavior-based automation, transactional emails, date-based automation, and more.
Email marketing
The concept of email marketing is simple-you send a promotional message and expect your prospects to click on it. However, its execution is much more complex. First of all, you should make sure that your email is wanted. This means having an email marketing provider that offers the following is essential:
Individualize content, both in the body and in the subject line
An email signature that offers clear unsubscribe options
Both, transactional and promotional emails
You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valuable service, not just as a promotional tool.
Email marketing is a proven and effective technique on its own, but it will be even better if you incorporate other digital marketing techniques such as marketing automation, which allows you to group and schedule your emails so that they meet the needs of your customers more effectively.
If you are considering email marketing, here are some tips that can help you create a great email marketing campaign:
Segment your audience to deliver relevant campaigns to the right people
Make sure emails look good on mobile devices
Create a campaign schedule
Run A / B testing
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage 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 very important to ensure that all content is optimized for mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Center, nine out of ten Americans own a smartphone, so your marketing efforts can go a long way when you create content for computer and mobile screens.
Benefits of digital marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent mainly because it reaches such a wide audience. However, it also offers a number of other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are some of the benefits of digital marketing.
Wide geographical reach
When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (as long as you don’t limit your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business ‘ market reach and connect with a larger audience across multiple digital channels.
Cost efficiency
Digital marketing not only reaches a wider audience than traditional marketing but also has lower costs. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audience will see the message in the first place.
With digital marketing, you can only create one piece of content that attracts visitors to your blog as long as it is still active. You can create email marketing campaigns that deliver messages to your targeted subscriber list on a schedule, and it’s easy to change that schedule or content if you need to.
When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you more flexibility and customer contact for your advertising spend.
Quantifiable results
To find out if your marketing strategy is working, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it generates. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?
There is always the traditional option of asking every customer, ” How did you find us?”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in all industries. Many companies are unable to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don’t always get complete results.
With digital marketing, monitoring results has become simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of conversions you want, whether it’s email open rates, homepage visits, or direct purchases.
Easier personalization
Digital marketing allows you to collect customer data in a way that offline marketing cannot. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.
Imagine that you offer financial services and want to send a special offer to internet users who have seen your product. You know you’ll get better results if you target offers to that person’s interests, so you decide to set up 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have seen your life insurance product, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plan.
How do you collect all that data without automated tracking? How many phone records do you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or has not read the brochure you sent?
With digital marketing, all this information is already at your fingertips.
More connections with customers
Digital marketing allows you to communicate with customers in real-time. More importantly, it allows them to communicate with you.
Think about your social media strategy. It’s great when your target audience sees your latest post, but even better when they comment on it or share it. This means more buzz around your product or service, as well as increased visibility whenever someone joins the conversation.
Interactivity also benefits your customers. Their engagement rate increases as they become active participants in your brand story. That sense of belonging can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.
Easy and convenient conversion
Digital marketing allows your customers to take action as soon as they see your ad or content. With traditional advertising, the quickest result you can expect is a phone call as soon as someone sees your ad. But how often does a person have time to reach out to the company while they are washing dishes, driving on the highway, or updating records at work?
With digital marketing, they can click on a link or save a blog post and instantly move along the sales funnel. They may not make a purchase right away, but they will still connect with you and give you the opportunity to interact further with them.
How to create a digital marketing strategy
For many small businesses and budding 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 may want to achieve, try to focus on those that will drive your strategy forward instead of causing it to remain stagnant.
Identify your audience
Before starting any marketing campaign, it is best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is a group of people that your campaign wants to reach based on similar attributes, 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 which information to include in your campaign.
Create a budget
A budget ensures you spend your money effectively to achieve your goals instead of overspending on digital marketing channels that may not deliver the desired results. Consider your SMART goals and the digital channels you’ll use to budget.
Choose your digital marketing channel
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 often depends on your goals, audience, and budget.
Improve your marketing efforts
Be sure to analyze your campaign data to identify what has done well and areas for improvement once the campaign is complete. This allows you to create better campaigns in the future. With the help of digital technology and software, you can get this data on an easy-to-see dashboard. Mailtools digital marketing analytics reports will help you track all your marketing campaigns in one centralized location.
Digital marketing creates growth
Digital marketing should be one of the main focuses of almost any overall business marketing strategy. There has never been a way to consistently stay in touch with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you can realize the growth potential of your company.
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