What is digital marketing?
Digital Marketing is a strategy that uses multiple channels to attract engage and convert customers online.
Digital marketing is a form of marketing for promoting and selling products or services on the Internet. It’s the process of leveraging different online marketing channels like search engines, social media networks, and email to reach your target audience.
Through Digital Marketing, you can find people interested in your offering, interact with them, and build trust with your brand.Digital Marketing has a number of types, the most important are website marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, PPC advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, video marketing, and affiliate marketing.
How Digital Marketing Works?
The way digital marketing works is simple.First, you need to specify your digital marketing goals i.e. what you want to achieve with digital marketing. Some common examples are: to increase brand awareness, to make more sales, or to grow your community.
Then you need to decide which marketing channels can help you achieve your goals. For example, if your goal is to make more sales then running paid campaigns on Google and Facebook is a good starting point.
To make the whole process easier to manage, you can create a plan specifying how much money you’ll spend, define your target audience, define your performance metrics, and other information that will help you control the process.
This is what a digital marketing campaign is all about. Don’t worry if it’s confusing now, there is a more detailed example of how to create a successful digital marketing campaign towards the end of this post.
Before creating your first digital marketing campaign, you need to know the different marketing channels and how they work.
- Socially Responsible Investment
- Comprehensive Investment Plans
- Financial Planning for Business
- Tax Mitigation Strategies
DIGITAL MARKETING – one of the most frequently mentioned buzzwords in marketing.
Digital marketing channels
Digital Marketing has a number of channels grouped into two major categories
Online marketing channels and offline marketing channels.
The main 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 that are not necessarily connected to the Internet.
Online Marketing Channels
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 to promote your website and content with the purpose of getting more traffic and customers.
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.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising gives you the ability to reach internet users on a number of networks through paid ads.
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
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
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
Despite the increased use of social media networks, email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels.
Many people confuse email marketing with the hundreds of 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 and this entails that these people want to hear from you and you are not hijacking their inbox.
In fact, many successful online businesses and marketers use all other digital marketing channels to add leads to their email lists, and then through email marketing, they create a number of funnels to turn those leads into customers.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has to do with reaching people in 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.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing that has grown considerably with the rise of Internet usage.
Basically, 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 cannot only drive more sales but they 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 main 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 bi-directional communication with them that will lead to more sales.
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.
Video Marketing
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.
Offline marketing channels
The channels described above are the most important components of digital marketing. These are the channels that can be executed through the Internet (thus the term online marketing channels) and in many cases, it’s the only ones you need to use to have a strong online presence.
The offline digital marketing channels described below are still used but they are not suitable for all companies. For example, a small business does not have the funds to advertise on TV or electronic billboards.
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 main 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 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 the social media mania.
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.
Video Marketing
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.
