What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing includes all online marketing activities. Businesses use digital channels like search engines, social media, email, and websites to generate leads and engage with customers. With the internet’s accessibility, the number of users continues to grow.
As a matter of fact, the internet adult users increased by 5% in the last three years only, according to Pew Research.
As we already know, the way people consume and buy services is drastically influenced by this increase, leading offline marketing to be less effective than it used to be back in the day
Marketing has always been a synchronicity matter, meaning that you’d have to reach your client at the right place at the right time. In today’s world however, marketing requires you to reach your audience in a place where they spend a lot of time : the web.
Get acquainted with digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that involves the use of an electronic device or the internet.
we talk a lot about inbound marketing as an excellent way to generate leads, turn those leads into customers, then satisfy those customers online. Still, a lot of questions are still being asked around digital marketing
An experienced inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are the same, yet there are some minor differences between the two. And through conversations with marketers and business owners all over the world, We’ve learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.
How do you define digital marketing?
Digital marketing is defined through the use of various digital strategies and channels to interact with customers where they spend much of their time: on the internet. From a company’s website itself to digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there’s a plethora of means to use “digital marketing.”
Digital Marketing Tactics and Examples
Each digital marketing campaign should support a company’s overarching goals. Depending on objectives and marketing strategies, marketers can lead a larger campaign through the free and paid channels that suit them best.
As an example, a content marketer might create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new eBook the business recently released. An email marketer will put together an email campaign to send those who download the eBook more information on the company. A company’s social media marketer might then help promote these posts through paid and organic posts on social media.
Here’s a small list of a few common digital marketing strategies along with the channels used for each one
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. In general, it is the earlier or higher ranked on the search results page, and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. The channels benefiting from this strategy are:
Websites.
Blogs.
Info graphics.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves the creation and diffusion, by a brand, of media content in order to develop its activity. The channels involved in this marketing strategy include:
Blog posts.
EBooks and whitepapers.
Info graphics.
Online brochures and lookbooks.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to the use of social media to promote a product or service. The channels involved in this strategy are:
Facebook.
Twitter.
LinkedIn.
Instagram.
Snapchat.
Pinterest.
Google+.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
The Pay Per Click, is an internet marketing techniques for search engines. Companies that use this technique pay each time someone clicks on their ad to visit their website. Other channels that can benefit from PPC include:
Paid ads on Facebook.
Promoted Tweets on Twitter.
Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. This could consist of:
Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.
Native Advertising
Native advertising, or integrated advertising, is a type of advertising, mostly online, that matches the classic editorial content on which it appears.
For instance, many consider facebook and instagram adds to be “native”.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to all the techniques and tools used to automate regular and repetitive tasks considered low added value and to provide analytical tools to marketing departments (email, social media, website, etc.)
In particular, marketing automation refers to the techniques and tools used to automate repetitive tasks by rolling out preconceived marketing scenarios, with the aim of stimulating the prospect to advance his purchasing process. The operations included in marketing automation include:
Email newsletters.
Social media post scheduling.
Contact list updating.
Lead-nurturing workflows.
Campaign tracking and reporting.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy used by businesses in order to keep in touch with their audience and communicate their latest news, such as events, new content release, discounts etc . At the same time email marketing campaigns redirects the audience to the business’s website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:
Blog subscription newsletters.
Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
Customer welcome emails.
Discounts for loyalty program members.
Tips or emails for customer nurturing.
Online PR
Online PR is very similar to traditional PR in the sense that it’s about influencing people by earning online coverage with publications, blogs, and other content–based websites, rather than buying placement for brand content. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
Reporter outreach via social media.
Engaging online reviews of your company.
Engaging comments on your personal website or blog.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing points to the “full funnel” method to attracting, engaging, and pleasing customers using online content. You can make use of every digital marketing tactic mentioned above during the whole course of an inbound marketing strategy.
What Does a Digital Marketer Do?
Digital marketers are responsible for promoting brand awareness and generating leads through any digital channels – free or paid – used by their companies. These channels include social media, the company’s website, search engine rankings, e-mails, advertisements and the company’s blog.
The digital marketing specialist usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel in order to properly measure the performance of the company on each. A digital marketer who is responsible for SEO, for example, measures the “organic traffic” of his website – this traffic comes from website visitors who have found a page of the company’s website via a Google search.
Digital marketing requires many roles today. In small businesses, a generalist may possess many of the digital marketing tactics described above at the same time. In large companies, these tactics involve several specialists who each focus on one or two of the digital channels of the brand.
Here are some examples of these specialists:
SEO Manager
Main KPIs: Organic traffic
In a nutshell, SEO managers work on getting the business to rank higher in search engines results such as Google. Using various ways to better search engine optimization, this person might work directly with content creators to ensure the content they produce performs well on Google — even if the company also posts this content on social media.
Content Marketing Specialist
Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers
Content marketers are the creators of digital content. They frequently follow the company’s blog schedule and offer a content strategy that also includes video. These professionals often work with people in other departments to ensure that the products and campaigns launched by the companies are accompanied by promotional content on each digital channel they use.
Social Media Manager
Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares
The role of the social media officer is easy to deduce from his title, but the social networks they manage depend on the industry. Most importantly, social media managers set a schedule for posting the company’s written and visual content. This employee can also work with the content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for which content must be published on which social network.
(Note: Per the KPIs above, “impressions” refers to the number of times a business’s posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate
The Marketing Automation Coordinator helps select and manage the software that allows the entire marketing team to understand their customers’ behavior and measure the growth of their business. Because many of the marketing operations described above can be run separately from each other, it is important that one person can group these digital activities into individual campaigns and track the performance of each campaign.
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?
In appearance, the two seem similar: both occur primarily online and both focus on creating digital content for users. But there is always a small difference.
The term “digital marketing” does not distinguish between inbound and out-of-box marketing tactics (push and pull). Both are considered digital marketing.
Outbound digital tactics are accessible directly from the market.
On the other hand, marketers use digital inbound tactics by providing them with assets that are useful to them. One of the simplest and most powerful ways of inbound digital marketing is the blog, which allows your website to capitalize on research.
In the end, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing resources to attract, engage and delight online customers. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella to describe any online marketing tactic, whether it is considered as entering or going out.
Finally, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to generate leads, engage prospects, and satisfy customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply a general term to describe online marketing strategies of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.
Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses?
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. No matter what product your company sells, digital marketing always involves enhancing your buyer’s personality and identifying valuable online content. However, that’s not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.
B2B Digital Marketing
If your business is a business-to-business (B2B) business, your digital marketing operations will probably focus on online lead generation, with the expected end result being that one of the generated prospects makes contact with one of your salespeople. Your marketing strategy will therefore be to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your sellers through your website and other digital channels.
Besides your website you will likely choose to focus on business-focused channels, such as LinkedIn, where your audience is more likely to spend their time online.
B2C Digital Marketing
If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the price range of your products, your efforts will most likely focus on bringing visitors to your website and have these visitors become buying customers without them interacting with a salesperson.
For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on generated 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 buy one of your products.
This means that you will need to put your product’s features more forward than you would if you had another type of business (Like B2B), and that you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).
For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest often give more fruitful results than business-focused platforms like LinkedIn.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?
Unlike traditional offline marketing, digital marketing allows your marketing team to see precise results in real time. If you’ve ever used a traditional marketing method (like placing an add on a billboard in a public place), you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people have actually paid attention to your ad.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of most of your marketing operations.
Here are some examples:
Website Traffic
Digital marketing allows you to see the exact number of people who have visited your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in analytics platforms like Google Analytics.
You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.
After analyzing this data and determining which channels drive the most visits to your website, you will then know how to optimize the time spent on each of the marketing channels you use. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you should work a little more on SEO.
Unlike with offline marketing, digital marketing allows you to identify trends and patterns in your audience’s behavior before they become a buyer, 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 poster for you product and distributed it on the street. The problem is that you have no idea how many people will read that content or how many people threw it straight into the trash after you gave it to them.
Now imagine you had that poster on your website instead. You have the means to know 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 interacting with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download your content.
Attribution Modeling
Attribution Modeling essentially consists of determining how a certain channel led to someone buying something. A good digital marketing tactic, along with the right tools will allow you to determine all the steps taken by your customer from his first visit to your online content to his purchase.
This enables you to identify trends and behavior patterns in the way people research and buy your product, helping you take coherent decisions about what sections of your marketing strategy need to be developed, and what sections of your sales cycle need to be done better.
Clearly seeing the relation 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. Digital marketing, when done right, improves your customer’s’ experience and is likely to reflect positively in your business’ revenue.
What Kind of Digital Content Should I Create?
The type of content you need to create depends on the needs of your audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey. You can start by creating buyers personas to identify the goals and challenges of your audience in relation to your business. At the grassroots level, your online content must help them achieve those goals and overcome their challenges.
Then you will have to think about when they will be most likely to consume that content depending on where they are in their buyer’s journey. We call this the content mapping.
With content mapping, the goal is to target content based on:
– The characteristics of the person who will consume it (this is where the buying personalities come into play).
– How close is this person to a purchase (i.e. Their life cycle stage)?
Regarding the format of your content, there are many different things to try. Here are some options that we recommend you use at each step of the buyer’s journey:Awareness Stage
– Blog posts. Ideal to increase your organic traffic when used along 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.
-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. Ideal to generate lead since they’re usually extensively comprehensive when compared to a blog post or infographic, meaning people are most likely to give you their contact details in order to receive it.
– Research reports. 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. Webinars being interactive and detailed, they are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or a short video.
Decision Stage
– Case studies. Showcasing detailed case studies on your website can be a great push for leads who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you influence them.
– Testimonials. If case studies don’t match your business, having short testimonials in your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, Testimonial can be understood in a more general manner: 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.
When will my content give results?
With digital marketing, you can often be under the impression that you can see the results much faster than offline marketing because it’s easier to measure the return on your investment. However, this ultimately depends on the scale of your marketing campaigns and how effective they are.
If you spend time creating complete buyers personas to identify the needs of your audience and focus on creating quality online content to attract customers and convert them, you may expect to see good results in the next first six months.
You may expect faster results if you use paid advertisement. However, focusing on creating organic reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term and sustainable success is a better practice.
How much should I spend on digital marketing ?
As with anything, it really depends on which channels you’re looking forward to using.
If you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for your website, you don’t need a very big budget. Inbound marketing focuses mainly on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to hire people for it, the only investment you’ll put in is your time.
You can get started by hosting a website and creating content. For those on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on WP Engine and using a simple theme from WordPress hosting packages.
Outbound techniques however do need a slightly bigger budget. What it costs comes down to the visibility you want to obtain from the advertising.
For example, to use 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 keyword and its competitiveness, this can be reasonably affordable, or very expensive, which is why you should focus building your organic reach, too.
How Does Mobile Marketing Fit Into My Digital Marketing Strategy?
One of the key components of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, smart phone usage accounts for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half. This means it’s extremely important to thoroughly work on your digital ads, website, social media images, and other digital assets that can be consumed from mobile devices. If your business has a mobile app that enables users to interact with your brand or shop your products, your app is a form of digital marketing too.
People visiting your company’s online content 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.
Digital marketing assets can be optimized in many ways for mobile users. Therefore, it is very important to think of how the browsing experience will be for mobile users. By keeping this in mind, the digital experiences and the content you create will be adapted for your audience and bring you closer to the results you want to achieve.
I’m Ready to Try Digital Marketing. Where do I start ?
If you’re familiar with digital marketing, you are probably already reaching some of your audience’s segments. If you are reading this article however, that also means that you can think of a few areas that need some improvement.
That’s why we created Why Digital Marketing? The Essential Guide to Marketing Your Brand Online — a step-by-step guide to help you build a digital marketing strategy that’s truly effective, whether you’re a complete beginner or have a little more experience. You can download it for free here.