Digital marketing has fundamentally changed the way businesses evolve. We now live in a super-functional world where advertising and marketing are not what they used to be.
In particular, the rise of social media has changed the way businesses communicate with their potential and existing customers.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, or digital marketing as it is also known, refers to all marketing that uses digital channels.
Digital marketing includes several different channels, such as natural links (SEO), paid links (SEA), social media, email, marketing automation …
If you’re new to digital marketing, it can seem complicated.
However, in many ways, digital marketing is no different than traditional marketing.
In both cases, businesses are concerned with building relationships and attracting new prospects and customers.
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
Digital marketing is beneficial for businesses of all sizes.
Unlike television or print advertising, it allows for truly personalized marketing.
The biggest advantage of digital marketing is that you can reach your target audience in a cost-effective and measurable way.
Other benefits of digital marketing include stronger brand loyalty and higher online sales.
The benefits of digital marketing include
– Global marketing capabilities. With a website, you can enter new markets and trade worldwide with very little investment.
– Significant reduction in marketing costs: a well-planned and targeted digital marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.
– Trackable and measurable results Measuring your digital marketing activities with web analytics tools and other online measurement tools contributes to the effectiveness of your campaigns.
You can get detailed information about how your customers are using your website and responding to your ads.
Once you have your analytics in place, you can show exactly how much revenue you are generating with each digital tactic.
– Over-personalization: if your customer database is linked to your website, you can send targeted offers every time someone visits your site.
The more they buy from you, the more you can refine your customer profile and approach them more effectively.
– By improving your brand image, using social media, and managing it carefully, you can build customer loyalty and reputation.
– Increase conversion rates If you have a website, your customers are just a few clicks away from making a purchase. Unlike other mediums where you have to get up and make a phone call or visit a store, digital marketing is transparent and immediate.
In this way, digital marketing can help you significantly increase your sales. By hiring the finest digital marketing agency, you can easily avail these benefits for your business.
Digital marketing: examples and tactics
Today’s marketers have a clear idea of how each digital marketing campaign will achieve its goals.
Depending on the objective, be it increasing awareness or attracting customers, digital marketers use different channels.
This means that marketers must employ different strategies.
For example, a content marketer might create a series of blog posts to encourage downloading of a new white paper the company recently created.
This would result in collecting personal data about the target audience, which could then be used to send automated emails to convert them into customers, for example.
Following the same principle, a company’s community manager can promote these blog posts by increasing or decreasing the number of posts on social media.
Here are some of the most common channels for engagement marketing.
Natural search engine recommendation (SEO).
This is the optimization of a website so that it appears higher up in the search engine results pages, thereby driving more organic (or free) traffic to the website.
SEA – Search Engine Advertising, CPC – Cost Per Click.
SEA is a method of attracting traffic to your website by paying a publisher, such as Google, to display your website in search engine results.
CPC is very similar to SEA but is a paid digital marketing method where you pay for each click to your website.
One of the most widely used platforms is Google AdWords, which lets you pay a price per click for links that appear at the top of Google search engine results pages.
Other channels where CPC can be used include
– Paid advertising on Facebook
– Twitter advertising
– Linkedin advertising
– Other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.
Content marketing or content marketing
Refers to the creation and promotion of content to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and improve lead generation and customer acquisition.
Channels that can play a role in your content marketing strategy include the following
– Blog posts
– E-books and white papers
– Infographics
Content marketing is a digital marketing technique that is directly derived from inbound marketing.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing helps you promote your brand and content on social media to increase brand awareness, drive traffic and generate leads for your business. The following channels can be used for social media marketing.
– Tweet
– Snapchat
– Google+
Affiliate Marketing
This is a form of performance-based advertising where you receive a commission for promoting the products or services of others on your website.
Affiliate channels include
– Social media
– Your website
– etc.
Native advertising
Native advertising refers to ads that are primarily content-based and appear on the platform in the same format as other unpaid content.
BuzzFeed’s sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider ads on social media, such as Facebook feed ads and Instagram ads, to be native.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation refers to the automation of key marketing activities.
It can automate repetitive tasks that many marketing departments used to do manually, such as
– Sending out newsletters
– Posting to social media
– Updating contact lists
– lead nurturing
– Monitoring and reporting on marketing campaigns
Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a means to communicate with their customers.
Email marketing is often used to announce content, promotions, and events, and to drive traffic to the company’s website.
As part of an email marketing campaign, you can send the following types of messages
– Newsletters
– Content download confirmation emails
– Welcome emails
– Automated emails to nurture leads
Online public relations
Online PR is the process of publicizing an event on the Internet through posts in newspapers, blogs and other content-related websites.
It is similar to traditional PR but on the Internet.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is about targeting your customers with relevant and useful content and providing value to them at every stage of their buying process.
With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.
Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing naturally engages your potential customers.
By creating content that solves the ideal customer’s problem or need, you can attract qualified leads and build trust and credibility for your business.
What does a digital marketer do?
Digital marketers are responsible for building brand awareness and generating leads across all free and paid digital channels available to companies.
These channels include social media, corporate websites, search engine rankings, email, display advertising, and content marketing.
Digital marketers typically establish one or more different KPIs (key performance indicators) for each channel to appropriately measure the company’s performance in each channel.
Digital marketing today is driven by a variety of marketing functions.
In small and medium-sized businesses, a polyvalent digital marketer may employ any number of digital marketing tactics, such as those listed above.
In larger companies, these tactics are manage by multiple marketers. Each focused on one or two digital brand channels.
