What is digital marketing?
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing includes all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the Internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.
A skilled inbound marketer might say that inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And talking to vendors and business owners from the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I learned a lot about how those small differences are being noticed around the world.
Why Digital Marketing?
While traditional marketing exists in print ads, phone communication or physical marketing, digital marketing can happen electronically and online. This means there are endless possibilities for brands, including email, video, social media, or website-based marketing opportunities.
Since there are so many options and strategies associated with digital marketing, you can experiment with creative and varied marketing strategies on a budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor your campaign success and ROI, along with traditional campaign content – a billboard or print ad.
Digital marketing is defined by the use of several digital strategies and channels that spend the most time with customers: online. From the website itself to the online branding assets of the business – digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures and beyond – there is a spectrum of techniques that fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing”.
The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign will support their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.
A content marketer, for example, might create a series of blog posts to solicit leads from a new eBook the business recently created.
A company’s social media marketer can help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business’s social media accounts. An email marketer creates an email campaign to send e-book downloaders more information about the company. We’ll talk more about this particular digital marketer in a minute.
Digital Marketing Examples:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Native Advertising
7. Marketing Automation
8. Email Marketing
9. Online PR
10. Inbound Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” on search engine results pages, thereby increasing the organic (or free) traffic your website receives. Channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.
There are several ways to approach SEO to generate the traffic you deserve to your website. including:
On-Line SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all the content that is “on the page” when viewing a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) that those questions generate.
• Off-Page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all activities that take place “off-page” when looking to optimize your website. “What activity not on my own website can affect my ranking?” You can ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks.
The number of publishers linking to you, and the relative “authority” of those publishers, will affect how high you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and attracting external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up the right SERPs.
Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading speed – a key ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Content Marketing:
The term refers to the creation and promotion of content assets aimed at generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation and customers. Channels that can play a role in your content marketing strategy include:
Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize the concept you want to help them learn.
Social media marketing
This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic and leads to your business. Channels you can use in social media marketing include:
• Instagram.
• Snapchat
• Pinterest.
If you’re new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule content for multiple channels simultaneously and monitor analytics from the platform.
On top of connecting social accounts for posting purposes, you can integrate your social media inboxes into HubSpot, so you can get your direct messages in one place.
Pay-per-Click (PPC)
PPC is a way to drive traffic to your website by paying the publisher every time your ad is clicked. The most common type of PPC is Google Ads, which allow you to pay a “per-click” price for the links you place to rank high on Google’s search engine results pages. Other channels you can use PPC include:
• Twitter ad campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges into a specific audience’s news feeds, all dedicated to achieving a specific goal for your business. This goal could be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement or app downloads.
Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.
Affiliate Marketing:
This is a type of performance based advertising where you receive a commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:
Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.
Native advertising
Native advertising refers primarily to content-led and other, non-paid content that appears on a platform. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people consider social media advertising to be “native” – such as Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising.
Marketing Automation:
Marketing automation refers to software that helps automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate tasks that they repeatedly do manually, including:
E-mail newsletters: Email automation does not allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. This helps you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters only go to people who want to see them in their inboxes.
Social Media Post Schedule: If you want to grow your organization’s presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting an unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
• Nurturing Workflows: Generating leads and converting those leads into customers is a long process. You can automate that process by sending specific emails when they download and open an eBook after matching the content to certain criteria.
Campaign Tracking and Reporting: Marketing campaigns can involve a ton of different people, emails, content, webpages, phone calls and more. Marketing automation helps you sort everything you work on by the campaign it’s working on, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.
Email Marketing:
Companies use email marketing as a way to communicate with their audience. Email is often used to promote content, discounts, and events, as well as direct people to a business’s website. Types of emails you can send in an email marketing campaign:
• Blog subscription newsletters.
Follow up emails to website visitors who have downloaded something.
Welcome emails.
Holiday promotions for loyalty program members.
Tips for customer nurturing or similar emails.
Online PR
Online PR is the practice of securing earned online reach with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s like traditional PR but in the online space. Channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
Influencing reporters through social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to build relationships with newspapers that can generate earned media opportunities for your company.
Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that review is good or bad, your instincts may not touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews can help humanize your brand and deliver a powerful message that protects your reputation.
Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you respond to reviews of your company, responding to people who read your content is a great way to generate productive conversation around your industry.
Inbound Marketing:
Inbound marketing refers to a marketing approach in which you attract, engage and delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Across an inbound marketing strategy, you can use each of the digital marketing strategies listed above to create a customer experience that works with customers. Here are some classic examples of traditional marketing and inbound marketing:
• Blogging vs pop-up ads
Video Marketing and Commercial Advertising
Email contact lists and email spam
What does a digital marketer do?
Digital distributors are in charge of brand awareness and lead generation – both free and paid – through all digital channels at the company’s disposal. These channels include social media, the company’s own website, search engine rankings, email, display advertising and the company blog.
A digital marketer usually focuses on a different Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for each channel, so they can accurately measure the company’s performance in each. For example, a digital marketer in charge of SEO measures their website’s “organic traffic” – traffic that comes from website visitors who find a page on the business’s website through a Google search.
Digital marketing is performed in many marketing roles today. In small companies, a generalist may have multiple digital marketing strategies described above at the same time. In large companies, these strategies have multiple specialists, each focusing on just one or two of the brand’s digital channels.
Here are some examples of these experts:
SEO Manager
Main KPIs: Organic traffic
In short, SEO managers get business on Google. Using a variety of methods for search engine optimization, this person can work directly with content creators to ensure that the content they produce performs well on Google – even if the company posts this content on social media.
Content Marketing Specialist
Main KPIs: time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers
Content marketing experts are digital content creators. They often track the company’s blogging calendar and come up with a content strategy that includes video. These professionals work with people in other departments to ensure business launches products and campaigns with promotional content on every digital channel.
Social media manager
Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares
It’s easy to guess the role of a social media manager from the title, but what social networks they manage for a company depends on the industry. Above all, the social media manager establishes a posting schedule for the company’s written and visual content. This employee may work with content marketing specialists to develop a strategy for which content should be posted on which social network.
(Note: For the KPIs above, “Impressions” refers to how often a business’s posts appear in a user’s newsfeed.)
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Key KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate
Marketing automation helps coordinators choose and manage software that allows the entire marketing team to understand their customers’ behavior and measure their business’s growth. Since many of the marketing operations described above are executed in isolation from one another, it is important to have someone who can categorize these digital activities into individual campaigns and track the performance of each campaign.
Inbound Marketing and Digital Marketing: Which Is It?
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” does not distinguish between push and pull marketing strategies (or what we may now call ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ approaches). Both still fall under digital marketing.
Digital outbound strategies aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible online – regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcome. For example, the pretty banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion on people who don’t need it.
On the other hand, marketers using digital inbound strategies use online content to attract their target customers to their websites. One of the simplest inbound digital marketing assets is that it allows your website to capitalize on the terms your ideal customers are searching for.
Finally, inbound marketing is a method of using digital marketing assets to attract, engage and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply a term to describe any type of online marketing strategy, regardless of whether they are inbound or outbound.
Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing involves building buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs and create valuable online content. However, that does not mean that all businesses must implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.
B 2 B Digital Marketing
If your company is business to business, your digital marketing efforts will be focused on online lead generation, with the ultimate goal being someone talking to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert high-quality leads to your sales force through your website and supporting digital channels.
Aside from your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic spends most of their time online.
B 2 C Digital Marketing (Business to Customer)
If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C) based on the pricing of your products, the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and convert them into customers without having to talk to them. seller
For that reason, you’re 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 they buy. . This usually puts your product features in your content higher up the marketing funnel than B2B business, and you may need to use strong calls-to-action (CTAs).
For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can be more valuable than business-focused platforms like LinkedIn.
What is the role of digital marketing in a company?
Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever placed an ad in a newspaper, you know how difficult it is to estimate how many people turned to that page and paid attention to your ad. There is no sure way to know if any ads are caused by that ad.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are some examples:
Website Traffic
With digital marketing, you can see the number of people who have viewed your website’s home page in real time using digital analytics software available on marketing platforms like HubSpot.
You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they’re using, and where they came from, among other digital analytics data.
This intelligence helps you prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on based on how many 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 interacting with a seller or making a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify the behavioral trends and patterns of people before they reach the final stage of the 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 even if it’s offline. The problem is that you don’t know how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.
Now imagine you have that brochure on your website. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page it hosted. And you can collect the contact details of those who download it using forms. You can measure how many people engage with your content, but you’re generating qualified leads when people download it.
Attractive Modeling
An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies will enable you to drive all your sales back to the 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 make more informed decisions about which parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention and which parts of your sales cycle need to be refined.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is critical – according to the 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 using digital technologies, it is likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.
What kind of digital content should we create?
The content you create depends on the needs of your audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience’s goals and challenges are for your business. At a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals and overcome their challenges.
Then, you need to think about when they are ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they are in their buyer journey. We call this thing mapping.
With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:
1. Characteristics of the person using it (that’s where buyer personas come in).
2. How close the person is to making a purchase (ie, their lifecycle stage).
Depending on the nature of your content, there are several different things to try. Here are some options we recommend using at each stage of the buyer’s journey:
Awareness stage
Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
• Infographics. Highly shareable, which means that when others share your content, it increases the likelihood that it will be seen through social media.
• Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help get your brand discovered by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.
Consideration step
• E-books. For the next generation, they’re usually better because they’re more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to get one.
• Research reports. Again, this is a high-value piece of content that’s great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage, as they are often picked up from the media or industry press.
•Webinars. Because they are a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration-level content format because they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.
Decision stage
•Case study. Having detailed case studies on your website is an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchase decision, as it helps to positively influence their decision.
• Certificates. If case studies are not suitable for your business, having short testimonials on your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think about testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, showing how people styled a shirt or dress can take the form of photos pulled from the brand hashtag that people contribute to.
How long does it take to see results from our content?
With digital marketing, it feels like you’ll be able to see results faster than you would with offline marketing because ROI is easier to measure. However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs and focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, you’re likely to see strong results in the first six months.
If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, results will come even faster – but for long-term, sustainable success it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO and social media.
Do I need a big budget for digital marketing?
As with anything, it really depends on what aspects of digital marketing you want to include.
Your strategy
The good news is that if you’re focusing on inbound strategies like SEO, social media, and content creation for a pre-existing website, you don’t need much of a budget. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high-quality content that your audience wants to consume, unless you plan to outsource the work, the only investment you need is your time.
You can start by hosting a website and creating content using HubSpot’s CMS. For those on a tight budget, you can start using WordPress hosted on WordPress Engine and use the simple ones from StudioPress.
With outbound strategies like buying online advertising and email lists, there are undoubtedly some costs involved. What the price is depends on what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the ad.
For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for keywords related to your industry. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, it can be reasonably affordable or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good idea to focus on building your organic reach.
How does mobile marketing fit into our digital marketing strategy?
Another important aspect of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, while smartphone use accounts for 69% of digital media consumption in the US, desktop-based digital media use accounts for less than half – and the US is still not a big fan of mobile compared to other countries.
This means optimizing your digital ads, web pages, social media images and other digital assets for mobile devices is essential. If your company has a mobile app that allows users to engage with your brand or shop for your products, your app falls under digital marketing.
Those who engage with your company online through mobile devices should have the same positive experience as they do on desktop.
This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. This means reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a seamless experience for people downloading your content on the go. As for your social media images, it’s important to always keep mobile users in mind when creating them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be cut off.
There are many ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users. When implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s important to consider how the experience translates on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front of mind, you’ll create digital experiences that work for your audience and, as a result, achieve the results you’re hoping for.
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