Understand digital marketing and why does it matters?

Digital marketing is well-known among Businesses because of its lower costs. It allows you to get more accurate measuring of data than traditional marketing activities. A good Digital Marketer should know the power of social media in marketing the brand image of the company.

Digital marketing encompasses 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.

What is the role of digital marketing to a company?

At this stage, digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It seems like every other brand has a website. And if they don’t, they at least have a social media presence or digital ad strategy. Digital content and marketing are so common that consumers now expect and rely on them as a way to learn about brands.

Long story short, to be competitive as a business owner, you’ll need to embrace some aspects of digital marketing.

Because digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor the success and ROI of your campaigns more than you could with traditional promotional content — such as a billboard or print ad.

Why is it important to ‘Go Digital’?

Digital Marketing has zero geographical boundaries. There is not one but many ways to expand your business digitally. Your business will reach the masses considering the amount of time the world spends online and the variety of digital platforms available.

So this is how does digital marketing will help your business -

• The ability to reach a global marketplace.
• You can save money and reach more customers than traditional marketing methods.
• Digital Marketing caters to mobile consumers.
• Digital Marketing builds brand reputation.

Digital Marketing Strategies

The list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the strategies most businesses are using:

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising” (which we’ll go over in a second). Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising”.

Paid Search Advertising

Google, Bing, and Yahoo all allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you don’t want to pay to show up in the SERPs, you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank pages or blog posts on your site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but getting a page to rank usually takes quite a bit of time and effort (for a more in-depth comparison of paid search and SEO.

Paid Social Media Advertising

Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, Pinterest, and Snapchat will allow you to run ads on their site. Paid social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences that might not be aware that your business, product, or service exists.

Social Media Marketing

Like SEO, social media marketing is the free, organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business. And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art and science of improving your online user experience. Most of the time, businesses use CRO to get more conversions (leads, chats, calls, sales, etc) out of their existing website traffic.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads, or sales.

Native Advertising

Ever get to the bottom of an article and see a list of suggested articles? That’s native advertising. Most native advertising falls under content marketing because it uses content to attract clicks (“you’ll never believe what happens next!”). Often, native advertising can be a bit hard to spot, since it is usually mixed in with non-paid content recommendations…but that’s kind of the point.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the oldest form of online marketing and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing), or promote an event.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.

As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of different ways to market your business online, which is why many businesses either hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team and marketing automation software to cover their marketing needs (for an in-depth comparison of these options

How does a business define digital marketing?

Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. From the website itself to a business’s online branding assets — digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there’s a spectrum of tactics that fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing.”

The 5Ds of digital marketing

The 5Ds define the opportunities for consumers to interact with brands and for businesses to reach and learn from their audiences in different ways:

1. Digital devices – audiences experience brands as they interact with business websites and mobile apps typically through a combination of connected devices including smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, TVs, and gaming devices.
2. Digital platforms – most interactions on these devices are through a browser or apps from the major platforms or services, that’s Facebook (and Instagram), Google (and YouTube), Twitter, and LinkedIn.
3. Digital media – different paid, owned, and earned communications channels for reaching and engaging audiences including advertising, email and messaging, search engines, and social networks.
4. Digital data – the insight businesses collect about their audience profiles and their interactions with businesses, which now needs to be protected by law in most countries.
5. Digital technology – the marketing technology or martech stack that businesses use to create interactive experiences from websites and mobile apps to in-store kiosks and email campaigns.

In Digital Marketing Excellence my co-author, PR Smith and I note that digital marketing can be used to support these aims as follows:

• Identifying – the internet can be used for marketing research to find out customers’ needs and wants
• Anticipating – the Internet provides an additional channel by which customers can access information and make purchases – evaluating this demand is key to governing resource allocation.
• Satisfying – a key success factor in achieving customer satisfaction through the appropriate channel, which raises issues such as: is the site easy to use, does it perform adequately, what is the standard of associated customer service and how are physical products dispatched?

So for us, the scope of the term should include activities across the customer lifecycle:

• Digital media and communications channels.
• Digital and mobile experiences such as web design and mobile apps.
• Prospect and customer relationship management through marketing automation.
• Digital strategy and integrating multichannel communications and experiences.
• Digital technologies and platforms to manage all digital activities.

Digital Marketing VS Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is a subset of digital marketing and is not the same thing.

Internet marketing or online marketing refers to the methods you can use to run campaigns on the Internet.

As shown in the diagram above, the main components of Internet marketing are: Search Engine Marketing (which includes SEO and PPC), Social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing. Mobile marketing and video marketing.

Digital marketing is over and above online / Internet marketing as it includes other digital channels as well.

Digital marketing VS Social media marketing

When you have an active presence in social media, you are essentially running social media marketing campaigns and not digital marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing is just one of the components of digital marketing. To fully experience the benefits of digital marketing, you need to add more digital channels to your plan.

B2B versus B2C digital marketing

• B2B clients tend to have longer decision-making processes, and thus longer sales funnels. 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, which is what skilled B2B digital marketers present. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally-based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.
• B2B decisions tend to need more than 1 person’s input. The marketing materials that best drive these decisions tend to be shareable and downloadable. B2C customers, on the other hand, favor one-on-one connections with a brand.

Digital marketing creates growth

Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact 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’ll be able to realize your company’s growth potential.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is the marketing of the future. In addition to all of the benefits we’ve discussed throughout this article, you can track the results of your digital marketing efforts with incredible accuracy, which means it is easy to see which strategies are producing profitable results and which ones need some work.