What Is Digital Marketing?

If you go back ten or fifteen years, everybody used to know what marketing is about, like banner ads and inventing slogans. However, today’s marketing is a little different than it used to be.

Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts on the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as social media, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and email marketing.

Communicating through those channels allows you to connect with existing customers and individuals interested in your products or services. As a result, you can build a brand, provide a great customer experience, bring in potential customers, and more.

Digital advertising can take place on various platforms and use multiple online channels. Unlike traditional marketing, you can use several of them at once, which wouldn’t cost us much money and workforce. In addition, digital marketing efforts can be improved in many ways, thanks to various tools and software that help automate the processes.

In this type of marketing, more people are working on strategies rather than carrying out day-to-day tasks. Because of this, digital marketing can be focused on specializing in niches such as social media or partner programs. Therefore, many people think of different aspects of digital marketing strategies within one organization. However, they all work to bring these marketing efforts together.

Why is digital marketing important?

Digital marketing is not only important, but it’s impossible to run a business without it. Because of the decreasing popularity of traditional media, banner ads have replaced billboards, Google ads have replaced leaflets, and influencer marketing has replaced TV commercials.

This is a marketing landscape we are navigating because of the digital revolution. But it comes with several advantages to both people and businesses. Here are some of them:

1. More new specialized marketing branches for marketers to discover
2. You can speak directly to the people you know would be interested in your product
3. The audience is easier to reach with more personalized messages
4. There are various means of measurement of campaigns’ effectiveness
5. The campaigns are cheaper and often more effective
6. Most processes can be automated with software
7. A digital marketing strategy is easier to change and adapt
8. You can be closer to your customers and engage them in your brand’s life

These benefits of digital marketing are what make it so powerful and widespread. Many companies rely solely on digital marketing plan. As a result, thousands of businesses have devised solutions to improve these efforts.

Therefore, you can see a rise in B2B (business to business) digital marketing, which is focused on communication with other companies rather than individual clients. This type of marketing also has its own rules, and the messaging you create is completely different. Next, we’ll go through different types of digital marketing.

Types of digital marketing

There are different digital marketing types, but here are the most popular ones:

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing involves attracting, engaging, and delighting your prospects. The company is in control of all these actions and the means to achieve marketing goals. So, for example, instead of hiring an outside advertising agency, you would create a team of people who communicate with prospective customers with the help of marketing automation.

Inbound marketing is a great way to connect with customers interested in your product. It starts with creating helpful and relevant content for your target audience. This content can be in the form of blog posts, white papers, ebooks, social media posts, or even videos. Once this content is created, you can start sharing it with your audience.

To reach more people, businesses use marketing automation. These tools allow you to create personalized messages based on customer data. You can also track how many people view and interact with your content. This helps you gauge the efficacy of your digital marketing efforts and make necessary adjustments.

Social media marketing

This type of marketing takes place on various social media platforms. Social media marketing is the process of creating and sharing content to attract and engage customers. This content can take many forms, such as blog posts, videos, or images, and it is typically shared on channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The content you create for social media should be based on the latest trends to remain relevant and engaging for your audience. Additionally, social media marketing involves building relationships with customers through interactions on these platforms. Therefore, creating and sharing quality content can attract more followers and provide valuable information to those interested in your products or services.

Content marketing

Content is one of the digital marketing channels that takes a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing high-quality and relevant content to attract and retain your target audience to drive profitable customer action. There are different types of content, like blog content, video content, infographics, ebooks, or templates. Creating content is supposed to engage your prospects and establish a line of communication through it.

When creating content, it’s important to think about what you want your audience to do. That’s the purpose of content marketing, after all: to engage prospects and convert them into customers. Therefore, you want to produce content that is so valuable, interesting, and well-written that people will see it and want to learn more about what you have to offer.

Once they’ve been drawn in, it’s important to keep providing them with valuable content on a regular basis. This helps keep them interested in what you have to offer and builds trust between you and your audience. Then, when they’re ready to buy, they’ll be more likely to think about you first.

SEM & SEO

Search Engine Marketing includes all marketing actions happening in search engines. On the other hand, Search Engine Optimization is a set of tactics meant to make specific web pages appear higher in search engines. This tactic is based on attracting organic traffic from Google. In SEO, several ranking factors influence whether the page will rank high, such as domain authority, proper keyword research, and many others. The point of SEO is to rank the highest you can get so that people click on your result in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Pay-per-click

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of the online marketing tactics where you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. It’s one of the most common ways to advertise online because it’s a very effective way to reach your target audience. With PPC, you can control how much you spend on each click and target specific demographics and interests. For example, if you sell running shoes, you can target people who have searched for “running shoes” or “runners.”

Email marketing

Email marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses email as its primary means of communication. It’s one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience because almost everyone has an email account.

Email marketing allows you to send targeted messages to your subscribers based on their interests and past behavior. You can also track how many people open and click on your emails, which allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing where you receive a commission for promoting products or services. It’s a popular way to make money online because there are no upfront costs, and you can earn a commission for every sale. In addition, affiliate marketing is a great way to build relationships with other businesses and generate leads.

In affiliate marketing a business rewards affiliates for each customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms involve someone else introducing customers to a product or service. However, referral marketing typically involves direct personal relationships between a customer and a referred party, whereas affiliate marketing relies on web traffic tracking technologies to determine commission payments.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where you work with online personalities to promote your products or services. An influencer is someone who has a large following on social media or in their industry. This marketing tactic is a great way to reach a large audience and build relationships with potential customers. It’s also a great way to build relationships with other businesses.

Mobile marketing

In this digital strategy, you communicate with your prospects through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Communication often happens through SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more.

Pew Research Center states that 85% of Americans have a smartphone, so investing in mobile marketing now can pay off in the future. An important point of this marketing channel is optimizing content for computer and mobile screens.

How to create a digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing campaigns are more elaborate as they need to bring together various channels and come up with coherent communication toward prospects.

Creating a digital marketing strategy can seem daunting, but it’s not as difficult as it seems. There are a few key things you need to keep in mind when creating your strategy:

1. Know your audience: Knowing who your target audience is essential for any marketing campaign. You need to know their interests and the content type they’re most likely to respond to.

2. Choose the right channels: Not all channels work for every business. You need to choose the channels that will reach your target audience and that you have the capacity to manage.

3. Create coherent content: Your content should be consistent across all channels and relevant to your target audience.

Plan

Failing to plan is planning to fail – this is an important motto in the digital marketing world. As said before, most of the effort goes into planning your moves, as the other tasks are mostly automated.

You need to understand your business and marketing objectives to create a digital marketing strategy. Then you need to consider what means you want to use to achieve these goals and how it responds to your audience’s needs.

This way, you can devise a plan to satisfy these needs and achieve the objectives. Then you plan out specific tasks that have to be completed to complete the vision of your digital marketing strategy.

Measure

You need concrete evidence to back up your methods to know exactly what works and doesn’t. This evidence can be obtained by tracking your marketing metrics. You need to track your website performance to gain more organic traffic from search engines. Ask yourself questions like how many people visit your site? What pages are the most popular? With this understanding, you can later adjust digital marketing tactics to match your goals.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a broad term that encompasses a variety of marketing activities and strategies. It can be difficult to know where to start, but the most important thing is to focus on your goals and objectives. 

There are different types of digital marketing, like content marketing, SEM & SEO, or affiliate marketing. They all work for different types of target audiences, and you need to know your prospects first before you match digital marketing channels of communication with them. 

Digital marketing is a constantly evolving and complex field. However, if you understand your target audience, know the best channels for them, and create relevant content, you can create a successful digital marketing strategy. In addition, measuring your results is essential to understanding what works and adjusting your tactics along the way.