What is Digital Marketing ?
Digital marketing, commonly referred to as online marketing, is the practice of using the internet and other digital media to distribute advertisements in order to connect brands with potential customers.
In a word, digital marketing is any marketing effort that makes use of any of the following online media channels.
- Search Engines
- Websites
- Social Medias
- Mobile Apps
- Text Messaging
- Web-Based Advertising
Today’s consumers conduct a lot of their product research online. According to HubSpot Research, almost 77% of consumers look up a brand online before interacting with it. While 51% of shoppers claim to research products on Google before making a purchase.
How does digital marketing work?
Whether the goal is to entice customers into making a purchase, boost their brand knowledge, or just engage them with your brand, digital marketing uses a variety of strategies to reach customers. A global network of channels make up modern digital marketing, including:
- Social Media
- Content Marketing
- Website Marketing
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- PPC (Pay Per Click ) Advertising
Marketers must dive deep into today’s huge and complex cross-channel world to find engagement marketing strategies in order to realize the full potential of digital marketing.
Based on the data you gather over time, engagement marketing is a strategy for creating meaningful interactions with prospective and repeat clients. By interacting with clients online, you can increase brand recognition, establish yourself as an industry authority, and put your company in the spotlight when a client is prepared to make a purchase.
Why is digital marketing important?
Employing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy paves the way for new consumer engagement strategies while providing marketers with insightful data on target audience behavior.
Digital marketing is still developing. For instance, the growing range of wearable technology available to customers offers new marketing options. According to Forbes, video material will be improved for search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing will get even more tailored. Social media will also become more conversational in the B2B area.
The differences between B2B and B2C marketing.
Almost definitely, you’ve heard of B2B and B2C, but do you know how they differ? Business-to-business (B2B) is different from business-to-consumer (B2C), thus your marketing efforts must be targeted to each group.
Language and messaging.
In B2B marketing, your goal is to communicate with other business units and conduct business with them, but in B2C marketing, your target audience is consumers and clients.
For instance, in B2B marketing, you’re more likely to concentrate on message that informs potential customers, using formal language and industry language so that you may be clear and official. In B2C marketing, the attention may be on luring clients, building brand recognition, and conveying a narrative.
Decision-making.
The way decisions are made is yet another big difference. With B2C, the customer could decide to purchase from you very quickly. Naturally, you must first gain their trust through your use of digital marketing.
However, decisions are frequently made by a single individual, particularly when selling items like clothing or kitchenware in retail. With more expensive purchases, like trips, things can get more complicated. However, the purchasing process is simpler and faster.
A company may need to persuade a number of stakeholders when using B2B marketing; for example, you can be selling building materials to major construction firms directly while competing with other service providers.
In the end, it all comes down to understanding your target audience and adjusting your marketing strategy accordingly.
The benefits of digital marketing.
You may use digital marketing to better understand your audience, gather crucial data about them, and provide analytics that will establish your marketing team’s trustworthiness. Among the advantages of digital marketing are:
- You will get to know your audience.
The ideal technique to get to know and interact with your audience is through digital marketing. You may test promotions and messages and see when people are most likely to visit your website. You may establish relationships with them more quickly and readily if you have a social media plan, which you really ought to have. Build credibility by being aware of your audience, and you’ll be able to stand out from the crowd. - Cost Effective
Digital marketing is less expensive than conventional marketing strategies. Less expenses are incurred. Using one of the many templated systems or spending more for a custom design, you may construct a polished, professional website for a fair price. You can partner with an email newsletter provider for a reasonable cost and build social media accounts for free. Digital marketing is appropriate for even the tiniest firms due to its relative affordability. - You can market to anyone, anywhere.
Your potential audience is enormous with digital marketing. With the same ease as placing an advertisement in your local newspaper, you may communicate with clients who are on the other side of the planet and in different time zones (easier, in fact). You can increase your customer base and develop your company in ways that previously seemed inconceivable. - Digital marketing is adaptable.
You can be quick, adaptable, and nimble in your approach when using digital marketing. Try out various approaches, evaluate the results, and try something new the following month—or week. Don’t wait weeks to see the outcomes of a campaign; have access to real-time data to help guide your business decisions. - You can personalize by channel.
For your marketing to reach clients where they are at that particular moment, cross-channel capabilities from teams with diverse skill sets is required. For instance, the consumers and expectations on each social media site vary, therefore marketing may seem different on each. This covers your post’s tone, images, offers, and timing. - You can measure campaigns and set KPIs.
The efficacy of your marketing can be assessed using a wide range of measures supported by digital marketing. Setting your goals and desired metrics for each channel should come first. You may monitor the number of leads and conversions, website views, and much more, offering you a wealth of useful information to advance your company.
Types of digital marketing.
Customers connect with a vast network of digital touchpoints throughout the course of a typical day thanks to digital marketing. You must comprehend each of these channels in order to use it effectively.
Paid search.
Typically, paid search refers to the sponsored result at the top or side of a search engine results page, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (SERP). These advertisements can be configured to show up when specific search phrases are entered and charge you for each click.
Advantages:- In essence, audiences looking for a specific product or item see your adverts. As a result, these advertisements can be quite successful since they employ information gained from people’s online activities and are used to increase website traffic by showing relevant advertisements to the appropriate people at the right time. These advertisements also use retargeting, which enables marketing automation technologies to create specific, tailored cross-platform advertisements in response to the customer’s behavior.
Disadvantages:- PPC’s drawbacks include labor and cost. Even if you have the freedom to spend how you want, expenses can pile up rapidly. Additionally requiring a significant time commitment, campaigns frequently require monitoring and optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The act of improving your website’s content, technical setup, and reach such that your pages show up at the top of a search engine result page for a certain set of keyword terms is known as SEO.
Advantages:- SEO-generated organic online traffic has a significant impact on search rankings and, consequently, organic site traffic. You may utilize SEO to significantly enhance visibility and start a long-lasting customer relationship by leveraging keywords and phrases. By utilizing well-known keywords and phrases, SEO is the process of raising a website’s position in online search results and, consequently, its organic site traffic. Since exposure is the first step in establishing a long-lasting consumer relationship, strong SEO methods are incredibly important in digital marketing initiatives.
Disadvantages:- It may take time for an SEO strategy to take effect on your website, therefore patience is a must. Your rankings may be impacted by Google algorithm upgrades, which may need you to alter your approach.
Content Marketing.
Effective content marketing works to inform and motivate information-seeking consumers rather than being overtly commercial in nature. When you provide material that is appropriate to your audience, you can become recognized as a thought leader and a reliable source of knowledge.
Advantages:- Content marketing is well worth the extra work, whether it involves writing blog posts, how-to guides, whitepapers, or any other kind of content because it generates three times as many leads than paid search advertising.
Disadvantages:- Finding the resource, coming up with something that differentiates itself from the competition, and keeping the momentum are all difficulties that many firms face.
Social Media Marketing.
Because social media is so broad, your business needs to be present on a number of various platforms. But having a few social media accounts is only one aspect of efficient social media marketing.
Advantages:- You must use your social media platforms wisely and successfully since the more engaged your audience is with your material, the more likely it is that they will share it and even persuade their friends to buy your products.
Disadvantages:- It’s important to change your content across platforms since what works on one, like Twitter, might not work as well on another, like Instagram, which is more visual. Failure to post frequently or posting inanely is a common error made by businesses using social media. Know your audience and what they desire once more.
Email Marketing.
Email continues to be the quickest and most direct method of getting important information to clients after more than 20 years. To avoid being buried in your customers’ inbox, great email marketing must be very engaging, relevant, educational, and entertaining.
Your marketing emails must meet five essential criteria in order to be successful. They have to be:
- Trustworthy
- Relevant
- Conversational
- Coordinated across channels
- Strategic
Timing and timing are crucial; if you repeatedly send customers irrelevant or repetitive messages, they may click the unsubscribe button.
Mobile Marketing.
We keep our mobile gadgets in our pockets, leave them next to our beds, and check them frequently during the day. Two-thirds of customers can recall a specific brand they have seen advertised on mobile in the recent week, which makes mobile marketing extremely significant. However, because to its intimate nature, mobile marketing is also quite complex.
Advantages:- You can reach your clients via SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing, but you should also think about coordinating your marketing efforts across all of your other digital marketing channels.
Disadvantages:- Privacy remains an issue — be careful with how you treat customer data.
Marketing Automation.
The platform that connects everything of your digital marketing is marketing automation. In fact, businesses that automate lead management enjoy an increase in revenue of 10% or more within the first six to nine months. Without it, your campaigns will resemble a puzzle with a critical component missing.
Marketing automation software:
- Streamlines marketing tasks and workflow
- Measures results
- Calculates the ROI of your digital campaigns
You may learn a lot about which campaigns are effective and which ones are not with the use of marketing automation. Additionally, it will offer analytics so you can demonstrate the impact of digital marketing on your business’s bottom line.