Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a type of marketing that uses electronic devices to promote promotional messages and track the impact those messages have on customers. Digital marketing can take many different forms, including online video, display ads, search engine optimization (SEO), paid social media advertising and social posts. Television is often lumped in with traditional advertising when discussing digital marketing because both are typically seen as methods for reaching consumers through technology.

Many Americans are online on a daily basis, with close to three quarters of them engaging in this activity multiple times per day. Additionally, over 43% of individuals go online more than once each day and 26% check their device regularly but constantly.

As a marketer, it is important to take advantage of the digital world by building and marketing a brand, providing great customer service that also brings in more potential customers. 89% of Americans go online at least daily and 31% are online almost constantly. As a result, it is essential for marketers to have an online advertising presence with strategies that attract more consumers.

By using a digital marketing strategy, you can take advantage of various online channels such as social media, pay-per-click advertising, SEO (search engine optimization), and email marketing to connect with your current customers and attract new ones. As a result, you can build an upstanding brand name while providing excellent customer service - all the while increasing sales potential.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of internet and other digital communications to promote brands to potential customers. This includes email, social media, web-based advertising, as well as text and multimedia messages.

If it's digital communication, then it's digital marketing.

Inbound marketing versus digital

Digital marketing is similar to inbound marketing, as it uses many of the same tools and techniques to capture attention and convert prospects into customers. However, digital marketing typically focuses on building relationships with customers rather than selling them products or services. In contrast, inbound marketing is more focused on selling products or services through email content and other online channels.

Digital marketing typically involves using multiple tools to reach and engage customers. A brand's digital marketing strategy can vary depending on the type of customer, as well as which platforms are used more frequently. For example, a company may produce content for social media sites, email campaigns, and other online channels simultaneously.

  According to the inbound marketing concept, a company's goal is always considered before considering which tools will be most effective at reaching their target market. For example, if a business wants to boost website traffic and generate more leads, they may focus on search engine optimization (SEO) when creating their content marketing strategy. This could include writing blogs, designing landing pages, and promoting content through other channels like social media platforms.

The most important thing to remember when it comes to digital marketing and inbound marketing is that they are two sides of the same coin. They should be used together as synergistic strategies instead of pitted against each other. Inbound marketing provides a framework for effective digital marketing, ensuring that each channel is used to achieve specific goals.

Why is digital marketing important?

 No marketing strategy is perfect, but the increasing prevalence of digital channels makes it especially important to use digital marketing. In April 2022 alone, there were 5 billion internet users who accessed the web via electronic devices.

Digital marketing techniques can be used to communicate with your target audience in a variety of ways, including through social media and text messages. Additionally, digital marketing is an affordable way for small businesses to reach their customers.


B2B versus B2C digital marketing

Digital marketing is effective for both B2B and B2C companies, but there are significant differences between the 2 types of businesses. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how digital marketing is used in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) strategies.

     *B2B clients tend to take longer to make a decision, which results in a longer sales funnel. Relationship-building strategies are more effective with these customers than those who buy products or services on an individual basis.

    *B2B transactions are typically based on rational thought and evidence. Digital marketing for B2C companies is more likely to be founded in emotion, catering to the customer's gratification through pleasurable experiences.

   *When making B2B decisions, it is often necessary for more than one person to be involved. Marketing materials that appeal to a company's marketing goals tend to be shareable and downloadable. In contrast, when dealing with C-level customers, interactions are typically geared around one-on-one connections.

Although there are exceptions to every rule, always remember that your digital marketing strategy should be tailored towards the needs of your own customer base- whether it's for a B2B company or a B2C product.

To create effective and targeted online marketing campaigns, you should take a look at your current audience. Doing so will help you understand who you're trying to reach, which will make your efforts more successful.

Search engine optimization

Rephrase Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that encompasses both the technical and creative aspects of web design. According to The Balance, SEO is essentially "the art and science of making websites attractive to search engines."

The most important aspect of SEO is understanding the scientific principles that must be followed in order to achieve a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is a science because it requires an systematic approach utilizing various research tools in order to achieve desired outcomes.

Rephrase In order to improve the ranking of a web page on search engines, important factors today include:

·         Quality of content

·         Level of user engagement

·         Mobile-friendliness

·         Number and quality of inbound links

 In addition to the elements above, you need to optimize technical SEO, which is all the back-end components of your site. This includes URL structure, loading times, and broken links. Improving your technical SEO can help search engines better navigate and crawl your site.

The strategic use of these factors makes search engine optimization a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.

Ultimately, the goal is to rank on the first page of a search engine’s result page. This ensures that those searching for a specific query related to your brand can easily find your products or services. While there are many search engines, digital marketers often focus on Google since it's a global leader in the search engine market.

In SEO, there is no set blueprint or precedent for ranking high on search engines. Google and other search engines constantly change their algorithms, which makes it virtually impossible to create a plan with exact measurements. What you can do instead is closely monitor your page's performance and make adjustments as necessary based on findings.

 In order to ensure high quality content, SEO is a critical factor in content marketing. This approach relies on the distribution of valuable and relevant content to an audience targetted specifically for it.

The goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately turn into customers. Unlike traditional advertising which uses potential value as bait, content marketing offers valuable information for free in the form of written material.

·         Blog posts

·         E-books

·         Newsletters

·         Video or audio transcripts

·         Whitepapers

·         Infographics

Content marketing matters, and there are plenty of stats to prove it:

·         84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful content experiences

·         62% of companies that have at least 5,000 employees produce content daily

·         92% of marketers believe that their company values content as an important asset

As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need to be able to rank highly in search engine results while also engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand. When the content is relevant, it can establish strong relationships throughout the pipeline.

To create effective content that’s highly relevant and engaging, it’s important to identify your audience. Who are you ultimately trying to reach with your content marketing efforts? Once you have a better grasp of your audience, you can determine the type of content you'll create. You can use many formats of content in your content marketing, including videos, blog posts, printable worksheets, and more.

Regardless of which content you create, it’s a good idea to follow content marketing best practices. This means making content that’s grammatically correct, free of errors, easy to understand, relevant, and interesting. Your content should also funnel readers to the next stage in the pipeline, whether that’s a free consultation with a sales representative or a signup page.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. You can use social media marketing to highlight your brand, products, services, culture, and more. With billions of people spending their time engaging on social media platforms, focusing on social media marketing can be worthwhile.

The most popular digital platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Ultimately, which social media platforms you use for your business depends on your goals and audience. For example, if you want to find new leads for your FinTech startup, targeting your audience on LinkedIn is a good idea since industry professionals are active on the platform. On the other hand, running social media ads on Instagram may be better for your brand if you run a B2C focused on younger consumers.

Because social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way of getting attention. It's the most popular content medium for B2C digital marketers at 96%, and it's gaining ground in the B2B sphere as well. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of B2B content marketers increased their use of social media this year.

 

Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely useful in helping you to understand how well you're reaching your audience. You get to decide which types of interactions mean the most to you, whether that means the number of shares, comments, or total clicks to your website. 

Direct purchase may not even be a goal of your social media marketing strategy. Many brands use social media marketing to start dialogues with audiences rather than encourage them to spend money right away. This is especially common in brands that target older audiences or offer products and services not appropriate for impulse buys. It all depends on your company's social media marketing goals.

To create an effective social media marketing strategy, it’s crucial to follow best practices. Here are a few of the most important social media marketing best practices:

·         Craft high-quality and engaging content

·         Reply to comments and questions in a professional manner

·         Create a social media posting schedule

·         Post at the right time

·         Hire social media managers to support your marketing efforts

·         Know your audience and which social media channels they’re most active on

To learn more about how Mailchimp can help with your social media strategy, check out the comparison of our free social media management tools versus others.

Pay-per-click marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing in which you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your digital ads. So, instead of paying a set amount to constantly run targeted ads on online channels, you only pay for the ads individuals interact with. How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated.

One of the most common types of PPC is search engine advertising, and because Google is the most popular search engine, many businesses use Google Ads for this purpose. When a spot is available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engine fills the spot with what is essentially an instant auction. An algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on a number of factors, including:

• Ad quality
• Keyword relevance
• Landing page quality
• Bid amount

PPC ads are then placed at the top of search engine result pages based on the factors above whenever a person searches for a specific query.

Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers are meant to complete after clicking an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is a newsletter signup or a call made to your home office.

Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them via your chosen digital marketing channels to see how your campaign is doing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing tactic that lets someone make money by promoting another person's business. You could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the same in either case.

It works using a revenue sharing model. If you're the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you're the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.

Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants.

Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the other party. You can use digital channels designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single-retailer program.

If you're a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program appealing to potential promoters. You'll need to provide those affiliates with the tools that they need to succeed. That includes incentives for great results as well as marketing tools and pre-made materials.

Native advertising

Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it’s less blatantly obvious as advertising.

Native advertising was created in reaction to the cynicism of today's consumers toward ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.

A native ad gets around this bias by offering information or entertainment before it gets to anything promotional, downplaying the "ad" aspect.

It’s important to always label your native ads clearly. Use words like “promoted” or “sponsored.” If those indicators are concealed, readers might end up spending significant time engaging with the content before they realize that it's advertising.

When your consumers know exactly what they're getting, they'll feel better about your content and your brand. Native ads are meant to be less obtrusive than traditional ads, but they’re not meant to be deceptive.

Influencer marketing

Like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing relies on working with an influencer–an individual with a large following, such as a celebrity, industry expert, or content creator–in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your products or services to their followers on several social media channels.

Influencer marketing works well for B2B and B2C companies who want to reach new audiences. However, it’s important to partner with reputable influencers since they’re essentially representing your brand. The wrong influencer can tarnish the trust consumers have with your business.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on creating the strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of cumbersome and time-consuming processes.

While marketing automation may seem like a luxury tool your business can do without, it can significantly improve the engagement between you and your audience.

According to statistics:

• 90% of US consumers find personalization either “very” or “somewhat” appealing
• 81% of consumers would like the brands they engage with to understand them better
• 77% of companies believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60% struggle with it

Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:

• Collect and analyze consumer information
• Design targeted marketing campaigns
• Send and post digital marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences

Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This level of real-time customization means that you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.

Mailchimp's marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience via behavior-based automations, transactional emails, date-based automations, and more.

Email marketing 

The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope that your prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following:

• Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
• States clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will get
• An email signature that offers a clear unsubscribe option
• Integrates both transactional and promotional emails

You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.

Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.

It can be even better if you incorporate other digital marketing techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer's needs more effectively.

If you’re considering email marketing, here are a few tips that can help you craft great email marketing campaigns:

• Segment your audience to send relevant campaigns to the right people
• Ensure emails look good on mobile devices
• Create a campaign schedule
• Run A/B tests

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage with your target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be via SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more.

It’s crucial to ensure that all content is optimized for mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans own a smartphone, so your marketing efforts can go a long way when you create content for computer and mobile screens.

The benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers a number of other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing.

A broad geographic reach

When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business's market reach and connect with a larger audience across different digital channels.

 Cost efficiency

Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place.

 With digital marketing, you can create just 1 content piece that draws visitors to your blog as long as it's active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it's easy to change that schedule or the content if you need to do so.

 When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend.

 Quantifiable results

To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?

 There's always the traditional option of asking each customer, “How did you find us?"

 Unfortunately, that doesn't work in all industries. Many companies don't get to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don't always get complete results.

 With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.

 Easier personalization

Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can't. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.

 Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to internet users people who have looked at your products. You know you'll get better results if you target the offer to the person's interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have looked at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.

How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone records would you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn't read the brochure you sent out?

With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.

 More connection with customers

Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.

 Think about your social media strategy. It's great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it's even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.

 Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand's story. That sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.

 Easy and convenient conversions

Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a company while they're doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?

 With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.

How to create a digital marketing strategy

For many small businesses and beginner digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.

 Set SMART goals

Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals is crucial for any marketing strategy. While there are many goals you may want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will propel your strategy forward instead of causing it to remain stagnant.

 Identify your audience

Before starting any marketing campaign, it’s best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want your campaign to reach based on similar attributes, such as age, gender, demographic, or purchasing behavior. Having a good understanding of your target audience can help you determine which digital marketing channels to use and the information to include in your campaigns.

 Create a budget

A budget ensures you’re spending your money effectively towards your goals instead of overspending on digital marketing channels that may not provide the desired results. Consider your SMART goals and the digital channel you’re planning to use to create a budget.

 Select your digital marketing channels

From content marketing to PPC campaigns and more, there are many digital marketing channels you can use to your advantage. Which digital marketing channels you use often depends on your goals, audience, and budget.

Refine your marketing efforts

After your marketing campaign is complete, analyze the data to find out what worked well and where there are areas for improvement. This will help you create better campaigns in the future using digital technologies and software. Mailchimp's digital marketing analytics reports can give you a comprehensive view of all your campaigns in one location.

Digital marketing creates growth

Digital marketing is essential for any business. It allows companies to stay in touch with their customers and personalize the experience based on data. The more a company adopts digital marketing, the greater its growth potential will be.