The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing

Today, digital marketing is essential than ever. It is the fastest way to connect with your potential customers and accelerate your business ROI.

With the number of active internet users hitting the 4.66 billion mark, online platforms are now the best place to advertise for building trust and promoting brand awareness.

Anyone who has decided to leverage digital marketing for building image, might have too many questions making rounds in their head, such as:

• What is digital marketing?
• Why is it important?
• How to get started?
• Which marketing strategy is suitable for you?

And so on.

Here, I will answer all the essential questions related to digital marketing to help you understand how it works in today’s market.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is advertising through a different electronic device or the internet such as social media, email, websites, mobile applications, search engines, etc.

Its fundamental purpose is to connect with prospective customers, promote brand image, build preference and boost sales with suitable digital marketing techniques.

Why Is Digital Marketing Essential?

Billions of users rely on different digital means to learn about brands, products, customer reviews, and so on before making a purchasing decision. According to Google marketing insights:

• 48% of consumers place product/service inquiries on search engines
• 33% of them check the product’s website
• 26% of users search using mobile apps

Let’s elaborate on the top four advantages of digital marketing:

Read; What are the Types of Digital Marketing?

1. Targets ONLY the prospects

In traditional marketing, you had limited control over potential buyers. But with digital marketing, you can reach only the targeted audience. It enables you to conduct market research to gather insights such as age, likes, networks, competitors’ products they like, etc. You can sub-group your audience to ensure your products reach audiences more likely to purchase.

2. Beats Competition

With digital marketing, you can leverage social media marketing or search engine, or SEO marketing to create high-quality content to promote your brand to the target audience. It doesn’t matter whether you are a 1M dollar company or a $100bn company; search engine only recognizes quality content with the right keywords, which boosts your brand’s Google ranking.

3. Improves measurability

Digital analytics helps you understand if your marketing campaign got you any sales at all. For instance, it helps you:

• Find the number of website visits, the number of pages they’ve visited, and so on.
• Measure your content performance and track the number of qualified leads from a specific post.
• Identify your target customers’ purchasing trends.

4. Cost-effective

Digital marketing gives you complete control of your marketing campaigns without wasting money on marketing channels that don’t generate leads.

Learn More: Top Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out in the Future

What Are The Types Of Digital Marketing?

There are many categories of digital marketing, all with the same target – to reach target customers and increase sales. Here are the crucial ones:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is optimizing your website to improve your SEO ranking and increase your website traffic organically. On-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO are some of the ways of attracting more traffic.

• Content Marketing

84% of customers expect entertaining and helpful content from brands. Content marketing is about creating high-quality content – be it blogs, articles, or infographics to demonstrate your product’s utility, boost traffic, thereby generating leads and increasing sales.

• Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing involves promoting your brand and product content on different social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. You can start by creating business pages on multiple channels to promote content regularly.

• Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, you make money by promoting a third-party business. Let’s say you are the affiliate, so every time someone purchases from the site you are promoting, you earn a commission.

• Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)

PPC is a method of increasing your website traffic by paying the publisher each time someone clicks on your ad. Google Ads, paid ads on Facebook and Twitter, and sponsored direct messages on LinkedIn are examples of PPC ad campaigns.

• Email Marketing

89% of professionals named email marketing as one of the most effective lead generation techniques. However, if you want your prospects to click on the ad, individualize the content without making it too promotional. That way, they can understand how it can meet their needs.

• Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the software that automates marketing efforts. For instance, keeping track of social media posting schedules, sending newsletters and specific emails to leads, and other campaign-related activities can be quickly done with marketing automation.

Learn More: Top 10 Digital Marketing Platforms

Who Is In Charge Of Digital Marketing?

A digital marketer is a driving force behind brand awareness and lead generation on different marketing channels, including social media, website, SERP, and blogs. S/he evaluates all key performance indicators (KPI) to measure every campaign’s performance on different channels.

Some of the specialists are:

• SEO Manager: S/he uses different digital marketing strategies to boost the business’s Google ranking. SEO managers also ensure that content’s quality is as per Google’s guidelines.

• Content Marketing Specialist: They are digital content creators who work with professionals from various teams to ensure the content aligns with the products and marketing campaigns online.

• Social Media Manager: This person maintains a posting schedule for the brand’s content and works with the content marketing specialist to develop a unique strategy for posting content on different platforms.

• Marketing Automation Coordinator: The role of a marketing automation coordinator is to choose the right software for the team to understand their potential buyers’ behavior, measure business growth, and track the marketing campaign’s performance.

How To Launch A Digital Marketing Program For My Business?

Regardless of the size and your company sales, digital marketing can help you understand your potential buyers and create valuable content accordingly. So, before you begin with digital marketing, make sure you do the following:

• Determine your goals

Your digital marketing strategy will vary based on your campaign goal. For example, if you want to drive more traffic, social media marketing would be ideal for you. In case you want to increase sales, you can work with PPC campaigns.

• Identify target audience

Digital marketing’s most significant benefit is reaching a broader audience. Conduct market research, create polls, and closely read customer reviews on your competitors’ websites to understand their needs and grievances, then create content to appeal to your customers.

• Create quality content with keywords

Always focus on creating engaging and informative content for various channels. Conduct thorough keyword research to optimize your content SEO so people can find you easily through search engines.

• Optimize your mobile app

Research shows that people spend 69% of their time on smartphones in the US to access digital media. It means you have to optimize your website, content, images, and other digital elements for smartphones to ensure a high user experience.

• Keep up with the analytics.

Let’s say you are running a marketing campaign for Facebook and Twitter. But your data shows that your audiences are more interested in your Facebook content than Twitter. The analytics allow you to re-strategize and focus more on generating quality content for Facebook.

Conclusion

Digital marketing should be a part of every business’s marketing strategy. It is one of the best ways to contact existing customers, attract new customers, generate leads, and increase sales. Digital marketing allows a business to provide an exceptional level of customization to its customers. Embrace every possibility of digital marketing to outrank your competitors and take your business to a new height.