What is marketing?
Before understanding what digital marketing is, it’s essential to understand the goals of marketing itself. What is its function, and what is it for?
Marketing actions are used to promote, sell, or distribute products or services of a company. It will also increase their visibility with a target audience.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to advertising through digital technologies on the Internet. Google searches, social networks, mobile apps, web applications, e-mails, and websites are persuasive digital channels. These channels help to connect your business with your prospective customers.
Importance to digital marketing
Today, the internet is hugely accessible to everyone. You may surprise to know how many people use the internet every day. In adults, internet usage has increased by 5% in the last three years. Users are spending double the time as compared to the time spent ten years ago. Consumption patterns have changed, and offline marketing has become less effective.
Marketing businesses means getting in touch with the target audience in the right place at the right time. Today, entrepreneurs can meet consumers on the Internet because they spend most of their time here. This facilitates business owners to beat their competitors in rankings on a low budget. It is a global marketplace that will enable you to reach more customers for less money.
Why implement a digital marketing strategy?
Inbound marketing is a compelling way to attract potential visitors, convert leads, and close sales. It also builds customer loyalty online. An experienced inbound marketer entices to say that inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually equivalent. However, some subtleties need to classify.
What is the definition of digital marketing?
Whether you need a website for your organization or looking for complete branding solutions, it includes a full range of content and strategies.
Digital marketing experts always know the best strategies to improve your website rankings. Listed below are some of the standard content and strategies digital marketing experts use:
- Attributes
- Website
- Blog articles
- E-books
- Infographic
- Interactive tools
- Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
- Free online presence (social networks, comments)
- Web Brochures
- Brand elements (logos, fonts, etc.)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It is about optimizing a website to get the best possible ranking in the results of search engines. Moreover, it attracts more natural organic traffic.
Content Marketing
It is also about promoting different forms of content to increase brand awareness. It is also a great way to enhance traffic.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a full-funnel approach that aims to attract visitors, convert leads, and close sales. It builds customer trustworthiness with online content.
Marketing on social networks
Promoting content on social networks improves the awareness, attracts traffic, and generates leads.
Cost per Click (CPC)
This is an advertising method designed to attract traffic to a website. The broadcaster will pay each time a user clicks on an advertisement. Google AdWords is one of the most common forms of CPC.
Affiliate Marketing
It is a performance-based advertising method. You’ll receive a commission in affiliate marketing by promoting third-party products or services on a website. Consequently, you can earn a profit from each sale.
Native advertising
These are content-based ads published on a third-party platform alongside non-paying content. Sponsored Articles are an example. Moreover, many marketers believe that advertising on social networks like Facebook and Instagram is native advertising.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation refers to software solutions designed to automate marketing campaigns. It is often wise to plan, manage, and coordinate repetitive tasks. Thus automate e-mails, social media postings, and web actions to generate leads and convert leads into customers.
E-mail marketing
Businesses use e-mail marketing to interact with their audiences. E-mail is used to promote content, special offers, and events. It also helps to redirect people to the company’s website.
Online Public Relations
Online PR is about developing a free presence through web publications, blogs, and other content-based sites. They are like classic public relations, transposed into the digital world.
Examples of digital marketing
Through various strategies of digital marketing, you can optimize your web presence. It allows you to enhance your leads and maximize revenue for your business. So, update yourself with new trends in digital marketing to boost your company.
Your website design should also be attractive and innovative. Aesthetically-pleasing design helps entrepreneurs to engage visitors and drive conversions for their businesses.
Here are a few examples of digital marketing that you may experience in your daily life.
Today’s consumers can download apps on their smartphones and interact with sellers. For example, K & Ns, Bundu Khan, and Pizza Hut created an app. It allows customers to place their orders while sitting in their homes.
Their smartphone will then determine where the nearest restaurant or bakery is.
Even you can book your ride from anywhere through mobile apps. For instance, Uber and Careem apps make it easier to book reservations.
In e-mail marketing, the company can quickly summarize information for each user. For example, how many times has a song been listened to? What were your favorite artists or genres of music? It also allows the brand to highlight site content and share exclusive offers.
Traditional Strategies VS (inbound) Digital Marketing
The term digital marketing does not distinguish between inbound and traditional (outbound) strategies.
Outbound or traditional tactics aim to spread a marketing message to the widest possible audience.
The inbound tactics attract target customers to a website by offering online content design.
At first glance, these two marketing types seem similar: both are deployed primarily online and focus on creating digital content for consumers. However, the difference is subtle.
The term digital marketing does not distinguish between inbound strategies and traditional strategies (outbound); it encompasses both methods.
Outbound tactics aim to spread a marketing message to the viewers, despite its relevance and the response set aside for it. For example, many websites display garish advertising banners at the top. It tries to convince the visitor to buy a product or take advantage of a promotion.
Inbound tactics, on the contrary, consist of attracting target customers to a website by offering them online content designed to be useful. Hence, inbound marketing is a powerful tool that assists a company in leveraging its target client’s requirements.
Is digital marketing effective for all B2B or B2C businesses?
Digital marketing can be useful for all businesses in all sectors. Whatever your business, digital marketing invites you to define buyer personas. It also helps you to identify the needs of your target audience and to create high-quality online content. Digital marketing strategies are not alike because they must meet the specificities of each company.
B2B Sector
The online marketing strategy of a B2B company tends to focus on generating leads to be put in touch with a seller. It attracts and converts the most qualified leads using a website and other digital channels to pass the baton to the sales team.
Beyond the website, developing marketing activities on more professional channels is interesting. That should be frequent by the target clientele, such as LinkedIn.
B2C sector
B2C companies’ online marketing strategy generally aims to attract Internet users to a website. It converts the users into customers without going through a commercial (depending on the positioning of the offer).
For this reason, companies focus less on their prospects. While significantly concentrating on the creation of an accelerated shopping journey. B2C companies often have to promote their product higher in the marketing funnel and use more powerful call-to-action (CTA).
Channels like Instagram and Pinterest are generally better suited to the needs of B2C companies rather than professional-oriented platforms like LinkedIn.
The advantages of digital marketing
Unlike offline marketing, digital marketing delivers accurate performance results in real-time.
Have you ever seen a print advertisement in a newspaper? You may know it is difficult to determine how many readers have seen the page and how many have paid attention to the ad. It is almost impossible to know whether the advertisement has generated sales.
On the contrary, digital marketing measures the ROI of each part of your strategy.
Here are some examples:
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Website Traffic
Many web analytics software like Google Analytics, Clicky, Mint, and much more exist. These tools help you to see how many users have seen your site’s homepage. Web analytics reveal, among other things, the number of pages viewed by each visitor, the device used, and the origin of the visit.
This data makes it possible to prioritize allocating resources to the different marketing channels according to the generated traffic. For example, if organic search represents only 10% of the traffic, it will be necessary to improve this percentage by refining the SEO strategy.
With offline marketing, it is difficult to determine how consumers interact with a brand before interacting with a salesperson or purchasing. Digital marketing allows us to identify people’s behavior trends and patterns before the last stage of the purchasing journey. It facilitates decision-making on tactics to deploy at the top of the funnel to attract customers to your website.
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Content performance and lead generation
Suppose you’ve created a brochure listing your offer and distributed it to people through letterboxes. It is a form of offline content. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know how many recipients have opened your brochure or how many have thrown it without opening it.
Now imagine that you make this same brochure on your website. In this case, you will know exactly how many visitors have posted on the page on which it is hosted. You can also collect the details of those who download it using a form.
This way, you will not only know how many visitors interact with your content but will also generate qualified leads each time you download.
- Attribution model
A robust digital marketing strategy can trace each sale to the customer’s first contact with the company.
It is thus possible to build an attribution model. The purpose of it is to reveal trends in how users discover and buy your products. You can efficiently allocate marketing resources to mitigate any weaknesses and optimize the various stages of the purchase journey.
It is vital to link marketing and sales. Firms with tightly aligned sales and marketing generally experience annual growth of 20%. Optimizing the purchasing path with the help of digital technologies thus tends to positively affect the company’s profits.
Your business must offer the same user experience on mobile and computers. For the convenience of mobile users, a responsive design website is a must. Reduce the length of Lead generation forms to allow visitors to download mobile content easily. Keep mobile users in mind while creating social media images, which means text can be truncated
There are many ways to optimize your digital marketing content for mobile. However, the quality of the experience must be a top priority in any digital marketing strategy.
If you apply these best practices to create online experiences tailored to your audience, the results will be more rewarding.
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