Digital marketing

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Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing typically refers to online marketing campaigns that appear on a computer phone tablet or other device. It can take many forms, including online video display ads search engine marketing paid social ads and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to traditional marketing such as magazine ads billboards and direct mail. Oddly television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing.

A digital marketing strategy allows you to leverage different digital channels such as social media pay-per-click search engine optimization and email marketing 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.

What is digital marketing

Digital marketing also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email social media and web-based advertising but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.

Inbound marketing versus digital marketing

Digital marketing and inbound marketing are easily confused and for good reason. Digital marketing uses many of the same tools as inbound marketing—email and online content to name a few. Both exist to capture the attention of prospects through the buyer’s journey and turn them into customers. But the 2 approaches take different views of the relationship between the tool and the goal.

Digital marketing considers how individual tools or digital channels can convert prospects. A brand's digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on 1 platform. For example a company may primarily create content for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns while ignoring other digital marketing avenues.

On the other hand inbound marketing is a holistic concept. It considers the goal first then looks at the available tools to determine which will effectively reach target customers, and then at which stage of the sales funnel that should happen. As an example say you want to boost website traffic to generate more prospects and leads. You can focus on search engine optimization when developing your content marketing strategy resulting in more optimized content including blogs landing pages and more.

The most important thing to remember about digital marketing and inbound marketing is that as a marketing professional you don’t have to choose between the

 2. In fact they work best together. Inbound marketing provides structure and purpose for effective digital marketing to digital marketing efforts making sure that each digital marketing channel works toward a goal.

Why is digital marketing important

Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone.

From social media to text messages there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics in order to communicate with your target audience. Additionally digital marketing has minimal upfront costs making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.

B2B versus B2C digital marketing

Digital marketing strategies work for B2B (business to business) as well as B2C (business to consumer) companies but best practices differ significantly between the 

2. Here's a closer look at how digital marketing is used in B2B and B2C marketing strategies.

B2B clients tend to have longer decision-making processes and thus longer sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for these clients whereas B2C customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages.

B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence which is what skilled B2B digital marketers present. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally-based focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.

B2B decisions tend to need more than 1 person's input. The marketing materials that best drive these decisions tend to be shareable and downloadable. B2C customers on the other hand favor one-on-one connections with a brand.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. A B2C company with a high-ticket product such as a car or computet might offer more informative and serious content. As a result your digital marketing strategy always needs to be geared toward your own customer base whether you're B2B or B2C.

Take a look at your current audience to create well-informed and targeted online marketing campaigns. Doing so ensures your marketing efforts are effective and you can capture the attention of potential customers.

Types of digital marketing

There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. Here are a few key examples of types of digital marketing tactics.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization or SEO is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing in itself. The Balance defines it as the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.

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. Ultimay  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 mwhich 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.

The art and science part of SEO is what’s most important. SEO is a science because it requires you to research and weigh different contributing factors to achieve the highest possible ranking on a serch engine results page (SERP).

Today my the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines 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's no quantifiable rubric or consistent rule for ranking highly on search engines. Google and other search engines change their algorithm almost constantly, so it's impossible to make exact predictions. What you can do is closely monitor your page's performance and make adjustments to your strategy accordingly.

Content marketing

As mentioned, the quality of your content is a key component of an optimized page. As a result SEO is a major factor in content marketing a strategy based on the distribution of relevant and valuable content to a target audience.

As in any marketing strategy the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service it offers value for free in the form of written material

Blog posts

E-books

Newsletters

Video or audio transcripts

Whitepapers

Infographics

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 marketing channels you only pay for the ads individuals interact with. How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated.

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.

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.