Digital marketing is a broad term that describes many marketing activities, including social media advertising, email marketing, mobile marketing, display advertising, and search engine optimization. While each form of digital marketing has its benefits and drawbacks, there are some commonalities across most forms of digital marketing. Here we’ll explore digital marketing, how it works, and why you might want to consider implementing it into your marketing strategy.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Before diving deeper into digital marketing specifics, let’s start with a simple definition. If you’re looking for a quick explanation, here’s one: “digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via electronic devices.” In simpler terms, digital marketing encompasses everything from traditional print advertisements to eCommerce sites like Amazon.com.
Digital marketing encompasses many activities, including email campaigns, social media advertising, mobile app development, web design, and more. These activities are often used together to help promote brands across multiple platforms.
There are many distinct types of digital marketing, such as paid, owned, earned, and shared. Paid refers to ads you pay for, like Facebook Ads. Held is what you create yourself, such as blogs, videos, articles, etc. Earned is when you build awareness about your brand or product through freeways, such as events, contests, giveaways, etc.
There are three main categories of digital marketing:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This includes keyword research, link building, site speed improvements, etc.
2. Social Media Advertising: These ads take advantage of the fact that people spend much time reading status updates, watching videos, and engaging with photos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, YouTube, and other platforms.
3. Email Marketing: You’ve heard about email marketing because it’s been around since the early days of the internet. But did you know that email marketing is still one of the best ways to market your brand? With over two billion emails sent daily, email marketing continues to grow in popularity.
Types of Digital Marketing
Big brands are moving towards digital marketing methods such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat Discover, YouTube videos, Twitter Moments, and Pinterest Pins. These platforms allow brands to connect directly with consumers and sell products and services without paying for TV commercials.
As people spend less time behind the steering wheel, companies are moving toward digital platforms like mobile apps, social media, email newsletters, and web pages. Digital marketing allows businesses to reach customers where they spend most of their time — on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
In the future, digital marketing is expected to become the primary method of earning revenue for businesses. By 2022, digital ad spending will be predicted to surpass $100 billion annually worldwide, and this number is expected to grow to $137 billion by 2025. Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important because it offers businesses ways to communicate with customers that don’t require them to shell out money for expensive television advertisements. Instead, they can use digital marketing strategies to promote their brand and product while reaching potential clients where they already spend their time.
The biggest challenge facing marketers today is figuring out how to target audiences across multiple channels effectively. They must know what type of messages work best on each channel, whether that’s a phone call, a text message, or a tweet.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization has three main parts: OnePage, Off-Page, and Technical. OnePage SEO includes optimizing your website’s title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page content, and Off-Page SEO includes building backlinks to your website from other high-quality websites. Technical SEO includes optimizing your website’s structure and code so that search engines can easily crawl and index your website’s content. All three parts are essential for ranking high on search engine results pages.
OnePage SEO
Title tags should be between 60 and 80 characters long and include relevant keywords. You may also want to consider using H1 and H2 tags.
Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide additional information about a web page’s title tag (H1). An excellent meta description makes a page more likely to appear in search results. You’ll need to do keyword research to optimize your meta description. Write several different versions of the same meta description and test which version gets the best click-through rate. It’s also helpful to add an image, but make sure not to put too much text next to the idea, which could look spammy.
On-Page Content: The body copy on your homepage should be optimized for both users and search engines. Include keywords in the first paragraph and any special deals or promotions. Make sure to keep the length under 2,000 words.
Off-Page SEO
Backlinks: Backlinks are links pointing to your site from another site. Google considers links as votes for your site. Get as many votes as possible. Every link helps! You can get links from forums, blogs, directories, articles, press releases, and even paid services such as Article Spinners. But beware of buying links. There are often flagged by Google and can get your account banned. If you buy links, try to find sites with similar content to yours and leave comments on those sites’ blog posts.
Pay-per-click Marketing
Pay-per-click advertising allows businesses to spend up to $100 daily on advertising without worrying about whether their audience will see it. Most pay-per-click ads are never seen because people don’t click on them. But there are ways around that problem. You can use keywords to target specific types of visitors to your site. And you can include calls-to-action in your ad copy to ensure that anyone who sees it knows exactly what to do next. However, not every business will succeed in using these techniques, and some may require extensive training and experience before they can implement effective digital marketing campaigns.
Keyword Research
Keywords are words that describe your products or services, and they’re used to help people find your business online. Your goal is to choose the best keywords that accurately reflect your business. For instance, if you’re selling shoes, you’d start with “shoes,” “cheap shoes,” and similar terms. You’ll also want to look for long tail keywords like “best shoe store near me.” This way, you’ll attract customers by searching for those exact phrases.
Ad Copy Writing
Ad copy is the text that appears above or beside your ads. It includes information such as the price of your goods or services, how many items you offer, exclusive offers, and contact info. You should write a clear, concise ad copy that tells readers why they should click on your link.
Optimization Tools can help you optimize your PPC campaigns, and one of the most popular is SEMrush.com. With this free tool, you can check hundreds of metrics related to your campaign. You can find everything you need to know, from traffic sources to competition data, in one place. You can even compare your performance against competitors’ campaigns.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an effective method of generating revenue for your online presence. You don’t necessarily have to sell anything to make money — it just depends on how much traffic you generate. If you’re looking to start making money off your blog, here are some tips to help you do so effectively.
Native Advertising
It is a term used to describe ads placed within articles rather than displayed alongside them. The goal is to make readers feel like they’re reading something authentic without having to look too closely. Consumers prefer seeing advertisements inside articles because they believe they’re getting a better deal — they know the ad and get what they came for.
Advertisers are increasingly buying space in news publications to reach audiences directly. But there’s still a stigma around placing ads in print content. So, companies are trying to disguise these ads as “native.” For example, you might see an article about a new restaurant opening next to a banner promoting the same thing. Or you could find out about a product launch while scrolling down a list of recipes.
In 2016, Facebook announced that it had begun testing native advertising on mobile devices. And now, Twitter is following suit. This week, the social network launched a feature called Promoted Tweets. Twitter promotes these tweets, appearing in the stream just like regular posts. But they also contain a small banner that says, “Promoted by @Twitter,” followed by the advertiser’s name. The idea behind Promoted Tweets is to give brands another opportunity to connect with customers outside the typical display advertising model. If someone sees a tweet from a brand, they’ll assume it’s coming from the account itself and therefore trust it more. Plus, it gives brands another channel to advertise to potential customers.
But there’s no guarantee that Promoted Tweets will work well, and you never know how many people will see a particular tweet and whether those people will even care enough to click on it. Still, we think it’s worth trying and one step closer to eliminating the stigma around advertising.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is like affiliate marketing, except for paying people to promote your brand. You might think of influencer marketing as celebrity endorsements because some famous brands use influencers to endorse products. But there are many ways to leverage influencer marketing, including partnerships with well-known social media personalities.
Several influencers include celebrities, bloggers/journalists, vloggers, YouTubers, and others. Each type of influencer has unique qualities that make them appeal to marketers. For example, celebrities are well-known, have large followings, and can influence trends. Bloggers are often passionate about topics and have loyal audiences. Journalists typically have access to complete information and may be willing to write positive reviews. Vloggers are usually young people who enjoy sharing videos online. And YouTubers are active on the site, uploading lots of videos.
You can partner with influencers in separate ways. Some companies pay influencers directly to post sponsored messages on their social accounts. Others work with influencers indirectly by hiring PR firms to help find influencers or with third-party platforms such as Hootsuite. These platforms match influencers with brands based on the criteria of follower size and engagement level. Once you’ve found an influencer, you negotiate terms with them. Most influencers charge anywhere from $1,500-$10,000 per sponsored tweet.
Be cautious about partnering with influencers who don’t align with your company’s values. For example, if you’re promoting a product that contains alcohol or tobacco, you shouldn’t partner with someone whose audience includes teens and tweens. In addition, you want to avoid partnering with influencers who aren’t trustworthy. An excellent way to determine whether an influencer is credible is to check their social media profiles and if they post inappropriate comments or images, which could indicate that the person isn’t reliable.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a tool that helps businesses automate their marketing tasks. It can create and manage marketing campaigns, track customer engagement, and measure marketing performance. Marketing automation can help companies to save time and money and improve their marketing effectiveness.
Here is a list of everyday marketing automation tasks that a marketing automation coordinator can handle:
- Create and manage lead generation campaigns
- Set and track KPIs for campaigns
- Manage and update campaign content
- Create and update landing pages for campaigns
- Set and manage CRM sync schedules
- Set and manage email autoresponders for campaigns
- Developed task-tracking apps to automate follow-up emails
- Set and contain drip email sequences
- Set up A/B testing for campaign pages
- Analyze campaign results and adjust
- Setup webhooks to automate follow-up actions such as automatically sending new leads to sales or closing leads.
Set up integrated analytics dashboards. A marketing automation solution allows users to schedule automatic email messages through various email providers, including Gmail and other Google-powered email services, such as Google Apps for Work or Salesforce.
Marketing automation via email has been around for a long time. Still, several significant changes over the last few years have significantly increased the power of automated email marketing and made it even more effective.
Mobile Marketing
“Mobile marketing” refers to advertising campaigns targeting people via smartphones and tablets, including everything from banner ads to push notifications to apps. As people spend increased time on their mobile devices, mobile marketing is becoming hugely important for businesses of all sizes. Business Insider predicts mobile advertising spending will surpass $11.1 billion in 2022.
While traditional marketing techniques such as billboards and print ads are still viable, reaching people on their mobile devices offers a unique opportunity to connect with potential customers when they’re most likely to make a purchase. According to Forbes, 59% of U.S. Small business owners aren’t satisfied with their marketing strategy, and being present on mobile is an essential part of any forward-thinking marketing plan.
Because mobile marketing is such a vast niche, you could build a large and lucrative business by serving the needs of small and medium-sized companies that want to market smartphones and tablets. While many big brands like Ford have embraced mobile marketing, there is still a gap between the companies that know how to do mobile marketing.
SMS Messaging
Text messaging is one of the most popular ways to communicate today. In fact, according to Pew Research Center, 90% of American adults own cell phones. And while many people are familiar with texting via mobile devices, many businesses and organizations still aren’t utilizing SMS marketing.
But why is it important to use text messages to market your brand? Here are three reasons why you should consider sending out texts to your customers and prospects:
1. Reach Everyone Everywhere
When you send out text messages, you’re reaching everyone everywhere. This includes those who don’t even have a smartphone. You’ll find that some people are hesitant about giving up their phone numbers because they think they won’t receive calls anymore. But the truth is, you can still reach them via text, and they might not see your call display on their phone.
2. Get More Opinions
One of the best things about text messaging is asking questions and gathering feedback without speaking directly to someone. Doing this lets you learn what people like and dislike about your product or service and discover how well your advertising campaigns perform.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is an effective tool for increasing brand awareness and driving sales. It’s one of the most powerful digital marketing tools around. But video marketing isn’t about posting videos on social media sites. There are many ways you can use video marketing to promote your products and services online. Here are some tips to help you make the most of video marketing.
1. Create Videos That Tell A Story
The best video to market your product or service is one that tells a story. People want to know what happens next, and they want to see how things turn out. Therefore, movies work so well. Your job is to tell a story that keeps people interested enough to keep watching.
2. Use Visuals to Impress and Engage
People love visuals. So don’t underestimate the power of images. You could post a picture of your product or service and text describing it. Or you could take a more creative approach and show a short video that illustrates your product’s work. Ensure to include visual elements such as arrows, labels, buttons, and icons. These small touches will make your video look professional and polished.
3. Include Calls to Action
You’ve heard the term “call to action.” It refers to words or phrases that prompt someone to do something. For example, if I wanted to buy a book, I might say, “Buy my book now!” If you’re trying to sell a product or service, there’s no better call to action than “buy now.” What does that mean? It means that you want visitors to act immediately. Don’t waste time talking about your product or service. Instead, give visitors a reason to work now.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is an effective way of connecting with people and creating brand awareness. A social media strategy should involve building relationships with your audience via social channels. You can use social networks to generate leads, including influencer marketing, paid advertising, and content creation.
You can also use social media marketing to create brand awareness, and this can be done by providing high-quality content for user interaction. The work of social media marketing is divided into four categories: content, engagement, promotion, and measurement.
You can also interact with your audience and get their feedback. A social media firm is required for creating and driving traffic to your websites and for user-generated content. Social media marketing is not about spamming the newsfeeds, and it is not about buying and selling. It is about building brand awareness, listening, and creating exciting content for your audience.
Facebook for Business
Facebook for business (FB4B) is a social media marketing service. FB4B integrates well with Facebook and other social networks to create brand awareness, engagement, and better conversions. Through the FB4B service, you can create powerful content that is optimized for Facebook. Your FB4B marketing materials are shared across your supported channels and published automatically within the Facebook experience.
Many techniques should be used in your social media strategy. It would help if you researched the right way to use Twitter and Facebook. You can also do many exciting things, like using social media tools to create content and drive traffic to your website.
Content Marketing
Many think “content marketing” is about creating great blogs or social media posts. But it’s much bigger than that. Content marketing includes everything, from email to banners. And it’s an effective way to reach new audiences. Your content needs to be relevant to your target market. Here are some tips for making sure you’re doing content marketing correctly.
Use Images
Don’t underestimate the power of images. Research shows that content with images is 42% more likely to be read than content without images. And 42% of your visitors will act after only 4 seconds of an image.
Use Video
Do you have a product you sell or a service you offer? Are you interested in the latest trends in your industry? Then you have something worth sharing with your audience. Video can tell a story and engage your viewers.
Build a Content Calendar
A content calendar organizes your main content themes along with pre-planned supporting content. A good calendar will help keep you on track and ensure your content isn’t missing any elements.
Make sure each piece of content has a specific purpose or goal. Otherwise, your audience may become confused and lose interest. With a purpose in mind, they’ll be more likely to keep reading — and acting on your prompts.
Give Each Piece of Content a Goal
Each piece of content should have a specific purpose, which will help it be more likely to be read and acted upon. Here are some examples of goals for content to help you create more engaging pieces of content.
Use Content as Promotional Tool
You can use content in a variety of ways for your business:
- Provide quality content for your site (whether written or video)
- Promote an event or product
- Introduce a new product or service
- Make a sale
- Build brand awareness
- Segmentation
Start with one niche or group of interests that represent the audience you have in mind. Then, start your marketing plan by creating different content at distinct levels to target these people.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail to deliver advertisements, solicitations, and promotional messages to attract and retain customers.
According to Datacom Group, the total number of email accounts worldwide will reach 4.75 billion in 2021, an increase from 2.76 billion in 2006. The growth rate is also high; it was 12.8% in 2011 and slowed to 3.7% in 2021. The total number of email users worldwide was 3.7 billion in 2011 and 4.15 billion in 2021. Thus, despite the increase in the use of social media networks, email remains important for marketers due to its nature and delivery into people’s inboxes, where they can easily find it.
Marketers have several ways to reach customers via emails, such as sharing newsletter updates, sending event invitations, and promoting products or services. Email marketing can be done manually or with the help of technology software. When done manually, email marketing can be time- and labor-intensive, so most marketers use a combination of both manual and automated efforts.
Why is Email Marketing Important?
It costs nothing to send emails and reach everyone with an address; you don’t need to pay for advertising space. There is no risk of losing customers because once they receive your message, their interest in what you have to say is already established. The best thing about email marketing is that you can customize your message to suit your customer base. You can segment your list, send targeted promotions, and measure results.
How Does Your Business Benefit from Email Marketing?
Empowering Customers
By providing helpful information to your customers, you show them that you care about them and their needs. Giving them valuable tips and tricks makes them feel appreciated and valued, making them more loyal to your company.
Building Relationships
You build relationships and trust by staying connected with current and potential clients. People like to know that someone is thinking about them and watching for their well-being. They feel good when they see that you value them enough to keep track of their preferences.
Boosting Sales
When you give your customers helpful information, they become more interested in buying from you. In email marketing, you can give your customers valuable information regarding your products and services and remind them of upcoming events and unique offers.
Your customers may not remember your name but remember your logo and branding! Make sure you include your logo in all your communications.
Personalization
The most successful email campaigns are those that are personalized. You know what works for your audience and want to send messages that match their interests and needs. To do this, you need to collect information about your recipients. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive anything useful.
Website Marketing
A thorough website will help you reach out to potential customers and increase sales. But it takes much work to ensure your site is well-designed, easy to navigate, and optimized for mobile devices. Here are some tips for getting started.
For example, let’s say your company sells clothing and accessories. You may want to run a campaign encouraging women to buy specific items during the fall. These items include scarves, boots, sweaters, and jackets in distinct colors and styles.
To get started with digital marketing, you must decide which platform will work best for your business model. Once you determine that, you must create a plan for each channel. Your first step should be to build your website because if you don’t have one yet, you won’t be able to attract visitors. Next, you need to choose a domain name for your site. This address appears in the URL bar when someone visits your site. The next thing you need to do is set up an online store. You must add products to your inventory and display them on your homepage so people can browse your offerings. Then, you need to promote your website by using SEO techniques. Finally, you need to monitor your analytics and respond accordingly.
To succeed in digital marketing, you need a good understanding of search engine optimization (SEO). This involves optimizing web pages, so they rank high in search results. Several factors influence whether your page ranks high, and in this post, we will cover these factors and explain why they matter.
Digital Marketing Challenges
The digital landscape is ever-changing, and marketers face unique challenges daily. From consumer expectations to technological advancements, there is no shortage of things to keep up with. In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Accenture, half of the businesses surveyed reported feeling unprepared for what lies ahead. This isn’t surprising given that most companies are still struggling to grasp how to leverage technology effectively across multiple channels fully.
Consumers are inundated with too much information. They’re bombarded with emails, texts, push notifications, ads, social media posts, and more. And while some people welcome this level of connectivity, others feel overwhelmed by it. As a result, consumers are less likely to respond to traditional marketing tactics like email and phone calls. Instead, they’ll opt to use apps, messaging platforms, and chatbots to interact with brands.
Marketers must understand consumers better to develop successful campaigns. To do this, they must know where consumers spend their time online and what motivates them. But even once you’ve identified those areas, you still must figure out how to reach them. For example, Facebook Messenger allows advertisers to target specific groups of users based on location, age, gender, interests, relationship status, education, occupation, and more. With this type of targeting, marketers can ensure that their messages reach the right audience.
Finally, marketers must consider the way consumers behave online. People don’t just browse the web; they engage with it. So, instead of simply sending a single text or email, marketers must consider how consumers are already interacting with the world around them. If consumers are browsing Instagram, they might check out a brand’s profile. Or they could see an ad pop up on Snapchat. By understanding how consumers engage with several types of content, marketers can craft more relevant messages and experiences.
The Bottom Line
In conclusion, digital marketing uses electronic devices to promote products or services through the internet. It encompasses all marketing activities that use electronic devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Digital marketing includes various activities such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and mobile marketing.
Advertising agencies are shifting from conventional advertising tactics like print and broadcast to digital marketing strategies. Consumers spend less time viewing traditional media outlets such as TV and radio and more time browsing the web. Digital marketing allows companies to reach customers where they are most likely to be found, and it can be a great advantage for small businesses with the correct strategy.
