Digital Marketing (Online Marketing) is a strategy that leverages the internet and other forms of digital communication to drive brand awareness, build customer relationships, and deliver measurable results.
It is an umbrella term used to describe the various ways companies can succeed in an increasingly digital world. It encompasses several different subcategories and approaches, including email marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), web design and development, social media marketing, video marketing, blogging, influencer marketing, etc. interactive software applications (apps) such as gamification and augmented reality, and more...
Why is digital marketing important?
Digital marketing is an essential part of your marketing strategy. That’s because digital marketing has allowed for an ease in advertising that wasn’t previously possible. With the use of internet, social media, and mobile phones, there are so many ways that businesses can communicate with their target audience. And while some types of digital marketing may have higher upfront costs, it often provides great returns.
Search Engine Optimisation(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.”
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 search engine results page (SERP).
Today, the most important elements to consider when optimising a web page for search engines include:
Content Quality
Level of User Engagement
Mobile-Friendliness
Number & Quality of inbound links
In addition to the elements above, you need to optimise 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 optimisation a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.
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
Is the strategy based on the distribution of relevant and valuable content to a target audience.
The goal of content marketing is always to attract leads, which 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, such as: blog posts, e-books, newsletters, video, whitepapers, infographics .etc. To create effective content that’s highly relevant and engaging, it’s important to identify your target audience.
Social Media Marketing
Is a must for any business with a digital presence. The best social media tools help businesses connect, engage and grow their audience by turning followers into customers.
Social media marketing can also help you expand your customer base, increase brand awareness and drive leads.
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
Pay-Per-Click(PPC)
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.
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. This can be via SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more...
If you’re not yet using mobile marketing, now is the time. Mobile devices are the main method for researching local businesses and products, making a purchase, and sharing information about your brand.
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 Personalisation
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.
Digital Marketing Creates Growth
Digital Marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalisation that digital data can provide.
The more you embrace the possibilities of Digital Marketing, the more you'll be able to realise your company's growth potential.
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