Are You Ready For Digital Marketing? Things You Must Know: A blog about what is digital marketing and why it is important for your business.

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.

Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it's digital marketing.

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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 each individual tool can convert prospects. A brand's digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on 1 platform.

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.

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.

When small businesses get started, their focus is often on how to get the first customers through the door. They may rely on traditional forms of advertising, such as print ads, coupon mailers or even outdoor advertising. Businesses may believe that since they offer a good product or service, it’s just a matter of time until customers find their way to them.

While this strategy may bring in a trickle of business, there is a better and easier way. Small businesses should consider the global marketplace of prospects online and benefit from converging their traditional and digital marketing. No small business, no matter how new, should overlook digital channels as a way to generate leads and convert interest into customers.

Let’s look at the benefits of digital marketing and the ways online platforms can be used to help grow your business.

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Benefits of Online Marketing

The potential customers you can find online is a much larger group than you’ll ever be able to attract only locally. Using digital marketing techniques, you can reach a global audience in a way that’s cost-effective, scalable and measurable.

Some of the key benefits of digital marketing include:

The ability to interact with your prospects and learn exactly what they are looking for
The ability to reach out to anyone and anywhere as there are no geographical boundaries with digital
Target the right audience at the right time - personalization is simpler with digital marketing
Communicate with your prospects at every stage of the buying process
Save money and reach more customers for less
Get to know your audience and drive engagement to create brand loyalty. Get some inspiration from the power of customer loyalty schemes.
Track and monitor responses to your marketing efforts easily and instantly

Getting started on digital marketing for small businesses

With endless opportunities, digital marketing can seem intimidating if you’ve never used it for a business before. There are a variety of platforms and digital marketing terms that may make it seem like a bigger project than it is.

Small businesses can believe they don’t have the time or money to compete online. As a result, many prefer to take things slowly and stick with one or two forms of traditional advertising, assuming that their business will evolve as time passes.

The fact is the marketplace is competitive and while word of mouth and customer recommendations can help drive traffic, customers will struggle to find your business unless you show up in the places they spend time. After all, 4.6 billion people use the internet for many reasons. That’s 60% global internet penetration according to Digital 2021: Global Overview Report.

So delaying building a presence online is not an effective approach. The best way to ensure success is to promote your business on a global scale and use targeting to attract customers that are interested in your service or product.

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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.

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.”

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. Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page include:

Quality of content
Level of user engagement
Mobile-friendliness
Number and quality of inbound links

The strategic use of these factors makes SEO a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.

In SEO, there's no quantifiable rubric or consistent rule for ranking highly. Google changes its 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 accordingly.

Content marketing

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.

Content marketing matters, and there are plenty of stats to prove it:

84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful content experiences
62% of companies that have at least 5,000 employees produce content daily
92% of marketers believe that their company values content as an important asset

As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need to be able to rank highly in search engine results while also engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand. When the content is relevant, it can establish strong relationships throughout the pipeline.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. The most popular platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind.

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 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, 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 goals.

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Pay-per-click marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is posting an ad on a platform and paying every time someone clicks on it.

How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated. 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

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 platform to see how your campaign is doing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing 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.

It works using a revenue sharing model. If you're the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you're the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.

Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants.

Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the other party. You can use a platform designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single-retailer program.

If you're a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program appealing to potential promoters. You'll need to provide those affiliates with the tools that they need to succeed. That includes incentives for great results as well as marketing support and pre-made materials.

Native advertising

Native advertising is 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.

A native ad gets around this bias by offering information or entertainment before it gets to anything promotional, downplaying the "ad" aspect.

It’s important to always label your native ads clearly. Use words like “promoted” or “sponsored.” If those indicators are concealed, readers might end up spending significant time engaging with the content before they realize that it's advertising.

When your consumers know exactly what they're getting, they'll feel better about your content and your brand. Native ads are meant to be less obtrusive than traditional ads, but they’re not meant to be deceptive.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising.

According to statistics:

90% of US consumers find personalization either “very” or “somewhat” appealing
81% of consumers would like the brands they engage with to understand them better
77% of companies believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60% struggle with it

Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:

Collect and analyze consumer information
Design targeted marketing campaigns
Send and post marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences

Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This level of real-time customization means that you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.

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 techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer's needs more effectively.

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