The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing includes all marketing activities that use electronic devices and the internet. Companies use digital channels such as search engines, media, email and other websites to communicate with existing and potential customers.

While traditional marketing can take the form of print advertising, telephone communication and physical marketing, digital marketing can be done both electronically and online. This means that brands have more options to reach their customers, e.g., via email, video, media and search engines.

At this stage, digital marketing is essential to get your business and brand known. More brands seem to have a website. If not, they at least have a social media or digital marketing policy. Consumers expect and rely on digital content and digital marketing to get to know a brand.

This means that as a business owner, you need to adopt some aspects of digital marketing to stay ahead of your competitors.

Since digital marketing involves many options and strategies, you can be creative and experiment with different marketing strategies on a limited budget. Unlike traditional advertising content such as billboards or print ads, digital marketing also allows you to use tools such as dashboards to track the success and ROI of your campaigns.

How does a company define digital marketing?

Digital marketing is defined as the use of multiple tactics and digital channels to connect with customers online, which is where they spend the most time. From websites to digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures and other corporate brand assets, there are many different tactics that fall under digital marketing.

The best digital marketers clearly understand how each digital marketing campaign supports their overall objectives. Depending on the objectives of the marketing strategy, marketers can use both free and paid channels to support a wider range of campaigns.

For example, a content marketer could create a series of blog posts to generate links to a company’s recently created e-book. The company’s media marketer can then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic submissions to the company’s media.

Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send more information about the company to people who download the e-book. We’ll talk about these digital marketers later.

Types of digital marketing

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Content Marketing
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Pay Per Click (PPC)
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Native Advertising
  • Marketing Automation
  • Email Marketing
  • Online PR
  • Inbound Marketing.
  • Sponsored Content

Below is a brief overview of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

search engine optimisation

This is the process of optimising your website so that it appears at the top of search results, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The networks that benefit from SEO are websites, blogs and infographics.

There are several ways to use SEO to get qualified traffic to your website. Here are a few:

On-page links: This type of linking focuses on all the content that is “on-page” when you look at the website. By searching for keywords by search volume and intent (or value), you can answer questions from readers and web users on search engine results pages (SERPs) that answer these questions.

Off-page links: This link type focuses on all actions that take place “off-page” when it comes to optimising your page. “What activities that don’t happen on my site can affect my rankings?” You may be asking yourself this question too. The answer is inbound links, also recognized as backlinks. The number of publishers linking to your site and the relative “authority” of those publishers will affect your rankings for the keywords you are interested in. By talking to other publishers, writing posts on these sites (and linking to your site) and getting outside attention, you can get the backlinks you need to move your site up in the relevant SERPs.

This type of SEO focuses on the background of your website and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data and optimising CSS files are all forms of SEO that can increase the loading speed of your website, an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.

Content Marketing

content marketing

This term refers to the creation and promotion of content assets to generate brand awareness, drive traffic, generate leads and attract customers. Channels that may play a part in your content marketing approach include.

Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on your business blog will help you showcase your industry knowledge and generate organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert your website visitors into leads for your sales team.

E-books and white papers: e-books, white papers and other similar length content help to better inform your website visitors. They also allow you to share content about your readers’ contact information, generate leads for your business and move people along the Buyer’s Journey.

Graphics: Sometimes readers want to be shown, not told. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualise the concept you want them to understand.

Social Media Marketing

social media marketing

This process promotes your brand and content through media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic and generate leads for your business. Some of the channels you can use in social media marketing are : Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest.

If you’re new to social platforms, you can use a tool like HubSpot to connect channels like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule content for multiple channels at once and keep control of your platform analytics.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

pay per click

PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying the publisher each time an ad is clicked. One of the most common forms of PPC is Google Ads, where you pay per click for top ads on the Google search engine results page and for placed links. Additional channels where PPC can be used.

Paid ads on Facebook: Here you can pay for videos, posted images or presentations that Facebook publishes in the news of people who match your company’s target audience.

Twitter ad campaigns: Here users can pay for a series of posts or profile badges to be published in the messages of a specific target audience in order to achieve a specific goal for your business. This goal could be to visit a website, increase the number of Twitter followers, engage with a tweet or even download an app.

Affiliate sponsorship: where users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.

Affiliate marketing

This is a form of performance-based advertising where you can earn commissions for promoting other people’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include.

  • Hosting video ads through YouTube’s affiliate programme.
  • Hosting affiliate links to your media account.

Native Advertising

Native ads are content-based ads that are displayed on the platform alongside other unpaid content. BuzzFeed’s sponsored columns are a good illustration, but many people also consider social media ads to be “native” – like Facebook and Instagram ads.

Marketing automation

marketing automation

Marketing automation is software that is used to automate basic marketing processes. For example, many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise have to be done manually.

Email communication: Email automation not only allows you to automate emails to subscribers. It can also help you shrink and, if necessary, expand your contact list so that your newsletters only reach those who want to see them in their inbox.

arketing departments can automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise have to be done manually.

Schedule media posts: If you want to increase your organisation’s social media presence, you will need to post regularly. This makes posting a somewhat undisciplined process. Media scheduling tools push content to media channels, giving you more time to focus on content strategy.

Lead Workflow: You can automate this process by sending certain emails and content when they meet certain criteria, such as when they download and open an eBook.

Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a variety of people, emails, content, websites, phone calls and more. With marketing automation, you can sort through all the things that work for a campaign and then track campaign performance over time based on the progress of all those components.

Email marketing

email marketing

Businesses use email marketing as a way to communicate with their target audience. Emails are often used to promote content, discounts, events and to drive traffic to a company’s website. Types of emails you can send as part of an email marketing campaign include.

  • Blog subscription newsletters.
  • Follow-up emails to website visitors who have downloaded something.
  • Sending welcome emails to customers.
  • Holiday offers to members of customer loyalty programmes.
  • A similar series of alerts or emails.

Online PR

online pr

Online public relations is the practice of communicating your message on the internet through digital publications, blogs and other content-based websites. It is similar to traditional public relations, but in the online world. Some of the channels you can use to maximise your PR efforts include.

Communicating with journalists on social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter is a great way to connect with the press and get the media attention your company deserves.

Get online feedback about your business: If someone criticises your business online, whether the comment is good or bad, your instincts may not allow you to respond. On the other hand, responding to criticism of your business can send a powerful message that humanises your brand and protects your reputation.

Respond to comments on your personal website or blog: Just like responding to comments about your business, responding to people who read your content is the best way to create productive conversations around your industry.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a marketing technique that targets, connects and engages customers at every stage of the Buyer’s Journey. As part of your inbound marketing strategy, you can use any of the digital marketing tactics above to create a customer experience that works with your customers, not against them. Here are some common examples of inbound marketing and traditional marketing.

  • Blogs and pop-ups
  • Video marketing vs. commercial advertising
  • Email contact lists and spam

Sponsored content

Sponsored content is where you, as a brand, pay another business or organisation to create and promote content that is related to your brand or service in some way.

One of the most popular forms of sponsored content is influencer marketing. In this form of sponsored content, brands make sponsorship deals with industry influencers to share posts and videos about them on social media.

Another form of sponsored content can be a blog post or article written to raise awareness about a specific topic, service or brand.

Does digital marketing work for all companies?

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing involves creating buyer personas to identify the needs of your target audience and creating valuable online content. However, this does not mean that all companies should implement their digital marketing strategy in the same way.

B2B digital marketing

If your business is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are likely to focus on creating online applications to communicate with vendors. Therefore, the mission of your marketing strategy should be to attract and convert high-quality sales results through your website and your digital support channels.

In addition to your website, you will also want to focus on company-centric channels, such as LinkedIn, where your target audience spends time online.

B2C digital marketing

If your business is B2C (business to consumer), depending on the price of your product, the goal of your digital marketing will be to get people to your website and convert them into customers without having to talk to a salesperson.

So, instead of concentrating on ‘leads’ in the traditional sense, focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey from the moment someone lands on your website to the moment they buy. This means your product will have a higher content marketing funnel than B2B companies, and you may need to use stronger calls to action (CTAs).

For B2C companies, channels like Pinterest and Instagram are more valuable than business-focused platforms like LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Here you will find a handful of information about digital marketing. As you can see, the internet is not the only place where marketers can succeed in today’s world.

Of course, no one can afford to miss out on the opportunities of the internet, and ultimately, every marketer needs to master online marketing.

Digital marketing offers businesses with extremely flexible opportunities for continuous growth — but it’s up to you to take advantage of them.

However, with some of these offline marketing tactics, you can avoid putting all your eggs in one basket and diversify your lead generation across media, digital marketing, content marketing and more.