Remember the time when there used to be a huge ad on the last page of your favorite magazine? Or, the billboard you used to pass by every day? Most of us have been there; we’ve seen traditional marketing in action. However, as digital technology grew, marketing tactics had to evolve. After all, most of your consumers are submerged in their gadgets, whether they are on the road or hanging out at home. There came the concept of digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
In simple terms, digital marketing is the use of different online mediums and strategies to promote a business or organization via digital avenues. The end goal of digital marketing is almost always a successful transaction of goods and/or services.
Some areas of digital marketing include:
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising
- Influencer Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Content Marketing
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Marketers use all types of promotional content to get in front of relevant audiences online. It could be text, video, graphics, or even audio content. The goal of a digital marketing strategy varies depending on the needs of a business. It’s the role of a marketer to devise a digital marketing plan to achieve a business’s marketing goals, cost-effectively.
Why Use Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing helps marketers better understand their prospects and target them more effectively with personalized ads and content. Moreover, marketing tools provide you with actionable marketing data so that you can track your performance and pivot your marketing efforts along the way. This makes digital marketing much more cost-effective in comparison to traditional “old school” marketing. It also provides a level-playing field to businesses of all sizes.
Thinking of starting a new venture but don’t have enough marketing budget? No problem! You can even start promoting your business right now with content marketing. All you’d have to do is start producing great, strategic content on platforms like Facebook, YouTube and the hottest platform recently, Tik Tok. With the right strategy, you can effectively have free advertising to tens of thousands or even millions of people. Many of which, will end up shopping at your business without a dime spent getting them there. Don’t underestimate the power of content marketing!
Here are a few major reasons why you’d want to use digital marketing for your business.
It Helps You Focus Your Resources on The Right People
Digital marketing lets you target the people that are most likely to purchase your product or service. With it, you can get your business in front of the right group of people. This allows you to send personalized marketing messages directly to the people who are not only in the market for your product or service, but minimizing wasted budget and helping you maximize your conversion rate.
It Gives You Control
In traditional marketing, you can’t control who sees your ad, which can drastically increase your ad spend. Think of a TV commercial, a newspaper ad, or a billboard. Businesses pay a handsome amount getting their message across on these avenues, but they’re not even sure if enough of their target audience is seeing it. There’s very few metrics that can be gathered through traditional marketing. Digital marketing on the other hand, gives you full control over who sees your message, when they see it, and how they see it.
It’s More Cost-Effective than Conventional Advertising
As mentioned briefly before, because you are choosing who sees your content and ads, you minimize the risk of wasting money allocating your budget on people who have minimal chances of purchasing from you. Imagine you are a store that sells diapers and other newborn necessities. Do you think you’d save more money paying one bulk price for space on a billboard, not knowing who will see it? Or using the same budget to run digital ads that specifically target new parents and only paying for clicks that drive traffic to your business? The answer should be clear as day.
It Offers a Level-Playing Field
Gone are the days when you had to struggle to compete with big brands with deep pockets to get your ad shown on a billboard or on TV. There is no shortage of digital real estate today. The only thing that matters is how effective your strategies are. Through digital marketing and a good strategy, you get a level-playing field where startups and small businesses can effectively compete with established brands, advertising on the same platforms.
It’s Measurable
In a traditional marketing campaign, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly how many people saw your message and you can forget about trying to measure if they took any action. It used to be a complete shot in the dark, an educated guess at best. Digital marketing lets you measure almost every aspect of your strategy, including:
Web Traffic: With digital analytics tools, you can know exactly how many visitors your website is getting. You can also know which device and channel they are landing on your site from. You can even get as deep as gender, location, what website they came from and more. This helps you prioritize your marketing efforts; for instance, let’s say 85% of your organic search web traffic is made up of middle aged men who use laptops and Google to browse the web. It is possible to cater your marketing campaigns to target that specific group.
Lead Generation: Imagine handing out a brochure to a bunch of people leaving a mall. Can you tell if they actually read your content? Nope! But that same brochure or content turned digital will allow you to tell exactly how many visitors read it. Not only that, but with a good email marketing strategy, you can even collect their information, converting them into qualified leads.
Sales: The most important metric for just about any business. Sales are what fuel your business and your life! Wouldn’t you want to make sure that the sales you’re generating are actually coming from that expensive ad campaigns you have up? Of course! Otherwise, those campaigns are a total waste of money. When advertising on digital space, you will be able to see every impression (view), click, and sale every campaign generates. Allowing you the ability to quickly scrap the campaigns that arn’t producing as much as you’d like in favor for the ones that do.
It Allows For an Adaptable Strategy
Ideally, you want your marketing strategies to work the way you intended in the first place. But, not everything will go according to the plan; It’s common to realize halfway through a strategy that something isn’t working. Digital marketing allows you to make tweaks to your strategy along the way, eliminating the need to start all over again.
It Engages Prospects at Every Stage of Their Buyer’s Journey
It’s important that you connect with your prospects right off the bat and continue engaging with them throughout their buyer’s journey. Digital marketing lets you engage your prospects and push them through the sales funnel until they become your paying customers. It also helps you identify any loopholes in your sales funnel and adapt your strategy to improve results.
Disadvantages of Digital Marketing
Everything comes at a price, right? Because digital marketing offers so many benefits, there is a lot of competition out there. Competing with other marketers and businesses on the digital space can be extremely challenging and not having a good understanding on marketing competition can easily be a businesses downfall.
In addition, criticism has made its place on the internet. Don’t like the food? Just drop a bad review on the restaurants Google page. Bad experience with a service? Let thousands of people know in the comments section of the video marketing it. This adds a bit of complexity when marketing on the digital space, but with a good marketing strategy in place, and a knowledgeable manager/team handling it, the down sides should be minimal. Nevertheless, we have no other option but to evolve and accept modern technology along with its pros and cons.
This is why it is important to hire an expert in the field, whether it be an in-house marketing manager or a full team via an agency to manage and optimize these areas and minimize the obstacles associated with digital marketing.
Types of Digital Marketing
Let’s do a quick overview of the most common types of digital marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Studies have shown that less than 10% of people move past the first page of search results. Meaning 90% of people find what they’re looking for on page one. The vast majority of that 90% are clicking on the first 5 results. What does this mean? It means that if you’re not ranking high on search results, you’re losing big time!
SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages in order to rank them higher in the SERPs (Search engine results pages). The goal, of course, is to increase the amount of traffic to those web pages. SEO is a vast industry and can be divided into three parts.
1. On-Page SEO
This type of SEO includes everything a marketer does to optimize the content present on a web page. It includes:
- Finding popular and “rankable” keywords
- Strategic implantation of keywords
- Producing SEO optimized content
- Keeping the content readable to search engines
- SEO optimizing images
- And, more!
So, on-page SEO, in a nutshell, is working on a website’s on-page content to make it rank higher in search engines.
2. Off-Page SEO
This type of SEO focuses on strategies a marketer implements “off a page”. But, how does a strategy help my rankings when it’s not implemented on my website, you might ask? The answer is “Backlinks”, or inbound links. These are the links on the internet that when clicked point a user to your site. Backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites can help your site rank higher for your target keywords. A backlink is like a vote of confidence from a webmaster that your website is worth sharing. This eventually helps your site’s authority and in turn organic rankings.
3. Technical SEO
This type of SEO is related to how your website’s pages are coded and focuses on all the backend stuff. Technical SEO includes:
- Image compression
- Website speed
- CSS file optimization
- Implementing Structured data
- Your site’s security (SSL certificate)
- Robots.txt file
- And, more
Many of the technical SEO factors contribute to how fast your site can perform tasks. Such as load a page, show an image, play a video, etc.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about producing and promoting strategic content in order to:
- Build brand awareness
- Increase web traffic
- Generate more leads
- Convert customers
Here are some channels you might want to include in your content marketing strategy:
Blogging
Creating helpful blog posts on relevant, in-demand topics helps you position your business as an authority. Blogging is a great way of attracting high-quality leads to your website while at the same time being a fantastic vehicle for strategic keyword implementation, which boosts your SEO.
E-books
Long-form content like e-books can also help you educate your website visitors and push them down your sales funnel. E-books give the business an opportunity to showcase a better level of depth on a certain subject more than a blog typically could.
So how do you benefit from making an e-book? Well, a common tactic marketers and businesses use is asking the customer for their email in exchange for a free digital copy of your e-book. This way, they get a lengthy piece of information in a topic they are interested in and you get another email for your marketing list. Win-Win!
Social Media Content
We are living in a social media world. Everyone is nose deep in their phone scrolling, through an endless ocean of content. This is why many marketers consider social media the best avenue for content marketing. The platform you choose to focus on really depends on what your niche is, and what your marketing goals are since all these platforms have different pros and cons, but the top dogs in the social media space right now are easily Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok.
Ideally, you should be on as many platforms as possible, pumping out as much content as you can. That being said, if you’re not on at least one of these platforms, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Social media content marketing also allows you to really focus on your brand personality with how your content is formulated and how you engage with customers.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
In a PPC ad campaign, every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay a specific amount to the publisher. The most popular PPC ad platforms are Google and Facebook, but many other search engines and social media platforms offer it.
Here is a very simplified take on how a Google PPC ad campaign would work:
- Multiple advertisers bid on a keyword for their ads
- The winner is determined based on ad relevancy, landing page experience, projected click through rate and your max bid, the winning advertiser gets the higher spot on Google’s first page
- For every click, the advertiser pays a pre-determined amount. Based either on your max bid or googles automated bidding
There’s a ton of research and optimizations that can be and should be done to help optimize your PPC ads and increase your chances of ranking higher, at cheaper costs.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you promote others’ products and get a pre-decided commission for every sale or lead.
Here is how an affiliate program would work:
- An affiliate program/network would give you a specialized affiliate link
- As an affiliate, you promote it on suitable platforms
- The product owner gives you a pre-decided commission on every sale incurred through your affiliate link
Email Marketing
Businesses commonly use email marketing to connect with their target audience on a more personal level. This type of digital marketing starts with capturing prospects’ emails using different strategies. One of the most common ways to get someone on your email list is by offering them something in return. Such as an e-book like discussed before. This is called a lead magnet. For instance, you offer a detailed e-book on a topic that your audience would like to learn about in return for their email addresses. You can then use that email address to send relevant marketing messages and offers with the goal of converting them from lead, to customer.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is becoming increasingly more popular with the growth of platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Tik Tok. Businesses will work with popular internet personalities to promote their products or services. Influencers usually have an audience around a specific industry or niche, which a business owner can use. By working with them, you are getting in front of that audience without having to build your own. For example, you own a makeup brand and decide to reach out to a famous youtuber who makes videos on makeup. You offer them a set amount of money to talk about your product in their next video and add a link to your website in the description. The youtuber gets paid and has more content, and the business owner has a new avenue for traffic to their website. Everyone wins! This can also be combined with affiliate marketing if you’re looking for a more long term relationship with that influencer.
Steps To Take When Getting Started in Digital Marketing
Define Your Goals
First, you want to identify your goal with digital marketing; for instance, do you want more traffic to your site? Or, maybe you want to increase your product sales? More email subscribers? Your marketing goal is your first step and the structure of your marketing campaigns will align with what that marketing goal is.
Identify Your Target Audience
One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the ability to target the right audience. But, you can’t do that without identifying that audience.
Establish a Budget
There are a number of digital marketing strategies you can implement with any budget. Even at no budget at all. But whatever your budget is, it will determine what avenues you can and can’t take. Definitely figure out what marketing budget makes sense for you and your business before coming up with a marketing plan or else you may be stuck with a plan you can’t afford.
Mobile-optimize Your Site
The total number of mobile internet users worldwide is around 4.32 billion. Some studies even show that around half of all eCommerce sales are done on mobile. This means no matter what industry you are in, your target audience is accessing the internet and making purchases from their mobile devices. So, optimizing your site and other digital assets for mobile is a must.
Conduct Keyword Research
In order to target the right audience with your content, you need to find the right kind of keywords first. For instance, if you want to rank your site on search engines, you’d need to create great content around in-demand, low-competition keywords.
Track Your Results
No matter what digital marketing strategy you implement, it’s important that you keep track of it. Digital marketing tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Business Manager provide actionable metrics to help you move in the right direction.
Final Thoughts
In a nutshell, digital marketing is a large combination of strategies from promoting a product or service on digital platforms like social media and search engines to making sure your site is fast and mobile optimized. It’s more cost-effective than traditional marketing mainly because you can put your business in front of the right people. it also provides a level-playing field for businesses of all types and sizes. This allows small businesses and startups to compete with big brands effectively.
Just about everything mentioned above can be done for you with highest level of expertise by our incredible team here at Growrilla Digital. Contact us and lets find the right digital marketing strategy to grow your company!
Published on March 1st, 2022 by Jay Spivak