Digital Marketing is the practice of promoting products or services using digital channels and technologies. It involves the use of various digital mediums such as search engines, social media, email, mobile apps, and other online platforms to reach out to a target audience and engage with them. The main goal of digital marketing is to build brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately drive sales.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Digital marketing promotes products and services through channels such as websites, mobile devices, and social media platforms.
- Digital marketers have several tools to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
- One of the biggest challenges digital marketers face is how to set themselves apart in a world that is oversaturated with digital ads and other distractions.
Why is Digital Marketing important?
Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone.
From social media to text messages, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics to communicate with your target audience. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.
B2B versus B2C Digital Marketing
Digital marketing strategies work for B2B (business-to-business) as well as B2C (business-to-consumer) companies, but best practices differ significantly between the 2. Here’s a closer look at how digital marketing is used in B2B and B2C marketing strategies.
- B2B clients tend to have longer decision-making processes and thus longer sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for these clients, whereas B2C customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages.
- B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, which is what skilled B2B digital marketers present. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.
- B2B decisions tend to need more than 1 person’s input. The marketing materials that best drive these decisions tend to be shareable and downloadable. B2C customers, on the other hand, favor one-on-one connections with a brand.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. A B2C company with a high-ticket product, such as a car or computer, might offer more informative and serious content. As a result, your digital marketing strategy always needs to be geared toward your customer base, whether you’re B2B or B2C.
Take a look at your current audience to create well-informed and targeted online marketing campaigns. Doing so ensures your marketing efforts are effective and you can capture the attention of potential customers.
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 of types of digital marketing tactics.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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 on a search engine results page (SERP).
Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines include:
- Quality of content
- Level of user engagement
- Mobile-friendliness
- Number and quality of inbound links
In addition to the elements above, you need to optimize 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 optimization a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.
Ultimately, the goal is to rank on the first page of a search engine’s results 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
Any content creation intended to increase awareness, attract customers, or promote a good or service is referred to as content marketing. Content marketing examples range from blogging and writing informative articles to sharing pictures and videos and using various social media advertising.
Information and value are what differentiate content marketing. While traditional marketing strategies emphasize grabbing attention, content marketing must be rich in informative data and content.
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, such as:
- Blog posts
- E-books
- Newsletters
- Video or audio transcripts
- Whitepapers
- Infographics
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.
To create effective content that’s highly relevant and engaging, it’s important to identify your audience. Who are you ultimately trying to reach with your content marketing efforts? Once you have a better grasp of your audience, you can determine the type of content you’ll create. You can use many formats of content in your content marketing, including videos, blog posts, printable worksheets, and more.
Regardless of which content you create, it’s a good idea to follow content marketing best practices. This means making content that’s grammatically correct, free of errors, easy to understand, relevant, and interesting. Your content should also funnel readers to the next stage in the pipeline, whether that’s a free consultation with a sales representative or a signup page.
Content is the present – and future – of marketing
Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) (also known as digital marketing and e-marketing) is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, social media marketing (SMM) has purpose-built data analytics that allows marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.
The power of social media marketing (SMM) is driven by the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.
Connection: Not only does social media enable businesses to connect with customers in previously impossible ways, but there is also an extraordinary range of avenues to connect with target audiences—from content platforms (like YouTube) and social sites (like Facebook) to microblogging services (like Twitter).
Interaction: The dynamic nature of the interaction on social media—whether direct communication or passive “liking”—enables businesses to leverage free advertising opportunities from eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) recommendations between existing and potential customers. Not only is the positive contagion effect from eWOM a valuable driver of consumer decisions, but the fact that these interactions happen on the social network makes them measurable. For example, businesses can measure their “social equity”—a term for the return on investment (ROI) from their social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.
Customer Data: A well-designed social media marketing (SMM) plan delivers another invaluable resource to boost marketing outcomes: customer data. Rather than being overwhelmed by the 3Vs of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM tools have the capacity not only to extract customer data but also to turn this gold into actionable market analysis—or even to use the data to crowdsource new strategies.
Consider how different demographics may not have equal access to social media. Relying only on digital or online marketing may unintendedly exclude certain groups of people without online access.
1. Define your social media marketing goals
Your first step to finding a path to success is to define where you want the journey to take you.
Social media today can help you reach a variety of objectives including:
- Raising the brand’s reach and awareness.
- Raising engagement with the brand.
- Directing more organic traffic to your website, blog, or e-commerce.
- Generating leads.
- Raising overall sales.
- Building a community around your brand.
- Improving customer service (CS).
- Monitoring the buzz around your brand.
Pick one or some of the goals in this list to start your planning. What you want for your brand is what will direct your decisions from now on.
Also, when those marketing goals are defined, research metrics and KPIs you should be monitoring to be sure you are following the path traced.
If you want more sales, for instance, you should follow numbers on conversion and loyalty rates.
2. Build a buyer persona for social media marketing
The buyer persona is one of the most important Social Media Marketing pillars.
You probably already have a consolidated target audience, right? For example, you know you need to talk to women aged 18 to 35 who live on the West Coast and like athletics.
But have you considered:
- How to engage with them?
- Which channels do they use to be informed and to connect with other people?
- What kind of content do they consume (text, video, audio, etc.)?
- What’s the time of the day they use social media?
- What kind of interests do they have that you can address?
- What are their doubts and difficulties in life?
- How can your product, service, and/or expertise be useful to them?
These are the questions you need to answer to build a semi-fictitious profile of the company’s ideal customer.
All your content will be talking to this character.
Although the target audience concept is important to your marketing decisions, in this context it is superficial and it doesn’t go deep into how humans connect and interact.
On social media, your brand is trying to be perceived in the same manner as a person. So you need this knowledge to understand how to talk and behave like one inside a niche or a specific demographic.
The buyer persona can give you that nuance.
3. Prioritize the networks that fit the brand better
Although it is advised to be present on as many of them as possible, you don’t have to — and usually can’t — divide your attention equally among each network.
Managing so many profiles at once demands time, people, and resources that you probably won’t have.
And even if you did, it is an inefficient approach, as your target audience probably doesn’t use all of the platforms.
In the end, dividing your efforts will result in subpar returns on all of them.
But, it is your job to find the most appropriate social media for your brand — the ones that fit your audience’s profile, your team’s capacity, and your marketing goals.
4. Plan both paid and organic strategies
The majority of social networks started just with organic material. Publishing relevant content was enough to make a profile reach all followers and beyond.
But when these platforms became popular, they started using different algorithms.
Since then, social media has prioritized the posts that it considers more relevant to each person in its feed or timeline.
In this context, it becomes harder for a brand’s posts to shine. As a result, companies that want to raise organic reach now have to invest in marketing.
It is the formula for growing numbers on social media, and the brands that don’t play the game tend to stay behind.
Businesses that want to thrive on social media should reconcile both organic and paid strategies.
Organic content is made frequently and creates daily contact with the brand, keeping followers informed and engaged.
Paid content should be on point and aim at specific segments of the audience to achieve pre-set direct goals.
Combining these two approaches is important because one can support the other.
Organic posts bring consistency and online presence while paid posts focus on acquiring new leads and being seen by new audiences.
5. Create unique and relevant content for your persona
Creating relevant content is the best way to bypass the limits of organic reach.
After all, relevance is what makes something appear on a user’s feed or timeline. The goal of social media is always to quickly and effectively draw attention.
Content production should aim at defined points to increase reach and engagement naturally.
Your content must be original, aligned to the persona, and adequate for what is best suited to each network. It can educate, inform, entertain, and advertise special offers.
Brands can’t and shouldn’t only talk about products and discounts.
One idea is to follow the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule: only 20% of the content should talk about what the brand sells.
The other 80% should approach subjects surrounding your field, answering interactions started by the persona.
But remember that all of that depends on your audience. It is a good idea to make some tests to know how your followers react to each type of post.
6. Create an editorial schedule
An editorial schedule will help you organize and control the brand’s activity on social media.
It brings projections like publishing frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly), as well as the processes of producing, scheduling posts, and generating reports, among other possibilities.
Brands can establish and maintain a pace on social networks.
This is essential for algorithms to consider your profiles active and keep showing your posts to your followers.
An editorial schedule gives you a big picture. During a month, for example, you can plan 16 educational/entertaining posts and 4 promoting posts on Instagram, giving you an 80/20 balance.
7. Follow performance indicators
Brands can’t use social media marketing without constantly checking indicators.
With the right metrics for social networks, you will find ways to continually improve your strategies toward better results.
Remember when we discussed the goals for social media when we cited the importance of getting the right KPIs for your marketing plan?
That alignment between what you measure and what you want to achieve is the best way to do it.
Just try to avoid keeping track of vanity metrics, those numbers that seem impressive at the surface.
The number of likes and followers, for example, doesn’t necessarily translate into real marketing goals.
The most important KPIs are those that directly help your audience find your product and become loyal to your brand.
Pay-per-click marketing
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is 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 several 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.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing tactic that lets someone make money by promoting another person’s business. You could be either the promoter or the business that 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 digital channels 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 tools and pre-made materials.
Native advertising
In digital marketing, native advertising refers to the use of ads that match the aesthetics and function of the app in which marketers place them. Consumers may encounter native advertisements when browsing social media, shopping, reading, or viewing search engine results. Businesses choose these types of ads because they don’t disrupt the user experience, which can lead to more consistent engagement.
Types of native advertising
There are different types of native advertising, each with its advantages. Here are five forms of native advertising:
1. Promoted listings
E-commerce sites frequently use promoted listings.. In this type of advertising, for a fee, sellers can promote their items on a given page. This puts their items at the top of most relevant search feeds or on the front page of the e-commerce site. This helps their items gain more attention.
2. Paid search ads
Paid search ads appear at the top of search engine results. They can appear in both major search engine results and individual domain results. Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, entails businesses only paying for an ad if it earns clicks. It’s a popular choice for native advertisers because of its affordability. However, they may see a deficit if the ad earns more clicks than sales.
3. In-feed ads
For those who want their ad to be more subtle, they may opt for in-feed ads. They appear in a site’s primary feed with a structure that looks like any other post. As users scroll through the page, they encounter ads in a less disruptive manner, making them more likely to engage.
4. In-ad with native elements
This type of ad looks like a generic advertisement and appears in relevant spaces. Advertising platforms decide where exactly the ad goes based on its keywords. For example, if advertisers publish this type of ad for a new film, it may appear next to a movie review on a popular film site.
5. Custom ads
Custom ads earn their name because they don’t fit into any of the above options. They often appear in unique places. For example, while listening to electronic music on a streaming app, a user may see an ad for a local nightclub’s special event. Although these ads are unique in how they display content, they still target relevant audiences.
Influencer marketing
Like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing relies on working with an influencer–an individual with a large following, such as a celebrity, industry expert, or content creator–in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your products or services to their followers on several social media channels.
Influencer marketing works well for B2B and B2C companies who want to reach new audiences. However, it’s important to partner with reputable influencers since they’re essentially representing your brand. The wrong influencer can tarnish the trust consumers have in your business.
Influencers are the people who have a huge following on social media.
These social media influencers can convince and/or influence their followers to buy a given product or service and become loyal customers, hence it’s called Influencer Marketing.
You would often see a top athlete or sportsperson endorsing a health food or a food supplement.
You would also frequently come across supremely fit celebrities giving lessons in Yoga, Zumba, or Pilates; or those with a perfect figure, endorsing a pair of jeans or a dress.
You would also have heard about several top celebrity beauticians, with thousands of YouTube followers.
That’s what is Influencer Marketing, and this phenomenon has seen continued success and huge growth in Influencer Marketing in recent years.
Influencer Marketing has been seen to drive 11 times more ROI than traditional online marketing according to Invespcro.
Social media influencers could be used as brand ambassadors, they may be asked for product reviews or mention the brand in their social media posts.
Three key benefits of using Influencer Marketing campaigns would be –
- you get good and focused content,
- your credibility goes up and,
- your brand gets exposure in the influencer’s and her followers’ entire networks
Marketing automation
Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on creating the strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of cumbersome and time-consuming processes.
While marketing automation may seem like a luxury tool your business can do without, it can significantly improve the engagement between you and your audience.
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-digital 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.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience via behavior-based automation, transactional emails, date-based automation, and more.
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 multi-channel online marketing technique focused on reaching a specific audience on their smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices. The channels used to reach them can include websites, email, SMS, social media, or other mobile applications.
The goal of mobile marketing is to provide consumers with personalized information that promotes goods and services and offers key reminders that enrich the lives of those opted in to receive notifications.
Advertising and modern society have not finished being transformed, as apps have yet to enter the arena until 2005. Jobs opened the first App Store with a humble 500 apps. Since then it has exploded to the 1.8 million number of apps available today on the App Store, the second-largest application store.
App Annie found that people spend nearly 3 hours daily on their phones, with 90% of that time being spent on apps. This shows the overwhelming use of apps, and thus, the need for marketers to advertise there, to reach their audience.
Most mobile marketers did not miss this chance and in-app advertising began and rose to prominence. This proved to be effective for the advertiser, in terms of brand awareness, user acquisition, and other marketing and advertising KPIs. Whilst, the publisher benefited from the added revenue. This method of revenue earning became so common, that it is now one of the main app monetization strategies.
However, AdAge reports that many companies struggle to add mobile marketing and mobile advertising into their advertising and marketing matrix, citing challenges such as “holistic” integration and due to the “another layer of complexity [required]”.
Digital Marketing vs Content Marketing
| Topics | Digital Marketing | Content Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Digital Marketing is the practice of promoting products or services using digital channels and technologies. It involves the use of various digital mediums such as search engines, social media, email, mobile apps, and other online platforms to reach out to a target audience and engage with them. The main goal of digital marketing is to build brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately drive sales. | Any content creation intended to increase awareness, attract customers, or promote a good or service is referred to as content marketing. Content marketing examples range from blogging and writing informative articles to sharing pictures and videos and using various social media advertising. |
| Benifits | Content marketing, including blog posts, social media posts, and articles, is a very affordable choice for brands and marketers looking to enhance engagement. Many content marketing solutions are free or affordable and simple to scale to meet rising demand. | Digital marketing allows brands to be very adaptable. Marketers may identify which of their numerous digital marketing strategies is most effective and make adjustments by understanding how customers respond to and interact with it. |
| Types | Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO is a digital marketing tactic that entails improving a website’s performance in search results. Most businesses use this strategy to help them expand online and generate new leads because 93% of online encounters begin with a search engine. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: These are paid ads that are labeled with the word “ad” and show up at the top of search results. This approach is popular with businesses that want to draw in leads that are prepared to buy. Social media marketing and advertising: While social media advertising entails promoting the company to qualified prospects, social media marketing allows businesses to establish an organic presence on social networking platforms. | Blogs: Blogging is a popular content marketing strategy since, when properly optimized, these postings can perform well in search results. Videos: They make it possible to quickly convey a large amount of information and engage viewers visually. It’s a useful format to utilize when breaking down material to make it more understandable and explain complex processes. Infographics: They are another type of visual, engaging content. Infographics are excellent for showing statistics or outlining a procedure. |
Which is Best for Your Business?
It might not be easy to choose between digital marketing and content marketing strategies depending on the budget and company. Online content performs significantly better than print content and digital marketing that incorporates some informational content often performs better than without. Increase your reputation and credibility while promoting your company to a global audience by posting educational, well-crafted material online. Therefore, make an effort to develop a strategy that combines both methods and optimizes engagement.
The benefits of digital marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers some 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 personalization
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.
More connection with customers
Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.
Think about your social media strategy. It’s great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it’s even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.
Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand’s story. That sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.
Easy and convenient conversions
Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a company while they’re doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?
With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.
How to create a digital marketing strategy
For many small businesses and beginner digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.
Set SMART goals
Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals is crucial for any marketing strategy. While there are many goals you may want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will propel your strategy forward instead of causing it to remain stagnant.
Identify your audience
Before starting any marketing campaign, it’s best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want your campaign to reach based on similar attributes, such as age, gender, demographic, or purchasing behavior. Having a good understanding of your target audience can help you determine which digital marketing channels to use and the information to include in your campaigns.
Create a budget
A budget ensures you’re spending your money effectively towards your goals instead of overspending on digital marketing channels that may not provide the desired results. Consider your SMART goals and the digital channel you’re planning to use to create a budget.
Select your digital marketing channels
From content marketing to PPC campaigns and more, there are many digital marketing channels you can use to your advantage. Which digital marketing channels you use often depends on your goals, audience, and budget.
Refine your marketing efforts
Make sure to analyze your campaign’s data to identify what was done well and areas for improvement once the campaign is over. This allows you to create even better campaigns in the future. With the help of digital technologies and software, you can obtain this data in an easy-to-view dashboard. Mailchimp’s digital marketing analytics reports will help you keep track of all your marketing campaigns in one centralized location.
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 personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you’ll be able to realize your company’s growth potential.
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