What Exactly is Digital Marketing: An Introduction
The digital landscape has changed significantly over the past 12 years, with people spending twice as much online now. Traditional, offline marketing methods are no longer as effective as they once were. The shift leads us to a critical question: What is digital marketing?
The Digital Sphere: Where Your Audience Lives
Digital marketing is essentially about meeting your target audience where they already are: online. With changing shopping behaviors and increased online interactions, there's no doubt that the Internet is the place to connect with consumers.
The Fine Line: Digital Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing
Though often used interchangeably, digital marketing and inbound marketing are different. Based on discussions with marketers and business owners across different continents, including the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, it's clear that subtle variations in digital marketing practices exist globally.
The Broad Scope of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a comprehensive term that includes all online marketing activities. Organizations utilize digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and websites to engage with current and prospective customers.
Common Assets and Tactics in Digital Marketing
Digital marketing incorporates a wide array of tactics and assets. The best digital marketers understand how each piece fits into the giant marketing puzzle. Here's a brief list of some critical digital assets and strategies:
Assets:
- Your Website
- Blog Posts
- Ebooks and Whitepapers
- Infographics
- Interactive Tools
- Social Media Channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
- Earned Online Coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
- Online Brochures and Lookbooks
- Branding Assets (logos, fonts, etc.)
What Exactly Are Digital Marketing Tactics: A Comprehensive Guide
Digital marketing has firmly established itself as a critical part of any business strategy. To navigate this broad landscape effectively, you need to be aware of the various tactics that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. Here's a detailed look at each of them.
Mastering Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, enhances your website to attain higher positions in search engine result pages (SERPs). By optimizing your site, you increase the chances of driving organic, non-paid traffic to your platform. Read this beginner's guide to SEO to get started.
The Power of Content Marketing
Content Marketing involves creating and sharing valuable content to capture the attention of a targeted audience. This tactic aims to build brand recognition, drive traffic, and foster lead generation or conversions. Here's how to formulate an effective content marketing strategy.
Inbound Marketing: A Full-Funnel Approach
Inbound marketing takes a comprehensive approach to attract, engage, convert, and retain customers. By utilizing online content tailored to the needs of your target consumers, inbound marketing enriches customer experience from the first point of contact to the end of the sale and beyond.
Social Media Marketing: More Than Just Posts
Social Media Marketing involves leveraging social platforms to promote your brand and content. This tactic enhances brand visibility, propels traffic, and creates business leads. Here are 41 resources to master social media marketing.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Quick Traffic Generation
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a tactic where you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your advertisement. Google AdWords is one of the most well-known PPC platforms, enabling you to rapidly drive targeted traffic to your site.
Dive into Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-driven tactic where you offer commissions for promoting another company's products or services on your website. It serves as a revenue-sharing strategy that benefits both parties.
Native Advertising: Subtly Effective
Native advertising consists of ads that are seamlessly integrated into a platform's content, making them less obtrusive. Examples include sponsored posts on BuzzFeed or content-like ads on social media like Facebook and Instagram.
Automate with Marketing Automation
Marketing automation platforms are designed to automate repetitive and mundane marketing tasks. Whether sending emails, posting on social media, or tracking user behavior, automation tools can significantly streamline your marketing operations.
The Significance of Email Marketing
Email marketing remains an essential digital marketing tactic. Companies use emails to communicate with their customer base, promoting various content, offers, and events that lead traffic back to their websites. Here are 15 stellar email marketing campaigns to inspire you.
Online PR: Building Digital Relationships
Like its traditional counterpart, online PR aims to garner earned media coverage in digital formats. This includes placements in online publications, blogs, and other content-rich sites.
Understanding the Nuances: What Exactly is the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing?
At first glance, Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing might seem synonymous. Both predominantly happen online and aim to create valuable content for consumers. So, how do they differ?
Digital Marketing: The Broader Framework
Digital Marketing is a broad term that doesn't specifically focus on either push or pull marketing tactics, commonly referred to now as 'outbound' and 'inbound' methods. Both kinds of tactics can be part of a digital marketing strategy.
For instance, digital outbound tactics seek to place a marketing message directly in front of a broad online audience. This is done without considering whether the message is relevant or even welcomed—think of those intrusive banner ads crowding the top of many web pages.
Inbound Digital Marketing: A More Targeted Approach
Conversely, marketers leveraging digital inbound methods create content to attract potential customers to their websites by offering helpful material. A blog is one of the most effective inbound digital marketing tools, which helps your website rank for the terms your target audience is searching for online.
To sum it up, Inbound Marketing is a specific methodology that uses various digital marketing assets—such as content—to attract, engage, convert, and delight customers online. Digital Marketing, on the other hand, is an overarching term encompassing any online marketing tactics, whether inbound or outbound.
Does Digital Marketing Suit Every Business Model? From B2B to B2C
The effectiveness of digital marketing isn't confined to a specific industry or type of business. Regardless of what your business offers, digital marketing involves creating buyer personas to understand your audience's needs better and craft valuable online content accordingly. However, how you implement your digital marketing strategy may vary.
B2B Focus
In a B2B context, digital marketing is usually centered around online lead generation. Ultimately, these leads will eventually engage with a sales representative. Accordingly, your marketing strategy will aim to attract and convert high-quality leads through your website and other digital platforms. For B2B companies, business-centric platforms like LinkedIn are often more suitable.
B2C Focus
On the other hand, if you operate in the B2C domain, your digital marketing will focus more on guiding potential customers through a streamlined buyer's journey—from website visit to purchase—without requiring interaction with a salesperson. As such, you're less likely to focus on 'leads' in the traditional sense and more on using powerful calls-to-action (CTAs) to expedite the buying process. B2C companies often find more value in consumer-focused platforms like Instagram and Pinterest than in business-oriented platforms like LinkedIn.
By understanding the differences and potentials of both digital and inbound marketing, businesses can craft more effective strategies to attract, engage, and convert their target audiences.
What Exactly Are the Key Advantages of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing offers distinct advantages over traditional offline marketing methods. One of the most significant benefits is the real-time ability to gauge your marketing activities, providing actionable insights to refine your strategy.
Real-Time Results
Unlike traditional offline marketing avenues, such as newspaper ads, digital marketing gives you real-time metrics. For instance, using digital analytics platforms like HubSpot, you can instantly see the number of visitors on your website, the pages they visited, the device they used, and their geographical location, among other data.
This granularity lets you focus on channels driving the most traffic. For example, if organic search accounts for only 10% of your site visits, you might want to invest more in SEO strategies to boost that number.
Unlike offline marketing, digital marketing lets you detect customer behavior trends early in their buying journey. This early identification enables you to make data-driven decisions on how best to guide them down the sales funnel.
Content Effectiveness and Lead Cultivation
Consider a scenario where you create a product brochure and distribute it to households—though this is a form of content marketing, it's offline and lacks measurable impact. How many opened it? How many tossed it? With a digital brochure, however, these questions are quickly answered.
When your brochure is online, you can monitor the number of page views it receives. More importantly, you can capture leads by having viewers complete a form to download the brochure. So, not only do you know how your content is performing, but you're also generating qualified leads.
Attribution Modeling
In the realm of digital marketing, attribution modeling is a critical tool. It allows you to trace a sale to the customer's first interaction with your online presence. This capability provides invaluable insights into customer behavior, which parts of your marketing strategy need more focus, and which aspects of your sales process could be refined.
Attribution modeling can go a long way in aligning your marketing and sales efforts. According to the Aberdeen Group, companies with strong alignment between these two departments see a 20% annual growth rate, whereas those with poor alignment could experience a 4% revenue decline.
You're not just optimizing your marketing strategies by leveraging digital technologies to improve the customer journey through the buying process. Still, you're also likely to see a positive impact on your business's bottom line.
What Type of Content Should You Produce?
The content you generate is deeply influenced by the needs of your audience, which vary based on where they are in the buyer's journey. First, it's essential to develop buyer personas using free templates or platforms like makemypersona.com. This will allow you to pinpoint your target audience's objectives and hurdles about your offering. Essentially, your digital content should be designed to assist them in achieving their objectives and navigating their challenges.
Next, you should determine when your audience is most open to engaging with your content and identify their current stage in the buyer's journey. This practice is known as content mapping.
Content Mapping Goals
Content mapping aims to align the content with:
- The specific traits of the individual consuming it (that's where the buyer personas become crucial).
- The proximity of the individual to finalizing a purchase (their lifecycle stage).
We've formulated a helpful guide and easy-to-use template to assist you in content mapping.
Content Formats for Various Buyer's Journey Stages
Depending on the stage your audience is at, various types of content formats can be effective:
Awareness Stage
- Blog Posts: Excellent for boosting organic traffic when optimized with a robust SEO and keyword plan.
- Infographics: Highly shareable infographics elevate your chance of discovery via social media sharing. (Utilize these free infographic templates to begin.)
- Short Videos: These are also highly shareable and can extend your brand reach by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.
Consideration Stage
- Ebooks are ideal for lead generation because they offer more in-depth information than a blog post or infographic. As a result, people are more willing to provide their contact details in exchange for an eBook. (Here's a guide to get you started.)
- Research Reports: A high-value content asset beneficial for lead generation. These can also serve in the awareness stage if they contain new industry data, as media and industry journals may cover them.
- Webinars: Offering interactive and detailed information, webinars serve as an efficient content format for the consideration stage due to their comprehensive nature compared to blog posts or short videos.
Decision Stage
- Case Studies: These can be compelling for those nearing a purchase decision, providing valuable insight and positively influencing their choice.
- Testimonials: If case studies don't resonate with your brand, brief testimonials can be an effective alternative. For B2C companies, consider testimonials more flexibly—like user-generated photos displaying how a product can be styled sourced from a specific branded hashtag.
By tailoring your content to suit your target audience's specific needs and stages, you'll provide valuable resources and maximize the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
When Can You Expect to See Results from Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing often gives the impression of quicker results than traditional offline marketing, mainly because measuring ROI is much simpler. However, the timeline for seeing results depends on how robust and efficient your digital marketing plan is.
If you craft detailed buyer personas to understand your audience better and then focus on generating high-quality online content to engage and convert them, you can generally expect promising outcomes within the first six months.
In scenarios where paid advertising forms part of your digital strategy, you might see quicker results. However, it's advisable to bolster your organic (or 'free') reach through content, SEO, and social media for enduring success.
Is a Hefty Budget Necessary for Digital Marketing?
The answer to this question varies based on which digital marketing components you wish to incorporate into your strategy.
Assuming you already possess a website, focusing on inbound methodologies like SEO, social media, and content creation doesn't require a massive budget. In inbound marketing, the primary aim is to produce top-tier content that attracts your target audience. Unless you plan to outsource, your direct expenditure will be time.
Conversely, outbound techniques such as online ads and purchasing email lists will involve some cost. Your expenses here depend on the visibility you wish to attain through your advertising efforts.
For instance, if you plan to use PPC via Google AdWords, you'll compete with other businesses in your niche to secure a spot at the top of Google search results for relevant keywords. Depending on the keyword's competitiveness, costs can range from affordable to quite expensive, so building your organic reach is also crucial.
The Role of Mobile Marketing in Digital Strategy
Mobile marketing is an indispensable facet of digital marketing. Approximately 60% of digital media consumption occurs on mobile devices, with the remaining 40% on desktops. This makes it crucial to optimize your digital ads, web content, social media visuals, and other digital assets for mobile use. If your business has a mobile app that enables customer interaction or sales, it also falls under digital marketing.
Those engaging with your brand on mobile should enjoy the same quality experience they would on a desktop. This involves implementing a mobile-responsive website design and possibly simplifying your lead capture forms to ensure a smooth experience for mobile users. Moreover, always design your social media images with mobile users in mind, given that image dimensions on mobile devices can truncate text.
To create a seamless mobile experience, there are various ways to optimize your digital marketing assets. When rolling out any digital marketing initiative, it’s vital to consider how it will translate on mobile devices continually. By keeping this in focus, you’ll be shaping digital experiences that resonate with your audience, thereby achieving the results you aim for.
Ready to Dive into Digital Marketing?
If you're already implementing digital marketing tactics, you're probably connecting with at least a portion of your target audience online. However, there's always room for refinement.