If you’re a business owner or aspiring entrepreneur, then you’ve probably heard of digital marketing. You know it’s essential and beneficial, but you aren’t exactly sure about how you can implement it. In this article, we will demystify digital marketing for you.
You’ll learn about all the various types of digital marketing, how they work, and how they can benefit you. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll understand just how important it is, and be imbued with a sense of direction and a new-found motivation to dive into your digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
How does Digital Marketing work?
The different types of Digital Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Digital marketing works to promote or sell your goods and services in several different ways. For example, digital marketing increases brand awareness, boosts engagement on your website, converts existing customers into repeat customers, promotes social sharing of your goods and services, shortens the user-journey, and builds long-lasting relationships between businesses and customers.
When it comes to choosing the right platform to use for your campaigns, think about the type of audience you are reaching out to, and the types of features the platform has. Mainly, you want to focus on social media platforms where your target audience is the most active.
Content Marketing
Content marketing centers on the creation and distribution of content, both online and offline. For online delivery, content can include videos, blogs, podcasts, articles, social media posts, e-books, whitepapers, and more.
Content marketing is excellent for building a relationship with customers because – when done right – it provides a lot of value. The value generated in each post comes typically in the form of entertainment, a solution to a problem, or a new benefit to foster trust and reputation for a brand. Furthermore, content marketing is an excellent method to generate leads.
Email Marketing
Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
PPC Advertising
Pay-Per-Click advertising works by paying a fee for each time somebody clicks on the advertorial. The silver lining of this kind of advertising is that you only pay when your ad is successful. When your content is valuable, and your sales process streamlined, PPC can necessarily pay for itself.
Moreover, the return on investment of PPC ads is rapid in comparison with SEO. You don’t have to wait for months to build traffic; instead, your advertising can be making an impact right away.
Affiliate Marketing
Mobile Phone Advertising
There are many more complex forms of affiliate marketing. However, this model is the simplest and most well-known.
Over the last years, an adapted form of digital marketing has emerged in the form of mobile phone advertising. Mobile phone advertising refers to all advertising through mobile phones. Aspects that are included are mobile-friendly websites and emails, utilizing mobile phone numbers in marketing campaigns, as well as incorporating push- and in-app notifications.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Awareness
Engagement
Convert new buyers
Social sharing
Shorten the buyer’s journey
Your users’ journey should never be to complicated or involve too many steps. The likelihood of the user bailing out starts to increase dramatically, the longer the process is. Digital marketing is an essential part of simplifying the buyers’ journey. At first, you aim at identifying the solution that you have to offer.
Secondly, you’ll have to research to identify a target audience, their problem, needs they have as well as wants. After that, you present your solution to your target markets’ problem by showing them valuable content, advertisements, and implementing call-to-action (CTA). The CTA functions as a bypass of all steps in the middle, such as typing in a webshop link, finding the right article, etc.
Use Analytics
It is essential to use an analytics platform such as Google Analytics to take away the guesswork from your digital marketing efforts. If you’re not able to measure your data, you won’t be able to accurately determine how well your digital marketing campaigns are doing, and if you’re booking success. Similarly, you can’t test a new feature, such as a shortcut on your website, if you have no data to compare.
Digital marketing is an iterative process; your efforts will need to be refined and revamped over time. Fine-tuning and optimizing is a constant process that ensures that you’re maximizing your opportunity to convert, increase traffic, generate leads, and increase customer engagement.
Is Digital Marketing Important?
A big resounding YES! Digital marketing is vital, not only for big businesses but also for smaller ones. Amongst the ever-increasing noise of the modern digital landscape, your business’s voice must be heard. Your business’s future depends on its ability to be found and the amount of traffic that flows into it.
The many benefits of digital marketing should be more than enough to convince business owners to invest time and money into digital marketing efforts. Whether it is to create awareness, boost engagement, convert buyers into recurring ones, refine the user experience, prompt social sharing, digital marketing should be taken seriously, used effectively, and overseen with analytics to give you a competitive edge.