Digital Marketing Introduction

t may come as no surprise that the market has become increasingly more digital as technology continues to evolve.

Today’s consumers are very advance, multi-device, and multi-channel. Buyers are smarter than ever before, doing their own research online before they even step foot into a store or speak to a salesperson.

In a fraction of seconds, they can find out anything they want to know regarding product quality, availability, and value. Unfortunately, the “build it and they will come” theory doesn’t hold much weight now.

Google Think Insights found that “48% of consumers start their queries on search engines, while 33% go for brand websites and 26% search within mobile applications.”

That means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet. As of 2018, over four billion people around the world use the internet,

To reach, interact and delight their customers, marketers need to understand how to succeed in a digital world.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

Here we go back to basics to define digital marketing. This is important since for some in business, particularly more traditional marketers or business owners, ‘digital’ is simplistically taken to mean ‘our website’ or ‘our Facebook page’. This thinking limits the scope and opportunity of what’s managed and it means that activities that should be managed may be missed.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a broad term that describes a set of marketing processes that utilize all available digital channels to promote a product or service or build a digital brand.

Today, most purchasing decisions begin online.

That being the case, an online presence is absolutely necessary—regardless of what you sell.

Be aware, though, innovations in digital marketing move at the speed of light.. Gurus, podcasts, and bloggers declare a tool or tactic hot one week and dead the next.

The truth is, today, digital marketing is less about “digital” and more about “marketing,” mostly because digital marketing has come of age. Its fundamentals have already been established.

Gone are the days when advertisers blindly thought about how many people might have seen their ad, or read their newspaper article.

The power of digital marketing is phenomenal. You can reach millions of users within hours and a couple of clicks. Now that’s the true superpower available to anyone.

How Digital Marketing Works

It is very important for any business to know the mechanism of a digital marketing agency so that they can make smarter decisions about their marketing campaigns. The key to understanding how it all works is to figure out each element of digital marketing and recognizing how they can help you reach your marketing goals.

It’s far easier to measure the success of your digital marketing campaign with online statistics than to assume how your traditional marketing worked.

To understand well how you can maximize the use of digital marketing, here are some of the elements which can help to market the company’s products and services:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)The company’s website is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. This is where many of your target customers first get an impression of your business, brand, and more often this is where your leads will finally convert into paying customers. SEO not only brings more organic traffic to your website but also ensures that you are getting genuine leads. The target of digital marketing or a digital marketing agency is to draw those who are right for your products or services, and SEO plays an important role in doing just that. By focusing on keywords and topics within your niche, you can reach those who are interested in your products or services.

• Social Media: Most of the brands today are using social media to hold their digital marketing campaigns and drive more traffic to their website. Social media marketing involves promoting content and engaging with target customers on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This approach helps businesses to increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and improve customer engagement.
  One of the biggest advantages of social media marketing is that it allows businesses to reach a broader audience online. Although it’s not just regarding posting content, in addition to that you also need to engage your ears and listen. The best social media marketers listen with such intent and aggression that nothing on the social network area gets past their eager ears.
• If you want to stay in-game you’ll also need to imagine visually. With every social network representing their brand from a visual perspective, this is critical in today’s online world.A little creativeness also doesn’t go amiss, as you’ll need to figure out how to handle a range of circumstances. If you are able to place humour, empathy, and understanding, then this social media marketing world will welcome you into its feed.

• Content Marketing
  Content marketing is another important method that plays a major role in digital marketing. It is basically when your business creates and promotes certain content resources that are aimed to attract and engage your target customers.They can be produced for creating brand awareness, growing website traffic, boosting leads, and retaining customers.
  Tons of different content marketing strategies exist today. More content marketing channels and methods exist than ever before in the history of the world. That means that the number of strategies is even greater.
  Learn more visit our Blog – Step to a Successful Content Marketing StrategyHere are just a few types of content marketing that you might craft to support your digital marketing campaign goals:

• • Website pages
  • Blog posts
  • Social media posts
  • E-books
  • White papers
  • Case Studies
  • Testimonials
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Infographics
  • PodcastsOnline Press Releases: The online press release is a strategy that is just like the traditional business newspaper ad. The only difference is that it distributes the marketing copies online, which would mean an outsized audience. Press releases are online publications that are cautiously written, optimized then distributed to different niche websites that are parallel to what the brand has to offer. 

• PPC Advertising: Even though the goal of digital marketing strategy is to bring in as much organic traffic as possible, however, businesses should not ignore the value of PPC ads. Pay per click is a type of advertising that involves paying the publisher every time a new lead clicks on the advertisement. Google AdWords is one of the most popular and effective types of PPC ads.
• Email Marketing: Email marketing is another piece of the digital marketing puzzle. Email marketing takes place when a company sends a business-related message to a group of people through email.
• 
  Companies can use categorized emails to communicate with their target audience. They are often used as a way to increase brand awareness, set up industry leadership, endorse events, and get the word out about special promotions. Take time to work out what’s best for your business and how to best go about it. If it doesn’t work out quite how you expected, re-evaluate the situation and try again.

Inbound Vs Digital Marketing Strategies

Inbound marketing is a consistent, committed long-term marketing methodology whereas digital marketing is more like a compilation of individual tactics which a business can use to reach its prospects.

A long-term approach to drive business growth includes more than just having a pretty website, thousands of likes on social media or being a popular business.

Inbound marketing is an overall approach that gets customers and conversions organically, increase growth rate through tailored content for different persona- and the one which drives interest and engagement of customers.

Your path to inbound marketing includes a specific set of expectations, definite and measurable long-term goals and it is customer-oriented.

While digital marketing is your place if you are looking forward to promoting your brand or increasing its visual demand through the use of various single digital marketing tactics.

Possibly the best way to think about digital marketing is as a part of an overall inbound marketing strategy. You can also take help from a digital marketing agency to help you strategize your plan.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is undoubtedly more affordable than traditional marketing methods. An email or social media campaign, for example, can market to consumers in a cheaper way when compared to TV or radio print advertisement and has the potential to reach a wider & right audience.

Besides this, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real-time as this not possible in offline marketing efforts.

If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no sure way to know if that ad will work for any sales at all.

But with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of any phase of your marketing efforts.

To learn more  read – How to create a powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

Here are a few reasons why your business needs to take advantage of digital marketing:

Website Traffic

By using digital analytics software, like HubSpot and Google Analytics, you can see the exact number of people who have visited your web site’s homepage and how many pages they visited, what device they used, and where they came from amongst other digital analytics data.

This information helps you to figure out which marketing channels need greater attention, based on the number of people coming through those channels to your website.

For instance, you found that only 10% of traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

If you had a brochure on your website and you want to measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted and collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms then online marketing can help you a lot.

Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it, but in the case of offline marketing, you will get no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Measurable results

The best reason why digital marketing has thrived in surpassing conventional marketing is the fact that it offers computable results. You cannot determine how many people looked at your billboard in a day or how many people read your flyer before it ended up in a recycler. On the other hand, when you go for digital marketing strategies, you can get trustworthy and solid information with numbers that tell you how many people checked your email or even clicked on a specific link. This enables you to cut out the excess and focus on areas that give results.

Flexibility

Naturally, traditional marketing has always been common, but these days, consumers are getting more attracted to a personalized and modified journey for fulfilling their needs. This is where digital marketing can be extremely helpful because it allows you to use the preferences and interests of an individual client for sending them attractive and appealing marketing messages. You can modify messages for different groups of customers and this kind of personalization is the biggest plus point you can get because it makes clients feel special and draws them in.

Target your ideal buyers

In digital marketing, you can ensure that the right consumers are screening your content. SEO allows you to target those consumers who are surfing the web for content and topics that are appropriate to your business. The PPC and Social media marketing empower you to focus on those consumers who are most likely to be concerned about your products or services based on statistical information and general characteristics.

Build a brand reputation

Digital Marketing leverages social media signals, social proof, and testimonials availed from bonafide consumers. The more reliable these social signals are, the higher the trust rate it can generate from targeted audiences.
People would believe information about a particular brand if the data comes from people they know.
And once you meet their expectations, your brand reputation will go viral. Eventually, it will open new doors of opportunities for reaching bigger markets.

Cost-effective
Digital marketing lets you save your money to a substantial extent. This has the potential to replace costly advertising channels such as television, radio and yellow pages.

With email marketing automation, you can boost your leads. Thus, it will allow you to pre-load content and schedule it for sending out the content at key times.

Type of Digital Content

The type of content you make depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey.

Initially, you have to grab the attention of your prospects with an offer that helps them solve a problem or resolve an issue.

However, it shouldn’t stop here. Keep trying different types of content from time to time to help your business thrive.

Here’s a list of different types of digital content, for you to choose from:

Pillar page- All the Content revolves around it

A pillar page is a single web page that comprehensively covers a core topic. It is content that is developed from subtopics. The subtopics are published independently and are linked back to the main pillar page and to each other.

An excellent way to think about pillar pages and topic clusters are like they’re a book; the pillar page is the book itself, and topic clusters resemble chapters.

Search engines understand that there is a connection between the information of different topic clusters and your pillar page and the more high-quality information you provide (and internally link to) on crawl-able pages, the more you will be considered as an expert in the eyes of Google— and therefore helps to boost your page rank.

To create a great pillar page, you have to examine your existing content that can be leveraged. Look at topics that are popular with your target audience and find the best keywords that match those topics.

Once you’ve done that, you have to publish, link, and track it all.

Your pillar content is what most of your customers or users are going to spot most of the time.  You have to keep sharing it on a regular basis on social media channels, and linking to it as often as you can.  Think of it as the central hub of your topic cluster.  It’s also your best content.

Topic Cluster

A topic cluster is a group of interlinked web pages. They’re built around one piece of pillar content targeting a broad topic, linked to several related but more narrowly-focused pages.

Seem complicated? It’s more simple than it sounds. Here’s a visual guide to what a topical content cluster might look like:

Screenshot: (https://research.hubspot.com/topic-clusters-seo)

Infographics

Infographics refer to the visual representation of information. The fact that visuals tend to stay in people’s minds than text works in favour of infographics.

SEO Tools

As a result, infographics are the most shared content compared to other digital content types. Infographics can include anything such as general information, data, statistics etc.

Almost everyone is making infographics these days and therefore, it is important to be creative with your infographics for the audience to take notice.

You can also create infographics, which is a type of infographic but includes animated GIF images instead of static images like in normal images.

E-books

E-books consist of large content of a minimum word count of 10,000 words, in PDF format, and are downloadable. An e-book gives an insight into your knowledge about an industry and is the most effective way of sharing your knowledge with others.

While creating an e-book, make sure that the content is divided into topics making it easier for the users to read. Remember, your e-book’s title plays an important role in the audiences’ decision regarding downloading your e-book. Therefore, make sure that the title is catchy and relevant.

An e-book with just texts is usually considered not worth reading. Therefore, try to include graphics and make sure that the e-book’s content is formatted well to grab attention.

It is always best to create both PDF and HTML versions of your e-book. You can add video and audio to the HTML version.

Allocate Digital Marketing Budget

Every brand is distinctive and all of us have different objectives to support the growth of our businesses. When it comes to assigning your digital marketing budget, you required to be strategic in how and where you spend funds. For example, if you go for inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation, they don’t require very much budget as compared to other traditional methods. In inbound marketing creating high-quality content is important and the only investment you’ll need is your time.

If you are going for a PPC campaign using Google AdWords, you’ll have to compete against other companies in your industry through the keywords associated with your business. Based on the keyword’s competitiveness, they can be reasonable, or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good quality idea to focus on building your organic reach, too.

Make sure to plainly outline the objectives and get a good overview of the digital marketing landscape in your industry. Come to the table with an understanding of how much you can afford to spend and assign those funds to channels that will support the goals you’ve set for a brand.

Conclusion

Traditional or offline marketing is not dead but it is no longer having the same impact as it used to have in the past. Prospects are now glued to their smartphones and are constantly being diverted. Therefore their attention span is very limited.

As a business, your goal is to find ways of grabbing that limited attention by communicating stories that connect with your target audience. Now that you know how digital marketing works it’s time to start planning your next digital marketing campaign.