What digital marketing does for a company depends on the goal of each type of marketing content, which includes increasing brand awareness and industry authority, boosting web traffic, and increasing overall leads and revenue.
Marketing your company online is a big deal these days. After all, internet usage has more than doubled over the past decade, and this shift has massively affected how people purchase products and interact with businesses.
What is Digital Marketing?
Like any other type of marketing, digital marketing is a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. The difference is that you do so online through a combination of digital marketing channels that include video content, social media posts, content marketing, web and social media advertisements, and search engine marketing.
Companies reach goals through the above means instead of using traditional marketing strategies like billboards, television ads, and promotional mail sent to consumer residences.
Common Digital Marketing Assets
Almost anything can be a digital marketing asset, meaning any marketing tool that you use online. That being said, you may not realize how many you have at your disposal. Here are a few examples:
- Your website
- Branded assets (logos, icons, acronyms)
- Video content (video ads, product demos)
- Images (infographics, product and company photos)
- Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, Help Sections, “learning center-type” content or online courses)
- Online products or tools (SaaS, calculators, interactive content)
- Reviews
- Social media pages
As you can probably imagine, this list only scratches the surface. Most digital marketing assets will fall into one of these categories. However, clever marketers are constantly coming up with new ways to reach customers online, and the list keeps growing.
Common Digital Marketing Strategies
Though the list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, these are some of the most common and effective strategies that businesses are using:
PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a broad term that covers any online marketing where the advertising business pays for each time a user clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising.” Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising.”
PAID SEARCH ADVERTISING
Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers actively searching for a product or service like yours. Google, Bing, and Yahoo allow you to run ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
According to Google, 91% of users are searching from their mobile devices. All of your PPC and paid search advertising campaigns should be optimized for mobile so your business isn’t missing out on all of those clicks and potential customers. If you’re missing the mark on this, you need to revamp your digital marketing strategy ASAP.
PAID SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat allow users to pay for digital media marketing ads on their sites. Paid social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences who might not know that your business, product, or service exists.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, is the technique used by digital media marketing professionals to get pages and blog posts to rank organically on SERPs. It takes more skill and know-how to get on the front page of Google with SEO than with paid search advertising, and it can be time-consuming.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Like SEO, social media marketing is the free, organic way to use platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business through digital means. Unfortunately, organically marketing your business on social media takes more time and effort than paid advertising. Still, it can be very effective when you’re operating on a tighter budget. Social media marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies you can use, even if you don’t pay for it.
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) improves the online user experience to maximize the number of users who perform a desired action known as converting. This can be as simple as getting them to click on a link and sign up for your newsletter. Businesses often use CRO to get leads, chats, calls, and sales from their existing website traffic and increase those conversions.
CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is another broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc.) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads, or sales. Most importantly, when you combine these elements the right way, you develop a clear online marketing strategy for your business.
NATIVE ADVERTISING
Have you ever noticed that at the bottom of an article you’re reading, there is often a list of suggested articles? That’s native advertising. Most of it falls under content marketing because it uses content to attract clicks (“You’ll never believe what happens next!”). Often, it can be difficult to spot because it is usually mixed in with non-paid content recommendations. Of course, that’s kind of the point.
EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is the oldest form of online marketing, and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use it for advertising special deals, highlighting content, or promoting an event. It offers opportunities to reach users who may not be on many of the more popular platforms, like social media.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
You use affiliate marketing to pay someone else — a person or a business — to promote your products and services on their website.
There are many ways to market your business online, which is why many companies outsource their online marketing efforts or pay for an in-house team and automation software to cover their marketing needs. This is one area where spending a little money can definitely improve your return on investment (ROI)
B2C COMPANIES
Generally speaking, B2C companies have much lower price points than their B2B counterparts. After all, it can be a little hard to sell a $150,000 drill bit (believe me, they exist) to a harried mom. But an inexpensive pair of kid’s pants? That’s a reasonably straightforward sell.
The good news is that, because B2C companies aren’t trying to sell incredibly expensive products or services, they don’t need big sales teams or complicated marketing funnels. All they have to do is get their products or services in front of the right audience with the right messaging, and the rest should take care of itself.
As a result, the primary goal of most B2C companies is to guide the customer journey into and through their marketing funnel. For example, if you can get that mom onto your kids’ clothing website and offer her an exciting deal, there’s a good chance that she’ll make a purchase today. You don’t need to build a ton of brand awareness or trust before you close a sale.
With that in mind, B2C companies often see great results from higher-funnel digital channels like social media marketing and paid social advertising. These channels do a great job of getting your business in front of potential customers who might not otherwise know that you exist.
How Is Digital Marketing Different on Mobile?
Digital marketing on mobile is very different from digital marketing on desktop. These differences are significant because smartphones are now the primary device people use to interact with the internet.
With over 50% of internet activity occurring on mobile devices, the shift from desktop to mobile has profoundly affected digital marketing.
Google Ads got rid of the sidebar ads on their results pages to create a consistent experience between mobile and desktop. Facebook Ads followed suit at some point in the last five years, no longer showing sidebar ads on desktop or mobile and instead only showing in-stream ads. This article has been updated to reflect this change in Facebook Ads’ in-app marketing approaches and placement that it allows businesses to use. This section used to read that on desktop, Facebook still showed sidebar ads. This is a great example of a continuous adaptation of digital marketing methods and strategies to maximize ROI.
In addition to optimizing your ads for mobile, it’s also essential to think about your site and landing page experience. Sure, your website might look beautiful on a desktop screen, but if it’s impossible to navigate on mobile, you’ll end up alienating a significant percentage of your web traffic.
At a minimum, you should have a mobile-responsive website. Ideally, a mobile user’s experience (UX) should be designed to allow users to easily access as many of the features on a desktop site as possible.
Whether most advertisers realize it or not, digital marketing is primarily a mobile experience now. The good
news is, if you’re relatively new to digital marketing, you don’t have to worry about reinventing the wheel. You can start by coming up with compelling mobile advertisements and then adapt as needed for desktop.
Taking the Next Step on Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the marketing of the future. Another valuable benefit of it is that you can easily and accurately track the results of your efforts using analytics tools to collect relevant data. It’s easy to see which strategies are producing profitable results and which ones need some work.
IF THIS ARTICLE HAS CONVINCED YOU THAT YOU NEED DIGITAL MARKETING OR NEED TO IMPROVE YOUR CURRENT STRATEGY, WE’RE HERE TO HELP YOU DO THAT. WE LOVE HELPING BUSINESSES GROW WITH DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES AND SOLUTIONS.
.
