Digital marketing has become one of the most popular forms of marketing in recent years. As more and more people have access to digital devices, marketing through digital platforms is a must for all businesses. Let's take a look at how companies can use digital marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness and influence customer purchase decisions.
Digital Marketing Definition
First, let's examine the definition of digital marketing.
Digital marketing is the act of promoting a product or service using the Internet and digital media.
eCommerce websites can observe past shopping behavior to recommend similar items customers are likely to purchase.
Platforms like Youtube and Facebook can track your activities and provide advertisers with data to create customized ads.
Price: Thanks to the Internet, businesses can adjust prices based on the time of order or user history. This ability to change prices according to various factors is called dynamic pricing. One typical example is when buying a flight ticket. You'll see an increase in the price by visiting a site too many times.
Promotion: The Internet also affects the way products and services are promoted. For example, content marketing and social media marketing are common ways businesses attract customers on the web. Digital marketing also makes it possible for companies to target specific segments and involve customers in the marketing process (for example, through product reviews or social media marketing).
Product: Many products today only exist in digital forms, such as ebooks, online courses, newsletters, etc. They can be downloaded directly from the web rather than collected from a physical store.
People: While the Internet has grown significantly, it hasn't been able to replace humans in customer service and personal selling. However, it provides customers access to sales representatives and support teams anytime, anywhere.
Physical appearance: Physical appearance, in the literal sense, physical appearance is no longer required to establish a business. Most businesses nowadays would instead invest in web design to increase customer experience on the web.
Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a big umbrella term that can be split into several sub-categories. These categories are the different types of digital marketing.
Digital Marketing: Search engine optimization (SEO)
The goal of SEO is to drive organic traffic to the company's website and transform that traffic into potential sales.
SEO is the combination of all activities to help a site rank higher on a search engine.
SEO practices are grouped into two categories:
On-page SEO includes activities that focus on improving on-page elements of a site, such as keywords, internal links, page speed, and images.
Off-page SEO includes activities that happen "off the page" to improve a site's ranking. For example, you can write guest posts, build backlinks, and create social media posts to drive traffic to your website.
Check out our explanation of SEO marketing to find out more.
Digital Marketing: Paid search
Paid search involves paying the search engine for ad space on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
These ads often work on a PPC (Pay per click) basis where you only pay when people click on your ads. You can find info on a keyword's competition level and pricing via SEO tools such as Ubersuggest, Moz, or SEMRush.
Digital Marketing: Content marketing
Content marketing is creating and sharing online materials (such as articles, videos, infographics, social media posts, podcasts, etc.) to attract, engage, and retain an audience. This strategy's key is delivering the right content at each stage of customer awareness.
Take a look at our content marketing explanation to find out more.
Digital Marketing: Social media marketing
You might already be familiar with social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok.
Social media marketing refers to the act of promoting a product or service using social media platforms.
Companies engage with various audiences on social media, including potential customers, journalists, employees, influencers, and the general public. One common aim of social media marketing is encouraging user-generated content such as product reviews or comments.
You can find more details in our explanation of social media marketing.
Digital Marketing: Email marketing
If you've ever provided your email address to a company or brand, in-store or online, you have engaged with email marketing.
Email marketing involves informing customers of a business's products and services via email.
It is also an important activity to nurture leads and generate sales. One example of an email marketing campaign is to send a weekly newsletter to inform your audience of the latest industry news. This allows your brand to establish itself as a trusty source of information and encourage people to do business with you in the future.
Digital Marketing: Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a form of advertising whereby companies pay others to promote their products or services.
It can range across many industries and product types. One example is bloggers who review Amazon books with an affiliate link for people to buy. The affiliate marketer earns a commission when someone purchases the book through the link.
Digital Marketing: Mobile marketing
With mobile making up more than 50% of total web traffic, mobile marketing has grown to be an indispensable part of all digital marketing strategies.
Mobile marketing includes reaching the audience on smartphones through emails, SMS, websites, and social media.
Digital Marketing Tools
There are a variety of tools digital marketers may use to facilitate the marketing process. Digital marketing tools can be divided into following categories:
- Social media marketing tools
- Email marketing tools
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools
- Conversion optimization tools
- Graphic creation tools
Most of these tools help businesses automate their marketing processes.
Marketing automation involves using automated technology to streamline your marketing activities and make them more effective.
Digital Marketing Strategies
As with traditional marketing, marketers have to develop digital marketing strategies.
A digital marketing strategy is a set of planned actions to help your business reach its goals.
Figure 6 below illustrates the six steps of developing a digital marketing strategy:
1. Research and define goals
2. Collect customer information
3. Create leads
4. Nurture leads
5. Retain existing customers
6. Build marketing automation
Step 1: Research and define goals
This step includes researching your competitors and collecting customer feedback to identify your business' online position. Once the research is gathered, the next step is to set a goal to help you realize your digital marketing goals.
You can increase your website's SEO ranking by setting goals such as creating quality content, building quality backlinks from authoritative websites, and improving page speed.
Step 2: Collect customer information
The next step is to collect data about your target groups. Marketers can do this by creating a buyer persona, including your customer's preferences and behaviors online. A tool like Google Analytics can help you collect real-time customer data and create more relevant content marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Create leads
This step is about collecting your audience's personal data for future contacts. The most common way to generate leads for websites is to give away free ebooks or coupons in exchange for customer emails. Other popular methods include target ads display, search engine optimization, social media, and influencer marketing.
Once the leads are generated, the next step is nurturing those leads into long-term relationships and potential customers. How can this be done? The best practice is to educate your customers about your business and service in a "non-salesy" way. In other words, to add value to their life.
One example of nurturing leads is to develop an email course to help people solve a nagging problem or keep them informed of industry news.
Step 5: Retain existing customers
In the long run, marketing should turn one-time buyers into loyal customers. Once you have convinced the hard-earned lead to make a purchase, it shouldn't be the end of the relationship. Try to turn them into repeat buyers with smart customer retention campaigns.
Some ways to nurture relationships with existing customers include:
Send a thank you note
Ask for feedback
Develop customer loyalty programs
Cross-sell related products through email newsletters
Disclose your plan for future product development.
Step 6: Build marketing automation
You don't have to do the same thing over and over time. Technology makes it easy to automate workflow so you can focus on more critical tasks.
Set up an onboarding email automation and chatbox to answer your customers' FAQs.
What is the job of a digital marketing agency?
If you don't want to conduct digital marketing on your own, one alternative is to outsource it to a digital marketing agency. Most agencies are well-versed in industry know-how, the latest trends, tools, and strategies. They can help to drive organic traffic, expand business reach, and generate sales with little effort on your side. You may choose a full-service agency that performs A to Z digital marketing campaigns or a specialized agency for one digital marketing area (inbound marketing, SEO, email, social media, or content marketing).
Digital Marketing Examples
Before you head off, let's take a quick look at a digital marketing example through the company ASOS.
Fig. 7 - Digital Marketing Analytics Example
ASOS uses a variety of digital marketing techniques to increase engagement and awareness and convince consumers to purchase its products. Some of the digital strategies ASOS follows are:
Mobile marketing by sending customers who have downloaded the app notifications anytime there is a sale or a limited-time-only event.
An online blog and style feed that increases its SEO traffic.
The company has amassed millions of followers on its social media pages, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, creating high engagement rates with customers. ASOS also advertises its products heavily on paid social media platforms.
Due to such digital strategies, the company has become one of the largest online fashion retailers in the world.
Digital Marketing - Key takeaways
- Digital marketing includes promoting a product or service using the Internet and digital media.
Some types of digital marketing are SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, paid search, mobile marketing, and marketing automation.
A digital marketing strategy is a set of planned actions to help a company improve its online presence. The strategy is split into six steps: research and define goals, collect data about the target audience, generate leads, nurture leads, retain existing customers, and set up automation.
Companies can either conduct digital marketing on their own or resource it to a digital marketing agency.
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