What Is Digital Marketing?
Get this: Digital marketing is the future and the in-thing in the world of marketing!
If your business is to thrive in the digital age, you’d have no choice but to embrace digital marketing.
But here’s the kicker: it can be tough if you’re just getting started!
So, what is digital marketing? Digital marketing is the art and science of conveying marketing information for products and services through the internet. To get the desired results, you need a medium like social media, email, mobile app, a website, and a target market. Also known as a customer avatar.
But there’s more to digital marketing than you can imagine. This is just a scratch on the surface. No doubt about it.
And you know what? You’re about to discover all there’s to know about digitalmarketing if you stick to the end.
Sounds good? Let’s dive in!
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How Digital Marketing Works
You’re getting started as an entrepreneur but you can’t quite understand how digital marketing works. You’re justified. See, marketing through electronic media is broad and requires a special kind of skill.
Therefore, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand everything. But isn’t that why we’re here? To provide you all there’s to know about digital marketing and how to apply it in your business.
Yes. In the next few minutes, we’ll show you just that. So, buckle up and let’s get down to business!
What Are The Benefits Of Digital Marketing?
Probably, you’re really wondering why digital marketing is important to your business. Or maybe you’re just getting started as an entrepreneur or a digital marketing cmo.
The truth is that there are tons of benefits you can reap from digital marketing. Especially when you do it right. Below, we’ll delve into the nitty-gritty benefits of online digital marketing and how to strategically position yourself.
But first, let’s run over some benefits of digital marketing statistics. Sounds like a good deal. Right? Let’s get going!
- You get a return of $44 for every 1$ you spend on email marketing. This is an ROI of 4400%.
- Social media has a little over 1.5 billion active monthly users. For sure, this is where the moolah is. No doubt!
- 78% of sales executives who are active on social media perform better than their counterparts.
- Buyers who use social media for research stand at 55%.
- Organic Google search is the source of 43% of e-commerce traffic.
- An average consumer spends at least 1800$ annually on e-commerce.
- On average, mobile phone users spend 3.5 hours on their phones.
- Consumers trust online product reviews 12X more than product descriptions.
- Blogging gets companies 55% additional traffic.
There are more stats we can pull out just to show you the ins and the outs of digital media marketing. The point is to show you the gaps and the opportunities right off the bat.
That said, here’s why digital marketing is important to any business.
1. Digital Marketing Is Less Costly
Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing costs less. For starters, you only need a computer and access to the internet. And once you have the marketing message out, you can always modify and scale it appropriately.
This is to say, cutting out losers and upscaling the winners. Something that’s impossible with traditional marketing like in billboards.
Through digital marketing, you get timely customer responses which you can use to make informed decisions.
The best part is that you have total control of digital marketing. Since there are multiple types of digital marketing, you can always choose what’s working for you.
Some examples include; pay per click, Facebook ads, native ads, or email marketing.
2. Digital Marketing Gets You Global Scale Exposure
Think about this fact: the internet is global and everything that happens on it is within the public domain. Therefore, any marketing content you create can be accessed by everyone around the globe.
That explains why some companies are international. To reach out to the world with a product or a service, the internet should be a perfect media consideration.
But first, have great content that can drive global traffic to your website, e-commerce store, or even social media accounts.
3. High Chances Of Creating Viral Content
The internet is full of people from all walks of life—of different psychographics and demographics. To get your content shared all over the world, first understand who your ideal customer is.
Next, create content that appeals to their interests or beliefs. Before creating content, ask yourself; does my content inspire my audience? Does it provide information and a solution to a problem? Is it educative?
Note that your audience can only share and take your content viral if it makes the above cut. Therefore, by creating an audience-centered content marketing message, you’ll probably need a single tweet or retweets before it goes viral.
4. You Can Track And Measure Results
Any form of marketing becomes less effective if there are no measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). But more importantly, is the ability to track the KPIs then measure them vis-a-vis your expectations.
With direct response marketing, this is practically possible. You can tell what you want from the start to the endpoint. Then in between assess the metrics to determine what’s working and what’s not working.
Some of the trackable and measurable metrics include; likes, shares, comments, conversion rates, open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, impressions, and views.
After an assessment, you can then scale your message appropriately. “But how do I track and measure these KPIs?” You could be asking. Look: there are tons of analytical tools available.
While others are free, some you’ll have to get at a fee. Here are a couple of examples; Google analytics, hot jar, or Facebook audience insight.
5. Get To Know What Your Competitors Are Up-to
In this digital age, every business is working around the clock to have a strong online presence. This also means that two-thirds of their information if not all are publicly available.
Therefore, it’s easy to analyze your competitor’s marketing efforts. Then use this information to identify gaps that you can fill. Besides filling market gaps, you can also emulate their strong points.
What is it that they’re doing that you aren’t? Plus, you can take it a notch by following them on social media or email.
6. You Can Customize Content For Laser Targeting
One thing that guarantees success in digital marketing is customizing and tailoring your marketing message around your target audience. When you do proper laser targeting, you stand high chances of raking in higher returns.
So, how does this work? One, it helps you stay focused and spend money on the right digital channels and the right digital marketing campaigns. Two, through laser targeting, you can retarget your audiences with relevant ads on other websites or social media.
7. Turn Online Leads To Customers And Raving Fans
The most valuable concept in direct response marketing is the customer value journey. In simple terms, it’s a strategy for acquiring new leads, engaging them with relevant content, turning them into customers and repeat buyers.
When done right, you can leverage your buyers to help you out with the marketing. By this, you turn them into advocates and promoters of your brand.
The amazing part is that all this can happen online without having to meet with your customers in person. The revenue from digital marketing should be your motivator. Compared with traditional marketing it doesn’t require a lot of monetary input.
You can enjoy all these benefits when you engage in the right digital marketing practices.
Different Types Of Digital Marketing
By now, you have an idea of how much digital marketing is beneficial to your business. It’s time to look at the different internet marketing examples that you can incorporate into your business in 2021.
And the best part is that you’re probably familiar with them. So, let’s get things underway!
1. Pay Per Click (PPC) and SEO Marketing
As a marketer, your goal is to get as many people as possible responding to your call to action. This implies if you want them to buy a product, then, that’s exactly what they do and you get your desired results.
In a nutshell, that’s what PPC is all about—results. With PPC marketing, you’ll be spending on every click you get for your ad.
Say, if you’re selling a digital product e.g. an eBook online, and your target customer clicks on the link, then you should pay for the click. Ideally, PPC marketing relies on keywords e.g., best digital marketing eBooks 2021.
After carrying out some keyword research, next, you want to optimize your ads around the said keyword or keywords. Remember to use a phrase or phrases that your ideal buyer would be using on search engines to get leads for a particular product or service.
The giant platform in pay-per-click marketing is GOOGLE. Others include; yahoo, social media platforms, and some specific mobile apps. This form of marketing works hand in hand with search engine optimization (SEO).
Actually, SEO can be split into two main categories—Organic and inorganic. Organic SEO involves attracting an audience around commonly searched keywords.
Moreover, an SEO expert uses the right user-centered content to provide value to searchers. Organic SEO is free and results in free organic traffic year after year.
Therefore, if you decide to go this way, only aim for creating quality user-centered content, then optimize it with high search volume and low competitive keywords.
On the flip side, inorganic SEO is pay-per-click marketing. It’s also known as paid traffic since you’ll have to pay for every click-through you get for your ads.
This form of marketing is effective as you’ll only be attracting people who are most likely to buy. Like other digital marketing strategies, Pay per click marketing is doable.
But if you’re one busy person, you can always outsource the work to a professional. A quick search of ‘the best PPC marketers’, Will get you tons of PPC and organic results on Google SERPs.
This a classic example of both PPC and SEO at work. However, if you want to dive into PPC marketing, some of the necessary skills are; direct response copywriting, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, Content marketing.
Other skills include graphic design, social media marketing.
2. Website Marketing
There can never be digital content marketing without the web. This is to say, websites form the backbone of the digital media market. And without the World Wide Web, there wouldn’t be a place for digital marketing platforms. Can you imagine that?
Therefore, savvy digital marketers strive to build a website first for their businesses. “But why is that so?” You’re probably asking. It’s simple. Experienced internet marketers know that their target market spends a lot of time online.
The best way to reach out to this kind of audience is to go where they hang out—which is online. The best part is that a website functions 100% online.
Therefore, as the target audience hang out on these social platforms, it’s always easy to interact with them. Besides, you can get a website that’s fully optimized for your business.
The most important thing is knowing your business and how you’d want customers to perceive your brand. Some types of websites to consider include; an e-commerce website, landing page website, and portfolio website.
Of course, there are more, but these few will suffice for illustration. To get a business website, you can hire a website developer or create one yourself if you have the skills.
One amazing thing about website marketing is the ability to retarget your audience. How do we mean? Allow us to explain! See, when a visitor comes to your website via a blog post about a specific topic like best digital marketing books.
In most instances, the visitor will leave the page without taking the desired call to action. When that happens, you can immediately launch a retargeting campaign by installing pixels on your web pages.
This feature allows you to show the same piece of content to your website visitors on other websites that they visit. Isn’t that amazing?
To master successful website marketing, you need other skills such as; direct response copywriting, writing website copy, content marketing, and graphics design.
Nonetheless, if you can’t handle these, you can always outsource them to a digital marketing specialist.
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3. Content Marketing
In the simplest terms possible, content marketing is using content to reach out to your target audience. It’s a fact that people don’t like being sold, yet they still love buying.
This only means in most cases, hard-selling never works. It’s also a common thing that people will buy after at least seven levels of engagement.
But you see, this can turn into a wild dream if you don’t have the right content. At best, the content should be entertaining, inspiring, and informative.
In marketing psychology, content marketing is a soft sell and doesn’t come out as pushy. Through content, you can pass an important tip or teach how to accomplish a task.
Then use a squeeze page to funnel the right audience to one of your offers.
Ideally, great content has value, value attracts an audience, and once you have the traffic, you can target them with relevant ads or a marketing campaign.
The opposite is true for mediocre content. Without value, there’s no traffic and no monetization. The common forms of content marketing include; text (blogs and articles), audio (podcasts), video (YouTube and social media), and images (photos and infographics.
The amazing part is that you can try out all of these for your business. However, if you’re only starting out and doesn’t have the human resource, you can either outsource or build each channel incrementally.
Once one picks up, you can move to the next until everything is up and running efficiently.
To succeed as a content marketer, you need to equip yourself with the following skills; blogs and articles content writing, direct response copywriting, video creation, podcasting, and graphics design.
Another extra valuable skill would be influencer marketing.
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4. Email Marketing
An email list is a source of owned traffic. For starters, this is traffic that’s absolutely owned by you. It’s unlike SEO which directs both paid and organic traffic to your website or social media channels which are known for earned traffic.
The problem with the earned and paid traffic is the lack of control. It means there are chances you can wake up one day to a rude shock of no traffic.
However, with email marketing, every person that’s on your list is under your control. Guess what! Absolute control means freedom. Therefore, you can monetize the list according to your desires.
This also includes the types of offers and content you share with the audience on your list. When done right, email marketing can yield an ROI of 4400%. That’s to say, for every 1$ you spend on email marketing, you get a return of $44.
The truth is that no other digital marketing strategy comes anywhere close to email marketing. Most importantly, you can blend your email marketing and content marketing efforts.
Once you have driven traffic to your blogs either organically or through paid traffic, you can capture the leads through a squeeze page.
A squeeze page is a lead generation inlet on your website that captures visitors’ contact information such as emails, phone numbers, names, etc.
Usually, you’ll need a lead magnet in the form of an eBook or a coupon to channel visitors to our email list. Therefore, besides email marketing and email copywriting skills, you need tons of content marketing skills to breakthrough.
Other related skills include; customer acquisition and customer value optimization.
5. Social Media Marketing
For any particular month, social media has a little over 1.5 billion active users. In the internet age, almost everyone is active on at least one of the social media channels.
The common ones include; Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It’s important to note why your audience loves any one of the social channels.
Obviously, they don’t go to hang out on Facebook, for example, to be sold to. The truth is that people love social media for the entertainment side of it.
However, a few such as LinkedIn are known for professional networking. Therefore, knowing the objective of social media channels should be the first priority.
Next, you want to study your audience insight to know what they like and their way of life. It’s after that that you can target them with relevant offers.
One that can help alleviate a pain point, a challenge, help realize a value system or goals. When done right, social media marketing can bring in thousands of sales.
To run a successful social media marketing outreach, you need to have skills in social media marketing and management, content marketing, direct response copywriting, customer acquisition, and customer value optimization.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Successful marketing is a process. It entails taking your prospect on a customer value journey—from total strangers to friends. Therefore, your aim is to turn leads into customers, repeat buyers, and raving fans.
In the value journey ladder, affiliate marketing comes in after your customers turn into raving fans. By that we mean, they become promoters and advocates of your business.
Simply put, affiliate marketing is about promoting another business for gain or benefit. When starting out, you may not have the budget to accommodate this marketing strategy.
But as time goes by and your business begins to thrive, you can establish an affiliate program and reward customers who help you acquire more customers.
To get into affiliate marketing, you need some knowledge in almost all disciplines of digital marketing. For the start, customer value optimization and customer acquisition are a must-have skillset.
Others include; direct response copywriting, content marketing, social media marketing, e-commerce marketing, and email marketing.
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What Is Digital Marketing: Final Thoughts
Are you still wondering how to get started in digital marketing? Going out on your own can feel like chasing after a wild goose.
That’s why we believe this detailed article is a timely resource for getting started in the digital and online marketing space. Again, Thumbs up for reading this far!
By now you know; digital marketing definition, how digital marketing works, the types of digital marketing, and the benefits of digital marketing. You can also watch this video by Adam Erhart for more insights.
So, what’s stopping you from becoming one of the most sought-after digital marketers? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts. Cheers!
