The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing

Would you think that there are more individuals using the internet every day given how widely it is now available?

Well, you’re right. In fact, Pew Research found that adults’ “continuous” internet usage rose by 5% in the previous three years alone. Even if we say it frequently, consumer behavior has changed as a result, and offline marketing is no longer as successful as it once was.

Marketing has always consisted of making connections with your audience at the appropriate time and place. Today, that means you need to connect with them online, where they are already spending time.

Start with digital marketing, which is any kind of internet marketing.

Inbound marketing is a particularly powerful strategy for attracting, retaining, and delighting online consumers, and we discuss it frequently on our blog. Yet individuals from all around the world continue to ask us a lot of questions about digital marketing. We, therefore, chose to respond to them. You may skip through to each of the questions by clicking the links below, or continue reading to learn how digital marketing is now done.

1. Digital marketing: What is it?
2. What makes digital marketing so crucial?
3. Digital Marketing Types
4. What is the role of a digital marketer?
5. Which is better, inbound marketing or digital marketing?
6. Do all firms benefit from digital marketing?
7. How to Implement Online Digital Marketing
8. Elements of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing: What is it?

All marketing activities that take place online are referred to as digital marketing, often known as online marketing. To engage with present and potential consumers, businesses use digital channels including search engines, social media, email, and other websites. This also involves messaging via text or other types of multimedia.

Although there are a few subtle distinctions, an experienced inbound marketer may claim that inbound marketing and digital marketing are essentially the same things. Get in touch with us to know more about digital marketing and its usage.

What Does An Organization Mean By “Digital Marketing”?

Digital marketing is essential for your brand exposure and business at this point. Every other company appears to have a website. If not, they at least have a digital ad plan or a presence on social media. Consumers now anticipate and rely on digital information and marketing as a method to learn about businesses. You can be inventive and test out different marketing methods on a budget because digital marketing has so many possibilities and ideas available to it.

Digital marketing is described as the process of connecting with customers online, where they spend a large portion of their time. The most effective digital marketers have a clear understanding of how each campaign supports its main objectives. Marketers may support a broader campaign using the available free and paid channels, based on the objectives of their marketing plan.

For instance, a content marketer can write a series of blog articles based on a new ebook the company just produced to generate leads. The social media marketer for the firm might then assist in promoting these blog pieces via sponsored and unpaid postings on the company’s social media pages. If people read the ebook, the email marketer could build an email campaign to provide them with further details about the business. In a moment, we’ll go into more detail about these specific digital marketers.

What Makes Digital Marketing So Crucial?

Digital marketing enables you to target the customers most likely to purchase your goods or services and reaches a wider audience than previous approaches could. Additionally, it allows you to monitor progress on a daily basis and pivot as necessary, and it is frequently more affordable than traditional advertising.

A few of the main advantages of digital marketing are:

1. Only the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service should receive your attention.
2. It is more affordable than outbound marketing strategies.
3. By leveling the playing field within your sector, digital marketing enables you to compete with more established brands.
4. Digital marketing has quantifiable results.
5. A digital marketing plan may be modified and adjusted more easily.
6. Your conversion rate and the caliber of your leads may both be increased through digital marketing.
7. With digital marketing, you can include audiences at every level.

We are always here to help you. Now let’s get into them.

1. You could concentrate your efforts exclusively on customers who are most likely to buy your good or service

You have a limited amount of control over who sees advertising that you place on television, in a magazine, or on a billboard. Of course, you can quantify some demographics, such as the normal readership of the magazine or the demography of a particular area, but it’s still mostly a guess.

On the other hand, digital marketing enables you to locate and target a very precise audience, as well as give that audience customized, very effective marketing communications.

Use social media’s targeting options, for instance, to display social media advertising to a specific audience based on factors like age, gender, geography, interests, networks, or habits. To offer to advertise to customers who have expressed interest in your product or service or who have looked up certain keywords related to your sector, you might also employ PPC or SEO techniques.

In the end, digital marketing helps you to carry out the research required to define your buyer persona and lets you iteratively improve your marketing plan to make sure you’re attracting customers who are most likely to make a purchase. The best part about digital marketing is that it enables you to promote to smaller segments of your main target market. This is especially useful if you sell several goods or services to various customer personas.

2. It is more budget-friendly than outbound marketing strategies

With digital marketing, you can monitor campaigns on a daily basis and cut back on your expenditure on a particular channel if it isn’t providing a good return on investment. Traditional types of advertising cannot be claimed to be the same. Whether or not your billboard converts for you, it still costs the same regardless of how it performs.

Additionally, you have total control over where you choose to spend your money with digital marketing. Perhaps instead of spending money on PPC advertisements, you decide to get design tools to produce Instagram content with a high conversion rate. You may continually pivot with a digital marketing plan, avoiding spending money on ineffective channels.

For example, if you work for a small firm with a little budget, you may consider investing in SEO, blogging, or social networking – three tactics that might provide big returns even with little investment.

3. You can compete with bigger firms thanks to the level playing field created by digital marketing inside your sector

If you work for a small company, it will probably be challenging for you to compete with the large companies in your sector, many of whom have millions of dollars to spend on national advertising campaigns or television ads. Fortunately, there are many chances for effective digital marketing activities to outrank the major firms.

To increase your ranking on search engines for certain long-tail keywords related to your product or service, for example, you may find such keywords and then produce high-quality content. The most popular content with the target demographic will be given precedence by search engines, not the largest brand.

4. Digital marketing has quantifiable results

The metrics that could be important to your business, such as impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page, can all be seen in detail from beginning to end with the help of digital marketing. One of the main advantages of digital marketing is this. Traditional advertising has several limitations, although it may be effective for some objectives.

Digital marketing, in contrast to the majority of offline marketing strategies, enables marketers to view precise outcomes in real-time. If you’ve ever placed an advertisement in a newspaper, you are aware of how challenging it is to gauge the number of readers who really turned to that page and focused on your advertisement. There is no definite method to determine if that advertisement contributed to any sales at all. To get more results and understand how it works, you can contact our experts.

Here are a few instances:

Website Visits

With digital marketing, you may use digital analytics software, which is accessible on marketing platforms, to see the precise amount of visitors who have visited the homepage of your website in real-time.

In addition to other digital analytics information, you can see how many pages they viewed, what device they were using, and where they came from.

Based on the number of visitors certain marketing channels are bringing to your website, this knowledge enables you to decide which marketing channels to spend more or less time on. For instance, if just 10% of your traffic originates from organic search, you are aware that you likely need to invest some time in SEO to raise that figure.

Performance of Content and Lead Generation

Consider creating a product brochure and mailing it via people’s letterboxes. Although offline, that brochure is still a type of content. The issue is that you don’t know how many people looked at your brochure or how many people dumped it in the garbage without ever opening it.

Imagine that brochure was instead available on your website. By employing forms, you can track the precise number of visitors to the website where it is hosted as well as gather contact information from those that download it. When consumers download your material, you’re not only creating qualified leads, but you can also track how many people are interacting with it.

Modeling by Attribution

You may track all of your sales back to a customer’s initial digital interaction with your company when you use a successful digital marketing strategy together with the appropriate tools and technology.

This process, known as attribution modeling, enables you to spot patterns in how consumers learn about and purchase your product, allowing you to make more informed choices about which aspects of your marketing strategy require additional focus and which phases of your sales cycle require improvement.

Connecting the links between marketing and sales is crucial because, according to Aberdeen Group, businesses with excellent sales and marketing alignment expand at a pace of 20% annually while those with weak alignment see their revenue fall by 4%. Using digital technology to enhance your customers’ buying cycle experience is likely to have a favorable impact on your company’s bottom line.

5. Changing and adapting a digital marketing plan is simpler

The process of creating a marketing strategy is laborious. Typically, you will carry out that plan to completion, give it time to work, and then evaluate the outcomes. But not everything always goes as expected. Halfway through, you can realize that a calculation, an assumption, or an audience response did not go as planned. Because you don’t have to start from scratch, being able to pivot or modify the plan along the road is really advantageous.

One major advantage of digital marketing is the simplicity of changing your plan. Comparatively speaking, changing a digital marketing plan is far simpler than changing a more conventional marketing approach like mailers or billboard advertising. For instance, you may immediately modify or halt an online advertisement if it isn’t producing the desired results.

6. Using digital marketing to increase conversion rates and lead quality

Using digital marketing also makes it easier to increase your conversion rate since it makes it easier to measure your marketing efforts. You can create more successful tactics by being able to evaluate the performance of each technique. Your conversion rate will increase if you keep improving your techniques. Putting money into web marketing makes sure that everything is optimized for the most conversions possible.

Additionally, not every lead offers the same value to your company. You have the chance to target a particular audience with digital marketing, which will result in higher-quality leads that are more likely to convert to consumers. Your conversion rate will increase immediately as a result of connecting your company with the most valuable leads.

7. Digital marketing enables audience engagement at every step

It’s crucial to start interacting with your audience as soon as you can. The lead is moved through the customer funnel more quickly when a connection is made at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. You may do that from beginning to end and at every stage in between by using digital marketing.

You can track your consumers’ whole purchasing process using online platforms. Converting leads requires an understanding of and analysis of how consumers behave and move. You can follow them throughout that journey thanks to digital marketing. And even if they don’t convert right away, it at least ensures that they have established a relationship with your company.

https://www.jootoor.com/importance-of-digital-marketing/

Through all available digital platforms, including both free and paid ones, a company’s digital marketers are responsible for promoting brand recognition and lead generation. Social media, the firm’s own webpage, rankings of the search engine, emailing, banner advertising, and the corporate blog are some of these channels.

To accurately assess the performance of the business across all channels, the digital marketer often concentrates on a distinct key performance indicator (KPI). In small businesses, one generalist could be in full control of many of the aforementioned digital marketing strategies at once, such as the SEO manager who monitors “organic traffic” to their website.

In bigger businesses, these strategies are handled by a number of experts, each of whom specializes in only one or two of the company’s digital channels.

Here are a few instances of these experts:

SEO Manager

Organic traffic is a major KPI.

Simply said, SEO managers raise a company’s Google ranking. Even if the business also distributes this information on social media, this individual may directly interact with content producers to guarantee it performs well on Google using a number of search engine optimization techniques.

Marketing Specialist for Content

Time on page, total blog traffic, and YouTube channel subscribers are the major KPIs.

The people who create digital content are called content marketers. They regularly monitor the company’s blogging schedule and develop a content plan that incorporates video. To guarantee that the goods and campaigns the company offers are backed with promotional material on each digital platform, these specialists frequently collaborate with individuals in different departments.

Social Media Manager

Follows, Impressions and Shares are the major KPIs.

The title of a social media manager makes it clear what their job entails, but the sector they work in determines which social networks they administer on behalf of the business. Above everything, social media managers create a publishing schedule for the textual and visual material produced by the business. A plan for what type of material to post on which social media platform may be developed by this employee in conjunction with the content marketing professional.

Coordinator of Marketing Automation

Lead generation (converting) value, advertising click-through rate, and email open rate are the major KPIs.

The marketing automation coordinator aids in the selection and administration of the software that enables the entire marketing team to comprehend consumer behavior and track the expansion of their company. It’s crucial to have someone who can organize these digital actions into different campaigns and monitor the effectiveness of each campaign because many of the marketing operations mentioned above may be carried out independently from one another.

Any firm in any field may benefit from digital marketing. No matter what your firm offers, digital marketing still entails developing buyer personas to pinpoint the needs of your audience and producing worthwhile online content. That is not to argue, though, that all organizations should use the same approach when implementing a digital marketing plan.

B2B Digital Marketing

Your digital marketing initiatives will probably be focused on online lead generation if your organization is business-to-business (B2B), with the ultimate objective being for a lead to talk with a salesperson. Because of this, the purpose of your marketing plan is to use your website and other supporting digital channels to draw in and convert the best quality lead for your salespeople.

In addition to your webpage, you’ll probably decide to increase your productivity on business-focused platforms like LinkedIn, where your target audience is active online.

B2C Digital Marketing

Depending on the pricing range of your items, if your firm is business-to-consumer (B2C), it’s probable that the aim of your digital marketing activities is to get visitors to your website and convert them into customers without ever having to talk to a salesperson.

Because of this, you’re considerably less likely to concentrate on “leads” in the conventional sense and more likely to concentrate on creating an expedited buyer’s journey that runs from the time a visitor lands on your webpage to the time they complete a purchase. Because of this, your product may frequently appear in your content earlier in the marketing funnel than it would for a B2B company, and you may need to utilize stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

Networks like Instagram and Pinterest may frequently be more beneficial for B2C businesses than business-focused websites like LinkedIn.

What Kind Of Digital Content Must I Produce?

Your choice of content relies on the demands of your audience at various points in the buying process. You should begin by developing buyer personas to understand the objectives and difficulties of your audience in connection to your company. Your web material should fundamentally work toward assisting people in achieving these objectives and overcoming obstacles.

In light of the stage they are in their buyer’s journey, you then need to consider when they are most likely to be prepared to ingest this material. It’s referred to as content mapping.

The objective of content mapping is to target material based on:

1. Attributes of the individual who will consume it. The buyer personas can help with that.
2. Their life cycle stage is determined by how close they are to completing a purchase.

There are many various things you may do when it comes to the format of your material. We advise utilizing the following choices at each stage of the buying process:

Alertness Level

• Blog posts: When combined with a solid SEO and keyword plan, they are excellent for growing your organic traffic.
• Infographics: Very shareable, which means they raise the likelihood that others will find you when they share your material on social media.
• Brief videos: Again, by placing them on websites like YouTube, you can help your company get discovered by new audiences and increase brand awareness.

Analysis Level

• Ebooks: They’re great for lead creation since people are more inclined to trade contact information to get them because they’re often more thorough than a blog article or infographic.
• Reports on research: Once more, this is a piece of high-quality content that is excellent for generating leads. However, because they are frequently covered by the media or industry press, research studies and new statistics for your sector can also be useful for raising awareness.
• Webinars: In addition to providing more in-depth information than a blog post or a brief video, webinars are a useful format for the material throughout the consideration stage.

Selection Level

• Case analyses: For individuals that are prepared to make a purchase decision, having thorough case studies on your website may be an effective sort of content since it enables you to favorably influence their choice.
• Testimonials: Short testimonials scattered throughout your website are a wonderful substitute for case studies if they aren’t a suitable match for your company. Consider testimonials with a bit more leniency for B2C businesses. If you are a clothing company, these may be images of other people wearing your shirt or outfit, taken from a branded hashtag where users can participate.

How to Implement Online Digital Marketing

1. Specify your objectives.
2. Decide who your target market is.
3. Set a spending cap for each digital channel.
4. Balance your use of paid and free digital methods.
5. Make interesting material.
6. Make your digital assets mobile-friendly.
7. Carry out a keyword search.
8. Adapt according to the analytics you collect.

1. Specify your objectives

Since your approach will be different depending on your goals when you first start out with digital marketing, it’s crucial to establish and define your goals first. For instance, you might want to focus more on reaching out to new audiences via social media if your objective is to raise brand recognition.

If, on the other hand, you want to boost sales of a certain product, it’s more crucial that you concentrate on SEO and content optimization to attract visitors to your website in the first place.

Whatever the case, after you’ve identified your company’s primary objectives, developing a digital marketing plan will be the simplest.

2. Decide who your target market is

One of the major advantages of digital marketing is the chance to target certain audiences. However, you can’t make use of that advantage if you haven’t first determined who your target audience is.

It’s vital to keep in mind that your target audience may change based on the distribution method or goal(s) you choose for a certain product or campaign.

For example, perhaps you’ve seen that the majority of your Instagram followers are younger and love hilarious memes and short videos, whilst your LinkedIn followers are often older professionals seeking more practical advice. To appeal to these various target audiences, you need to alter your material.

3. Set a spending cap for each digital channel

The budget you choose truly relies on the specific aspects of digital marketing you want to incorporate into your plan, as with anything else.

The good news is that you don’t need much of a budget at all if you’re concentrating on inbound strategies for an already-existing website, such as SEO, social networking, and content production. The basic goal of inbound marketing is to attract customers by producing high-quality content that they want to read. Unless you want to hire someone else to do the task, the only investment you’ll really want is time.

There is obviously some cost associated with outbound strategies like web advertising and acquiring email lists. What it costs ultimately depends on the level of visibility you hope to get through the advertisement.

For instance, if you use Google AdWords to execute PPC, you’ll compete against other businesses in your sector to show up at the top of Google’s search results for terms related to your company. This might be either reasonable or incredibly expensive depending on how competitive the term is, so it makes sense to concentrate on increasing your organic reach as well.

4. Balance your use of paid and free digital methods

To be genuinely effective, a digital marketing campaign probably needs both paid and unpaid components.

For instance, if you invest time in creating thorough buyer personas to pinpoint your audience’s needs and you concentrate on producing high-quality online content to draw them in and convert them, you’re likely to see significant results during the first six months having spent little on advertising.

The results, though, can come much quicker if sponsored advertising is a component of your digital plan.

For further long-term, sustainable success, it is ultimately advised to concentrate on increasing your organic or free reach through content, SEO, and social media.

Whenever in confusion, try both. As you discover which sponsored and free channels work best for your business, refine your technique.

5. Make interesting material

It’s time to start producing content for the different channels you’ll be using once you’ve determined your target demographic and your spending limit. This material may take the form of updates on social media, blog articles, PPC advertisements, sponsored content, email newsletters, and more.

Since the goal of marketing content is to boost lead generation and raise brand recognition, it goes without saying that any material you produce should be intriguing too and engaging for your target audience.

6. Make your digital assets mobile-friendly

Mobile marketing is another essential element of digital marketing. In fact, 69% of all digital media consumption in the U.S. occurs on smartphones, compared to less than 50% on desktops. However, the U.S. is still not the greatest supporter of mobile compared to other nations.

This means it’s crucial to optimize all of your digital content for mobile, including your adverts, websites, social media photos, and other digital assets. Your company’s mobile app, whether it allows people to interact with your business or shop for your items, also falls under the category of digital marketing.

Mobile users should enjoy the same good online interaction with your business that desktop users do. Making surfing on mobile devices user-friendly entails developing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design. Making it easier for individuals to download your material while they are on the move, it can also mean shortening your lead-generating forms. When generating social media photographs, it’s crucial to keep in mind that mobile users will be viewing them because the size of the images on their devices is smaller, and content may be obscured.

There are several ways to optimize your digital marketing materials for mobile consumers, and it’s crucial to take mobile compatibility into account when adopting any digital marketing plan. By keeping this at the forefront of your mind, you’ll design digital experiences that resonate with your audience and ultimately provide the outcomes you want.

7. Carry out a keyword search

Without thorough keyword research, it would be impossible to reach specific audiences with customized content in the world of digital marketing.

For your website and content to be SEO-optimized and to guarantee that customers can find your company on search engines, keyword research is essential. Furthermore, social media keyword research may be useful for promoting your goods or services on different social media platforms.

Even without a full-time SEO expert, you should still perform keyword research. Make a list of effective keywords related to your goods or services and take into account long-tail variations for more prospects.

8. Adapt according to the analytics you collect

Finally, it’s critical that your team understand how to pivot based on data if you want to develop a successful digital marketing plan for the long run.

For instance, you can discover after a few months that your audience is still engaged in your material on Twitter but less so on Instagram. Yes, this might be a chance to review your whole Instagram approach, but it could also indicate that your audience prefers to get branded material through a different channel.

Alternately, you can discover that an older web page isn’t receiving as much traffic as it formerly did. If you want to make sure that visitors are accessing the most recent, pertinent information for their requirements, you can think about upgrading the page or completely removing it.

I’m All Set To Test Out Digital Marketing. What’s Next?

You are probably already reaching part of your audience online if you are currently using digital marketing. But there are undoubtedly certain aspects of your plan that may be made a bit better.

To help you develop a digital marketing plan that is actually effective, whether you are an absolute novice or have some expertise, we have produced a step-by-step guide.

Let’s move on to some digital marketing examples that are most likely to motivate you.