Digital marketing (sometimes referred to as online or internet marketing) is a way for your business to employ internet-based tactics such as search engine optimization, email, social media channels, web sites, and much more to promote and sell your business’ product or service over interconnected electronic devices.
Digital marketing allows you to take advantage of this interconnected digital network to put your business’ unique selling proposition in front of millions of potential customers, very efficiently, over most any laptop, tablet, or smartphone. But more importantly, digital marketing allows you to target your message more specifically to a market segment, geographic area, demographic subgroup, or individual customer.
Digital marketing has the same objectives and employs the same strategies and methods as traditional, offline marketing. You want to build brand awareness, generate leads, foster customer relationships, and grow your business. The key difference is that digital marketing uses technology to achieve those goals. And just like traditional marketing, you need a strategy, a plan, and to be consistent and cohesive in your approach to level up your digital marketing power.
How Can Digital Marketing Work for My Business?
Digital marketing uses a variety of digitally connected means to push your message to both existing and potential customers. Your message might be a graphic image, a piece of content, a video, and distributed in many places online. Digital marketing could be as simple as the social media feed for your business. It could be as complicated as a fully-integrated marketing system with multiple modes at each touchpoint in a customer purchasing journey, including social media channels, email, websites, CRM platforms, paid advertisements, search engine results pages (SERPs), and more.
Which digital marketing methods are right for your business depends entirely on your objectives and how your target consumers use online sources to find products or services like yours. According to recent data, as many as 87% of consumers research their purchases online before making them. It can also depend on what your competitors do online. If they do a better job of answering important consumer questions or present a more credible and cohesive brand or identity, to remain competitive, your business will have to respond.
Ultimately, digital marketing breaks down into understanding the demographics or firmographics of your target market, their purchasing habits, how they use digital mediums in their purchasing journey, and how your business can influence them along the way.
Consider, for example, a local retail business like a bakery. The business owner might use their Instagram feed to highlight their products, photos of delighted customers, or dedicated employees, to entice new customers to stop by. A manufacturing concern may use LinkedIn to highlight their operational processes, demonstrate subject-matter expertise, build brand awareness, and increase credibility within their target market.
Does My Business Need Digital Marketing?
The quick answer is, yes, it does. As more and more consumers look online first to meet their purchasing needs, including business-to-business consumers, digital marketing will only grow in importance to businesses of all types, not just big brands.
In the past, marketing your business online was something small to medium sized businesses (SMEs) could ignore in favor of traditional marketing methods and more personal selling strategies.
However, as consumer and business purchasing habits have become more sophisticated, buyers are much more likely to “go online” to research their purchases before committing to buy. For retailers, your customers are possibly online, researching a product you carry while they’re standing in your store (showrooming)!
Generally, all businesses should be considering digital marketing as the most efficient and accountable method to attract, engage, and retain new customers. If your business isn’t online, you can rest assured your competitor is.
Types of Digital Marketing.
There are nearly as many types of digital marketing as there are ways of finding information online. However, several methods and a cohesive approach tend to see success for businesses.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) And Search engine Marketing (SEM).
Digital marketing includes search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEO is the process of fine-tuning the text on your business website to rank higher in search engine result listings when your customers enter search terms that are relevant to your business. Optimizing your website to perform better in search results is a low-cost alternative to SEM or paid search but should be handled by a professional to maximize results. A website that ranks highly and produces a large volume of relevant, organic (unpaid) traffic can be a boon to lead generation and conversion for your business.
SEM is a paid search marketing strategy. Search engines such as Google and Bing charge a “pay-per-click” fee to display your ad, typically at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when a user conducts a search using one of your targeted keywords. Paid search, or SEM, is essentially a way to buy your way into critical customer searches while your business builds organic, unpaid search results.
SEM metrics and KPIs can provide excellent feedback on the effectiveness of your advertising. For example, a metric called the click-through rate (CTR) indicates the number of times your ad has been clicked relative to the number of times the page containing the ad has been seen. It reveals how appealing people find your ad to be. The more enticing and attractive your ad is, the more likely they are to click through to your website.
Digital Display Advertising.
There are many types of online advertising opportunities available, including paid display and remarketing ads. Display ads are paid banner ads embedded into web pages related to your business or relevant to your customer. Display ads are a way for your business’ message to appear on the websites your customers are already visiting, increasing the likelihood they are seen.
Remarketing ads are those ads that follow consumers around for a time after they have visited your site but did not fill out a form or in some way contact your business. Remarketing is an excellent method to “nudge” and recapture those potentially lost customer conversions and turn them into leads or sales. Other options include interstitials, which are ads that appear before or between pieces of content. Different social media providers, such as Facebook, also sell advertising on their platforms.
Outbound Email.
You can use email to deliver highly targeted business updates, newsletters, product promotions, or customized service offerings to meet specific customers’ needs. Email is also a critical element of customer relationship marketing (CRM) platforms designed to engage, nurture, and inform existing and potential customers who have “opted in” to your mailings.
Once you have built a subscriber list of people interested in your products or services, email marketing is an effective way to reach them because your message arrives in their email inbox, where they are likely to see it.
Social Media Marketing.
Social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok all present opportunities to engage with your customers online in a format with which they already participate. In other words, you’re placing your business message where your customers already hang out, en masse. The key is to understand the social media platform, listen to what users want, and why visitors are there. Don’t be too promotional, but instead be conversational, relevant, and engaging. Social media marketing works best when part of an overall content marketing strategy, emphasizing the quality and usefulness of the content you create for your brand.
Blog Posts And Content Marketing.
Your blog is a vital method for delivering content that can influence your organic ranking and position on search engine results pages (SERPs) shown by Google or Bing. Your blog content can provide answers to the fundamental questions your customers are asking through their online searches. Search engine algorithms take notice and reward your content with higher rankings if it answers consumer questions more fully or effectively.
When blog content is written to answer key questions your consumers have in their language, it becomes more than a way to converse with your customers and keep them informed about your business offerings. It becomes a strategic tool to dramatically increase your digital marketing metrics such as SERP rankings, impressions, and click-through rate.
Beyond the hard marketing metrics, a well-written, thought-provoking blog that considers fundamental SEO best practices can deliver the “soft” metrics like brand awareness, demonstrated thought leadership, and subject-matter expertise. All of which contribute to your business’ or brand’s credibility and can significantly influence consumer behavior.
Summing It All Up.
Digital marketing is the strategic use of the online tools and platforms, your customer’s purchasing behavior, and interconnected mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop devices to promote your business.
Digital marketing can encompass many different strategies and methods of reaching customers, including websites, social media, email, content marketing, search engine optimization, and more.
To help make sense of all the digital marketing tools available and tailor them to suit your business objectives, target market, and budget, contact us at connect@methoddigitalmarketing.com. We can put together a digital marketing strategy and plan to optimize your digital marketing efforts and maximize your results.
