You may have seen the term “digital marketing” before, especially if you are involved in any business. But what is Digital Marketing? It is a growing industry. Digital Marketing is essentially the promotion of products or brands using any electronic device or the internet. This online promotion includes many things such as display ads, online videos, search engine marketing, social media posts, social media ads and much more.
It also utilises different forms of communications such as email, web-based advertising and even text and multimedia messages. If any digital communication occurs, then it is regarded as Digital Marketing.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Digital Marketing has been a growing industry in recent years and even more so during the ongoing covid pandemic. Many businesses had to transition to set up online shops to keep their business going, which was new. People may have told them to invest in digital marketing but their response would be, what is digital marketing? Small businesses may not have heard of it and rely on traditional marketing only. Many learned and adapted. They would need to implement a digital marketing strategy to help increase their sales online and boost their visibility.
Everyone is online now. Google and all the social media platforms have valuable info to help you target your ideal customers. Digital Marketing enables you to reach a larger audience than you could through traditional marketing methods. You can measure and track your results daily, and if needed, you change elements if they’re not working. Making daily changes on a campaign was not possible with traditional marketing.
As you can tell, there are many benefits to digital marketing, and we will explain a couple of them in more detail now.
1. It’s cost-effective.
When running a digital marketing campaign, you can track results daily, and if you’re spending too much on paid ads that day, you can decrease it if it isn’t returning a high ROI (Return On Investment). This can’t be done for traditional marketing. You can’t track how well a billboard is doing even if it has helped your business.
With digital marketing, you have complete control over where to spend your money. You can choose to put money into PPC or put money into creating high-quality social media content that converts users to buyers.
2. You can target specific customers to purchase your product or service.
With traditional marketing, you can place an advertisement on TV or in a newspaper, but you have no control over who sees the ad. You can, of course, measure demographics such as it is mainly males who will watch the Sky Sports Premier League Channel and mostly women watching the channel E!. But even then, it’s a large group who will not have the same buying habits.
Digital Marketing allows you to identify and target a very specific audience to try and convert them into a buyer.
You can use Instagram’s Ad feature to show a particular ad you have created to a specific audience based on several variables such as age, location, gender, behaviours or interests. You may also use a PPC strategy to utilise search ads to advertise to users who have searched for a specific keyword related to your product or service.
Types of Digital Marketing
Within Digital Marketing, there are several ways to interact using digital media. The following are a few examples.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation, known as SEO, is more of a marketing tool than a type of marketing. SEO requires you to research and look into contributing factors to achieve the highest possible ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). There are many elements you need to consider and optimise on your website to improve your SEO, such as:
- The number of inbound links and their quality
- Mobile-Friendliness
- Quality of your content
- User engagement
- Keywords
- Images and videos
Content Marketing
SEO is a significant contributor to content marketing. Content marketing is the strategy of creating valuable content for a target audience. To do this, you may use a tool such as Semrush to see the search volume around a particular topic.
The goal of content marketing, like other strategies, is to attract leads and convert users to buyers. Consumers expect companies to produce informative and entertaining content.
If you follow a sports team, you expect to see interviews with the manager, players and some behind the scenes clips. You will see that every team is doing this on social media, which helps them grow. Sports fans love hearing from their team and seeing them chat to an interviewer. It gives them a different perspective on the team. You can take this into whatever industry you’re in.
For example, a new Netflix series may release, and you will see tons of interviews, articles and behind the scenes clips online. There will be a lot of content created around the show. They have developed a content marketing strategy to get their TV series in front of their target audience. It has probably even worked on you already.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the creation of content to promote your business and products to several social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You should tailor your content to the specific platforms as each is used differently. The use of social media marketing helps boost conversions and brand awareness.
On social media, it is all about meeting your target audience. By connecting with your customers online, you build a relationship with them. This can be as simple as replying to their comment or sharing their post on your story.
You can also create giveaways that you can share with thousands in minutes, which can help with your brand awareness.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Pay-per-click or PPC is the act of posting an ad online and paying every time someone clicks on it.
We have all seen these ads online. You may search for “Nike trainers” in Google, and the top 2 or 3 results may be ads. If you click on them, those companies may have to pay out for your click if that is the bidding option they used.
The search engine results page, SERP, fills the top spots with an auction. You may appear above a competitor if you are willing to pay more per click. The algorithm may prioritise each ad based on several factors, such as:
- Bidding amount
- Ad Quality
- Keyword Relevance
- Landing page quality. This is how good the quality of content on the page someone lands on after they click on an ad.
Affiliate Marketing
Larger businesses mainly use affiliate marketing. Influencers use affiliate marketing. Brands may pay an influencer and offer them a cut of each sale to promote a product or service and give a 10% discount to their customers using their discount code. You will often see this on Instagram for sites like ASOS or BOOHOO.
There are also ways for anybody to use affiliate marketing. If you run a blog or have a decent following on social media, you can sign up for affiliate platforms such as Amazon Associates Program. Here you can promote Amazon products on your website. You will get a commission for every sale made through your link. It’s a handy way of making money if you are running a tech website, for example.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still an essential part of digital marketing. It essentially involves sending a promotional message to your email list and hoping that they click on it.
The first step is getting people to subscribe to your email list. Getting people on an email list is typically done by giving a discount code or a free guide for signing up. It needs to incentivise the consumer to input their email and hit subscribe. Once you get them on your email list, it’s all about trying to convert them.
The Benefits of Using Digital Marketing
Today, most companies have shifted from traditional marketing to digital marketing as the world is shifting to online business. There are several benefits to using digital marketing for your business. The following are a few examples of the benefits.
Large reach
People can see your ad online no matter where they are unless you have set up your ad geographically. You may have an ad that triggers a keyword for anyone in Ireland. That is a vast reach.
Cost
Digital Marketing carries a low cost. The cost of tv ads or newspaper ads can be high and give you less control.
With digital marketing, you can create a single piece of content that draws visitors to your website as soon as you publish it. You can create an email marketing campaign to deliver specific messages to target customers. It can all be scheduled, too, so you don’t even have to hit send every time.
Digital marketing gives you a lot more freedom and control over spending your money, and you get a much more tailored experience with digital marketing.
So now when you’re asked what is digital marketing? You will have a great understanding of the basics of digital marketing and what it can do for your business.
