What is Digital Marketing?

People spend more time online now than ever, and as the time we spend online continues growing, investing in digital marketing becomes more effective and valuable.

So, what is digital marketing?

Simply put – digital marketing is using any sort of digital medium to find your audience and present your product. The list of channels is long, and there’s a high chance you’re using digital marketing already. Here are a few of them:

• Search engines
• Social media
• Email
• Websites
• Phone apps

Marketing has to go to where the audience is, and today, more audiences are plugged into their phones and computers than ever before. In fact, most customers expect and connect with digital marketing rather than older mediums. As such, it’s strange for a brand not to have at least a website. Nearly every big name has a presence on social media. The simple fact is that having a digital ad strategy has become essential for brand awareness.

So, if you want to be competitive, then you need to embrace digital marketing.

There’s so much that digital marketing can do that traditional marketing can’t! Compared to old-school methods, digital marketing offers much more opportunities to reach potential and existing clients.

With digital marketing, your ad strategy is

• Not bound by physical space
• Can target your ads to a specific audience
• More cost-effective than old-school marketing
• Easy to measure

To many, the way you can track the progress of an ad strategy is a huge plus. With digital marketing, you gain the ability to measure your success and progress in real-time. And as a result, you quickly know what isn’t working, and you can change course to something more effective without wasting too much time.

As much as digital marketing can do for you, there are some caveats.

In digital marketing, you have to fight harder for your customers’ attention. Generally, messages need to be shorter and more eye-catching than old-school ad campaigns.

This can be a challenge if you have a product that people are unfamiliar with or a product that needs explanation.

Mediums for Digital Marketing

Of course, as digital marketing becomes more mainstream, the number of mediums you can use keeps growing. Here’s a short list of tools you can use.

• Websites
• Online Ads
• Content Marketing
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Non-linear marketing
• Organic traffic optimization

The list of tools available is long, and it doesn’t end there! So let’s look at how some of these can boost your digital marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is the creation of content meant to show off your product. One of the most common forms of this is having a website. These days, having a website for your product or enterprise is an expectation rather than a suggestion.

Of course, websites aren’t the only content you can create. A lot of businesses have regularly updated blogs. This has the advantage of keeping audiences engaged with something new and touching on relevant topics.

While creating content is simple enough, the real trick is getting people to see what you’ve made.

Organic Traffic Optimization

This is also known as SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is something you should always be doing. The end goal is to have your website organically rank higher in online searches. This helps people come to you rather than being directed there by ads or another website. 

There are also plenty of mediums that put your businesses directly right in front of the client. Probably the oldest of these is email marketing. The premise is quite basic. You tailor and advertise email and send it to potential or pre-existing clients.

Digital ad campaigns are becoming more common, though you have a range of options like Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

Tools for Digital Marketing

Now that you know some of the major mediums for digital marketing, it’s time to talk about the tools you’ll need to make it better. This is the part where we move into analytics and digital research tools.

Together, these allow you to research your target market and measure the effectiveness of your marketing. Tools like analytics dashboards can help you monitor the reach, effectiveness, and ROI of your strategy. 

Of course, when we talk about marketing analytics, there are several different key performance indicators (KPI) to use.

For example, if you want to focus on your website, you can look more at the organic traffic (via search engines), ad traffic, or affiliate traffic. Anyone you focus on is all part of your digital marketing strategy.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

In a few words, your digital marketing strategy is how you choose digital channels to market your product. And with so many tools and mediums to use, you have many options and so much flexibility to experiment with different marketing strategies. So, where do you start? First, you should think about your:

• Goals
• Target audience
• Product
• Budget

Always establish your goals beforehand!

This may seem like common sense, but the return on advertising and marketing is often less obvious or tangible immediately. That’s why it’s essential to set clear goals and establish ways to measure them. This means deciding on and deafening your metrics for who you want to reach and how many.

The strategy you use will be hugely different if you want to reach out to new customers and increase brand awareness or advertise a specific product. So, only when you know your goals should you start planning a marketing strategy to meet them. 

Identify the audience you’re targeting. For example, customers have different needs and expectations for B2B and B2C. Your marketing strategy should be tailored for your audience.

After that, make a digital marketing strategy that fits your budget.

If you work more on inbound marketing, then a smaller budget is just fine. If you’re looking to work more with ads, then you’ll need to invest more.

The essential thing to decide is the channels your take to market your product. You can decide to use multiple mediums or put everything into one channel.

And remember. Just because you’re building a digital marketing strategy doesn’t mean that you can’t combine it with traditional methods!