What is Digital Marketing?
By digital marketing, we mean creating and distributing content across digital media channels such as websites, landing pages, social media, email, and mobile apps. It also includes promoting content through a variety of strategies across paid, established, and proprietary digital channels, including SEO, SEM, pay-per-click (PPC), content syndication, social media, email, text, and more.
The Importance of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing strategies help marketers set goals, identify a target audience, and develop a marketing plan that will reach and engage an audience. These strategies set the direction for a particular campaign or program and serve as a basis for evaluating results.
Digital technologies surround us everywhere, so digital marketing touches almost every aspect of business, having a huge impact on how companies communicate with customers and create profitable offers.
So, in order to compete in a rapidly growing global online market, your company needs a well-thought-out and correctly implemented digital marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing Strategies
Cross-channel marketing , multi-channel marketing, omni-channel marketing – these and other similar terms refer to communication with customers or potential buyers across all digital channels and from any device. With a variety of mobile devices, today’s consumers communicate on the go through their preferred channels (from email to social networks) and expect you to always be connected.
We want to help you build an effective cross-channel marketing strategy, which is why we’ve compiled detailed information on the most popular digital marketing channels below.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the first and most well-known types of digital marketing that provides communication both between companies and between companies and customers . Email marketing requires collecting data about customers at various stages of the journey, learning about the interests and preferences of potential customers, and finally getting permission to add them to your email list(s).
Emails may include information about your products and services, news about your company and upcoming events, personalized offers, customer success stories, links to case studies, technical or business reviews. The content of the letters should be relevant, because only in this way will people open and read them, and not delete them immediately upon receipt. To increase engagement, you can add personalized content and relevant offers .
Email marketing is part art, part science. Emails and digital content need to be really interesting, and you need to choose the right frequency for mailings – not too often, but not too infrequently.
Video marketing
Video is one of the most powerful digital marketing channels. People love to watch entertaining and educational videos and share the videos they like. According to YouTube , more than two billion viewers use the site every month. Effective videos often lead to purchases in both B2B and B2C segments .
Video marketing helps increase metrics such as brand awareness, digital traffic, and conversions. For many years, video in blog posts has been one of the main content marketing tools for both B2B and B2C.
When people share videos they like, more people watch them. That’s why we recommend posting videos on third-party platforms like YouTube and promoting the videos on your website and social media channels, and encouraging people to share your videos.
Videos should be concise and informative. People get distracted quickly, so try to present relevant content in a fun way.
Social media marketing
Social networks are a great way to reach a specific target audience and establish communication with customers, including potential ones, and partners. The social network platform should be chosen based on who you want to reach. Facebook is still the largest social media platform in the world. Twitter is popular with B2B buyers. Instagram and TikTok are incredibly popular with millennials and Gen Z, and LinkedIn is the best place to connect with B2B buyers early in the buying cycle.
Each platform can offer different types of content, but visual content plays a key role in all social networks. Therefore, when creating content, always consider how you will distribute it through social networks, and then make adjustments accordingly.
More platforms may be coming in the future, so marketers need to keep an eye on the social media world and develop digital marketing techniques. For example, TikTok only appeared in September 2016, and these days, this social network has more active users than LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
Text messages (SMS and MMS)
Text messaging is another great way to reach out to customers directly. As with social media, effective messages need to be concise. Marketers can choose between short message service (SMS), which contains only text, or multimedia messages (MMS), which can include videos and gifs.
Content Marketing
Content marketing allows you to personalize communication with potential customers and buyers. The better the content is optimized for the recipient, the more likely it is to attract, intrigue and hold the attention of a person. At the same time, the content should meet the intentions and interests of the target audience and be of some value, which ensures engagement and increases conversions.
The different types of content include: email text, landing pages, infographics, ebooks, product benefit documents, banner ads, videos, text messages, infomercials, newsletters, press releases, articles, blogs, and digital postcards. Content can (and should) be launched through different channels, but all materials must be in the same style and carry a clear message.
SEO and PPC (or SEM)
A good search engine optimization ( SEO ) strategy allows you to plan your website content (landing pages, blogs, etc.) in such a way that it appears in search results more often and higher, driving traffic to your content. For high SEO performance, keywords and page optimization are indispensable. To improve SEO and ensure high traffic and conversion results, you need to add researched and long-tail keywords (3+ word phrases) in all page content. Organically posting links from high-authority third-party pages is another way to boost your page rank and drive potential customers to your content.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising involves paying for each click on a specific link. PPC is supported by search engines and most social networking sites. Such ads will appear in the feeds of your target and potential customers.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a fairly effective form of pay-per-click advertising. It involves paying a search engine to display advertisements (text) and links in a prominent place when visitors search for certain keywords.
Website development and marketing
A website is often the first point of communication between potential customers and your company and brand. Thanks to the excellent web design, users immediately pay attention to the desired digital objects. Also, web design allows you to make the site more visible to search engines, create a convenient user interface and increase the conversion rate (more clicks, registrations, etc.).
Display advertising
Marketers can place relevant ads on third-party sites to reach more potential customers. These ads include banners, sidebars, video ads, and interactive ads that redirect users to a website or landing page.
affiliate marketing
Many bloggers and social media influencers often promote various products and services on their blogs and accounts, so they can be an effective marketing strategy tool. This type of marketing is performance based. Advertising partners receive a commission for promoting certain products. The more visitors and customers such a partner brings, the more he earns.
Advertising
In recent years, the usual advertising tools have changed markedly. Modern technologies make it possible to purposefully purchase ads on new television platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and others. But broadcast television and radio should not be discounted, because despite the growing number of new types of entertainment, people still watch broadcast television and listen to radio.
