What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, in its broadest sense, describes the distribution of advertising via online platforms like search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Digital marketing is the process by which businesses promote their products, services, and brands using these online media channels.  When researching products, consumers frequently turn to digital channels. According to research from Think with Google marketing insights, 48% of consumers begin their searches on search engines, 33% go to brand websites, and 26% use mobile applications to conduct their searches.

Online advertising is much more complicated than just the channels, even though modern digital marketing is a vast system of channels that marketers simply must integrate their brands into. Marketers must delve deeply into today’s vast and complex cross-channel world to find engagement marketing strategies in order to realize the full potential of digital marketing. Based on the data you gather over time, engagement marketing is a strategy for creating meaningful interactions with prospective and repeat customers. By interacting with customers online, you can increase brand recognition, establish yourself as a thought leader in your field, and position your company at the top of the list when a customer is ready to make a purchase.

Employing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy paves the way for new customer engagement strategies while providing marketers with insightful data on target audience behavior. Companies can also anticipate an improvement in retention. Companies with effective omnichannel customer engagement strategies typically retain 89% of their customers, compared to businesses with subpar omnichannel initiatives, which have a retention rate of just 33%. 

As for the future of digital marketing, we can anticipate a steady rise in the number of wearable gadgets that consumers have access to. According to Forbes, video content will be improved for search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing will become even more personalized. Social media will also become more conversational in the B2B space.

Digital marketing elements

Customers interact with a vast network of digital touchpoints throughout the course of a typical day. You must comprehend each of these channels in order to use them effectively.

• Paid searches: The sponsored result at the top or side of a search engine results page (SERP) is typically referred to as paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. These advertisements cost you for each click and can be customized to show up when specific search terms are entered, allowing you to target audiences who are actively looking for specific things. These advertisements, which use data from people’s online activities to deliver relevant ads to the right people at the right time, can be very powerful at increasing website traffic. These advertisements also use retargeting, which enables marketing automation tools to create specific, tailored cross-platform advertisements in response to the actions of the customers.

• SEO, or search engine optimization. In order for your pages to rank at the top of a search engine result for a particular set of keyword terms, you must optimize the content, technical setup, and reach of your website. When users behave in a way that suggests they’re looking for relevant products, SEO can direct them to your website, which can be a game-changer given that 90% of searchers haven’t formed an opinion about a brand yet (Status Labs, 2018). When users behave in a way that suggests they’re looking for relevant products, SEO can direct them to your website, which can be a game-changer given that 90% of searchers haven’t formed an opinion about a brand yet (Status Labs, 2018). While PPC and retargeting have their uses, search engine optimization (SEO) has a much greater impact on search rankings and, consequently, organic site traffic. You can use SEO to significantly increase visibility and start a long-lasting customer relationship by using keywords and phrases. By utilizing well-known keywords and phrases, SEO is the process of raising a website’s position in online search results and, consequently, its organic site traffic. Since visibility is the first step to establishing a long-term customer relationship, effective SEO strategies have a significant impact on digital marketing campaigns.  

• Content Marketing: Effective content marketing serves to inform and inspire customers who are looking for information rather than being overtly promotional in nature. It can help establish you as a thought leader and a reliable source of information when you provide content that is relevant to your audience. This reduces the likelihood that your other marketing initiatives will get lost in the noise. Content marketing generates three times as many leads as paid search advertising in the era of the self-directed consumer, making the extra work well worth it.

• Social media marketing. Having active social media accounts is only one aspect of successful social media marketing. To maximize the opportunities for peer-to-peer sharing, you must also incorporate social components into every facet of your marketing strategies. The more engaged your audience is with your content, the more likely it is that they will share it and possibly influence their friends to become customers as well.

• Email marketing. Email is still the quickest and most effective way to contact customers with urgent information after more than two decades. To avoid being buried in your customers’ inbox, successful email campaigns must be incredibly engaging, relevant, educational, and entertaining. Your marketing emails must meet five essential criteria in order to be successful. They must be reliable, pertinent, conversational, channel-agnostic, and strategic.   

• Mobile marketing. We keep our mobile devices in our pockets, leave them next to our beds, and check them frequently throughout the day. Two-thirds of consumers can recall a specific brand they have seen advertised on mobile in the most recent week, which makes mobile marketing extremely important. However, due to its intimate nature, mobile marketing is also very nuanced. You can reach your customers via SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing, but you should also think about coordinating your marketing efforts across all of your other digital marketing channels.

•  Marketing automation. The platform that connects all of your digital marketing is marketing automation. In fact, businesses that automate lead management see an increase in revenue of 10% or more within the first six to nine months. Without it, your campaigns will resemble a puzzle with a critical piece missing. The use of marketing automation software can help you increase revenue more quickly by streamlining and automating marketing tasks and workflow, measuring results, and calculating the return on investment (ROI) of your digital campaigns. Marketing automation will give you metrics so you can demonstrate the impact of digital marketing on your company’s bottom line and give you useful insight into which programs are effective and which are not.