Digital Marketing – 10 Types, Importance, Benefits And Other Things You Need To Know About Digital Marketing
Did you know that over 75 per cent of Americans use the Internet daily? Additionally, 26% are online “almost constantly”, and 43% log on more than once per day. When it comes to mobile internet users, these numbers are even higher. 89% of Americans use the internet at least once daily, and 31% use it constantly.
As a marketer, it’s critical to capitalize on the digital sphere with an online advertising presence by developing a brand and offering excellent customer service that attracts more potential customers.
With a digital marketing strategy, you can connect with current clients and potential customers using digital channels like social media, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, and email marketing. As a result, you can create a strong brand, offer excellent customer service, attract new clients, and more.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, or online marketing, promotes brands using the internet and other digital communication channels to reach potential customers.
As a marketing channel, this includes text and multimedia messages, email, social media, and web-based advertising. Digital marketing is essentially any marketing campaign that uses digital communication.
In actuality, digital marketing refers to advertising campaigns on a computer, phone, tablet, or another electronic device. It can appear in various ways, such as social media posts, paid social ads, display ads, online videos, and search engine marketing.
Digital marketing is frequently contrasted with “traditional marketing,” which includes billboards, magazine ads, and direct mail. Surprisingly, television is frequently grouped with traditional marketing.
Inbound Marketing Versus Digital Marketing
Inbound and digital marketing frequently get mixed up, and for good reason. Email and online content are just a couple of the many tools used in digital and inbound marketing. Both exist to draw potential customers’ attention throughout the buyer’s journey and convert them into customers.
The relationship between the tool and the goal, however, is viewed differently in the 2 approaches. Digital marketing takes into account the ability of specific tools or digital channels to convert prospects. The digital marketing strategy of a company may utilize several platforms or concentrate all of its efforts on a single platform.
For instance, a business might ignore other digital marketing channels to produce content primarily for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns. In contrast, inbound marketing is a comprehensive idea. The goal is taken into account first, and then the available tools are examined to see which will best reach target customers and at what stage of the sales funnel should occur.
Consider the scenario where you want to increase website traffic to produce more leads and prospects. When creating your content marketing strategy, you can concentrate on search engine optimization, which will produce more optimized content, including blogs, landing pages, and more.
The most crucial thing to remember about inbound and digital marketing is that, as a marketing professional, you don’t have to pick one over the other. They actually function best together. Inbound marketing gives digital marketing initiatives structure and direction, ensuring that each digital marketing channel serves a specific purpose.
Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
Your business can succeed with any marketing. However, due to the accessibility of digital channels, digital marketing has grown in importance. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users just in April 2022.
There are numerous ways to communicate with your target audience using digital marketing strategies, from social media to text messages. A cost-effective marketing strategy for small businesses, digital marketing also has low upfront costs.
B2B Versus B2C Digital Marketing
Digital marketing strategies work for B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) companies, but best practices differ significantly between the 2. Here’s a closer look at how digital marketing is used in B2B and B2C marketing strategies.
- B2B clients tend to have longer decision-making processes and, thus, longer sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for these clients, whereas B2C customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages.
- B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, which is what skilled B2B digital marketers present. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.
- B2B decisions tend to need more than 1 person’s input. The marketing materials that best drive these decisions tend to be shareable and downloadable. B2C customers, on the other hand, favour one-on-one connections with a brand.
Of course, every rule has exceptions. A B2C company selling expensive items like cars or computers might provide more serious and educational content. As a result, whether you’re in the B2B or B2C space, your digital marketing strategy must always be focused on your own clientele.
For informed and focused online marketing campaigns, consider your current audience. By doing this, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are successful and that you can draw in potential customers.
Types Of Digital Marketing
There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. Here are a few key examples of types of digital marketing tactics.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Technically speaking, search engine optimization, or SEO, is a tool for marketing rather than a type of marketing in and of itself. It is “the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines,” according to The Balance. What matters most in SEO is the “art and science” component. Because you must conduct research and weigh various contributing factors to achieve the highest ranking on a search engine results page, SEO is a science (SERP).
Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines include the following:
- Quality of content
- Level of user engagement
- Mobile-friendliness
- Number and quality of inbound links
Search engine optimization involves optimizing technical SEO, which includes URL structure, loading times, and broken links. The goal is to rank on the first page of a search engine’s result page, and digital marketers often focus on Google.
There is no quantifiable rubric or consistent rule for ranking highly, so it is important to closely monitor your page’s performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.
2. Content Marketing
As mentioned, a crucial element of an optimized page is the calibre of your content. Because of this, SEO plays a significant role in content marketing, a strategy based on providing target audiences with useful and relevant content.
The objective of content marketing, as with any marketing strategy, is to draw leads who will eventually become customers. But it does so in a unique way from conventional advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with the potential value from a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material, such as:
- Blog posts
- E-books
- Newsletters
- Video or audio transcripts
- Whitepapers
- Infographics
Content marketing matters, and there are plenty of stats to prove it:
- 84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful content experiences
- 62% of companies that have at least 5,000 employees produce content daily
- 92% of marketers believe that their company values content as an important asset
Content marketing writers need to rank highly in search engine results while engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand.
To create effective content, identify your audience and determine the type of content you’ll create. Follow content marketing best practices such as grammatically correct, error-free, easy-to-understand, relevant, and interesting.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a popular way to drive traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussions online. The most popular digital platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind.
It is the most popular content medium for B2C digital marketers at 96%, and it is also gaining ground in the B2B sphere. Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which can help you understand how well you’re reaching your audience.
Direct purchase may not be a goal of your social media marketing strategy, as brands use it to start dialogues with audiences rather than encourage them to spend money right away. It all depends on your company’s social media marketing goals.
To create an effective social media marketing strategy, it’s crucial to follow best practices. Here are a few of the most important social media marketing best practices:
- Craft high-quality and engaging content
- Reply to comments and questions in a professional manner
- Create a social media posting schedule
- Post at the right time
- Hire social media managers to support your marketing efforts
- Know your audience and which social media channels they’re most active on
To learn more about how Mailchimp can help with your social media strategy, compare our free social media management tools to others.
4. Pay-per-click Marketing
PPC, or pay-per-click, is a type of online advertising in which you are charged a fee each time a user clicks on one of your advertisements. As a result, you only pay for the ads that people actually interact with rather than a fixed amount to run targeted ads on online channels continuously.
It is more difficult to control how and when people see your advertisement. Search engine advertising is among the most popular PPC strategies, and since Google is the most widely used search engine, many companies use Google Ads for this purpose.
The search engine uses an instant auction-style process to fill a spot when one becomes available on a SERP or search engine results page. An algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on several factors, including:
- Ad Quality
- Keyword relevance
- Landing page quality
- Bid Amount
When someone searches for a particular term, PPC ads are then positioned at the top of search engine result pages based on the aforementioned factors. After clicking an ad, viewers are expected to carry out 1 or more target actions that are part of every PPC campaign. These processes, which are called conversions, can be transactional or non-transactional.
A conversion can be anything from signing up for a newsletter to calling your home office. You can monitor your campaign’s performance by tracking your target conversions through your selected digital marketing channels.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Using the digital marketing strategy known as affiliate marketing, one can profit from promoting another person’s company. The procedure is the same whether you are the promoter or the company that collaborates with the promoter. It operates based on revenue sharing.
If you are the affiliate, you will receive a commission for each sale of your promoted product. If you are the merchant, you must pay the affiliate for each sale you make, thanks to their efforts. Some affiliate marketers opt to review just one company’s products, possibly on a blog or another external website. Others have connections with numerous retailers.
The first step is establishing contact with the other party, whether you want to be an affiliate or find one. You can start or join a single-retailer program or use digital channels to link affiliates with retailers. You can do many things as a retailer to make your program appealing to potential promoters if you decide to work directly with affiliates.
You must give those affiliates the resources they require to succeed. Along with marketing resources and ready-made materials, this also includes rewards for outstanding performance.
6. Native Advertising
Digital marketing under the guise of native advertising. It aims to blend in with the surrounding content to make itself less identifiable as advertising. Due to the cynicism of today’s consumers toward advertisements, native advertising was developed. Many consumers will assume that an advertisement is biased after learning that the person who created it paid for it to be run, leading them to ignore it.
This bias is overcome by native advertising, which downplays the “ad” element by providing useful or entertaining content. It’s crucial to label all of your native advertisements clearly. Say things like “sponsored” or “promoted.”
Readers may engage with the content for a long time before realizing it is advertising if those clues are hidden. They will have a better opinion of your content and brand when your customers clearly understand what they are getting. Native ads are not intended to be misleading, but they are intended to be less intrusive than traditional ads.
7. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is similar to affiliate marketing in that it involves partnering with an influencer—someone with a significant following, such as a celebrity, subject-matter authority, or content creator—in exchange for exposure.
These influencers frequently recommend your goods or services to their followers on various social media platforms. Influencer marketing is effective for B2B and B2C businesses looking to expand their customer bases.
The fact that they essentially represent your brand makes it crucial to work with trustworthy influencers. The wrong influencer can damage consumers’ trust in your company.
8. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation boosts the effectiveness and relevance of advertising by using software to power digital marketing campaigns. As a result, rather than spending time and effort on laborious processes, you can concentrate on developing the strategy for your digital marketing initiatives. Marketing automation can significantly increase the level of engagement between you and your audience, even though it might seem like a luxury tool that your business can do without.
According to statistics:
- 90% of US consumers find personalization either “very” or “somewhat” appealing
- 81% of consumers would like the brands they engage with to understand them better
- 77% of companies believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60% struggle with it
Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:
- Collect and analyze consumer information
- Design targeted marketing campaigns
- Send and post-digital marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences
Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This real-time customisation level means you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience via behaviour-based automation, transactional emails, and date-based automation.
9. Email Marketing
The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope your prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following:
- Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
- States clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will get
- An email signature that offers a clear unsubscribe option
- Integrates both transactional and promotional emails
You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.
Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.
It can be even better if you incorporate other digital marketing techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer’s needs more effectively.
If you’re considering email marketing, here are a few tips that can help you craft great email marketing campaigns:
- Segment your audience to send relevant campaigns to the right people
- Ensure emails look good on mobile devices
- Create a campaign schedule
- Run A/B tests
10. Mobile Marketing
With the help of mobile marketing, you can interact with your target market via their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be done through SMS and MMS messages, notifications from social media, mobile app alerts, and other means.
It is essential to make sure that all content is mobile-friendly. Since 85% of Americans own a smartphone, your marketing efforts can be greatly enhanced by producing content for both computer and mobile screens.
The Benefits Of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers several other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing.
1. A Broad Geographic Reach
When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business’s market reach and connect with a larger audience across different digital channels.
2. Cost Efficiency
Digital marketing offers a broader audience and lower cost than traditional marketing, allowing for more flexibility and customer contact.
3. Quantifiable Results
Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track desired conversions, making determining whether a marketing strategy works easier.
4. Easier Personalization
Digital marketing allows businesses to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can’t, making it easier to target offers to people who have looked at their products.
5. More Connection With Customers
Digital marketing allows businesses to communicate with customers in real time, increasing their level of engagement and creating a sense of loyalty.
6. Easy And Convenient Conversions
Digital marketing allows customers to take action immediately after viewing an ad or content, even if they don’t make a purchase.
