Digital marketing is any marketing that uses electronic devices and the marketing specialists can use it to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device.
Digital marketing uses the same principles as traditional offline marketing but in a digital space. It relies on consumer data to find a business’s target audience and deliver the most relevant messaging possible.
Types of digital marketing
Search engine optimization
SEO is the process of optimizing the content, technical setup, and reach of your website so your pages appear at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) for a specific set of keyword terms. With SEO, businesses analyze their website’s performance, score it against competitors, and create a data-backed strategy to improve their rankings over time.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Not to be confused with SEO, SEM revolves around paid ads that display in the SERPs. Paid search typically refers to the sponsored result on the top or side of a SERP. SEM ads appear when users enter a certain search term. As the advertiser, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. The two most popular SEM platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads.
Content marketing
Content Marketing is a type of digital marketing that aims to educate and share value with readers instead of promoting a product or service. It isn’t outwardly promotional or salesy, but establishes your business as a thought leader and a trustworthy source of information.
Social media marketing
You can use social media marketing to drive traffic and highlight your brand, products, services, culture, and more. With billions of people engaging on social media platforms, focusing on social media marketing can be worthwhile. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most popular platforms for social media marketing, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind.
Pay-per-click marketing
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing in which you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your digital ads. So, instead of paying a set amount to constantly run targeted ads on online channels, you only pay for the ads individuals interact with.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing tactic that lets someone make money by promoting another person’s business. It works using a revenue-sharing model. If you’re the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you’re the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale it helps you make.
Native advertising
Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it’s less blatantly obvious that it’s advertising. A native ad does this by offering information or entertainment before it gets to anything promotional.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing relies on working with an individual with a large following, such as a celebrity, industry expert, or content creator — in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your products or services to their followers on several social media channels.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns and improve the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on creating the strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of spending time on complicated processes.
Email marketing
The concept of email marketing is pretty simple. Brands send a promotional message and hope that their prospect clicks on it. But, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. So, it’s important to have 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; has a signature with a clear “Unsubscribe” button; and integrates transactional and promotional emails.
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage with your target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be via SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more.
Why is digital marketing important?
Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. From social media to text messages, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics in order to communicate with your target audience. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.
A digital marketing strategy allows you to leverage different digital channels — such as social media, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and email marketing — to connect with existing customers and individuals interested in your products or services. As a result, you can build a brand, provide a great customer experience, bring in potential customers, and drive brand loyalty.
The benefits of digital marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. But, it also has other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing:
A broad geographic reach
When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are. This makes it easy to grow your business’s market reach and connect with a larger audience across different digital channels.
Cost efficiency
Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also costs less than newspaper ads, television spots, etc. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place. When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend.
Quantifiable results
To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases. When you know what works and what doesn’t, it’s easier to be successful.
Easier personalization
Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can’t. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific. With digital marketing, you have the important information at your fingertips so it’s easier to target the message to the person’s interests.
More connection with customers
Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you. Interactivity benefits the customer as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand’s story, which can create a strong brand loyalty.
Easy and convenient conversions
Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away.
As you can see, digital marketing is an important part of your overall marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help get your message to more people, we can help. As an innovative, full-service agency, Brandon has the insights, capabilities and know-how to help your brand grow. Reach out today and let’s get started on a digital advertising campaign that works for you and your brand.