What is Digital Marketing? || Digital Marketing: Definition + Strategies || A Beginner's Guide in 2022

Digital marketing is a type of advertising used to advertise and sell goods and services online. It is the process of using various online marketing channels, such as email, social media networks, and search engines, to connect with your target market.

You may locate people who are interested in your product through digital marketing, communicate with them, and develop brand loyalty.

There are many different forms of digital marketing, but the most significant ones include Affiliate Marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, PPC advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, and video marketing.

Digital marketing is commonly contrasted with "conventional marketing" methods like direct mail, billboards, and magazine advertisements. Amazingly, conventional marketing is sometimes associated with television.

Did you know that more than 34 percent of Americans use the internet every day? Furthermore, 26% of users are online "nearly continuously" and 43% log on more than once every day.

When it comes to mobile internet users, these numbers are considerably greater. 89 percent of Americans use the internet at least once every day, and 31% do so almost continuously. As a marketer, it's necessary to use the digital environment through online advertising, brand building, offering excellent customer service that attracts additional potential consumers, and more.

With the use of a digital marketing plan, you may engage with current clients and potential consumers by using digital channels like social media, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, and email marketing. As a response, you may increase brand recognition, give excellent customer service, attract new clients, and more.

How does Digital Marketing work?

The process of internet marketing is straightforward.

You must first be clear about your digital marketing objectives, or what you hope to accomplish with them. Examples of typical goals include growing brand exposure, boosting sales, and expanding your community.

The next step is to choose the marketing channels that will best assist you to reach your objectives. For example, executing sponsored advertising on Google and Facebook is a fantastic place to start if your objective is to increase sales.

You may prepare a strategy outlining the amount of money you'll spend, your target market, your performance indicators, and other details to assist you to manage the process to make it easier to handle.

This is the main goal of a digital marketing campaign. If this is still unclear to you, don't worry; towards the conclusion of this essay, there is a more thorough example of how to build a successful digital marketing campaign.

You must be familiar with the various marketing channels and how they operate before developing your first digital marketing strategy.

Inbound Marketing Versus Digital Marketing

For good reason, inbound marketing and digital marketing are frequently confused. Only a few of the countless strategies utilized in digital marketing and inbound marketing include email and online content. Both are there to capture potential customers' interest throughout the buying process and turn them into paying clients. The link between the instrument and the aim, however, is seen differently in the 2 approaches.

Digital marketing takes into account the ability of certain technologies or digital platforms 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 example, a business can ignore other digital marketing channels in favor of producing content only for social networking platforms and email marketing campaigns.

In contrast, inbound marketing is a comprehensive idea. The aim is looked at first, and then the tools that are available are examined to see which will best reach target clients and at what stage of the sales process that should occur. Consider the scenario when you want to increase website traffic to produce more leads and prospects. When creating your content marketing plan, you may concentrate on search engine optimization, which will provide more optimized material, including blogs, landing sites, and more.

The most significant thing to keep in mind regarding inbound and digital marketing is that, as a marketing expert, 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?

Any form of marketing may make your company successful. But since digital platforms are so widely available, digital marketing has grown in significance. In reality, just in April 2022, there were 5 billion internet users worldwide.

There are various methods to employ digital marketing strategies to reach your target audience, from social media to SMS messaging. Digital marketing is also a low-cost marketing strategy for small enterprises because of its low upfront expenses.

Types of Digital Marketing

As there are many methods to communicate with digital media, there are also different specialties within digital marketing. Here are a few significant samples of various digital marketing strategies.

1- Search Engine Optimization

Practically speaking, SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is an advertising technique rather than a specific form of promotion. According to The Balance, it is "the art and science of making internet pages attractive to search engines."

What matters most in SEO is the "art and science" component. Because you must do research and balance several contributing criteria in order to attain the maximum rating on a search engine results page, SEO is a science (SERP).

The following are the key factors to take into account today when optimizing a web page for search engines:

• User engagement level and content quality
• Mobile-friendliness
• Inbound connections' quantity and quality

You also need to optimize technical SEO, which refers to all of your site's back-end components, in addition to the factors mentioned above. This covers things like loading times, broken links, and URL structure. Search engines can better crawl and navigate your website by making technical SEO improvements.

Search engine optimization is an art, but it is also a science when these aspects are used strategically.

Ranking on the top page of a search engine's result page is the ultimate objective. This makes it such that those looking for a particular inquiry associated with your brand may quickly locate your goods or services. Although there are various search engines, due to its position as the industry leader globally, digital marketers frequently concentrate on Google.

There is no quantitative formula or established standard in SEO to follow in order to rank well. It's hard to make accurate estimates since the algorithms of Google and other search engines change virtually continuously. What you can do is keep a careful eye on the performance of your page and modify your strategy as necessary.

2- Website Marketing

The foundation of any digital marketing effort is a website. It is a very effective channel on its own, but it also serves as the platform for the majority of other internet marketing initiatives.

Your website ought to give the greatest possible impression of your company, goods, and services. It must be quick, responsive, and simple to use.

Once you have a website, the following stage is to develop a digital marketing plan to market your website and content in an effort to attract more visitors and clients.

3- Content Marketing

As already noted, a vital factor of an optimized page is the value of your content. Because of this, SEO plays a significant role in content marketing, a strategy built on providing target audiences with useful and relevant information.

The objective of content marketing, like any marketing plan, is to draw leads who will eventually become customers. But it does it in a unique way from conventional advertising. Instead of attracting buyers with the promise of value from a product or service, it provides value for nothing in the form of written data, like:

• Blog posts
• E-books
• Newsletters
• Video or audio transcripts
• Whitepapers
• Infographics

Numerous statistics demonstrate the importance of content marketing:

• 84 percent of customers want businesses to create enjoyable and beneficial content experiences.
• 62 percent of Companies with at least 5,000 workers create material every day.
• Marketers believe that their company views content as a useful asset in 92 percent of cases.

Despite how effective content marketing is, there may still be difficulties. Content marketers need writers who can top search engine rankings while also engaging consumers to read, share, and interact with the company. Strong connections may be made throughout the pipeline when the material is appropriate.

Knowing your target is necessary for producing excellent content that is both extremely relevant and interesting. Who is it that your content marketing efforts are ultimately aimed at? You may choose the kind of content you'll produce after you have a deeper understanding of your audience. In your content marketing, you may utilize a variety of content types, such as videos, blog posts, downloadable worksheets, and more.

No matter what kind of material you produce, it's a good idea to adhere to best practices for content marketing. This entails creating information that is grammatically accurate, error-free, simple to grasp, pertinent, and engaging. If a free consultation with a salesperson or a registration page is the next step in the pipeline, your material should direct visitors there.

4- Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the practice of increasing website traffic and brand recognition via online interaction. You may promote your business, goods, services, culture, and more via social media marketing. Concentrating on social media marketing may be beneficial because billions of people use social media platforms to communicate.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most widely used digital channels for social media marketing, followed closely by LinkedIn and YouTube. The social media channels you use for your business ultimately rely on your objectives and target market. For example, targeting your audience on LinkedIn is a fantastic idea if you want to get new leads for your FinTech firm because experts in the field are active there. On the other hand, if your firm runs a B2C (Business to Consumer) with a younger customer emphasis, Instagram social media advertisements can be preferable for your business.

Social media marketing has gained popularity because it encourages interesting audience engagement. At 96%, it is the most common container format for B2C digital marketers, and it is also becoming more popular in the B2B sector. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 61 percent of B2B content marketers used social media more this year.

Built-in engagement metrics in social media marketing are quite helpful for letting you know how well you're connecting with your audience. You get to choose which interactions—like the number of shares, remarks, or overall hits to your website—mean the most to you.

Your social media marketing plan may not even have direct purchase as one of its objectives. Many firms utilize social media marketing to engage people in conversation rather than pressuring them to make an immediate purchase. Brands that focus on older audiences or provide goods and services unfit for impulsive purchases are especially vulnerable to this. Everything relies on the social media marketing objectives of your business.

It's essential to adhere to best practices in order to develop a social media marketing plan that is successful. Some of the most significant social media marketing best practices are listed below:

• Create effective, high-quality material.
• Respond to queries and comments in a professional way.
• Make a timetable for publishing on social media.
• Post at the perfect moment.
• Employ social media managers to aid your marketing campaigns.
• Know your audience and which social media networks they are most active on.

5- Pay-Per-Click Marketing

PPC, also known as pay-per-click marketing, is a type of online advertising in which you are charged each time a user clicks on one of your digital adverts. Therefore, you only pay for the advertising people actually interact with rather than paying a fixed sum to continuously show targeted ads on online channels. It's a little trickier to control who and when see your advertisement.

One of the most well-liked PPC tactics is search engine advertising, and as Google is the most extensively utilized search engine, many businesses use Google Ads for this purpose. When a spot opens up, a SERP, sometimes referred to as a search engine results page, fills it by holding what is essentially a quick market. An algorithm assigns a ranking to each available advertising based on a variety of factors, including:

• Ad Quality
• Keyword relevance
• Landing page quality
• Bid Amount

When someone searches for a certain term, PPC adverts are then positioned at the top of search engine result pages depending on the key parameters.

After clicking an ad, viewers are expected to carry out 1 or more target actions that are part of any PPC campaign. These processes, which go by the name of conversions, might be transactional or non-transactional. A conversion might be anything from signing up for a newsletter to making a call to your home office.

You may monitor your campaign's performance by tracking your target conversions through the digital marketing channels you've selected.

6- Affiliate Marketing

One may make money by promoting someone else's business by using the affiliate marketing technique, which is a type of digital marketing approach. Whether you are the promoter or the business that works with the promoter, the process is the same.

It works on a revenue-sharing model. Each time the product you have marketed is sold, you, the affiliate, will be paid a commission. The affiliate must be paid for each sale you make with their assistance if you are the merchant.

Some affiliate marketers choose to review just the products of one business, maybe on a blog or another external website. Some people have links to several different retailers.

Whether you want to find an affiliate or already have one, the first step is to get in touch with the other party. A single-retailer program can be started or joined, or you can use digital channels designed to connect affiliates with merchants.

If you want to deal directly with affiliates, there are several things you can do as a retailer to attract potential promoters to your program. For those affiliates to be successful, you must give them the resources they need. It also provides ready-made content and marketing tools, as well as incentives for exceptional performance.

7- Native Advertising

Digital marketing is actually native advertising. Its objective is to blend in with the surrounding material to make its presence as advertising less annoying.

The distrust of today's consumers toward marketing led to the creation of native advertising. Many customers would assume that an advertisement is biased once they know someone has paid for it, leading them to disregard it.

By providing content that is informative or entertaining before it begins to promote anything, a native advertisement avoids this presumption and minimizes the "ad" element.

8- Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, like affiliate marketing, involves collaborating with an influencer—someone with a significant following, such as a celebrity, subject-matter authority, or content creator—in return for visibility. These influencers frequently recommend your goods or services to their followers across a variety of social media platforms.

Businesses seeking to reach new audiences, both B2B and B2C, might find success with influencer marketing. However, since they are effectively representing your company, it's crucial to work with trustworthy influencers. The trust that customers have in your company might be damaged by the incorrect influencer.

9- Email Marketing

The idea behind email marketing is straightforward: you send a promotional message and wait for your potential customer to click on it. The execution is considerably more difficult. Prior to sending an email, you must be sure the recipients are interested. Having an opt-in list that does the following :

• Individualizes the text in the subject line and the body.
• Clearly explains the type of emails the subscriber will receive.
• Promotional and transactional emails are combined with a visible unsubscribe option in the email signature.
• You want potential buyers to view your campaign as more than just a form of advertising.
• 89 percent of the experts surveyed claimed that email marketing was their top source of leads, making it a tried-and-true technique in and of itself.

Other digital marketing strategies, like marketing automation, which enables you to segment and schedule your emails so that they better serve the requirements of your customers, can make it even better.

Here are some pointers to assist you to create effective email marketing campaigns if you're thinking about using email marketing:

• Segment your audience so that you can deliver the correct individuals' relevant campaigns.
• Make sure emails are mobile-friendly.
• Make a campaign calendar.

10- Inbound Marketing

Another fancy word is "inbound marketing," which describes how you might utilize various digital marketing channels to reach new clients, mostly through the development of content and how to "push" them through a conversion funnel.

Content, attention, engagement, trust, and satisfaction are the essential components of inbound marketing.

All of these components have the same purpose: to assist businesses in connecting with their prospective clients and creating a line of two-way contact with them that will result in increased sales.

SIDE NOTE: Sales funnels are comparable across all digital marketing mediums. The term used to describe each step of the funnel varies in various situations. A digital sales funnel generally has three major objectives: to spread awareness of your brand, to encourage user interaction (via your website or app), and to encourage conversion.

11- Mobile Marketing

With the help of mobile marketing, you may interact with your target market via their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be done by SMS and MMS messages, notifications from social media, mobile app alerts, and other means.

It is essential to make sure that all material is mobile-friendly. Since 85% of Americans own a smartphone, creating content for both PC and mobile displays may greatly increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

12- Video Marketing

Although video marketing is still very new, it has recently grown to such a level of popularity that it is impossible to ignore.

Many consumers now go to YouTube before making a purchase choice, to learn something new, or just to chill. YouTube has overtaken Google as the second most popular search engine.

One of the platforms you may use for video marketing is YouTube. To execute a video marketing campaign, there are a tonne of different channels you may utilize, including Facebook Videos, Instagram, and Vimeo.

Including videos in your SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing initiatives is the greatest way to benefit from them.

Running solo video ads can be expensive and not necessarily provide a profit, but when the video is included in other initiatives, the ROI is acceptable.

13- SMS Marketing

Even if it's not the most effective method, SMS marketing is still a valid option for reaching out to potential clients.

These days, there are better options available, such as push messages on Facebook Messenger and on the web and mobile.

However, SMS marketing may be employed to increase foot traffic to your neighborhood shop.

The Benefits Of Digital Marketing

Because in significant part to its ability to reach such a big number of people, digital marketing has gained popularity. It does, however, provide a number of additional benefits that might help your marketing efforts. A few of the advantages of digital marketing are listed above.

1- A Broad Geographic Reach

If you place an advertisement online, anybody may view it (assuming you haven't geographically restricted your advertisement). This makes it simple to increase the market reach of your business and engage with more people through various digital platforms.

2- Cost Efficiency

Digital marketing is less expensive than traditional marketing and reaches a bigger audience. The overhead expenses for television commercials, print advertisements, and other conventional marketing options can be expensive. Additionally, they provide you less control over whether or not your target viewers will ever receive those communications.

As long as your blog is current, you may use digital marketing to draw customers with just 1 content item. An email marketing campaign that is scheduled to deliver messages to certain customer groups on a regular basis may easily be changed in terms of time or content.

When it comes down to it, investing in digital marketing provides you a lot more flexibility and opportunities to interact with customers.

3- Measurable Outcomes

You need to determine how many consumers and how much income your marketing approach finally brings in to determine if it is effective. But how would one go about doing that with a conventional marketing plan?

There is always the conventional choice of inquiring "How did you find us?" to every customer.

Unfortunately, not all industries can benefit from that. For many firms, one-on-one customer encounters are uncommon, and surveys typically produce inaccurate data.

Monitoring outcomes when using digital marketing is easy. Whether it's email open rates, home page views, or direct transactions, digital marketing platforms and tools automatically measure the number of targeted conversions that you obtain.

4- Easier Personalization

With digital marketing, you can gather customer data in a way that is not feasible with traditional marketing.

The accuracy and detail of digital data are typically far greater.

Imagine you provide financial services and want to reach out to internet users who have looked at your products with unique offers. You choose to plan two campaigns since you know you'll achieve greater results if you tailor the offer to the person's interests. The first is aimed at young families who have looked at your life insurance options, while the second is aimed at younger business owners who have thought about your retirement plans.

How are all of those statistics collected without automated tracking? How many call records would you need to examine? How many client profiles exist? And how do you know if the booklet you sent has been read or not?

You already have access to all of this knowledge with digital marketing.

5- More Connection With Customers

Real-time communication with your consumers is possible due to digital marketing. More significantly, it enables them to interact with you.

Consider your social media plan. Although it's wonderful when your primary audience views your most recent content, it's much better when they leave comments or share it. Your business or product will become more well-known and create more buzz each time a new individual joins the conversation.

Customers gain from the interaction as well. As people actively engage in the narrative of your brand, their degree of engagement rises. A strong sense of brand loyalty may result from that sense of ownership.

Digital Marketing Creates Growth

Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of virtually any company's overall marketing strategy. Nothing else delivers the amount of personalization that digital data can, and there has never been a method to keep in such constant contact with your consumers. Your company's potential for development will become more apparent the more you appreciate the power of digital marketing.