How to Understand Digital Marketing

What you need to know

Digital marketing is a key component of a successful business because, digital marketing helps you reach a much larger audience and people will be made more aware of you due to your digital marketing. However whether or not people buy from you is if your digital marketing convinced people to buy your products or services.

If you’re struggling with digital marketing, both as a concept and a strategy, you’re not alone. This marketing category is complicated at a glance and plenty of business professionals aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to using digital marketing.

Understanding digital marketing is a great deal similar to understanding marketing in general. There are so many intricacies involved that the learning experience is often jarring.

To help you learn how to understand digital marketing, we’ll touch on what digital marketing is, what it entails, why it matters, and how to get started for yourself. Read on to discover what digital marketing could do for your business.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing encompasses an array of marketing methods and formats that take place online. Advertisers and marketing teams make use of the internet to create, launch, monitor, and enhance their strategies in order to improve sales. This form of marketing can take on several forms, which we will cover in just a moment.

Additionally, digital marketing can be similar to standard ads in the ways they’re posted, but they can also have an interactive element to them. For example, digital marketing can take place through chats and instant messaging systems.

Types of Digital Marketing

A variety of digital marketing types and formats exist in today’s technologically advanced world. Let’s explore some of the most common digital marketing types.

Social Media Marketing

Social media accounts present companies with unique opportunities to market their products and services. By posting about promotions, information, and other elements of a business on social media, companies can effectively increase awareness, pull in more traffic, and convert leads into loyal customers. One significant benefit of using this method is that it doesn’t have to be terribly expensive. Businesses can post on their own accounts for free, and if the information is engaging, it draws a crowd.

Content Marketing

Content marketing can take on several forms, but this type of marketing uses written content to encourage website visits, lead engagement, and future purchases. Common elements of content marketing include:

• Blog posts
• Guides and ebooks
• Infographics
• Video or Audio content

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click, or PPC ads allow businesses to purchase ad space, and they only need to pay for elements of the campaign that consumers engage with. These ads are posted on search engine pages and websites that allow ad space and they aim to attract relevant traffic to ad pages.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is an in-depth type of digital marketing. It involves several components that marketers can use to improve the rankings their sites receive from search engines. Such elements include:

• Keyword usage
• Content relevance
• Page quality
• Mobile-friendly settings
• Organised information

Furthermore, SEO can be used to enhance website traffic both on the company’s web pages (on-page) and through third-party pages or listings (off-page).

Email Marketing

Email marketing can take the form of newsletters, offers, promotions, new product announcements, and more. Companies design email marketing campaigns to reach out to leads and current customers in order to keep them informed about the business.

The Significance of Digital Marketing

Part of what makes digital marketing so relevant to today’s marketing landscape is the versatility it provides. Digital marketing efforts can differ greatly from one company to another, and finding what works best for each marketing team is more approachable through digital marketing than any other form.

Digital marketing allows companies to experiment with the strategies they use to attract potential customers, but it also allows businesses to interact with current customers. Through digital marketing, much of the distance between companies and consumers can be bridged. As a result, marketing teams get to know their customers at a deeper level.

When businesses leverage digital marketing effectively, they’re able to provide target audiences with the exact information, product, or service they’re looking for. Additionally, they’re able to engage with customers in ways that reach these individuals on a more personal level.

How Does It Work?

Allow us to provide an example of digital marketing success. Both Company A and Company B make use of digital marketing strategies. Both companies operate in the same industry, and they have similar target audiences.

Company A focuses on digital marketing efforts, collects customer reviews, engages with audiences on social media, and remains current on today’s trends as they relate to business processes.

Company B utilises digital marketing, but its efforts consist of standard email campaigns and digital ads.

Company A has created realistic audience personas based on customer interaction, and the marketing team has noticed that 85% of their customers are Jewish women in their mid-20s who rent apartments and own pets. Using this information, Company A crafts catered holiday-related ads that offer 20% deals on harness and leash sets just in time for Hanukkah.

Company B didn’t create realistic personas, and though they share audiences with Company A, their ads offer deals on backyard doghouses for Christmas.

Company A has used smart strategies to get familiar with its audience and then offered its customer base something useful and relevant to them as people. Company B has not.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

As illustrated above, developing an effective grasp of digital marketing strategies can present immense benefits. For one, digital marketing can help expand a company’s reach, helping the marketing team draw in audiences and customers from great distances. Additionally, digital marketing strategies can be designed around practically any budget, so there are opportunities for small businesses as well as large corporations.

Digital marketing also serves as a method to collect customer data ethically. By creating and posting content, marketing teams can track analytics and generate reports that help to further cater ads to specific audiences. These marketing efforts make it easy to view tangible results, utilise greater connection methods, and plan product and service releases in ways that will convert the greatest number of potential customers.

Tips for Digital Marketing Strategy Creation

Don’t let being new to digital marketing discourage you from trying to develop a strategy. Digital marketing is a great way to propel your business to the next level, and when you’re a beginner, you don’t necessarily have to get familiar with every aspect of digital marketing right away. Take it one step at a time and strategise in a way that highlights your company’s needs.

First, think about your goals. What are you trying to achieve through marketing online? Of course, every business wants to increase profits, but what else do you need to accomplish? Do you want to make X number of sales in the next three months? Do you want to launch a new product and make sure the right people see it? It’s important to have a clear vision of what you want your marketing efforts to gain.

Next, develop a campaign budget. If you’re a small business owner, you’ll probably have a small marketing budget. However, knowing how much money you have available to invest will help you choose the right marketing methods.

Create target personas or customer profiles. Who are you hoping to convert? Think about your current customers and list the features they have in common: age group, business industry, socioeconomic background, gender, hobbies, etc. Make a semi-fictional profile detailing your perfect customer, and then keep your desired audience in mind when creating marketing material.

Choose the marketing strategies you want to use, then expand upon the main idea by writing ad ideas, content schedules, promotional deals, mailing lists, etc. For example, if you’re using mostly social media and blogging to market your business, come up with a blog schedule, generate topics, and write posts for different social media platforms. Remember to create content that’s relevant to your industry, useful to your audience, and of the highest quality so that people see you as an authority on the topic.

Keep track of your posts and articles. Engage with the comments professionally. utilise tools to measure your metrics and analytics so that you can make improvements where necessary and focus on enhancing your strongest techniques.

As your company grows, so too should your marketing knowledge. Take time to explore your options, reach out to industry experts for guidance, and participate in courses and webinars that will help you improve your skills. Learn about opportunities that will meet your company’s needs, and slowly step into those marketing types. Each time you experiment with a new marketing strategy, learn from it. Whether the campaign succeeds or fails, make use of the valuable data attached to your marketing efforts.

Learning to be an effective marketer is not often a simple path to follow. Each company will probably develop marketing strategies in different ways, so start with what you know. Develop plans based on the methods you’re already familiar with and over time, you can add new digital marketing strategies to your overall marketing tactics.

If you enjoyed this article, check out our articles on how to run your first influential marketing campaign and 5 trends to help your digital marketing.