What is digital marketing?
- Search engines
- Websites
- Social media
- Mobile apps
- Text messaging
- Web-based advertising
In-short, if a marketing campaign is using any of the above online media channels, it is digital marketing.
Consumers today rely heavily on digital means to research products. Some 77% of customers research a brand online before engaging with it, according to HubSpot Research. Meanwhile, 51% of consumers say they use Google to research products before buying.
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How Does Digital Marketing Work?
In many ways, digital marketing is no different than traditional marketing. In both, smart organizations seek to develop mutually beneficial relationships with prospects, leads, and customers.
But digital marketing has replaced most traditional marketing tactics because it's designed to reach today's consumers.
As an example...
Think about the last important purchase you made. Perhaps you purchased a home, hired someone to fix your roof, or changed paper suppliers at your office.
Regardless of what it was, you probably began by searching the Internet to learn more about available solutions, who provided them, and what your best options were. Your ultimate buying decision was then based on the reviews you read, the friends and family you consulted, and the solutions, features, and pricing you researched.
Most purchasing decisions begin online.
That being the case, an online presence is absolutely necessary—regardless of what you sell.
The key is to develop a digital marketing strategy that puts you in all the places your followers are already hanging out, then using a variety of digital channels to connect with them in a multitude of ways...
...Content to keep them updated with industry news, the problems they're facing, and how you solve those problems...
...Social media to share that content and then engage with them as friends and followers...
...Search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize your content, so it will show up when someone is searching for the information you've written about...
...Advertising to drive paid traffic to your website, where people can see your offers...
...And email marketing to follow up with your audience to be sure they continue to get the solutions they're looking for.
When you put all these pieces together, you'll end up with an efficient, easy-to-operate digital marketing machine. And while it looks intimidating to build that machine from scratch, it's as simple as learning and integrating one digital marketing tactic at a time.
Which is why we've put together this guide: To help you build or refine your own digital marketing plan without the false starts and missteps that come with doing it alone.
Why is digital marketing important?
By implementing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy, marketers can collect valuable insights into target audience behaviors while opening the door to new methods of customer engagement.
Additionally, companies can expect an increase in retention. According to a report by Invesp, companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers. Compare that to companies with weak omnichannel programs and they have a retention rate of just 33%.
Digital marketing continues to evolve. For example, the increasing variety of wearable devices available to consumers affords new opportunities to market to them. Forbes also forecasts that social media will become increasingly conversational in the B2B space, video content will be refined for search engine optimization (Free Seo Link Directory) purposes, and email marketing will become even more personalized.
“Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today — it has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.’”
There are a few major benefits of digital marketing:
- You can focus your efforts on only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service.
- It's more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods.
- Digital marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands.
- Digital marketing is measurable.
- It’s easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy.
- Digital marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads.
- You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing.
Let's dive into them now.
1. You can focus your efforts on only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service.
If you place an advertisement on TV, in a magazine, or on a billboard, you have limited control over who sees the ad. Of course, you can measure certain demographics — including the magazine's typical readership, or the demographic of a certain neighborhood — but it's still largely a shot in the dark.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to identify and target a highly-specific audience, and send that audience personalized, high-converting marketing messages.
For instance, you might take advantage of social media's targeting features to show social media ads to a certain audience based on variables such as age, gender, location, interests, networks, or behaviors. Alternatively, you might use PPC or SEO strategies to serve ads to users who've shown interest in your product or service, or who've searched for specific keywords that relate to your industry.
Ultimately, digital marketing enables you to conduct the research necessary to identify your buyer persona, and lets you refine your marketing strategy over time to ensure you're reaching prospects most likely to buy. Best of all, digital marketing helps you market to sub-groups within your larger target audience. If you sell multiple products or services to different buyer personas, this is especially helpful.
2. It's more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods.
Digital marketing enables you to track campaigns on a daily basis and decrease the amount of money you're spending on a certain channel if it isn't demonstrating high ROI. The same can't be said for traditional forms of advertising. It doesn't matter how your billboard performs — it still costs the same, whether or not it converts for you.
Plus, with digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. Perhaps rather than paying for PPC campaigns, you choose to spend money on design software to create high-converting Instagram content. A digital marketing strategy allows you to continuously pivot, ensuring you're never wasting money on channels that don't perform well.
For instance, if you work for a small business with a limited budget, you might try investing in social media, blogging, or SEO – three strategies that can give you high ROI even with minimal spend.
3. Digital marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands.
If you work for a small business, it's likely difficult for you to compete with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of dollars to invest in television commercials or nationwide campaigns. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to outrank the big players through strategic digital marketing initiatives.
For instance, you might identify certain long-tail keywords that relate to your product or service, and create high-quality content to help you rank on search engines for those keywords. Search engines don't care which brand is biggest — instead, search engines will prioritize content that resonates best with the target audience.
4. Digital marketing is measurable.
Digital marketing can give you a comprehensive, start-to-finish view of all the metrics that might matter to your company — including impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page. This is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing. While traditional advertising can be useful for certain goals, its biggest limitation is measurability.
Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you've ever put an advertisement in a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There's no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are some examples:
Website Traffic
With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website's homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.
You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.
This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.
With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people's behavior before they've reached the final stage in their buyer's journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Imagine you've created a product brochure and posted it through people's letterboxes — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you're also generating qualified leads when people download it.
Attribution Modeling
An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your business.
We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important — according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom line.
5. It’s easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy.
A lot of work goes into developing a marketing strategy. Generally, you will follow through with that strategy until completion, allow it to take effect, and then judge its results. However, things do not always go according to plan. You may realize halfway through that a calculation was off, an assumption was incorrect, or an audience did not react how they were expected to. Being able to pivot or adjust the strategy along the way is highly beneficial because it prevents you from having to start over completely.
Being able to change your strategy easily is a great benefit of digital marketing. Adapting a digital marketing strategy is a lot easier than other more traditional forms of marketing, like mailers or billboard advertising. For instance, if an online ad isn’t delivering as expected, you can quickly adjust it or pause it to yield better results.
6. Digital marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads.
As digital marketing makes it simpler to measure your marketing efforts, this makes improving your conversion rate simpler as well. Being able to measure the effectiveness of each tactic helps you develop better strategies. Continuously refining your methods improves your conversion rate. Investing in online marketing ensures that everything is optimized for the highest amount of conversions.
Additionally, all leads do not offer the same value for your business. Digital marketing provides an opportunity for you to target a specific audience that will yield higher quality leads that are more likely to become customers. Connecting your business with the most valuable leads will directly improve your conversion rate.
7. You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing.
It’s essential to begin engaging your audience as early as possible. Making a connection at the first stage of the buyer’s journey helps push the lead through the customer funnel. Using digital marketing allows you to accomplish that from start to finish and at every point in between.
Online channels allow you to follow the entire buying journey of your customers. Understanding and analyzing how customers are moving and operating is important for converting leads. Digital marketing allows you to track them through that process. And, even if they don’t convert in the early stages, it at least helps ensure they have made a connection with your business.
What are the Career Opportunities in Digital Marketing?
As we mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a broad sector with a variety of sectors present in it. So, whether you’re a creative person or a technical one, you’ll find something for yourself in this field.
Here are some of the prominent digital marketing skills and their roles:
Search Engine Optimization
Google receives around 60,000 searches per second every day. People search on these platforms to get answers. And with the help of SEO, you can make sure that when they search for something related to your website, they find it.
Businesses are focusing on SEO to get more traffic for their websites. If your audience is huge, then you can have more customers as well.
SEO depends on multiple factors such as the loading speed of the website, keyword optimization, etc. As an SEO manager, you will have to identify the reasons why your website is performing poorly SEO-wise and fix the same.
SEO takes time to show results but a better rank in SERPs can help in strengthening the brand and generate more awareness.
Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms are a gold mine for digital marketers. Take, for example, Facebook, which has around 2 billion monthly users. Other social media platforms also have millions of users all across the globe.
These platforms let the marketers go where the audiences are. They can communicate with their prospects directly and create thriving followings for their brand. For example, Wendy’s is famous for its witty Tweets.
As their tweets get popular among Twitter users, their brand popularity also increases. This way they are able to stay in touch with their customers and offer a better experience to the same.
Digital marketers have to perform such tasks and manage the social media presence of their clients.
Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to the creation and promotion of valuable content for the audience. It helps in establishing trust in the audience and attracting new visitors.
All the content you see online, whether it’s a blog article or a YouTube video, is a result of content marketing. Brands are able to help their prospects by solving their real-life problems through high-quality content.
As a digital marketer, you’ll have to plan, create and promote the content for different brands. You’ll also have to identify which form of content would be perfect for the company as well as which platforms would suit it the most.
Content marketing is mainly popular among B2B marketers. Blogs of various companies including Outbrain and Neil Patel are great examples of content marketing.
This role requires creativity and a clear understanding of the brand’s requirements.
Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing for both outbound as well as inbound marketing. They release ads on emails to reach customers where they are. And they create email newsletters for turning followers into customers.
As a digital marketer, you’ll have to increase the number of newsletter signups, create compelling content for the newsletters and convert the subscribers into customers.
Email is still one of the most powerful online tools for lead generation. That’s why companies are so dependent on email marketing. You will also have to make yourself familiar with different email marketing tools such as MailChimp.
The above were only a few of the many sectors present in digital marketing. Each of them helps a brand in a unique way and as a digital marketer, you will have to master them.
Reasons to choose a Career in Digital Marketing:
Everything is getting digitalized. Companies in all sectors are focusing on developing a robust online presence.
And for that purpose, they are hiring digital marketers. In digital marketing career growth is also fast. That’s why so many people are opting for a career in digital marketing.
Here are a few other reasons why you should study this skill:
High Demand for Digital Marketers
Around 69% of companies were going to hire more marketers, according to a report by Marketing Hiring Trends.
The report also found that there is a considerable gap between the supply and demand of digital marketing professionals. The demand stood at around 59%, but the supply was only 19%.
It means companies are dying to hire digital marketers. And learning an in-demand skill never hurts. It only means that you can get better-paying jobs with more security after learning such a highly demanded skill.
Great Growth Prospects
Digital marketing skills will keep seeing an increase in demand in the near future. Why?
And that’s because the digital economy is growing 10x faster than the offline economy.
There are many reasons why digital marketing skills will keep rising in demand. Companies know how beneficial the internet and digital platforms are. Digital marketing lets them reach a wider audience, scale their business further, and generate more revenue.
Setting up a business online, running ad campaigns, developing content strategies are a few of the tasks a digital marketing expert does to provide such results.
But without trained digital marketing professionals, they can’t do these tasks. That’s why the demand for these skills will continue to increase.
Start Your Own Business (or Promote the Existing One)
Digital marketers have ample knowledge of multiple online tools and platforms. They can start websites, create products, and sell them to the targeted market.
If you study digital marketing skills thoroughly, you can start an online business yourself if you want. Or, you can even become a digital marketing consultant and start a freelancing business.
For people wanting to become entrepreneurs, learning digital marketing is imperative.
You’d be able to reduce the costs of your business’s promotion, target the right audience, and measure your progress better with the help of this knowledge.
Get Better Pay
Want to increase your salary? Start learning digital marketing.
As we mentioned earlier, there is a massive demand for digital marketing professionals. Because of the high demand, the pay for digital marketing roles is also high.
You can get better roles in the organization because of your expertise, which can help you enhance your salary.
Digital marketing managers earn around 5 to 10 lakh per year. Social Media Managers earn about 6 to 8 lakh rupees per year, as well.
Wouldn’t a pay raise be amazing?
Easy to Start a Career
If you want to become an engineer, you will need to get a degree in engineering. If you want to become a pilot, you will have to go to aviation school and get a license.
But if you want to become a digital marketer, you will only need to practice the essential online marketing techniques, create a portfolio, and you’ll be good to go.
You don’t need to get another degree or go to college to start a career in this field. Entering the sector is quite easy.
Plus, the digital marketing community is amicable and full of amazing people. So, if you ever have a question, you can ask around or look it up online, you’ll find an answer.
If you want to start a new career, digital marketing would be a great choice.
Full of Variety
Were you using WhatsApp in 2011? Or were you using Google Assistant to look up stuff in 2015?
The answer would most probably be no.
These examples show how fast the internet changes. It changes every year, and these changes aren’t negligible, they’re the opposite. And digital marketers have to adapt themselves to these changes constantly.
So they are always learning new stuff and mastering new techniques. If you’re looking for a field that is full of novelty and variety, then you should go for digital marketing.
A Technical and Creative Field
Digital marketing requires a unique combination of both creativity and technical knowledge. You’ll be writing eye-catching headlines for ad campaigns, and you’ll also be checking the analytics of the campaign.
Because this field is vast, it has a variety of sections, each of which requires a unique skill set. For example, a content marketer should know how to write amazing blog articles. On the other hand, a social media marketer should know how to run a great promotion campaign
What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?
Having a strong digital presence will help you in multiple ways:
- It will make it easier to create awareness and engagement both before and after the sale
- It will help you convert new buyers into rabid fans who buy more (and more often)
- It will kickstart word-of-mouth and social sharing—and all the benefits that come with them
- It will shorten the buyer's journey by presenting the right offers at the right time
Intro to Digital Marketing
There are four big categories of digital marketing: enhanced offline marketing, radio marketing, television marketing, and phone marketing.
Enhanced offline marketing is a form of marketing that is entirely offline but enhanced with electronic devices.
For example, if your restaurant uses iPads for your customers to create their orders on, then the offline experience of say, eating Thai food, is enhanced with this electronic device.
People have been using digital media to enhance their marketing for decades (you’ve only forgotten in what ways, as you’ll see).
Next, there’s radio marketing. The next time you hear an annoying, over-enthusiastic car dealer shout every word of his or her commercial, thank Mr. Marconi.
Of course, we can’t forget television marketing. TV ads have been around for more than half a century (and since 1953 also in color, nationwide; yes, there was a time before color TV).
Finally, the biggest and fastest-growing area of offline marketing, with admittedly also a lot of flops, busts, and failures: phone marketing.
Let’s look at the four areas in more detail.
Enhanced Offline Marketing
What’s the difference between a billboard somewhere in the desert of Arizona and a billboard in New York City’s Times Square?
The size? The product?
3 letters: LED. Light emitting diodes.
All of the billboards in Times Square are electronic!
Why? Because in the desert of Arizona, no one’s competing with you for people’s attention. If you have a billboard at all, you win.
But, in Times Square, attention is probably more valuable than anywhere else in the world. Over 330,000 people cross through it each day.
If you want to be distracted, there’s buses, taxis, promoters shouting, and then, of course, the electronic billboards.
Some of them are even interactive, showing live feeds of the people on the square or pictures of customers.
Renting a billboard space on Times Square, for a year, will set you back a whopping $1,000,000 to $4,000,000.
What other forms does enhanced offline marketing take?
What do you see when you walk into an Apple Store these days?
People leaning over iPads, Macbooks and iPhones.
If you have any type of electronic product, any product demo is an important part of your digital marketing strategy.
Okay, the next one’s a good one. If you remember this, you can consider yourself an extremely lucky kid:
This is a demo disc for the original PlayStation. Several of these were handed out with other games or sometimes even magazines.
It was the same with PC magazines. Remember when they came with CDs (and later DVDs) and you couldn’t wait to throw them into your disk drive and see what samples were on them?
A little different than a demo, these are product samples in digital format.
Radio Marketing
Over 100 years have passed since that original first live broadcast of the opera performance at the Met and guess what: radio is still here.
- Nearly 250 million Americans listen to the radio each month
- People spend an average of 102 minutes per day listening to radio content
- By 2023, radio ad spend is predicted to grow by half a billion dollars
In recent years, radio made a smart move: having the hosts read out advertising sponsorships at the beginning of shows. This is where the host of the radio program reads out a script you or they have written that promotes your product.
To create a sponsorship, find your local radio stations with a quick Google search. Find a station whose audience reflects your company’s target demographic; radio stations should be able to provide you with the data that helps you select the right fit.
For example, if your company sells maternity products, you want to find a radio program whose average listener is a female between the ages of 24 and 40.
If you go the traditional radio advertising route, the key is to be entertaining and catch the listener’s attention.
Cadillac and Dairy Queen are two brands that come up with solid radio commercials on a consistent basis.
You can listen to some examples here.
TV Marketing
Television marketing is such a Goliath, it’ll likely never go away. It’s also easily the industry where the most money is burned each year.
Some fast facts about TV markting:
- the average American still watches 4 hours of TV each day, but this includes shows that are streamed
- only 2/3 of people still subscribe to cable
- 78% of people have a subscription to multiple streaming service
Though cable TV ads are harder to target the right audience, have a low ROI compared to other forms of digital advertising, and seem generally irrelevant in the digital age, there is one type of tv ad that may still be worth it; but it will cost ya.
Remember I mentioned that renting a billboard in Times Square, for a year, will set you back a million or more?
A 60 second commercial aired during the Super Bowl costs $5.6 million.
Thanks to their cross-pollinating effect, the often viral and memorable commercials still pay for themselves.
Roughly 10% of all TV commercial-related shares on social media come from Super Bowl ads. So do about 8% of all views on YouTube that go to TV commercial videos.
If your commercial makes it to the blacklist (commercials the network decides can’t be shown on TV), the viral effect is usually even stronger, like the infamous Carl’s Junior ad that couldn’t be shown in the 2015 Superbowl.
What’s more, these commercials become online assets, generating millions of YouTube views over time.
Sadly, the hype of the Super Bowl commercials is probably more of a remnant from a success period that’s about to fade.
The $200 billion that companies still annually spend worldwide on TV commercials is hardly justifiable, as every 10th person in the United States has a Netflix account, with more to come.
TV, in the form as we know it, is going to die and will make way for the more custom-tailored experiences we are already getting used to.
So, if you do plan on doing offline digital marketing, I’d suggest that you spend your time and money focusing on a marketing platform or channel of the future.
Phone Marketing
Nearly 75% of Americans own a smartphone and, in 2014, we crossed the tipping point where more people are accessing the internet from their phone than via a desktop PC or laptop.
Mobile marketing is here, and, in 2015, the amount spent on mobile ads first exceeded the amount spent on desktop ads.
Let’s look at some offline ways to market your products using phone marketing.
There are 2 apps that are grossly underestimated, yet they are on every phone, smart or not:
Calling and Texting
Cold calling is the act of calling a person with no prior contact and trying to sell them something.
While at roughly 3 sales per day (marketers call 52 people a day, on average, with about 17 calls until they find a buyer), it doesn’t have the scalability of social media or email, it’s still a valid approach to marketing.
The tactic works, but doesn’t scale very well when selling to end customers (B2C) and making contact before trying to sell helps to close the deal (especially in B2B, which is all about connections).
What works better is marketing via texting, an “app” that is also available on each and every single phone out there.
Online or offline, a text message is almost a guaranteed read.
While you should definitely get permission first, for example, in the form of having your customers text a certain word to a phone number, there are several providers that offer text marketing at scale.
There are several ways to leverage text message marketing.
Special deals, coupons, and discounts are a great way for restaurants to get additional customers and turn walk-ins into regulars.
You can see more examples of successful restaurant text messaging campaigns here.
Using text reminders as customer service can also enhance your mobile marketing as many pharmacies do. They alert customers when their prescription is ready for pickup.
Another option is to create a loyalty program, where you text participating customers special deals and giveaways.
QR Codes
Another option is QR codes.
You used to have to download a specific app to use QR codes, but now all you need to do is use the camera on your smartphone and the code will scan, bringing up a webpage.
How to Set Up an Offline Digital Marketing Strategy
- Set up an enhanced offline marketing strategy
Create ads optimized for platforms like digital billboards, give product demos, and offer digital product samples.
- Create a radio marketing strategy
Approach local radio stations about ad sponsorships or create engaging traditional ads by using silly voices, local celebrities, or mentioning trendy topics.
- Engage in tv marketing
The most effective way to get a decent ROI on tv ads is to buy ad time during popular events that people watch live, create ads that go viral (by being controversial, emotional, or funny), or creating ads that you can reuse across multiple ad channels.
- Do phone marketing
Smartphones create unique phone advertising opportunities. You can use modern software to cold call and leave ringless voicemails for targets, send texts offering deals and promotions to subscribing customers, or make use of QR codes.
General Digital Marketing FAQ
Digital Marketing Conclusion
That’s the scoop on digital marketing. As you can see, the internet is, by far, not the only place for marketers to gain success, even today.
Of course, no one can afford to miss out on the opportunities of the web and, eventually, every marketer will have to master online marketing.
Employing a few of these offline marketing tactics can help you to not put all of your eggs into one basket in the meantime, as well as diversify your lead generation beyond social media, content marketing, and the like.
Plus the offline and online worlds are colliding. Traditional devices such as fridges, ovens, and even billboards will all be modernized to leverage digital media.
Though our agency does not specialize in offline marketing, we can help you if you need help growing or getting your online digital marketing strategy off the ground! Reach out to learn more.
Will you use any of these tactics in your business?
Which of these do you remember from back in the day? Have I missed any?
