What is digital marketing?
Let’s start by looking briefly at what digital marketing is.
In short, digital marketing involves any activities you conduct online to promote your business. It’s one of the most cost effective ways to connect with potential and current customers when they’re browsing or actively searching online through their smartphones, tablets, desktops and laptops. You can promote your business through emails, ads, blogs, videos and social media posts.
Types of digital marketing
Now we’ve looked at what digital marketing is, we’ll have a look at the platforms available to you. Digital marketing is not just one platform, it’s a strategy that uses various a variety of digital platforms and tools.
Not all platforms or strategies are the right or the same for every business. The platforms you choose will be dependent on where your target audience is and what you want to achieve.
Here are the key channels involved in digital marketing:
- SEO - is a process in which you optimise your website and online content to ensure it’s friendly for both users and Google’s algorithm to make sure your website shows in the search engine results pages when potential customers are actively looking for your products or services.
- PPC - PPC, or pay per click, allows you to display ads on a variety of digital platforms to drive traffic to your site by paying a small fee whenever a customer clicks on your ad. PPC can be used across different channels but Google is the most common.
- Social media - you can use social media marketing to build a presence organically or to advertise your products and services on channels such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Content marketing - create content to inform or entertain your customers and build awareness and trust with the brand. Content can be in the form of blogs, videos, social media posts and email marketing and allows you to interact with potential and current customers while providing valuable information.
How is digital marketing adding value to business?
Without a digital marketing strategy, you could be missing out on hundreds or thousands of new customers for your business. And, your competitors are likely to be advertising online too so you could be missing out on customers who are finding your competitors easily online.
These are just some of the ways digital marketing is adding value to businesses (and how it could add value to yours too!).
1. Stand out from your competitors
Traditional marketing methods such as print and television advertising can be expensive, making them inaccessible or unachievable for those businesses that do not have a large budget. This meant that larger corporations were able to dominate the marketing sphere and take a larger share of the market.
On the other hand, digital marketing levels the playing field significantly and allows any business, no matter how big or small, to reach the same customers. Once you have invested in a website, some of the early digital marketing strategies you can implement require an investment of your time, rather than money.
Platforms such as social media allow you to build a community of potential and existing customers and share your content, new products and promotions with them without heavy investment. Other channels will require some investment but you can start with a small budget and expand depending on the results you achieve.
2. Optimise your budget by targeting specific customers
When you buy advertising space in a newspaper, magazine or on television, the audience is defined through the average demographics of the people who buy, subscribe or watch that particular channel but it’s very difficult to know exactly who’s going to see your ad.
However, when you’re selling your products in one location or to a specific group of customers, your budget is wasted if you’re advertising nationally or to anyone and everyone.
Digital marketing channels allow you to cut through the noise and focus purely on the people who are most likely to buy from your business. Digital platforms also track the interests and location of users which makes it easier to recommend content related to their interests so you can follow potential customers around online until they’re ready to purchase from you.
Through digital marketing, you can target customers based on their age, gender, income level, job title and interests and so much more. This prevents you from wasting budget on the people who are never going to buy from you.
If you’re not sure exactly who your customers are, free analytics tools from Google and Facebook can show you the characteristics of the people who follow you or visit your website so you can start to build out an audience that is likely to drive results for your business.
3. Achieve better return on investment
When you get your audience targeting and strategy right, digital marketing helps you to drive potential leads for your business and then convert those leads into sales and loyal customers. As a result, it delivers a great return on investment in comparison to traditional marketing methods. Targeting a specific audience, understanding their needs and providing them with the best solution provides better results and much higher conversion rates than a scattered approach.
4. Refine your lead generation strategy
Lead generation is the process of identifying and then nurturing potential customers to help them find the information they need from you. Traditional marketing can tell you how many people are likely to have seen your ad but it can’t tell you how many of those converted into a sale.
In contrast, digital ads allow you to identify exactly how many people saw or engaged with your ad and tracking can tell you whether they converted into a sale too. This allows you to get a much better understanding of the activities that are working for your business and how many customers are buying based on how much you’re spending.
5. Engage with customers more effectively
Modern consumers are accessing the internet everywhere and anyway through laptops, mobile devices and their phones so you can keep in touch with them wherever they are.
Having a digital marketing strategy in place and knowing where your customers are spending their time and how they like to interact with you will help you to keep them engaged and keep your brand top of mind once they’re ready to buy from you.
In summary
Whether you’re looking to create brand awareness, drive leads or keep your existing customers engaged, there’s a digital marketing strategy or channel to help you. It’s taking over traditional marketing methods due to the value it can provide and the financial benefits many brands are seeing as a result of their activities. So, if you’re not using digital marketing to reach your potential customers, you could be missing out on revenue for your business.
If you’d like to know more about how digital marketing can help you to drive results for your business, sign up to our newsletter for monthly insights, hints and tips.
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