What Is Digital Marketing?

What Is Digital Marketing? 

HISTORY:

Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising,and any other digital medium. Digital marketing channels are systems based on the internet that can create, accelerate, and transmit product value from producer to the terminal consumer by digital networks.

Digital marketing's development since the 1990s and 2000s has changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing. As digital platforms are increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people use digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns are becoming more prevalent and efficient.

Digital marketing methods such as search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, Display advertising, e–books, and optical disks and games are becoming more common in our advancing technology. In fact, digital marketing now extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as mobile phones (SMS and MMS), callback, and on-hold mobile ring tones. In essence, this extension to non-Internet channels helps to differentiate digital marketing from online marketing, another catch-all term for the marketing methods mentioned above, which strictly occur online.

Why Digital Marketing is the Key to Success for Your Business?

When creating a marketing strategy you may find yourself asking why digital marketing over another more traditional form of marketing? What are the benefits? Are there any downfalls? Is it worth the money? Is it hard? Is it fast? Will it even work? If you are just starting out and marketing isn’t in your wheel house, then take some time to learn why digital marketing can help you build a profitable business.

Before we can talk about why digital marketing is king, let’s first define it. Digital marketing is an umbrella term for any type of online marketing including SEO, PPC, email marketing, content marketing and social media marketing. If you aren’t familiar with these terms, here’s a quick breakdown.

PPC in Digital Marketing

PPC stands for “pay per click” and is attributed to Google’s search and display ads. When you run these ads on Google, you pay a set price each time someone clicks on your advertisement. You will need to come up with a keyword strategy that aligns with your business. There is a lot that goes into a keyword strategy like choosing words with high search volume that have a low cost per click. When Google users search your target keywords your ads will appear. With PPC you have the power to create your own ads and you are also in full control of your budget. Some keywords are relatively inexpensive per click like “men’s t-shirts” at $1.70 per click whereas some are extremely expensive like “car accident lawyers” at $209 per click.

SEO in Digital Marketing

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is how you organically rank in Google search. This means that you are not paying to do so like you are with PPC. Everyone wants their business to be on the first page or at least in the top three organic search results because those get the most traffic from potential customers. How do you rank in search engines without spending money?

Email in Digital Marketing

According to a Campaign Monitor study for every dollar spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44. With a return like that, it’s no wonder why digital marketing is the best way to market a business! Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like. You as a business send emails out to your subscribers in order to convince them to buy your product or service or follow your brand. It’s like writing letters to your potential customers except with email you can see how many people have opened your “letter” and who has clicked links within your email.

Content is King in Digital Marketing

Content marketing includes things like blogging which can immensely help your business. You can write blogs so that they rank in Google search and they can also help your potential customers to understand your business or answer questions that they have. How can you rank with a blog? It’s all about the length of the blog, how many times you can strategically place your keyword, how many clicks and shares it receives and how long people spend reading. Whatever you blog about make sure your blogs are full of useful and relevant information that is related to your brand. No matter what type of business you have, there is something to blog about, whether it’s tips and tricks, giving advice or simply promoting your business.

Get Social with Digital Marketing

Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves marketing across social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Advertising campaigns on social media are quick to set up and you can target these ads to specific groups of people. The amount of data that is collected through social media can help you tweak ads to make them more aligned with what your customers want to see as well as make your dollar stretch as far as it can. Advertising on social media is by far the cheapest way to advertise.

SMS Marketing

Here’s an interesting fact: Did you know that people check their phones at least 85 times a day on an average note? And that 80% of the Millenials state that the check their phone right after waking up.

That equates to an impressive 82.1% open rates.

And this number is actually higher than email open rates.

Nowadays, people always have their phones within arm’s reach to be updated with the latest happenings, especially in social media. That’s why SMS open rate is also increasing.

Indeed, SMS or Short Message Service marketing is another way to reach out to your market by sending permission based text message. You can use these messages to promote your product, send updates, inform them about flash deals and increase your engagement.

Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

When we say traditional marketing we mean the marketing that you are probably already used to seeing like advertisements in newspapers or magazines, on billboards or in TV commercials. Many people think that traditional marketing is the way to go so that you can build trust with customers and create a network of lasting relationships. Surprisingly enough, the same thing can be done over the internet but for a lower cost and ultimately a more successful outcome.

Custom Audiences

For starters you can attract highly targeted traffic by creating a custom audience when using digital marketing. This proves difficult with traditional media. You can put an ad in a specific magazine that your target audience reads but how many people will actually purchase that magazine or even see your ad? Or let’s say your business wants to advertise on a  billboard. A bunch of eyes will see your ad but will they take action? Chances are your ad won’t apply to every person that sees it.

Retargeting

You can’t retarget with potential customers with traditional media. Retargeting is one of the reasons why digital marketing is so successful. When a customer interacts with your advertisement on Google, Facebook, Instagram or any other channel, you can track their every move and use this data to retarget them in the future. Wondering why that ad for those shoes you looked at last week keeps appearing in your newsfeed? You are being retargeted and chances are high that one day you will revisit that store and purchase them. After all if they keep appearing this must be a sign right?

Cost

Every business wants to save money in any way that they can. You want to get the most bang for your buck! Facebook advertising is the cheapest and most effective form of advertising out there. The average cost per click for a Facebook ad is around $1.72. That’s pretty good when you consider that there are over 2 billion active Facebook users every day.

Measuring Results

With digital marketing it is much easier to measure results. You will be able to monitor everything from how long someone spent on your web page to where that person came from on the internet to get to your website. You can monitor how well your ads are doing and make quick adjustments when they are under-performing. This is why digital marketing has so much power. Every action that your customers take can be recorded, and that data can be used to form a successful digital marketing campaign.

Facebook delivers all of your data to you through ads manager. It is user friendly, gives you a simple break down of costs and results, and allows you to control your budget. With traditional media like advertising in a magazine, the only analytics that are really available to you would be how large the magazine’s circulation is, and that’s not going to be super helpful for your marketing campaign.

Why Digital Marketing Comes Out On Top

If you are a small to medium sized business you need to take advantage of everything digital marketing has to offer. Beating out large competitors is difficult enough. Don’t make it harder on yourself by using outdated marketing methods. There are countless reasons why digital marketing always wins versus traditional marketing. Digital or online marketing allows you to engage with your fans, keep your costs down and builds trust with your customers.

Communication

One reason why digital marketing is taking over is the ease of communication with customers. Online marketing is a two-way street. You can communicate with your customers as easily as they can communicate with you. This is something that you as a business owner need to take advantage of. And it’s one reason why digital marketing reigns supreme over traditional marketing methods.

Nordstrom is a brand that is killing it on social media! They reply to fans comments and ask if they need any assistance with their shopping. Engaging with your fans and customers can make a huge difference in their shopping experience. It humanizes you as a brand and shows customers that you are here to help them.

Building Trust

Digital marketing builds trust with users. You can use social proof like testimonials from previous customers on your website or star ratings in order to show shoppers what others think of your products. Patagonia displays their ratings for every product on their website and breaks it down by stars. As you can see they have 64 five star ratings on this product. Since all of these reviews are accessible to the shopper they can browse and read through all of them if they want. This is something you just can’t do with traditional marketing or even in-store shopping. It would be immensely difficult to show 60+ reviews in a magazine for your product.

Over 80% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from family and friends. The more ratings you have the more trustworthy you come across to potential customers. Would you be more likely to give your business to a company with one five star review or a company with 46 four and five star reviews? Many consumers do at least little bit of research before they decide to buy from a new company, so make sure you earn their trust online!

Speaking of ratings, asking for reviews for your business is something that is extremely easy to do online. You can send an email asking your customers what they thought of your product and to kindly rate it. You can run an ad or boost a post asking followers to give you a review in exchange for a coupon. In both of these examples you can include a simple button or call to action that links directly to a review site. This information can be used to redesign your product or service so that it better meets people’s needs if the ratings are not so great. It can also be used to show new customers that your product or service is better than your competitors if the ratings are great!

Call to Action

On your website you can also use clever calls to action or CTA’s to entice users to buy. CTA’s are typically action buttons that tell customers what you want them to do like buy, like, share or contact you. You can’t really link your newspaper advertisement to more information. Everything on your site is right there ready for your customers to purchase. If they see an ad in the newspaper they have to physically go take action and probably be reminded to do so several times (and then they still may not take action).

Instant Gratification

In most cases digital marketing is instant. You can create an ad for Google, give it a budget and start running it relatively quick if you’re a pro. With some forms of digital marketing like SEO it does take time, but it is well worth the wait when you see your business page ranking number one in Google search. To potential customers, that first result is trustworthy. It must be good if it’s ranking number one right?

Useful Analytics & Data

Probably the biggest reason why digital marketing has overtaken traditional marketing is that you as a business have the ability to track your customers every move online. This provides you with a wealth of data to analyze so that you can make adjustments in your digital marketing campaigns. With other forms of traditional marketing like radio or TV there is no way of knowing who saw your ad and who converted because of it.

Analytics from a Facebook ad will tell you how many people saw your ad, how many times it was displayed and how many conversions you received from it as well as how much you are paying per conversion.

Let’s say you pay $500 for a billboard (this is excluding the amount you would pay for someone to design it) there is no way of lowering this cost. With Facebook you can spend a small amount each month and rapidly increase your audience and receive all of this data that you can use to make your campaign stronger. By “small amount” we mean $10. Yes you can actually grow by spending only $10 a month!

Just posting on Facebook and not running ads is not enough. Facebook is a pay to play platform which means that you have to put in some money (even a small amount) in order to gain followers and fans. In reality your followers will see less than 1% of your posts. But having an active Facebook ad campaign can increase your page clicks by 96%.

With digital marketing you can target your specific audience. You can even use something called a lookalike audience on Facebook to target customers like the ones you already have. This audience is built from your email list of customers that you already have. Facebook will take these emails and find customers on Facebook that are similar to your existing customers. You also don’t have to target your existing customers with Facebook ads – you can completely exclude them! Using a lookalike audience will mean that your ads are being seen by more qualified leads which can ultimately lead to more sales and building lifetime relationships with loyal customers.

Why Digital Marketing for Your Business

The first time the term “digital marketing” was used was in 1990 with the advent of the first search engine. It’s been around for quite some time now and is backed by tons of research and use. If you are scared to jump into the digital world, it’s time to take the plunge.

The options are endless and that’s why digital marketing should be at the top of your list when creating a marketing strategy for your business. In the end it will save you time, money and the headache of jumping through hoops to get your business into a magazine or on a billboard. You can start your digital marketing campaign right now without even moving from your computer! If you are new to the digital marketing world, we recommend getting help from a professional. Contact us with any questions you may have, and we’ll help you start growing your business with a curated digital marketing strategy.