What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is using digital channels to promote and sell products or services. It can also be referred to as online marketing as brands are using the internet to connect with future customers. Digital marketing takes form in a variety of different ways such as search engines,websites, social media, email, etc. It also includes communication through textor multimedia messages.

For businesses to connect with their customers, they need tobe where their customers are – online. With digital marketing, brands can nurture their clients all the way through their buyer’s journey, saving the brand time and money.

Here are some of the other ways that businesses can benefit from using Digital Marketing:

• Increase brand awareness & visibility
• Boost engagement while creating brand loyalty
• Generate leads and nurture those relationships
• Educate current & future customers
• Drive website traffic
• Increase conversions and overall revenue

Throughout this guide we will be discussing several different types of online marketing. Successful marketing campaigns include a range of different tactics. These are some of the strategies that businesses use:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Paid Advertising

Afterwards, we will give a brief overview on how to create a digital marketing strategy.

‍

Why is Digital Marketing Important for Your Business?

Digital marketing is incredibly important for business owners in today’s world. Customers are using tech every day to do things like check their email, see what their friends are doing via social media, and read the news. According to Neil Patel, there are 5.16 billion users online and 4.76billion users who use social media. With the reach potential being online has,business owners can’t afford to not have an online presence.

Your customers are online, which is why you should be too.

‍

‍

‍

However, if you don’t understand how to properly build a digital marketing strategy, you can impact your reach and the growth of the business. Companies must learn to utilize the different channels to increase their revenue potential and brand awareness. Digital marketing isn’t just for the big guys anymore, the small businesses in rural communities also need to have an online presence.

The reach potential isn’t even the best part. Digital marketing can benefit in many other ways as well:

• Cost Effective: Compared to traditional marketing (print ads, billboards, etc.), online marketing is very cost effective. For example, when you purchase a billboard, there is usually justone price. You either pay it or you don’t get the billboard. With online marketing, you have complete control over your budget and ad spending.
• ‍Easy to Measure Results: With digital marketing, you can monitor the success of each step in your buyer’s journey,something that isn’t possible with traditional marketing.
• Increased Brand Awareness: Creating an online presence allows your business to be seen by potentially 5.1 billion people worldwide. While its unlikely that your website will be seen by every person that uses the internet, the number of people that know and talk about your brand can be limitless.‍
• Increases Engagement: When your business is online, you are giving people the chance to have real conversations with your company to ask questions and learn about you. It also presents the opportunity for them to easily tell their friends.‍
• Nurture at Every Stage of Your Buyers Journey: With digital marketing you engage with them from the time they realize they need your product until you convert them into a paying customer.

Essentially, through digital marketing you can: identify newleads, nurture them though your buyer’s journey, provide excellent customer service all for low cost and real time analytics.

‍

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing isn’t just having a website and social media pages. You have countless ways to communicate your message and interact with potential customers on the internet. Below we go into some of the most common forms.

‍

1.    Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher and perform better with search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Essentially, you are trying to give search engines a reason to list your website as high as possible because 67.6% of organic traffic clicks are generated from the first 5 listings in search results.

There are a few different types of SEO: on-page, off-page,and technical. On-page SEO is what is displayed to your website’s visitors. Search engines will pull this information from your website’s FAQ’s, articles, blog posts, and anything else that’s on your website.

Off-Page SEO is how much attention you are receiving from other websites. For example, if another company writes an article and links to your website, it would be considered a backlink. Backlinks are crucial for building a websites credibility and boosting your ranking on search results pages.

Last is technical SEO, which is the backend of your website. This includes things like your websites coding, file names, page speed, and metadata on your website. This is more complicated than the other two and often is done by your web developer.

There are numerous different ways to increase your search ranking, but most businesses start with the following methods:

• Keyword Research and Targeting
• Creating quality content
• Creating a better user experience by optimizing page speed and ensuring its mobile friendly
• Monitoring analytics to see what’s working and what needs changed

It’s important to note that updating your website to include these things won’t increase your ranking overnight. It will take several months of creating content and optimizing the website before search engines will begin to notice.

‍

2.    Content Marketing

Content marketing Is publishing information to attract views and nurture them through the buying process. It’s one of the most effective strategies as you are offering the information to free while showing them that you know your stuff.

Content marketing usually involved one of these methods:

• Blog Posts
• E-Books or White Papers
• Newsletters
• Video Content (reels, youtube shorts, etc.)
• Audio Content (podcasts)
• Infographics
• Guides

Content marketing is a very affordable marketing strategy, andone that’s quite effective as well. The content marketing industry is projected to be worth  $107 billion by 2026.

3.    Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves promoting your business through social channels like Instagram, Facebook, X, Pinterest, etc. Marketing your business on social media lets you drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, and engage with your customers and potential customers.

This method is much more than just having an account and posting occasionally though. With 4.76 billion users on social media, your business has endless opportunities to get in front of new customers if you know how to use the different platforms. Here are some quick tips on how to use social media effectively:

• Know your audience and what platform they are using. (You don’t want to be on LinkedIn if your customers are all on Instagram.)
• Create good content. This means high quality photos/videos and creating something that resonates with your viewers to encourage them to share it.
• Answer comments, messages, and reviews quickly.This includes negative ones.
• Use SEO practices when creating your business page and when writing captions.
• Follow trends and jump on the bandwagon!
• Post often.

The goal of social media is to give your customers a reason to interact with your company on the platform. The more you are chatting with your audience, the more opportunities you will have to get in front of new customers.

‍

4.    Email Marketing

Email marketing focuses on users that have already interacted with your business to nurture the relationship. As one of the most popular methods, this strategy allows you to personalize your message, target segmented groups, and allows you to schedule events in advance.

Some common emails you might see are:

• Blog Subscriptions
• Welcome Emails to New Customers
• Holiday or Special Event Promotions
• Saved Cart Reminders
• Satisfaction Surveys' or Guides on Using the Product
• Company Announcements

If you decide to use email as a marketing tactic for your business,make sure you familiarize yourself with the laws and regulations in your area. In the United States, every marketing email needs to have an “unsubscribe” button at the bottom and don’t flood customers inboxes.

‍

5.    Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing allows a company to use affiliates, or brand reps, to promote their product by agreeing to pay them a percentage of the sale amount. Some affiliates will pay a flat fee, but it's less common. Affiliate marketing works because you are using someone’s established platform to promote your product. Since the affiliates followers already trust them, they are more likely to consider your product when the affiliate recommends it.

Affiliate marketing takes many different forms, from long-form videos to reels and blog posts to e-books. The affiliate usually uses however their audience is used to hearing from them. To promote the product, affiliates are given a unique code or URL to provide their audience with.

‍

‍

6.    Influencer Marketing

Using influencers helps companies reach new audiences and build brand trust. Similar to affiliate marketing, brands are using established content creators to promote their product. The biggest difference between the two is that with influencer marketing, you are paying the influencer a flat fee for creating sponsored content.

Here are some quick tips for working with influencers:

• Work with influencers that are in your industry and have similar values
• Establish a clear, written agreement with the influencer before exchanging any money or products
• Provide the influencer with clear instructions regarding your brand voice, image, and/or tone
• Consider working with smaller influencers as they often create a larger ROI

‍

7.    Paid Advertising

Paid advertising can come in a variety of different forms. For example, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising allows you to only pay if you’re ad is clicked on. This is common when working with social media channels or search engines to grab that top spot. PPC has low risk and can generate great results in a relatively low amount of time.

Another type of paid ads is Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM involves paying search engines to display your advertisement either at the top or on the side of search results. This strategy works a bit differently than PPC with the placement of the ads.

Lastly, there is social advertising. Social ads are a great way to expand your reach and generate new leads. With social media, you can easily target specific customers based on their interests, demographics, and behaviors. Social media is also very easy to gauge its effectiveness, making it easy to assess your campaign and pivot when necessary.

As you can see there are countless ways to connect with leads and customers online. This guide only covered a few of them, but there are other options out there like SMS, Video Marketing, Marketing Automation, etc.

‍

Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that you know some of the different ways you can market your business online, it's time to build your strategy. We will go deeper into this at a later date, but here is a brief overview.

1.    Create a Buyer Persona

In order to know how to sell to your customers, you need to know what their pains and struggles are. To do this, you can create a Buyer Persona that includes things like their gender, age, occupation, location, interests,needs, wants, pains, struggles, etc. The more you understand about your customer, the better you will be able to provide them with solutions to their problems.

‍

2.    Set Goals and Decide How to Measure Them

In order for any of these strategies to work, you have to understand what it is you are trying to achieve first. Example goals are increasing your follower count, acquiring more newsletter subscribers, or driving website traffic. Just remember, whatever you choose make sure that you understand how you will measure its success. Some common ways to measure are tracking website visits, referrals,or purchases made.

‍

3.    Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that you know what your goals are and who your customers are, its time to create the strategy. Take a look at where your customers can frequently be found and start there. If your customers are using Google to search for answers to their questions, then consider optimizing your website for search engines or adding helpful content. If your customers are checking their social media to see what their friends are doing, then start publishing more content. Don't try to do all of them all at once and burn yourself out. Choose one or two different strategies to focus on at a time

Want to learn more about building a strategy? There are lots of helpful resources out there! For example, both SEMRush and Hubspot have great information in their blogs, or you can subscribe to our blog at the end of this post and have new articles sent straight to your inbox.

‍

4.    Pay Attention to Your Metrics & Pivot When Needed

Watch your metrics to see what is working and what isn't. If your content isn’t getting any views, try something new. Ask for feedback. Your analytics can tell you what your followers do and don’t like. Use them to your advantage and don’t be afraid to pivot when needed.

The most important thing to remember is: There is no one size fits all approach. What worked for someone else might not work for you and your customer base. If something isn't working for you, try something else. Find what your customers are resonating with the most and do more of whatever that is.

‍

‍

‍

This seems like a lot...

If you are feeling overwhelmed, we get it. We were once there ourselves. Not to worry, there are places out there that not only can help you understand all of this, but there are agencies that will handle the digital space for you! For example, here at Dynamyte Digital Lab, we offer a range of digital services because we like helping people achieve their dreams.

Let us worry about expanding your reach online so you can get back to doing what you do best- helping your customers.

Want to learn more? Send us a message today!